Daily Archives: February 7, 2017

Memes, as any alt-right Pepe sorcerer will tell you, are not just frivolous entertainment. They are magic, the stuff by which reality is made and manipulated. What's perhaps surprising is that this view is not so far off from one within the US defense establishment, where a growing body of research explores how memes can be used to win wars.

This recent election proved that memes, some of which have been funded by politically motivated millionaires and foreign governments, can be potent weapons, but they pose a particular challenge to a superpower like the United States.

Memes appear to function like the IEDs of information warfare. They are natural tools of an insurgency; great for blowing things up, but likely to sabotage the desired effects when handled by the larger actor in an asymmetric conflict. Just think back to the NYPD's hashtag boondoggle for an example of how quickly things can go wrong when big institutions try to control messaging on the internet. That doesn't mean research should be abandoned or memes disposed of altogether, but as the NYPD case and other examples show, the establishment isn't really built for meme warfare.

For a number of reasons, memetics are likely to become more important in the new White House.

To understand this issue, we first have to define what a meme is because that is a subject of some controversy and confusion in its own right. We tend to think of memes from their popular use on the internet as iterative single panel illustrations with catchy tag lines, Pepe and Lolcats being two well known known examples of that type. But in its scientific and military usage a meme refers to something far broader. In his 2006 essay Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War, the American transhumanist writer Keith Henson defined memes as "replicating information patterns: ways to do things, learned elements of culture, beliefs or ideas."

Memetics, the study of meme theory and application, is a kind of grab bag of concepts and disciplines. It's part biology and neuroscience, part evolutionary psychology, part old fashioned propaganda, and part marketing campaign driven by the same thinking that goes into figuring out what makes a banner ad clickable. Though memetics currently exists somewhere between science, science fiction, and social science, some enthusiasts present it as a kind of hidden code that can be used to reprogram not only individual behaviors but entire societies.

For a number of reasons, memetics are likely to become more important in the new White House. Jeff Giesea is a former employee of tech giant and Trump donor Peter Thiel, and an influential organizer within the alt right who was prominently featured in recent profiles on the movement and its ties to the Trump administration. Giesea is also the author of an article published in an official NATO strategic journal in late 2015just as the Trump campaign was really building steamentitled "It's Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare."

"It's time to drive towards a more expansive view of Strategic Communications on the social media battlefield," Giesea said in his essay on the power of memes. "It's time to adopt a more aggressive, proactive, and agile mindset and approach. It's time to embrace memetic warfare."

Giesea was far from the first to suggest this. Some forward thinkers within the US military were interested in how memes might be used in warfare years before the killing and digital resurrection of Harambe dominated popular culture. Public records indicate that the military's interest in memes picked up after 2001, spurred by the wars against jihadist terrorist groups and the parallel "War of ideas" with Islamist ideology.

Despite the government research and interest inside the military for applying memes to war, it seemed to be insurgent groups that used them most effectively.

"Memetics: A Growth Industry in US Military operations" was published in 2005 by Michael B. Prosser, then a Major and now a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps. Written as an assignment for the Marine Corps' School of Advanced Warfighting, Prosser's paper includes a disclaimer clarifying that it represents only his own views and not those of the military or US government. In it, he lays out a vision for both weaponizing and diffusing memes, defined as "units of cultural transmission" and "bits of cultural information transmitted and replicated throughout populations and/or societies" in order to "understand and defeat an enemy ideology and win over the masses of undecided noncombatants."

Prosser's paper includes a detailed proposal for the development of a "Meme Warfare Center." The center's function is to "advise the Commander on meme generation, transmission, coupled with a detailed analysis on enemy, friendly and noncombatant populations." Headed by a senior civilian or military leader known as a "Meme Management Officer" or "Meme and Information Integration Advisor," Prosser writes, "the MWC is designed to advise the commander and provide the most relevant meme combat options within the ideological and nonlinear battle space."

Subscribe to the Motherboard podcast on iTunes

A year after the Meme Warfare Center proposal was published, DARPA, the Pentagon agency that develops new military technology, commissioned a four-year study of memetics. The research was led by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, founder of the Robotic Technology Institute, and an academic with a background in physics and cybernetics.

Finkelstein's study of "Military Memetics" centered on a basic problem in the field, determining "whether memetics can be established as a science with the ability to explain and predict phenomena." It still had to be proved, in other words, that memes were actual components of reality and not just a nifty concept with great marketing.

Finkelstein's work tries to bring memetics closer to hard science by providing a "meme definition for Military Memetics," that is "information which propagates, has impact, and persists (Info-PIP)." Classifying memes according to this definition, and separating them out from all the ideas that don't count as memes, he offers metrics like "persistence" to measure their effectiveness.

Despite the government research and interest inside the military for applying memes to war, it seemed to be insurgent groups that used them most effectively. During the early stages of ISIS' war in Iraq and Syria, for instance, the group used memes to captivate an international audience and broadcast its message both to enemies and potential recruits.

One of the first public applications of the research into memetics and social media propaganda was the State Department's 2013 "Think Again Turn Away" initiative. The campaign's attempts to counteract ISIS social media propaganda did not turn out well. The program, according to director of the SITE Intelligence Group Rita Katz, was "not only ineffective, but also provides jihadists with a stage to voice their arguments." Similar to how ISIS supporters hijacked the government's platform, a year later activists used the NYPD's own hashtag to highlight police abuse.

"Look at their fancy memes compared to what we're not doing," said Sen. Cory Booker to other members of the Homeland Security Committee during a 2015 hearing on "Jihad 2.0." Booker's assessment has become increasingly common but some critics question whether focusing on a "meme gap" is an effective way to combat groups like ISIS.

"I've never seen a military program in that area that was effective," John Robb, a former Air Force pilot involved in special operations and author of Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, told Motherboard. As he sees it, the US military will always be at a structural disadvantage when it comes to applying memetics in war because, "the most effective types of manipulation all yield disruption." According to Robb, "the broad manipulation of public sentiment is really not in [the military's] wheelhouse," and that is largely because, "all the power is in the hands of the people on the outside doing the disruption."

Meme wars seem to favor insurgencies because, by their nature, they weaken monopolies on narrative and empower challenges to centralized authority. A government could use memes to increase disorder within a system, but if the goal is to increase stability, it's the wrong tool for the job.

"Stuff like this is perennial," Robb said about the new interest in meme warfare. "Every couple of years a new program comes out, people spend money for a couple of years then it goes away. Then people forget about that failure and they do it again."

We've just witnessed a successful meme insurgency in America. Donald Trump's campaign was founded as an oppositional movementagainst the Republican establishment, Democrats, the media, and "political correctness." It used memes successfully precisely because, as an opposition, it benefited by increasing disorder. Every meme about "Sick Hillary," "cucks," or "draining the swamp" chipped away at the wall built around institutional authority.

Trump's win shocked the world, but if we all read alt-right power broker Jeff Giesea's paper about memetic warfare in 2015, we might have seen it coming.

"For many of us in the social media world, it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies," he said.

Original post:

Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare? - Motherboard

Bethan Clark investigates the surprising academics behind memeticsm the field behind the humble internet meme

Memes currently dominate Facebook homepages and Twitter feeds. Indeed, even before their relatively recent rise to ubiquity, they had a home on niche sites for sharing image macros, early meme flagships, and other more popular platforms such as Tumblr. Recently, the rise of Memebridge has already prompted discussion on the pervasiveness and influence of memes on social media.

An interesting point is often overlooked however. There is an oft-omitted fact about the origin of internet memes: that they are not what the term was originally intended to mean. Tracing back the evolution of the term is a gateway to the surprisingly controversial field of science that inspired memes as we know them.

It was Richard Dawkins who coined the term meme, proposing to define it as the cultural version of a gene in his well-known book, The Selfish Gene. Understanding human cultural evolution as being comparable to the biological evolution of species, this makes the meme a unit of culture, just as the gene is a unit of genetic inheritance.

Like genes existing in individuals cells and being passed down through generations, memes reside in individuals and can replicate themselves. Memes are hosted in the mind and reproduce by jumping between individuals when one influences another to adopt a belief. What makes the meme such a useful idea is the framework it provides to describe cultural evolution.

In the academic world, as well as across our Facebook feeds, the meme war rages on

What counts as a meme? Almost anything, according to Dawkins. His examples include tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches and even the idea of God. The spin-off that we are more familiar with nowadays, internet memes, is clearly a rather more limited category.

The internet meme as a concept was first suggested by Mike Godwin in Wired in June 1993 and 20 years later, Dawkins made clear their distinction from his original. This distinction lies in their distribution, altered deliberately by human creativity as opposed to random mutation and selection processes.

However, the original version of the meme is still discussed in academia. It led to the creation of a whole field, that of memetics, where memes are used as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Extending the analogy with genes, if the three conditions of variation, replication, and differential fitness are met, then meme evolution willnaturally occur, and with it, cultural evolution.

Memetics is simply the study of this process, applied to culture: the analysis of the spread of ideas based on their success instead of the more traditional concern for their truth. However, it is a hotly-contested field, full of internal warring as well as external attacks.

Criticism of meme theory comes from many angles, ranging from quibbles about terminology to queries of theresearch status of the meme. Its been labelled a pseudoscience by critics, with the concept of a meme being called into question at every stage. At the level of terminology, semiotic theorists claim the meme is a simplified version of the semiotic concept of the sign, and evolutionary biology Ernst Mayr declared it an unnecessary synonym for concept.

The usefulness of memetics has also been criticised. Mary Midgley, an English moral philosopher, argued that as culture is pattern-like, a reductionist approach is limited. Its an interesting parallel to emerging criticism about internet memes, though many would reject this as taking them too seriously.

Memebridge: dank memes or dark feelings?

Not even the application of memes within the field itself is free from quarrelling. Some memeticists see memes as a useful philosophical perspective to guide inquiry, whereas others focus on developing an empirical grounding for the field to be respected.

Not everyone is convinced this is possible, however. Midgley has highlighted the reliance of memetics on producing knowledge through metaphors, something she asserts is a questionable research approach. The use of metaphor, in this case the analogy between cultural phenomena and genes, can overlook effects that do not fit neatly into the comparison.

Memeticists defend their position, pointing to the ability of metaphors to reveal insights that would otherwise have been missed, but its a debate that is unlikely to be decisively concluded any time soon. The mirror criticism of the reliance of internet memes on relatability, and the corresponding alienation of individuals who do not identify with the subject of the memes, is currently just as unresolved.

It seems the criticism and confusion in the field of memetics is unlikely to abate any time soon. In the academic world, as well as across our Facebook feeds, the meme war rages on

See more here:

The scientific controversy behind memes - Varsity Online

Daniel C. Dennett W. W. Norton: 2017. ISBN: 9780393242072

Buy this book: US UK Japan

Bryce Vickmark/NYT/eyevine

Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett in 2013.

In Joel and Ethan Coen's 2009 film A Serious Man, physics professor Larry Gopnik is in the middle of an existential crisis. In a dream, he gives a lecture on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; Sy Ableman, the older man with whom Gopnik's wife is having an affair, stays on after the students disperse. In a condescending drawl, he addresses Gopnik and his equation-covered chalkboard: I'll concede that it's subtle, clever but at the end of the day, is it convincing?

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has been hearing variants of this riposte for decades. If history is a guide, his latest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, will elicit similar responses. It is a supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work, tying together 50 years of thinking about where minds come from and how they work. Dennett's path from the origins of life to symphonies is long and winding, but you couldn't hope for a better guide. Walk with him and you'll learn a lot.

The book's backbone is Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. That replaced the idea of top-down intelligent design with a mindless, mechanical, bottom-up process that guides organisms along evolutionary trajectories into ever more complex regions of design space. Dennett also draws heavily on the idea of 'competence without comprehension', best illustrated by mathematician Alan Turing's proof that a mechanical device could do anything computational. Natural selection has created, through genetic evolution, a world rich in competence without comprehension the bacteria, trees and termites that make up so much of Earth's biomass.

Yet, as Dennett and others argue, genetic evolution is not enough to explain the skills, power and versatility of the human mind. Over the past 10,000 years, human behaviour and our ability to manipulate the planet have changed too quickly for biological evolution to have been the driving force. In Dennett's view, our brains turned into fully fledged modern minds thanks to cultural memes: 'ways of behaving' pronouncing a word this way, dancing like so that can be copied, remembered and passed on.

Some memes are better than others at getting passed on. This drives natural selection, fashioning memetic design without a designer. The first memes, Dennett argues, were words, the lifeblood of cultural evolution, which act as virtual DNA for the richly cumulative cultural evolution that marks out our species. At first, he writes, words evolved to better fit the brains they had to colonize. Only later did brains start evolving genetically to better accommodate words, beginning a co-evolutionary process that turned us into voluble creatures.

More generally, Dennett sees memetic evolution as akin to how software has co-evolved with hardware. Memes are like apps that add a talent, a bit of know-how, slowly building up the repertoire of human competences and ever-greater degrees of comprehension. This, he avers, kicked off an incremental process that led to self-monitoring, reflection and the emergence of new things to think about: words and other memes.

Later, inventions from writing to clocks gave us memorable things to do things with. Step by small step, he argues, we moved away from bottom-up cultural evolution towards consciously directed, top-down explorations, giving birth to genuinely intelligent design. This has enabled us to wipe out smallpox, put people on the Moon and ask questions about our own minds.

Perhaps none are bigger than the problem of consciousness. Dennett reprises his long-held counter-intuitive idea that consciousness is a 'user illusion' similar to the interface of an app, through which people interact with the program without understanding how it works. Memetic apps in our brains, Dennett argues, create a 'user interface' that renders the memes 'visible' to the 'self', authoring both words and deeds.

Critics often quip that Dennett doesn't explain consciousness so much as explain it away, or duck the challenge entirely, and this chapter is unlikely to bring them around. When it comes to plugging the hole of subjective experience, sceptics are likely to see his solution as barely touching the sides. Dennett might well reply that a lack of imagination prevents them from seeing how his theory supports a version of consciousness devoid of over-inflation. For the philosophical background to these hard-to-swallow ideas, see Dennett's Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown, 1991).

Although From Bacteria to Bach and Back covers territory that Dennett has explored before, it is no mere rehash. Over the past couple of decades, many psychologists, linguists and philosophers have developed ideas that extend and deepen Dennett's contributions, and he draws on these in consolidating and refining his arguments.

Dennett has earned his reputation as one of today's most readable, intellectually nimble and scientifically literate philosophers, as this subtle, clever book shows. But at the end of the day, is it convincing? It's not an open-and-shut case, as he acknowledges. Many may find the earlier chapters more persuasive than the later ones, in which memetics shoulders so much weight and human consciousness looms large. Even scholars who embrace Dennett's account of how Darwinian processes fashion cultural design may stop short of hitching their wagon to his claims. But a virtue of his broad perspective is that it can tolerate disagreements over fine details while still hewing to the spirit of his vision.

Dennett's is not the only game in town, as he well knows, but it is immensely instructive and pleasurable to see this game played with such skill, verve and wit.

Original post:

Cognitive science: Dennett rides again - Nature.com