« The World's Baby's Daddy | Main | The Sea is a Mean Bitch »
Mutates Base Constructs
Powerful influence is oftentimes unperceivable because it mutates base constructs—the institutional memory—so that the evolution isn't realized or remembered. For this reason, it is important to rigorously log the process and audit the system before the influence begins. This is most important because after the catalyst is introduced, there will appear to be systemic changes that are complex and wide-ranging. These broad shifts can be blamed more easily on the natural process or a natural course than on what they really are, which is the pandemic resulting from the catalytic ground zero. Although it is very difficult to discover the ground zero of an epidemic of TB or AIDS, it is even more challenging to track the infection patterns within a culture that can include any number of important though dissimilar organs of transmission. The track back is even more complex because as the effect expands and becomes more diffuse, the direct attribution will become corrupt and there will be examples of plagiarizing and faux sui generis. Although impossible to track and maddening to account for, the more often there are these thefts the better, because it is only through this sort of ownership of idea by the culture itself that the memory can be universally erased. In some cases, it requires a generation, as in the case of albums, rotary phones, and Betamax, but in other cases it may require only weeks, if not fewer.