It started with memes!

I've always been a fan of memes and gifs even before they were a thing. Sometime during the later part of 1998, I'd heard an NPR segment about this term called the meme, coined by author Richard Dawkins. I struggled through The Selfish Gene just to gain a grasp on the concept. Around the same time frame, I was at a bar in San Francisco called the Lucky 13 with a group of friends. A random conversation was struck up with an acquaintance who said that the Internet (just going mainstream at the time) was going to fundamentally change the world and transform human consciousness into a living, breathing membrane of universal consciousness. My interest was piqued! How do I get in on this, I asked. On a Lucky 13 cocktail napkin he wrote down the names of 3 books I should read. The next day I went to Green Apple books on Clement street and easily found a copy of the Taoist Iching (Thomas Cleary), The Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) and Tao of Physics (Fritjof Capra).

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Fast forward to 2018 and I was working as a web developer in San Diego. Over the course of that 20 year period I'd read my Cleary version of the Iching several times and this crazy idea kept gnawing at me. Why not take the meanings of the 64 iching hexagrams and use memes and gifs to express their concepts from the perspective of modern day life. Being unemployed, time was an asset, so I took the leap and began building out this concept. I had no idea what to call it or how to structure it but taking the first step was the only way forward. Slowly but surely things began to fall into place. Over the past 8 years there have been a few prototypes of this concept. Memes and gifs have evolved into other forms of media and data integrations. The goal here is to filter real time data through api's and rss feeds against these 64 hexagrams to try and get a grasp and understanding of where this living, breathing membrane of universal consciousness is going. Stay tuned for more.

Here is the first api integration that got this concept rolling Giphy Gifs