Back in 2013 when people cared about the NSA stuff in the news, I remember lurking around on that other site and seeing someone post JC Denton talking to Morpheus. These days the first thought the video invokes out of me is of social media. Another five years and I bet it'll remind me of something else. Deus Ex is just kind of like that. A bunch of moments of foresight and "redpills" that anyone can draw the connection to, that evolve over time to relate to different current events. This has been happening as early as 2001, when the WTC towers went down and some people wondered why this game from 2000 just so happened to be missing two towers in the skyline present from the Ellis Island level (technical reasons, apparently, for some reason they couldn't get them to render in the background).
I remember the word "meme" in 2006 being one name of many names. In YTMND we would put repeating GIFs on a background with superimposed text and looping music. Those were called Sites, because they were hosted on their own subdomain. If a particular Site became popular enough that other Sites popped up copying/parodying it, it would be called a Fad. For other mediums you had Image Macros, Demotivationals, Flash Movies, Photoshops, etc. Labels for the emerging inexplicable sense of humor borne from Internet subcultures that the rest of the world couldn't understand. It really didn't all start to codify under a single unified term until ~2008-ish or so. The words "Internet Phenomena" were too long, so the old stuff like Snowy Owl, All Your Base, Caturday, and Numa Numa have all been retroactively labeled as "memes". And pretty much everything that's come after it. Try showing a friend of yours a standard toptext-image-bottomtext thingy today and call it an image macro. Chances are they'll have no idea what you're talking about, they might even try to correct you and call it a meme.
Point being, Meme didn't mean what it meant in 2000 as it does today. The word existed as an obscure neologism from Richard Dawkins made in 1976. But it didn't have quite the same context. So how'd the Deus Ex writers pick a phrase that managed to be spot-on relevant sixteen years later? It could have been that one of the developers chose the word "Meme" from Richard Dawkins works back in 2000 because it sounded weird and interesting, and it's all just a pure coincidence. Or it could be that they envisioned something similar to what the chain emails of the day were doing, and went through the same cognitive process of finding the right word to describe it all just as the world would later on.
Or maybe something else. I dunno, food for thought.
when the WTC towers went down and some people wondered why this game from 2000 just so happened to be missing two towers in the skyline present from the Ellis Island level (technical reasons, apparently, for some reason they couldn't get them to render in the background).
You mean the couldn't get them to render because the PLANES in the background were interfering?
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J20 ago
The Deus Ex bit in question.
Back in 2013 when people cared about the NSA stuff in the news, I remember lurking around on that other site and seeing someone post JC Denton talking to Morpheus. These days the first thought the video invokes out of me is of social media. Another five years and I bet it'll remind me of something else. Deus Ex is just kind of like that. A bunch of moments of foresight and "redpills" that anyone can draw the connection to, that evolve over time to relate to different current events. This has been happening as early as 2001, when the WTC towers went down and some people wondered why this game from 2000 just so happened to be missing two towers in the skyline present from the Ellis Island level (technical reasons, apparently, for some reason they couldn't get them to render in the background).
I remember the word "meme" in 2006 being one name of many names. In YTMND we would put repeating GIFs on a background with superimposed text and looping music. Those were called Sites, because they were hosted on their own subdomain. If a particular Site became popular enough that other Sites popped up copying/parodying it, it would be called a Fad. For other mediums you had Image Macros, Demotivationals, Flash Movies, Photoshops, etc. Labels for the emerging inexplicable sense of humor borne from Internet subcultures that the rest of the world couldn't understand. It really didn't all start to codify under a single unified term until ~2008-ish or so. The words "Internet Phenomena" were too long, so the old stuff like Snowy Owl, All Your Base, Caturday, and Numa Numa have all been retroactively labeled as "memes". And pretty much everything that's come after it. Try showing a friend of yours a standard toptext-image-bottomtext thingy today and call it an image macro. Chances are they'll have no idea what you're talking about, they might even try to correct you and call it a meme.
Point being, Meme didn't mean what it meant in 2000 as it does today. The word existed as an obscure neologism from Richard Dawkins made in 1976. But it didn't have quite the same context. So how'd the Deus Ex writers pick a phrase that managed to be spot-on relevant sixteen years later? It could have been that one of the developers chose the word "Meme" from Richard Dawkins works back in 2000 because it sounded weird and interesting, and it's all just a pure coincidence. Or it could be that they envisioned something similar to what the chain emails of the day were doing, and went through the same cognitive process of finding the right word to describe it all just as the world would later on.
Or maybe something else. I dunno, food for thought.
MyOnlyAccount ago
You mean the couldn't get them to render because the PLANES in the background were interfering?
J20 ago
Goddammit you're right, Ion Storm were the Grandjews behind Mossad all along.
Everything I know is a lie.