My friend David Pescovitz, Small Times writer and BoingBoing blogger, recently taught me the meaning of memes — ideas that spread through popular culture like a virus. He tells me that nano is among one of the most virulent memes out there right now. In an upcoming Small Times magazine column, he even credits TV shows and video games.

David also tells me that the way a meme reveals something about our culture's relationship to an idea is through its context, rather than its content. For example, when the nouveau-Luddite branch of the political left flings the n-word around it means one thing in a particular context to a particular audience, yet quite another to, say, this guy, who thinks it's all just another prefix for hucksters and spammers to sell their amazing organ-growing technology.

So, it is with memes on my mind that I look at the "NANO" T-shirts sold by a new merchandiser called Emergants. These shirts obviously were designed by nanotech fans — although I have a feeling they might not have considered that designing a logo so similar to NASA's might drag nano down to the level of "disaster waiting to happen."

Anyway, I asked Emergants co-founder Jeff McHugh what he was thinking, and here's some of what he said:

I became interested in Nanotechnology after I read Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines." That book along with the writings of Drexler, Regis, Merkle, and others such as yourself opened my eyes to just how drastically nanotech will change our lives in the very near future.  So, I just always wanted a way to make the knowledge of nanotechnology less exclusive. I was never much of a writer, so I couldn't really go that route. I'd rather read stuff like yours. Somewhere along the line I started thinking about how else I could spread the word of this exciting new and revolutionary technology.
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