Memes are difficult to work with, as most people aren't good at thinking about ideas. Ideas are scary, but ideas about ideas get a bit meta and are hard to make compelling. My first thought was to go and trawl the SCP Foundation wiki for ideas. They tag their works to be searchable; http://www.scp-wiki.net/system:page-tags/tag/memetic for instance. SCP-1059 is a great example. A concept causes the human mind to mis-identify the value and importance of other data. Secrets start getting over-protectively hidden, and important information starts to get classified. This is the sort of thing that could remain undetected for a while in transhuman society, with privacy already rampant. What do you know, and what did you need to know, and wasn't told to you?

Mindjammer? Ah, thanks, I was having a good morning up to now. I'm not sure one can honestly talk about a FATE game having mechanics for anything so much as loosely skinned shenanigans that a proper GM would do automatically. I think that one thing that people overdo when talking about memes (in the EP/Dawkins sense) is that they aren't like mindhacks and stuff. An example of a modern day memetic assault is the sort of stuff ISIS does all the time. Nobody else really does it like they do; even opponents and outsiders to ISIS can see the horrific things they do, but their memetic structure paints a pretty strong picture of them winning, which allows them to recruit from a position of strength despite being nowhere near superpower status. The Ultimates are probably one of the best examples of meme-based societies in Eclipse Phase. While some might say that they fall a little far to the fascist side of things, they're not so much totalitarian as they are incredibly focused on a particular political/social model and having a united purpose (basically, posthumanity via improvement) that they can form a whole society based on that. One of the things that Eclipse Phase notably lacks are non-exsurgent terrorist groups. You have Firewall, but they're really more a secret organization, and while their actions look like terrorism, you don't really see them do terrorism. Barsoomians occasionally cause some serious trouble for hypercorps, but for the most part you don't see large-scale terrorism throughout the solar system. In space, where you have a ton of easily penetrated "soft-shell" stations and a need for life support systems almost everywhere (to say nothing of high population density and enclosed spaces), they'd be a major concern for security forces. For thought-germs, one thing to remember is that a meme doesn't necessarily have to be catastrophically horrible to be bad. Anger goes a long way in terms of memes/thought-germs. We see that in real life with a variety of things that I won't mention because of political reasons and wanting to work at some point in the future, but when you have a bunch of people on a habitat being run by a small group of people, what happens when one person does something they shouldn't and then suddenly the whole station management is thrown into question? Keep in mind that in EP there are a bunch of people from different backgrounds and situations thrown together. There's some level of affinity-based selection for living spaces, but that's not exactly going to result in a happy family. Just because I have +morphological freedom and +open source doesn't mean that I'm going to get along with other people with +morphological freedom and +open source moods. For instance, I'm anti-copyleft, which is not necessarily the dominant open source ethos, and I'm pro-alpha forking. Add in +religion, +personal development, +philanthropy, +hypercapitalism, and -hedonism, and you get some sources of strife with a lot of that community, not to mention a desire to integrate with other communities. For instance, if I were just +open source and +morphological freedom, I'd almost certainly associate with the argonauts. Take that -hedonism meme and +personal development, and I'd lean more toward the Ultimates. If you focus exclusively on +religion, I'd likely end up in the Jovian Republic. The weakness of affinity groups is that their members don't swear allegiance to the flag, so to speak. People with a mix of common motivations for their affinity group and motivations that run against the grain in their affinity group are prime targets for rage memes; point out places where their local affinity group has motivations that differ from theirs, and you wind up with someone that can be easily swayed into actions that run contrary to the general social order of that habitat or affinity group.

... I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. I'm actually surprised it hasn't been brought up already, but Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex also contains an example of an Akaja-style meme in the Laughing Man. The original Laughing Man was a young hacker who pulled a one-off stunt because he had stumbled onto a conspiracy and got all hot-headed about blowing it wide open. However the "Laughing Man" pursued through most of the series is actually a large collection of copy-cats who had picked up on the meme and ran with it, often using it toward their own ends. The original Laughing Man had long since retired (for lack of a better word), and could only look on with disappointment as the meme he had accidentally created ran rampant. The sequel has a twist on it with the Individual Eleven, which at first appear to be an out-of-control meme originating in an obscure series of political essays, but in fact turn out to be a cyberbrain virus that mimics memetic behavior to hide its origin (the "eleventh essay" in the series never existed, it's a red herring planted by the virus.)

The Anti-Life equation is an example of a meme-virus from the comic books, and a great example of how hard it is to make something that would seem like an actual effective meme-virus. Most of what I can think of as far as a true X-threat meme goes, would be something that undermines the sense of self and continuity that most people need to keep sane. Most transhumans reject memes that challenge their sense of legitimacy as a person, but a meme that seemed seductive for one reason, but carried implications that the transhuman themself is just a mindvirus and therefore has no moral duties or whatever, could be really dangerous.

Wha... what? A thread I can meaningfully contribute to? I... Live... AGAIN.

MrWigggles wrote:

The problem with Meme based dangers, is you're kinda stuck with just copying Akaja. Any weaponized meme, isn't something that players can really interact with well, unless your group is almost entirely research types and you like doing medical dramas.

Armoured wrote:

Memes are difficult to work with, as most people aren't good at thinking about ideas. Ideas are scary, but ideas about ideas get a bit meta and are hard to make compelling.

Sort of this. The problem is that technically every faction, cult, group, or following is a meme or collection of memes, so if you want to "explicitly" call attention to a meme-based plot then you need to build in details that differentiate it from the norm, like the difference between "disease" and "bacteria". The first, akiaja-esque way is to make the memeplex sapient/sentient. I can see two ways of doing this, apart from Akaja's wandering personality. In the first, the Memeplex works on a purely unconscious level; the actions of the memeplex derive from "incidental actions", like throwing cans away, choosing which way to walk down a street, changes to speech patterns, and so on. From the point of view of the PCs, they would see that there is a sentient agent acting, but all those actions would be a result of accidents or impossible coincidences – A businessman throws an empty beercan onto the ground instead of into the recycler, a passing youth idly kicks it down a path, hitting a woman who yells back, distracting a construction worker who accidentally drops a 50-tonne wrecking ball onto the group's getaway car. The second way is similar, but more blatant – the memeplex's actions are buried in what the carrier thinks is the correct response to a given situation – your waiter tries to gut you with a steak knife because it's the polite thing to do, and a random woman on the street mocks your impotence, and that the PlagueMind will spread and consume all... because it's such a nice morning and she's being friendly. On the other hand, if the meme is to be played "straight", then there needs to be something specific about the infection method or symptoms to advertise it's exceptional nature. The easiest way to do this is by making the meme be irrational, but be successful anyway – "Headhunters make great housepets" or "The TQZ is a great place for a romantic weekend" for example - If people are treating these as rational, well thought out ideas then something is seriously off. The flipside would be having an otherwise acceptable concept being taken to irrational extremes – "All knowledge should be free and open source, so I must make everyone know what it feels like to be eviscerated" or "We shouldn't break the law, therefore Jaywalkers should be Drawn and Quartered". Or if that's all too much, give the meme an incidental symptom.

A good, if unintentional, example of a meme that can exploit other existing memes (or as the people holding them would say, reasonable beliefs) to bring about dramatic outcomes is the intro to Dawn of War's Dark Crusade campaign: https://youtu.be/dD1eLDQ-BTg The memes at play here are simple: A: Something your faction wants is on Kronus (and that "something" isn't necessarily the same for all factions, but can draw them into conflict regardless). B: Allowing that something to fall into the wrong hands (or failure to bring that something about) is utterly unacceptable. C: All other factions are plotting against you and not to be trusted. The result: seven armies clashed on this one world. Each refusing to back down, each *convinced* it was in the right.

Aren't Petals designed to be one-off use on purpose because even the scum and the anarchists don't want contagious Petals since they are highly disruptive things that rewrite your brain bits and hack your mesh inserts/entoptics. Now I want to design a scenario where someone unshackles a Petal and sets it loose into the air, like a hyper dangerous hallucinogenic hacking gas... then it just needs to developed sentience and sapience due to meshing together all of the neural pathways of affected transhumans.