9 ms·

The Meme Leak Theory

49 points by jger15 5y ago

api 5y ago
I've kind of watched the meme resistance thing in real time. We had this massive authoritarian populist right wing movement a few years ago that really exploited the fact that a huge number of Internet-naive people had just been brought online via the mobile/tablet revolution. These people had never been exposed to memes (in the Internet parlance), troll culture, conspiracy theories, propaganda bots, click bait, and all the other tools of the Internet influence trade and were easy pickings for a loosely organized confederation of "alt-right" propagandists. As this happened I watched a surge in analytical takes on this from both the left and from anti-authoritarian libertarian (a.k.a. actual libertarian) circles. I saw podcasts that had formerly discussed conspiracy and fringe ideas in a detached "Art Bell" style pivot and go "meta" on these theories and start digging into their intellectual and cultural origins. I saw books like "It Came From Something Awful" that analyzed these phenomena become bestsellers in more mainstream circles. All that analysis was the immune system working. The Pepe the frog movement was a one off thing. It won't be repeated. I doubt we will see anything as explosively successful as Qanon again either. Sure there will be things like that on the fringes but something that vaults from a dumb 4chan LARP into a nationwide movement within a month or two is not likely to happen a second time. The population has already been exposed. China on the other hand... if this is what they are doing and if they are actually successful at it, they will remain deeply vulnerable to an outbreak of this type of propaganda whether it originates from foreign or domestic sources (or most likely a mix thereof). P.S. I think the strongest argument against deplatforming is that this is interfering with the process of memetic immunity. Given that we have no vaccines against toxic memes (or even a theory of how that would work), letting the population get exposed and achieving herd immunity is probably the best strategy. So go ahead, let tons of naive "conspiracy virgins" get sucked into Qanon or whatever. They need to build up their immune systems. I rolled my eyes instantly at Q because I knew chan culture and I also recognized a grab bag of worn old conspiracy tropes from Usenet in the 1990s. I saw all that stuff when I was fifteen. I've changed my mind on deplatforming multiple times, but I think this is where I've settled as I've watched everything play out. Democracy, if we let it function, is antifragile.
- dangerlibrary 5y ago
  We don't get to live the counterfactual though - we don't know how much of what feels like immunity as a result of "people coming to their senses" is actually the result of a successful de-platforming effort.
  - api 5y ago
    No, but given that the spread of these things through social networks resembles infectious disease we can take an educated guess. I'd propose that deplatforming probably stretched out the curve. I suppose an argument could still be made from that. Maybe without stretching out the curve we would have seen significant loss of life on January 6th from many more thousands of Q people marching on the capital and eventually being hurt or killed in confrontations with capital police and the national guard. That would not have been good, though it would have in the long term perhaps more deeply discredited the movement. We can never live the counterfactual with history.
    - gogithefish 5y ago
      Possibly. Also important to note that by responding improperly to such threats, the institutions themselves end up weakening themselves. For example, instead of being honest about what vaccines can and can't do, they pre-empt the dumbest arguments by pretending vaccines are perfect. Once some (reasonable) limits to efficacy become known, the institutions are completely discredited and the anti-vaxxer meme becomes even more powerful.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  I'm having trouble squaring the idea that American adults were unfamiliar with conspiracy theories and the way the JFK assassination is talked about. Or Loose Change is more obvious to me as the first Internet-native conspiracy theory to go mainstream.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    No, conspiracy theories have always been floating around, and people have always been pushing them. The difference is that the rest of society fought tooth-and-nail to keep them underground. Nowadays most social media platforms work tirelessly to keep you on a steady drip of whatever content happens to push your buttons the best. So if the system thinks you might buy into a conspiracy theory, it'll keep serving you more and more extreme versions of that meme. This is a necessary side effect of how a recommendation engine works. One particularly odd bit of misinformation about how misinformation spreads is the idea that otherwise normal people are merely tricked into believing it. In other words, someone says "the moon landing was faked" or "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself" and everyone believes it because monkey reptile brain. This is a very simplified idea of how conspiracy shit spreads. Most people tend to be highly critical of new information and view it in context based on how plausible it seems. Even theories like Jeffrey Epstein being murdered in prison are only believable because it fits in with the already-proven facts, not because we just want the story to be more interesting.[0] Conspiracy theorists think differently. To put it bluntly, they are extremely gullible. They want to believe information that fits a simplified narrative. And so they tend to disconnect from everyone else and connect to other conspiracy theorists[1]. This has been happening years, decades, arguably centuries prior to today's social media world. It just wasn't nearly as visible. Now, the gullible people group together on social media and plan out how to be as loud and obnoxious as possible. Decades ago, you could never imagine organizing the world's moon landing conspiracy theorists to flash-mob Cape Canaveral; because we didn't let these people have a platform. But now we do. [0] If you're wondering, I actually don't think Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison. [1] RationalWiki calls this process "crank magnetism"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hprotagonist 5y ago
Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense. Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones–a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney? Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now–much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with–and we simply can’t handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary. But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well. We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence. A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people’s minds. Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando’s civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while. To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities. The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It’s not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures–teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians–are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be. The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds. The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely–and that is actually a pretty good thing! The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And–again–perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other. On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you’ve got some tools. In this country, the people who run things–who populate major law firms and corporate boards–understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don’t raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way. And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting about what direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities they have. And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the porous buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu ruins in Orlando. 1999, Neal Stephenson "In the Beginning Was The Command Line"
croes 5y ago
>First Amendment is one of America's finest and most resilient memes. But it's only valid for US citizens. Other countries have rights that are valid for every human being. "Human dignity is inviolable" Didn't find that in the US constitution.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  You’re missing the point. Legally, it doesn’t exist in Canada. But collective belief is what underlies even the system of law, so if Canadians collectively are memed into it, it can take hold there, too. (This hasn’t happened, yet, FWIW.)
- thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
  But it is valid. “Congress shall make no law …” is actionable, and lets you challenge things in court. “Human dignity is inviolable” is a platitude. What can be done with it?
  - disgu 5y ago
    But there are laws restricting the 1st Amendment in the US.
    - hirundo 5y ago
      There are court decisions defining the scope of the 1st Amendment. There are no valid laws restricting it, since the 1st Amendment is in the Constitution and no law can supersede the constitution. Such laws that are written and passed are unconstitutional. Edit: The above is mistaken. A law can restrict the 1st Amendment, or any other, if it survives "strict scrutiny": Although "strict scrutiny leaves few survivors" and will usually strike down such laws when strict scrutiny is found to apply, "the government must show that there is a compelling, or very strong, interest in law, and that the law is either narrowly tailored or is the least restrictive means available to the government." https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1966/strict-scrutiny https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1966/strict-scrutin...
Quarrelsome 5y ago
Are we not mistaking fashion for people? Memes are the fashionable aspect of a given movement and a movement's success isn't the quality or even quantity of its memes but whether it resonates with a target market and that target market has the numbers. Whether it represents a need or belief of the people. The reason that the GME meme worked is because there are more than ever available small-time investors called the "WFH COVID crowd". Furthermore there are countless people that believe the market is rigged in one way or another so the story was appealing. Added to that, there's a crowd of millennials that have fond memories of Gamestop and browse reddit and all of that combines into a powerful movement with a lot of energy behind it. The memes (to the moon, diamond hands) are just the gaseous by-product of that activity.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  The word "meme" was coined in the 1970's. It's a biology term which describes behaviors like cooking our food or wearing pants or voting. Things that one organism might notice another doing, and do the same themselves. It had a resurgence in the 2000's where it was only used to describe media: image macros, phrases, that sort of thing. If you take the latter usage, then you're right. There's more to this stuff than the pictures or words that we share about them. But if you take the original meaning then > Whether it represents a need or belief of the people. is indeed a quality of the meme.
Robotbeat 5y ago
America is a cultural empire more than a physical one. And memes like civil rights, human rights, technology, and conspiracies spread like wildfire, burning through the whole world. “Me Too,” the Freedom Convoy, Joe Rogan, Woke stuff like BLM, Obama and Trump (both being like the embodiments of powerful memes), etc… this inspires movements all throughout the world. See the Hong Kong protestors using Pepe the Frog as a mascot. See protestors in Southeast Asia using the Hunger Games salute. As some comedian (can’t remember who) pointed out, we are the country that landed on the moon and also the country that made up the idea that it was a hoax. We don’t let self-interest get in the way of a really good meme. A country might typically be lucky to invent a meme like Marxism or Maoism or whatever once a decade or century. America generates these things every month or even week, and it burns through the entire world in that time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kmeisthax 5y ago
>Perplexed, the judge responded: "What do you mean, first amendment? What's that?," pointing out that the U.S. constitution does not apply to Canada. I don't think the judge is saying "Freedom of Speech is un-Canadian", I think the judge is dunking on an unsympathetic defendant for getting their understanding of the law from Internet memes. While there are differences in how strictly American and Canadian law interpret the concept, it's not like one country has freedom of speech and the other one doesn't.
- hirundo 5y ago
  He should have gone with the Prime Directive instead. William Shatner is bound by it, after all, and he is Canadian.
  - danaris 5y ago
    No; Captain Kirk's bound by it, and he's from Iowa. (He only works in outer space.)
- newaccount2021 5y ago
- stygiansonic 5y ago
  Indeed, the "Fundamental Freedoms" section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is mostly equivalent to the First Amendment. (At least to a layperson, I'm sure there are some legal details that differ) https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-rights-protected/guide-canadian-charter-rights-freedoms.html#a2b https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-righ...
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    It's very significantly different - it's an alienable right as long as the alienation is considered "democratic and free". It can also be completely alienated by suspension of articles in the Charter.
Glyptodon 5y ago
One of the big risks with China is that eventually some sort of bellicose xenophobic nationalist meme fever ends up being the thing that can't be contained or cleaned up and they force themselves into a WW3 death spiral.
- Tostino 5y ago
  That same threat exists for just about every nuclear armed country. I don't know why China is more scary in that regard than the USA for instance.
gennarro 5y ago
> But when multiple "crowds" try to sway more people to join them, what determines which groups ultimately succeed? The quality of their memes. Seems to be the premise of this argument, and this seems to be deeply flawed to me. Wishful thinking at best, and liked a confusion of correlation and causation. But I also have no data to prove this claim.
bugbuddy 5y ago
I kept reading the title as “The Memory Leak Theory.” Even after knowing it’s about meme. The down side of fast reading habits.
labrador 5y ago
> Memes, like genes, are "selfish" — their sole goal is to replicate I've heard this bandied about before but it makes no sense to me. Genes are the code enabling duplication of life. Successful replication paths have been stumbled upon so life continues to exists. None of that applies to memes
- anoonmoose 5y ago
  the dude who invented the word meme wrote an entire book explaining this metaphor
- krapp 5y ago
  > Genes are the code enabling duplication of life. Successful replication paths have been stumbled upon so life continues to exists. >None of that applies to memes That is literally the original definition of, and concept behind, memes[0], as coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s - a self-replicating component of culture equivalent in behavior to a virus or DNA in biology, which acts to propagate cultural ideals, symbols or practices. The study of the "successful replication paths" of memes in this original context is called memetics[1]. You may have that confused for what "meme" has come to represent in internet culture, which is a popular image caption or joke that spreads no cultural referent other than itself, but that's not what's being discussed here. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
  - labrador 5y ago
    Thanks, yes I was thinking of joke images
- AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  On the contrary, the gene rules apply to anything that duplicates or is duplicated. Not just ideas or phenotypes. It’s a property of path-dependency. What exists today is a function of what existed yesterday, and not what did not exist. Everything that exists “descends” from something that survived the filter of reality, where only a subset of what is possible is realized.
Mezzie 5y ago
Interesting, but the author makes a mistake that I think a lot of tech culture writers make: Assuming all the issues with technology stem from the technology and not the culture that developed it. What I mean by that is that while we can see the influence that an app like TikTok has on behavior by comparing pre and post TT, we can't compare our TikTok/internet with a TikTok/internet that was made by hunter-gatherers, or fascists, or Georgists, or whomever. Or a TikTok made in 17th century France. In particular, I think the author is onto something here when he discusses the speed of the memes, but he doesn't mention the other half of the equation: The speed of governments/societies to respond. I think a lot of what we're seeing is a tension between the speed of culture and the speed of its institutions. When those are out of sync, bad things happen. Culture too fast plus institutions that can't/don't change means they fall apart; institutions changing too fast without people results in stuff like the fall of the USSR. Basically, when the people in a culture don't have a reason to trust its institutions, they'll turn on them. I would also argue that this was inevitable, because any new tool is used for political purposes. Therefore, the invention of the internet meant it would be harnessed for political purposes. Most well-off governments of today are democracies of some stripe and America's recent military adventures have proven that quick and mobile is a good tactic against slow giant democracies. It'd be like aliens wondering why humans shoot each other in/aim for the head no matter what weapons we come up with.
- bugbuddy 5y ago
  This vaguely reminds me of Ronald Wright’s “Rebellion of the Tools.” There is a lot of momentum involved in a lot of human behaviors. People tend to prefer familiarity (including the foreign but familiar kinds.) Salience and repetition creates familiarity and it is mostly advertisements and commercial interests that drive most eyeballs nowadays in most of the world. So, in my opinion, it all circles back to to the old adage: “follow the money.”
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Oh, thank you for that, I found it and read a couple of pages and it looks delightful. I agree on follow the money, though to make the adage work for more societies, I would say "follow the incentives".
est 5y ago
> And what about China? Trying to avoid memes completely might weaken the country's immune system The argument is voided because Chinese memes are spreading regardless of government censorship. Even government agencies are making cringe propaganda videos inspired by popular memes. The only problem is that those memes are circulating inside Chinese language sphere and mostly inside the Great Firewall. The effectiveness of "censorship" is greatly exaggerated. In many cases, censorship itself is a fuel to memes, fighting censorship is a meme of its own called Chongta (crush the towers, derived from pvp MOBA games) America does not have a superior meme culture. What's more damaging to its "immune system"? Ignorance & Arrogance.
earthboundkid 5y ago
I started read Robert Adam's novel The This last night. Still only on chapter 2, but anyone who is interested in this content will probably be interested in the novel. The premise is that in the near future there is a new social network that works by injecting a device into the roof of your mouth that lets you just always be connected to the hive mind. Wackiness ensues. (Okay, not wackiness.)
Emanation 5y ago
Big fat no. The entire article hinges on the misnomer memes are are some how separate entities from the human mind, when they're not. They are ideas and also our behavior. The notion that the US is less subsceptible to them because we're 'immune' is nonsense. Behaving in some manner will make us continue to behave in some manner until acted upon by a change agent/event/*idea/etc. A meme is fundementally a type of set of information. If a population was skeptical of sets of information, that in itself would be categorizable under a set of information, a meme.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
vsareto 5y ago
>The gist is that social unrest increases in line with the velocity of memes. Put differently: the faster that memes can emerge and spread, the bigger the threat to democracy and social order. I think engagement with social media is the root cause here. Velocity of memes definitely follows that metric though. Memes are just an information packet, but there's additional information flowing over different formats. This sentiment feels very similar to the Big Mac index as it relates to economics.

49 points by jger15 5y ago

api 5y ago

I've kind of watched the meme resistance thing in real time. We had this massive authoritarian populist right wing movement a few years ago that really exploited the fact that a huge number of Internet-naive people had just been brought online via the mobile/tablet revolution. These people had never been exposed to memes (in the Internet parlance), troll culture, conspiracy theories, propaganda bots, click bait, and all the other tools of the Internet influence trade and were easy pickings for a loosely organized confederation of "alt-right" propagandists. As this happened I watched a surge in analytical takes on this from both the left and from anti-authoritarian libertarian (a.k.a. actual libertarian) circles. I saw podcasts that had formerly discussed conspiracy and fringe ideas in a detached "Art Bell" style pivot and go "meta" on these theories and start digging into their intellectual and cultural origins. I saw books like "It Came From Something Awful" that analyzed these phenomena become bestsellers in more mainstream circles. All that analysis was the immune system working. The Pepe the frog movement was a one off thing. It won't be repeated. I doubt we will see anything as explosively successful as Qanon again either. Sure there will be things like that on the fringes but something that vaults from a dumb 4chan LARP into a nationwide movement within a month or two is not likely to happen a second time. The population has already been exposed. China on the other hand... if this is what they are doing and if they are actually successful at it, they will remain deeply vulnerable to an outbreak of this type of propaganda whether it originates from foreign or domestic sources (or most likely a mix thereof). P.S. I think the strongest argument against deplatforming is that this is interfering with the process of memetic immunity. Given that we have no vaccines against toxic memes (or even a theory of how that would work), letting the population get exposed and achieving herd immunity is probably the best strategy. So go ahead, let tons of naive "conspiracy virgins" get sucked into Qanon or whatever. They need to build up their immune systems. I rolled my eyes instantly at Q because I knew chan culture and I also recognized a grab bag of worn old conspiracy tropes from Usenet in the 1990s. I saw all that stuff when I was fifteen. I've changed my mind on deplatforming multiple times, but I think this is where I've settled as I've watched everything play out. Democracy, if we let it function, is antifragile.

dangerlibrary 5y ago
We don't get to live the counterfactual though - we don't know how much of what feels like immunity as a result of "people coming to their senses" is actually the result of a successful de-platforming effort.
- api 5y ago
  No, but given that the spread of these things through social networks resembles infectious disease we can take an educated guess. I'd propose that deplatforming probably stretched out the curve. I suppose an argument could still be made from that. Maybe without stretching out the curve we would have seen significant loss of life on January 6th from many more thousands of Q people marching on the capital and eventually being hurt or killed in confrontations with capital police and the national guard. That would not have been good, though it would have in the long term perhaps more deeply discredited the movement. We can never live the counterfactual with history.
  - gogithefish 5y ago
    Possibly. Also important to note that by responding improperly to such threats, the institutions themselves end up weakening themselves. For example, instead of being honest about what vaccines can and can't do, they pre-empt the dumbest arguments by pretending vaccines are perfect. Once some (reasonable) limits to efficacy become known, the institutions are completely discredited and the anti-vaxxer meme becomes even more powerful.
kevinmchugh 5y ago
I'm having trouble squaring the idea that American adults were unfamiliar with conspiracy theories and the way the JFK assassination is talked about. Or Loose Change is more obvious to me as the first Internet-native conspiracy theory to go mainstream.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  No, conspiracy theories have always been floating around, and people have always been pushing them. The difference is that the rest of society fought tooth-and-nail to keep them underground. Nowadays most social media platforms work tirelessly to keep you on a steady drip of whatever content happens to push your buttons the best. So if the system thinks you might buy into a conspiracy theory, it'll keep serving you more and more extreme versions of that meme. This is a necessary side effect of how a recommendation engine works. One particularly odd bit of misinformation about how misinformation spreads is the idea that otherwise normal people are merely tricked into believing it. In other words, someone says "the moon landing was faked" or "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself" and everyone believes it because monkey reptile brain. This is a very simplified idea of how conspiracy shit spreads. Most people tend to be highly critical of new information and view it in context based on how plausible it seems. Even theories like Jeffrey Epstein being murdered in prison are only believable because it fits in with the already-proven facts, not because we just want the story to be more interesting.[0] Conspiracy theorists think differently. To put it bluntly, they are extremely gullible. They want to believe information that fits a simplified narrative. And so they tend to disconnect from everyone else and connect to other conspiracy theorists[1]. This has been happening years, decades, arguably centuries prior to today's social media world. It just wasn't nearly as visible. Now, the gullible people group together on social media and plan out how to be as loud and obnoxious as possible. Decades ago, you could never imagine organizing the world's moon landing conspiracy theorists to flash-mob Cape Canaveral; because we didn't let these people have a platform. But now we do. [0] If you're wondering, I actually don't think Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison. [1] RationalWiki calls this process "crank magnetism"

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hprotagonist 5y ago

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense. Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones–a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney? Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now–much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with–and we simply can’t handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary. But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well. We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence. A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people’s minds. Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando’s civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while. To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities. The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It’s not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures–teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians–are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be. The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds. The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely–and that is actually a pretty good thing! The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And–again–perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other. On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you’ve got some tools. In this country, the people who run things–who populate major law firms and corporate boards–understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don’t raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way. And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting about what direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities they have. And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the porous buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu ruins in Orlando. 1999, Neal Stephenson "In the Beginning Was The Command Line"

croes 5y ago

>First Amendment is one of America's finest and most resilient memes. But it's only valid for US citizens. Other countries have rights that are valid for every human being. "Human dignity is inviolable" Didn't find that in the US constitution.

Robotbeat 5y ago
You’re missing the point. Legally, it doesn’t exist in Canada. But collective belief is what underlies even the system of law, so if Canadians collectively are memed into it, it can take hold there, too. (This hasn’t happened, yet, FWIW.)
thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
But it is valid. “Congress shall make no law …” is actionable, and lets you challenge things in court. “Human dignity is inviolable” is a platitude. What can be done with it?
- disgu 5y ago
  But there are laws restricting the 1st Amendment in the US.
  - hirundo 5y ago
    There are court decisions defining the scope of the 1st Amendment. There are no valid laws restricting it, since the 1st Amendment is in the Constitution and no law can supersede the constitution. Such laws that are written and passed are unconstitutional. Edit: The above is mistaken. A law can restrict the 1st Amendment, or any other, if it survives "strict scrutiny": Although "strict scrutiny leaves few survivors" and will usually strike down such laws when strict scrutiny is found to apply, "the government must show that there is a compelling, or very strong, interest in law, and that the law is either narrowly tailored or is the least restrictive means available to the government." https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1966/strict-scrutiny https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1966/strict-scrutin...

Quarrelsome 5y ago

Are we not mistaking fashion for people? Memes are the fashionable aspect of a given movement and a movement's success isn't the quality or even quantity of its memes but whether it resonates with a target market and that target market has the numbers. Whether it represents a need or belief of the people. The reason that the GME meme worked is because there are more than ever available small-time investors called the "WFH COVID crowd". Furthermore there are countless people that believe the market is rigged in one way or another so the story was appealing. Added to that, there's a crowd of millennials that have fond memories of Gamestop and browse reddit and all of that combines into a powerful movement with a lot of energy behind it. The memes (to the moon, diamond hands) are just the gaseous by-product of that activity.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
The word "meme" was coined in the 1970's. It's a biology term which describes behaviors like cooking our food or wearing pants or voting. Things that one organism might notice another doing, and do the same themselves. It had a resurgence in the 2000's where it was only used to describe media: image macros, phrases, that sort of thing. If you take the latter usage, then you're right. There's more to this stuff than the pictures or words that we share about them. But if you take the original meaning then > Whether it represents a need or belief of the people. is indeed a quality of the meme.

Robotbeat 5y ago

America is a cultural empire more than a physical one. And memes like civil rights, human rights, technology, and conspiracies spread like wildfire, burning through the whole world. “Me Too,” the Freedom Convoy, Joe Rogan, Woke stuff like BLM, Obama and Trump (both being like the embodiments of powerful memes), etc… this inspires movements all throughout the world. See the Hong Kong protestors using Pepe the Frog as a mascot. See protestors in Southeast Asia using the Hunger Games salute. As some comedian (can’t remember who) pointed out, we are the country that landed on the moon and also the country that made up the idea that it was a hoax. We don’t let self-interest get in the way of a really good meme. A country might typically be lucky to invent a meme like Marxism or Maoism or whatever once a decade or century. America generates these things every month or even week, and it burns through the entire world in that time.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kmeisthax 5y ago

>Perplexed, the judge responded: "What do you mean, first amendment? What's that?," pointing out that the U.S. constitution does not apply to Canada. I don't think the judge is saying "Freedom of Speech is un-Canadian", I think the judge is dunking on an unsympathetic defendant for getting their understanding of the law from Internet memes. While there are differences in how strictly American and Canadian law interpret the concept, it's not like one country has freedom of speech and the other one doesn't.

hirundo 5y ago
He should have gone with the Prime Directive instead. William Shatner is bound by it, after all, and he is Canadian.
- danaris 5y ago
  No; Captain Kirk's bound by it, and he's from Iowa. (He only works in outer space.)
newaccount2021 5y ago
stygiansonic 5y ago
Indeed, the "Fundamental Freedoms" section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is mostly equivalent to the First Amendment. (At least to a layperson, I'm sure there are some legal details that differ) https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-rights-protected/guide-canadian-charter-rights-freedoms.html#a2b https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-righ...
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  It's very significantly different - it's an alienable right as long as the alienation is considered "democratic and free". It can also be completely alienated by suspension of articles in the Charter.

Glyptodon 5y ago

One of the big risks with China is that eventually some sort of bellicose xenophobic nationalist meme fever ends up being the thing that can't be contained or cleaned up and they force themselves into a WW3 death spiral.

Tostino 5y ago
That same threat exists for just about every nuclear armed country. I don't know why China is more scary in that regard than the USA for instance.

gennarro 5y ago

> But when multiple "crowds" try to sway more people to join them, what determines which groups ultimately succeed? The quality of their memes. Seems to be the premise of this argument, and this seems to be deeply flawed to me. Wishful thinking at best, and liked a confusion of correlation and causation. But I also have no data to prove this claim.

bugbuddy 5y ago

I kept reading the title as “The Memory Leak Theory.” Even after knowing it’s about meme. The down side of fast reading habits.

labrador 5y ago

> Memes, like genes, are "selfish" — their sole goal is to replicate I've heard this bandied about before but it makes no sense to me. Genes are the code enabling duplication of life. Successful replication paths have been stumbled upon so life continues to exists. None of that applies to memes

anoonmoose 5y ago
the dude who invented the word meme wrote an entire book explaining this metaphor
krapp 5y ago
> Genes are the code enabling duplication of life. Successful replication paths have been stumbled upon so life continues to exists. >None of that applies to memes That is literally the original definition of, and concept behind, memes[0], as coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s - a self-replicating component of culture equivalent in behavior to a virus or DNA in biology, which acts to propagate cultural ideals, symbols or practices. The study of the "successful replication paths" of memes in this original context is called memetics[1]. You may have that confused for what "meme" has come to represent in internet culture, which is a popular image caption or joke that spreads no cultural referent other than itself, but that's not what's being discussed here. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
- labrador 5y ago
  Thanks, yes I was thinking of joke images
AbrahamParangi 5y ago
On the contrary, the gene rules apply to anything that duplicates or is duplicated. Not just ideas or phenotypes. It’s a property of path-dependency. What exists today is a function of what existed yesterday, and not what did not exist. Everything that exists “descends” from something that survived the filter of reality, where only a subset of what is possible is realized.

Mezzie 5y ago

Interesting, but the author makes a mistake that I think a lot of tech culture writers make: Assuming all the issues with technology stem from the technology and not the culture that developed it. What I mean by that is that while we can see the influence that an app like TikTok has on behavior by comparing pre and post TT, we can't compare our TikTok/internet with a TikTok/internet that was made by hunter-gatherers, or fascists, or Georgists, or whomever. Or a TikTok made in 17th century France. In particular, I think the author is onto something here when he discusses the speed of the memes, but he doesn't mention the other half of the equation: The speed of governments/societies to respond. I think a lot of what we're seeing is a tension between the speed of culture and the speed of its institutions. When those are out of sync, bad things happen. Culture too fast plus institutions that can't/don't change means they fall apart; institutions changing too fast without people results in stuff like the fall of the USSR. Basically, when the people in a culture don't have a reason to trust its institutions, they'll turn on them. I would also argue that this was inevitable, because any new tool is used for political purposes. Therefore, the invention of the internet meant it would be harnessed for political purposes. Most well-off governments of today are democracies of some stripe and America's recent military adventures have proven that quick and mobile is a good tactic against slow giant democracies. It'd be like aliens wondering why humans shoot each other in/aim for the head no matter what weapons we come up with.

bugbuddy 5y ago
This vaguely reminds me of Ronald Wright’s “Rebellion of the Tools.” There is a lot of momentum involved in a lot of human behaviors. People tend to prefer familiarity (including the foreign but familiar kinds.) Salience and repetition creates familiarity and it is mostly advertisements and commercial interests that drive most eyeballs nowadays in most of the world. So, in my opinion, it all circles back to to the old adage: “follow the money.”
- Mezzie 5y ago
  Oh, thank you for that, I found it and read a couple of pages and it looks delightful. I agree on follow the money, though to make the adage work for more societies, I would say "follow the incentives".

est 5y ago

> And what about China? Trying to avoid memes completely might weaken the country's immune system The argument is voided because Chinese memes are spreading regardless of government censorship. Even government agencies are making cringe propaganda videos inspired by popular memes. The only problem is that those memes are circulating inside Chinese language sphere and mostly inside the Great Firewall. The effectiveness of "censorship" is greatly exaggerated. In many cases, censorship itself is a fuel to memes, fighting censorship is a meme of its own called Chongta (crush the towers, derived from pvp MOBA games) America does not have a superior meme culture. What's more damaging to its "immune system"? Ignorance & Arrogance.

earthboundkid 5y ago

I started read Robert Adam's novel The This last night. Still only on chapter 2, but anyone who is interested in this content will probably be interested in the novel. The premise is that in the near future there is a new social network that works by injecting a device into the roof of your mouth that lets you just always be connected to the hive mind. Wackiness ensues. (Okay, not wackiness.)

Emanation 5y ago

Big fat no. The entire article hinges on the misnomer memes are are some how separate entities from the human mind, when they're not. They are ideas and also our behavior. The notion that the US is less subsceptible to them because we're 'immune' is nonsense. Behaving in some manner will make us continue to behave in some manner until acted upon by a change agent/event/*idea/etc. A meme is fundementally a type of set of information. If a population was skeptical of sets of information, that in itself would be categorizable under a set of information, a meme.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

vsareto 5y ago

>The gist is that social unrest increases in line with the velocity of memes. Put differently: the faster that memes can emerge and spread, the bigger the threat to democracy and social order. I think engagement with social media is the root cause here. Velocity of memes definitely follows that metric though. Memes are just an information packet, but there's additional information flowing over different formats. This sentiment feels very similar to the Big Mac index as it relates to economics.