Hacking the Brainstem

The plot of Snow Crash revolves the ancient Sumerian myth of Enki.
Basically, before Enki came along, the people of the world all spoke
one language, and it was driven by programs called ME, which programmed
people to do all sorts of tasks, from farming to fucking to fighting to
taking out the trash. Thing was, this language, what today we might
call "babble" or "gibberish", sprang directly from the primitive
brainstem, bypassing humanity's higher capacity for rational thought.
This made brainwashing as easy as breathing, and because of this
memetic "plagues" could spread through the population, rendering all of
Civilization a depressing mass of blithering, Kansas-style zombies. In
order to free humanity from this slavery to their Sumerian overlords,
Enki basically enacted the Tower of Babel, smashing this one language
into a thousand different tongues, ensuring that enslaving "viruses"
couldn't spread, giving humanity a fighting chance at evolving out of
the Precambrian ooze from which is sprang.

In Snow Crash, L. Bob Rife, monopolist of the global telecom system AND
an investor in Pentacostal "speaking in tongues" type of religion, is
attempting a massive conspiracy to bring back the rule of ME, and
enslave humanity to be the babbling idiots they outgrew so long ago on
the plains of Iraq. Arrayed against this superpowerful villain are Hiro
and Juanita. Juanita has figured out how to use the language of ME to
her own advantage, meaning she's "hacked" the babbling glossalalia of
the brainstem, giving her power to rival Enki's himself. Luckily, Hiro
convinces her to use this power for good, to resist the encroaching ME<
much the way Enki did, to set Rife's blithering masses free once again.

Why the fuck do *I* care?

Because not long ago -- a month ago actually -- I was playing around in
my own intuitive way with the idea of MEs, of creating and spreading
behavioral codes for the purposes of liberating humanity, or at least
to help them practice a more comprehensive approach to personal
development. When one sits and contemplates the nature of reality, and
sees how wide open it is, one realizes how funny and arbitrary our
everyday behaviors are. Stephenson writes (p. 398):

"At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People
were carrying out the same old ME all the time, not coming up with new
ones, not thinking for themselves."

in other words, people were carrying out the same mind-numbing
routines. Look at the routines of today: work all day, go home and
watch TV, go out drinking, fuck some random stranger you met at a seedy
dive bar. Repeat. But what if we could "hack" our own consciousness
(much the way they do in NLP), and reprogram ourselves to do, with
minimal amounts of mental energy, whole new sequences of wholesome,
Self-building tasks, beyond the stereotypes and compartmentalization we
find today. Even with positive things, "going to the gym" just doesn't
hack it any more. Imagine if there was a "button" one could push to
carry out a complicated ITP sequence, such as "Meditate 5 minutes / 5
minutes energy work / talk to stranger 5 minutes / 5 minute jog / 5
minutes yoga / eat seaweed / write in dream journal." What if there was
a sequence of glossolalia-style syllables which would bypass one's
reasoning mind to imbed these life-enhancing behaviors WITH THE
BRAINSTEM, waiting to occur at a moment's notice given that the right
trigger is pushed?

Topic for another post, duh.