When it comes to the internet, the Chinese government may have taken inspiration from the Great Wall of China and created the largest digital boundary in the world, blocking 500 million users from accessing the global-standard social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But blogger Michael Anti, whose real name is Jing Zhao, explains in a vivid talk given at TEDGlobal 2012 that the internet landscape of the world’s most populous country is far more complicated than that simple story. Chinese innovators have copycatted popular Western social media sites. While we have Google, China has Baidu. While we have Facebook, China has RenRen. While we have Twitter, China has Weibo — and 300 million microbloggers using it, as 140 characters allows for a full paragraph to be written in Chinese.

In his talk, Anti looks at some of the fascinating ways in which social media are changing Chinese life, and shifting the balance of power in the country. For example, after local authorities tried to cover up a train crash in Wenzhou in 2011, people took to social media sites to criticize the move. With more than 10 million messages about the cover-up visible for all to read, an official investigation was eventually launched. Anti also explains that on Weibo, people regularly tweet their misfortunes, waiting for them to be picked up by popular micobloggers and shared widely.

So what exactly is huge on ChinaNet? Below, a look at 8 popular memes, many political in tone and others the Chinese equivalent of Keyboard Cat.

Free CGC

When Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng escaped from house arrest this spring, this meme — a send-up of a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad — began spreading across the Chinese internet. Why? Because while his name, and even his initials, were blocked by the government, the image got through the country’s censors. The spreading of the meme has been called “guerrilla activism.” [Christian Science Monitor]

Dress the Nude

China Central Television inspired this hilarious meme when they aired a broadcast about an exhibit at the National Museum of China … and blurred the genitals on Michaelangelo’s famous David. Ever since, internet users have poked fun at the “anti-vulgarism campaign” by putting clothes on famous nude works of art. [Ministry of Tofu]

Singing Schoolchildren

The song “Shang Bu Qi” has become something of an anthem of the Chinese internet. So when this video appeared on Youku — the Chinese version of YouTube — featuring a bus full of schoolchildren singing the song, it instantly went viral. [China Smack]

Dark Glasses Portraits

Another show of support for Chen Guangcheng, Chinese internet users snapped photos of themselves wearing the blind activist’s signature sunglasses. [Christian Science Monitor]

The Salt Panic Incident

In 2011, China was very fearful of radiation following the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan. When chatter began that salt could fight the effects, thanks to its iodine content, people began buying stores out of salt. And images of empty salt shelves became all the rage on the internet. [China Whisper]

Grass Mud Horse

These alpacas might look cute and fuzzy, but they are an example of a highly political meme in China. Grass mud horse, or Cao Ni Ma, first appeared in January 2009 as a symbol of anti-censorship sentiment in this video. Earlier this month, the alpaca symbol was seen on many signs in a protest in Hong Kong as Chinese President Hu Jintao celebrated the 15th anniversary of the city’s handover to China. On the internet, July 1 was officially dubbed “Grass Mud Horse Day,” as high numbers of people posted alpaca images. [Tea Leaf Nation, NY Times]

Sunflower seeds

Similarly, the sunflower seed has become an online symbol for artist Ai Weiwei, whose name and likeness where quickly scrubbed from the Chinese internet when he was detained in 2011. (Watch the talk Ai Weiwei made for TED2011, just weeks before he was put under arrest in China and his studio destroyed.) As supporters realized that Weiwei’s nicknames, and even puns related to him, were also being blocked, they channeled his famous sunflower fields installation at the Tate Modern as a form of protest. [Fast Company]

Pu-Wen-Er

For this highly popular meme, three photos are cobbled together — one representing the “ordinary youth,” another representing the “artistic youth” and finally the “idiotic youth.” The meme became so popular so quickly that gained a Chinese acronym, 普文二. [Ministry of Tofu]

The TED Blog would like to extend special thanks to An Xiao Mina, whose research on Chinese memes formed the framework for many of the articles above. Watch her speak at MIT’s Personal Democracy Forum and read her piece in The Atlantic, comparing the Chen Guangcheng meme above to the Trayvon Martin hoodie meme. And check out her column on Chinese political and social memes at 88-Bar.com.

Today, we posted Diane Benscoter’s revealing talk on being a Moonie and how cult thought can lead people to do the unthinkable. It’s a topic that’s not often talked about and that fascinates many, so, to bring you more from Diane the TEDBlog caught up with her for an interview. We talked about her time with the Moonies, her efforts as a deprogrammer and her ideas about how we should be fighting cults and extremism around the world.

Could you speak a little more about how you came to join the Moonies?

I had just turned 17. I was very idealistic. The Vietnam War really bothered me. I had a good friend with a brother in Vietnam. I was determined to find a community that would stop the madness. I went off in search of something like that. I went off on this Walk for World Peace. It was a five day walk, and during the entire walk there would be two people walking with me at all times, talking about this new world they were going to build, saying that I was special and chosen by God to be a part of this, otherwise I wouldn’t be there. There were lectures every night. And slowly I came to believe that they were right, and that Sun Myung Moon was the second coming of the Messiah.

What was it like once you were in the group? What was it like to live as a Moonie?

It was constantly reinforced that we had a purpose that was much higher than that of anyone else in the world. It was pretty appealing to be a part of something like that. But, I missed my freedom. There were times when I really missed being like the people I saw on the street every day. But, it was constantly reinforced that I was saving the world, so I trusted my beliefs and gave up my freedom.

I spent most of my days fundraising — selling candy and flowers. I started in Nebraska and began living in their Nebraska center. I cut my hair off and cut my ties with my family. I was shipped off not long after I joined, for training at a “monastery” in upstate New York. Then I began my mission — fundraising. We lived in vans and went from place to place selling candy and flowers. We also went back for training over and over, and the trainings were pretty long. One of them was 120 days. They reinforced beliefs and erased any doubts during their training. They kept the circular logic intact.

What was this experience like for your family?

They were desperate. You see, it wasn’t like I came from a family that was dysfunctional or abusive. I came from a normal, loving home. My mother was especially desperate to get me out. And when they did talk to me, all I wanted was to get them to join. I thought Satan was using them, was talking through them. They suffered greatly. Now that I’m a parent, I can’t imagine how hard it was for them.

They did everything they could. My mom really wanted to have me deprogrammed, my dad wasn’t as sure. It’s a drastic measure. And what if it didn’t work? He was afraid that if they tried, and it didn’t work, that they might lose me forever.

Could you speak a little bit about deprogramming? You were deprogrammed and became a deprogrammer, but it’s a rather controversial practice and many think that it brings up ethical issues relating to free will.

Yeah, I have a lot to say on this topic, but I’ll try to give the main points first. One — involuntary deprogrammings, which I was involved with, aren’t really taking place anymore and definitely not as they were. Looking back on it, I think there are ethical issues there. Still, I totally understand why people did it, why I did it — desperation, not knowing what to do, love of their child. You’re dealing with a problem that hasn’t been defined psychologically, so you can’t lock people in a mental hospital for it.

Now, I had one foot in and one foot out of the Moonies when I was deprogrammed. My faith was already wavering. Also, I had a loving family. But, to pull a belief system away from someone who doesn’t have the correct support system can be very dangerous. It’s like chemotherapy. Chemotherapy many times cures cancer, but it can also kill people. So, I’m not going to say that deprogramming is the way. And that‘s why I’ve gone in the direction of prevention.

Also, some people came to deprogramming more professionally that others. Some made mistakes and some used really admirable techniques. For the most part, in the ones that I was a part of, we just talked to the person and made sure that they ate and slept well. We were trying to introduce rational thought and a healthy mental state. We presented no new philosophy and no desire for them to take up any of our personal beliefs. We simply tried to explain that much of what they had been told was not true and was possibly brainwashing. We based our techniques on psychological theory, especially the work of Robert Lifton.

READ MORE: Diane talks about how to distinguish a cult from a group, what it feels like to lose your critical thinking and how we can combat extremism — using memes.
What do you think are the identifying traits of a cult? What differentiates cult from group?

The first one is an all or nothing world view. If easy answers to complex questions are handed to you on a silver platter and if you’re asked to believe in them unquestioningly and told not to seek an alternative, that’s a cult. If there’s a clear us and them, and we the insiders have the answers to all the questions about the world — especially if those answers are very simple. For example — Moon is the messiah. I’m a mere mortal so I shouldn’t question anything. Anytime that you feel that you’re inside a group looking out at the rest of the world thinking, “If they only knew what we knew, they’d understand how right we are.”

Also, if the leader is all-knowing. That’s a big one. And of course, the circular logic is the other thing. If everything comes back to this simple logic, if you can’t have rational thought or critical thought, that’s a cult.

What is it like to have this circular thought? What does it feel like for the individual in this logic loop?

Often, I would hear a song, or see a headline, or encounter someone that would bring up issues contradictory to the perspective of the group and it would just bounce off of me, because I knew that that was Satan invading. If it would start to make sense to me, it was Satan invading my thoughts. And this was reinforced by the group that that type of experience was as a result of a lack of faith. We were God’s soldiers and Satan was constantly trying to break down God’s soldiers. I needed to pray harder.

Any critical question — the kind that a scientist would welcome — was not acceptable. In circular logic, anything that questions belief means something evil, bad or Satan. It’s wrong to listen, it’s wrong to even play with ideas that are different. This is how unthinkable things can happen.

So, you stop using critical thought?

Yes. And the thing that takes the place of critical thought is someone else’s voice. That voice literally replaces critical thought.

Could you elaborate on the connection you made in your talk between memetics and combating extremism?

What I theorize is that we’re looking in the wrong place and we’re attacking the extremism in the wrong way at the moment. To try to fight extremism with guns and to simply label extremists as bad or terrible people is wrong. The actions of these extremists are unthinkable, horrific, repulsive, but the person is a person who is passionate and truly believe that they are doing good. A mother who fed poison to her baby in Jonestown is not an evil person. She truly believed she was saving her baby. It’s hard to contemplate, but these are the same motivations that drove Hitler Youth and suicide bombers.

We need to take these phenomena out of the realm of good and evil and into the realm of science. What we really need to do is understand what happens in the brain, and I challenge experts in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry to do this — perhaps there is some way to identify the extremist brain.

When extremism occurs, something has happened to our mind. The human mind is very susceptible to ideas — to memes. And, much like viruses, memes spread. If we can just define this as a problem, as a memetic infection, as a disease. Ideas can infect our brains, and shut down other pathways of thought.

I suspect that the more a person uses critical thinking, the healthier their brain is. It’s like a computer that is well-tuned and running fast. For some time now, doctors have been recommending to older patients that they do crossword or number puzzles to ward off the onset of senility — suggesting that practicing our thought processes preserves them. Circular logic stops us from using our faculties of critical thinking, and causes our ability for critical and independent thought to atrophy. A lack of critical thought can cause behavior that is dangerous to the person and to others. That person is like a machine that’s broken — they’re simply not functioning normally.

I think that this particularly dangerous state called extremism can be prevented. I realized that when I found memetics. For me, finding memetics was like water to a thirsty person. It was only theory that was able to explain what happened to my brain and how it could be prevented in others. This circular logic I was caught in was a malfunction — if that meme caught on and people started speaking out against circular logic, perhaps the incidence of that malfunction could be reduced. We have memes about which sandal is fashionable for which season, why not a meme against circular logic?

A glorious slideshow from Discover discusses 8 zombie animals and the parasites that control their minds and/or bodies. Snails, spiders, crabs and people — we all are at risk of zombification from tiny forces that know how to make us do things.

Philosopher Dan Dennett suggests that — just as these parasites force their host to act in ways that benefit the parasite — so do certain ideas find a home inside our brains and make us act in ways that don’t directly benefit us. To hear more about this phenomenon, watch Dan Dennett’s TEDTalk about zombie ants and the dangerous power of memes.

Or just watch some zombies do yoga.

Image: Steve Yanoviak/University of Arkansas at Little Rock. From Discover.

Watch Susan Blackmore’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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Memeticist Susan Blackmore uses the hotel-bathroom toilet-paper fold as an example of a useless meme — a meme that has spread throughout the world, even though there is no human reason for it to exist. The persistence of this meme easily disproves the comfortable notion that we humans only spread ideas that are useful or interesting — it shows that, once a meme takes on life, it spreads itself.

Inspired by Blackmore’s research, origamist and TEDster Bruno Bowden created a combinatorial meme — linking Blackmore’s ideas with the sophisticated folding techniques discussed by origami master Robert J. Lang onstage at TED. See photo at left.

+ To learn more about dangerous memes, listen to
Dan Dennett’s awesome 2002 TEDTalk >>

+ To learn more about toilet-paper origami, check out this devoted student of the art >>

+ To see what happened when Ze Frank was attacked by this meme on Day 4 of TED@Aspen, visit our Flickr set >>

NEW: Read the transcript >>

Watch this talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

How many creationists do we have in the room? Probably none. I think we’re all Darwinians. And yet, many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy, would like to see some limits on just how far the Darwinism goes.

It’s all right, you know. Spider webs? Sure, they are products of evolution. The World Wide Web? Not so sure. Beaver dams, yes; Hoover Dam, no.

What do they think it is that prevents the products of human ingenuity from being themselves fruits of the tree of life — and hence in some sense obeying evolutionary rules? And yet people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking — to our thinking. And so I’m going to talk a little bit about that — keeping in mind that we have a lot on the program here.

So you’re out in the woods, or you’re out in the pasture, and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass. It climbs to the top and it falls, and it climbs, and it falls, and it climbs — trying to stay at the very top of the blade of grass. What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of? What goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass? What’s in it for the ant?

And the answer is, nothing. There’s nothing in it for the ant.

Well then, why is it doing this? Is it just a fluke?

Yeah, it’s just a fluke.

It’s a lancet fluke: it’s a little brain worm — a parasitic brain worm — that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. So, salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant, crawl into its brain, and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle.

So there’s nothing in it for the ant. The ant’s brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior. Pretty scary. Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one’s own genetic fitness, of course. Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means “surrender,” or “submission of self-interest to the will of Allah.” Well, it’s ideas — not worms — that hijack our brains. Now, am I saying that a sizable minority of the world’s population is having their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas? Oh, it’s worse than that. Most people have.

There are a lot of ideas to die for: Freedom, if you’re from New Hampshire. Justice. Truth. Communism. Many people have laid down their lives for Communism, and many have laid down their lives for Capitalism. And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam. These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They’re infectious.

Yesterday, Amory Lovins spoke about “infectious repetitis.” It was a term of abuse, in effect. This is unthinking engineering. Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking; it’s infectious repetitis.
And we might as well try to have a theory of what’s going on when that happens, so that we can understand the conditions of infection.

Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others. I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is.
And you have to have a bumper sticker, you know, you have to have a statement. So, this is mine: The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. Most of us — now that the Me Decade is well in the past — we actually do this. One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives in our own lives. This is what our summum bonum is. It’s not maximizing the number of grandchildren we have.

Now, this is a profound biological effect: the subordination of genetic interest to other interests. And no other species does anything at all like it.

Well, how are we going to think about this? It is, on the one hand, a biological effect, and a very large one. Unmistakable. Now, what theories do we want to use to look at this? Well, many theories. But how — what’s going to tie them together?
The idea of replicating ideas. Ideas that replicate by passing from brain to brain.
Richard Dawkins, whom you’ll be hearing later in the day, invented the term “memes,” and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book The Selfish Gene.

Now, here am I talking about his idea. Well, you see, it’s not his. Yes — he started it. But it’s everybody’s idea now. And he’s not responsible for what I say about memes. I’m responsible for what I say about memes. Actually, I think we’re all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but for their likely misuses. So it is important, I think, to Richard, and to me, that these ideas not be abused and misused. They’re very easy to misuse; that’s why they’re dangerous. And it’s just about a full-time job trying to prevent people who are scared of these ideas from caricaturing them and then running off to one dire purpose or another.
So we have to keep plugging away, trying to correct the misapprehensions so that only the benign and useful variants of our ideas continue to spread. But it is a problem.

We don’t have much time, and I’m going to go over just a little bit of this and cut out, because there’s a lot of other things that are going to be said.
So let me just point out: memes are like viruses. That’s what Richard said, back in ’93. And you might think, Well, how can that be? I mean, a virus is, well, you know, it’s stuff. What’s a meme made of? Yesterday, Negroponte was talking about viral telecommunications, but — what’s a virus? A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude.

That is, there is something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that’s what a meme is. An information packet with attitude.
What’s a meme made of? “What are bits made of, Mom?” Not silicon. They’re made of information. Can be carried in any physical medium. What’s a word made of? Sometimes when people say, “Do memes exist?” I say, “Well, do words exist?” Are they in your ontology? If they are… Words are memes that can be pronounced. Then there’s all the other memes that can’t be pronounced — different species of memes.

Remember the Shakers? “Gift to Be Simple?” Simple furniture? And of course they’re basically extinct now. And one of the reasons is that, among the creed of Shakerdom is that one should be celibate. Not just the priests — everybody.
Well, it’s not so surprising that they’ve gone extinct. But in fact that’s not why they went extinct. They survived as long as they did at a time when the social safety nets weren’t there and there were lots of widows and orphans, people like that, who needed a foster home. And so they had a ready supply of converts. And they could keep it going. And, in principle, it could’ve gone on forever. With perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts. The idea being passed on through proselytizing, instead of through the gene line.

So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they’re not being passed on genetically. A meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shakerdom was essentially a sterilizing parasite.
There are other parasites which do this — which render the host sterile. It’s part of their plan. They don’t have to have minds to have a plan.

I’m just going to draw your attention to just one of the many implications of the memetic perspective, which I recommend. I’ve not time to go into more of it.
In Jared Diamond’s wonderful book Guns, Germs and Steel, he talks about how it was germs more than guns and steel that conquered the new hemisphere — the Western hemisphere — that conquered the rest of the world. When European explorers or travelers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to, that they had learned how to tolerate over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years, of living with domesticated animals, the sources of those pathogens.

And they just wiped out — these pathogens just wiped out the native people who had no immunity to them at all.

And we’re doing it again. We’re doing it this time with toxic ideas.

Yesterday, a number of people — Nicholas Negroponte and others — spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out thanks to all the new technology all over the world. I agree. It is, largely, wonderful. Largely wonderful. But among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology, are a lot of toxic ideas.

Now, this has been realized for some time. Sayyid Qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical Islam, one of the — one of the ideologues that inspired Osama Bin Laden. One has only to glance at its press films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars and broadcasting stations — memes. These memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages. They are wiping out traditions, practices. And it’s not our fault anymore than it’s our fault when our germs lay waste to people that haven’t developed the immunity. We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies at the edges of our culture. We — free society, so we let pornography, and all these things, you know, we shrug them off. They’re like a mild cold. They’re not a big deal for us. But we should realize that, for many people in the world, they are a big deal. And we should be very alert to this as we spread our education and our technology.

One of the things that we are doing is, we’re the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes — the memes that they are prepared to die for. Well, now how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes? That is not the job of memetics, of the science of memetics. Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger. It’s — if you’ve had a friend who’s died of AIDS, then you hate the HIV virus. But the way to deal with that is to do science, and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective. Get the facts. Work out the implications. There’s plenty of room for moral passion once we’ve got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do.

And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures, and the like, that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.

That’s all the time I have, so thank you very much for your attention.