Before we get started, I strongly recommend a quick read of this to catch up with what I’m saying, otherwise what I’ll say will just sound like gibberish.
Done? Good, let’s move on.
So, is there a deity behind the digits? Is there a spirit haunting the code? No. However, it is one of the greatest applications of memetic warfare ever devised. What’s memetic warfare you may ask? Well that’s what this post is about.
To understand the concept of memetic warfare, we must first understand what a meme is in the first place. A meme, in the most basic sense of the word is an element of a culture, a system of behavior(s), or an idea that is spread from one individual to another extremely rapidly, especially in an extremely basic manner. Notice how I never mentioned anything about the internet, this is intentional. While the internet is definitely an extremely potent medium through which memes are spread, and really what lets memetic warfare pack its punch (I’ll go into this later), memes don’t necessarily have to exist within the confines of the internet. In fact, as you have seen, memes can directly manifest in the real world. Indeed, memes by my definition have existed since the beginning of time. All mainstream religions, philosophy, and frameworks of thought ever conceived in their most basic forms are memes.
Next, we must find an accurate framework in which memes spread. While there have been many theories on this, the most easy to understand and in my opinion the most accurate is the thought virus model. This model essentially views the spread of ideas in the same way as the spread of germs, where the idea (in this case meme) is a germ that spreads from a host brain to another via telling/sharing/etc, causing it to multiply,spread and mutate through a population. This video explains it far better than I could. As the video said, “thought germs” spreads faster due to the internet. This is why we never saw any form of memetic warfare as widespread, powerful and democratic as we’re seeing now. In those days, it was a lot harder to communicate on a large scale, a lot harder to have one’s voice be heard. Because of this the vast majority of memetic warfare was done by the government through propaganda or corporations through advertising because they were the only entities large and well connected enough to pull it off. The only way for the people to truly engage in it being a popular revolt, uprising or movement and mostly staying contained in a nation. However, thanks to the internet, everyone with a connection has the ability to spread memes, to influence and subvert in ways governments could only dream of. This lack of physical limits and unpredictable nature is what makes memetic warfare a true force to be reckoned with. Its direction and narrative can be shifted, but it cannot be completely subverted no matter how much one side tries.
So if memetic warfare is so powerful, why isn’t the government using it? Well it already is. Most of the media is controlled by the government, allowing them to control the narrative with relative ease. However in recent years, especially with Donald Trump, they have been facing resistance with the counter-memetic warfare of /pol/. Because of this, the government actually has set up an organization to demoralize and oppose Trump supporters and post pro-Clinton messages called Correct the Record, or CTR for short.
They have been paid a total of 1 million dollars to “fight back on social media”. In fact, in one wikileaks email, they said, “Reformed Clinton antagonist David Brock’s team of ‘nerd virgins’ seeks to destroy the anti-Hillary memes he once unleashed.” (source: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/141)
This shows that memetic warfare is so powerful that the establishment is actually trying to harness it to stay in power. Meaning that memes have officially become a powerful new tool of a master propagandist.
So in conclusion, war will now be fought in a new front: memes.
The Patrician Plebeian 