Anyway, ‘social Tinkers’. I’d actually already done some reading on this; yeah I’m a cape nerd, laugh it up. Emma was too until – focus, Taylor.

So. The recent academic discussion was sparked by the emergence of an Earth Aleph Rogue/Villain (depending on how charitable you were being, since though he had not done anything serious, he was still a Master, after all) calling himself the Memelord. About as mature as his name might imply, Memelord was capable of creating what the PRT was calling “Visual mediums that impart minute instructions upon the victim’s subconscious, which emerge as a subtle Master influence at a later time due to a feedback loop of autosuggestion began by initial exposure to a pattern within the medium”.

In English: He makes ‘memes’ (a much bigger phenomenon on Earth Aleph than here, apparently) that weakly mind-control people. He could have done it with street art, commercials, or propaganda posters, but instead he chose pictures of animals with colorful backgrounds and text strings above and below.

The only reason we were hearing about him was because his ‘art’ was making its way over here through the portal-assisted information exchange between our dimensions. Now, obviously he had a Master rating. The question, though, was what to categorize his picture-making ‘skills’ as. Was he a Thinker that knew how to draw visual patterns ‘just so’ in order to imprint upon the subconscious of his victims? That ‘creation’ aspect sounds more like a Tinker skill to me, but of course people don’t like to apply a Tinker label to anything but ‘hard’ sciences.

That’s the crux of the issue, I mused. Physics, electronics, coding, materials, medicine; all technical, quantifiable sciences that no one has a problem saying Tinkers can produce advanced technology within. Social sciences, though? Suddenly people hesitate to even call it ‘technology’ at all. As if massive strides have not been made in ‘soft’ science fields like psychology, anthropology, even education; Mom would’ve been incensed at the double standard.

There was a girl in the UK that could write stories that imparted the experiences of the characters the reader most closely identified with upon said reader (within reason; things like good aim or courage, not magic or flight), and they called her a Thinker too. Yet, “Applies parahuman knowledge and competence to create advanced objects out of otherwise mundane materials” fits the bill for a description of Tinkers, in my opinion, while also describing Memelord and… I think book-girl’s name was Self-Insert?

Horrible choice, but I understand what she was going for. (c) Freaky Friday