I'm on the run at work for the rest of the week, so detailed response to any of the interesting stuff going on here will have to wait a few days, but I'd like to make a quick reply to Lyle's note about my flippant comment about Picasso and Ted Turner (what was I THINKING when I wrote THAT???).
My comment was not intended to indicate that the examples I gave were by any means self-consciously engaged in memetic engineering (although Picasso certainly was). Rather, it was simply to indicate that "culture work" can be lucrative and/or influential in realms outside of the purely memetic realm of culture per se. You certainly don't have to know what a "meme" is to do such things.
As for my discussion of making or not making money in the work of propagating memes (transhuman and extropian memes, in particular), my point was to communicate that such an effort is, in my opinion, part and parcel of bringing about a world that will produce the particular technological fruits of thetranshuman agenda we are pursuing. But cf my point about "free riding": One doesn't necessarily have to an active meme-propagator to get at least some benefit from the efforts of others who are.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com> Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"Civilization is protest against nature;
progress requires us to take control of evolution." -- Thomas Huxley