Category Archives: Memetics

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Its been awhile since Ive felt this torn about a movie.

The original Ghost in the Shell (1995) ranks among my favorite movies of all time, and Im an equally huge fan of the anime series; the first season of Stand Alone Complex, the series that followed the movie 7 years later, is a masterpiece of thoughtful science fiction and sharp visuals. I must admit that it was with my fond memories very much in mind that I sat down a few days ago to watch Ghost in the Shell, Rupert Sanders highly publicized live-action adaptation.

My first thought: the film looks great. It is stylistically and visually spectacular, at once capturing the clean precision of futuristic technology and the unruly growth of the metropolis. Im given to understand that the artists took inspiration from, of all things, the reams of Ghost in the Shell fan art onlineand the result is magnificent. The flickering lights, giant holograms and ground-level sprawl of the futuristic city merge perfectly to create a palpably realistic environment that sets the stage beautifully for the action-packed plot. The shootouts, chases and death-defying leaps are well-choreographed and artistic, blending the human and the mechanical in exactly the right way. When combined with Scarlett Johanssons grace and technically masterful acting, the effect is visually breathtaking.

My second thought: The story is nothing like the Ghost in the Shell I once knew.

The original Ghost in the Shell was enthralling not only for its fantastic animation but also for a deep, ever-present philosophy inspired by The Ghost in the Machine, Koestlers treatise on the duality of mind and body. The animated series explored the interaction of the mental and physical with the environment and society, touching on Cartesian dualism, cognitive science, memetics and solipsism. It was thoughtful, and at times intellectually dark: the ending to the original movie, wherein the survival of Motoko Kusanagis ghost (the universes slang for distinct human consciousness) is left ambiguous to the extreme, asked more questions than it truly answeredand that was a good thing. The new movie instead opts for a plot that, sans a few clever touches, is standard Hollywood fare, with an ending deliberately far more optimistic and formulaic than that of the original. The chases and gunfights are excellently shot, but far too numerous and far too Americanized; there is very little left of the overarching philosophical questions that the original explored. That Mokoto Kusanagi is being played by Scarlett Johansson rather than any one of a number of talented Japanese actresses, for example the excellent Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim, Norwegian Wood) is emblematic of the extent to which the movie has lost touch with its source material.

Despite Ghost in the Shells impressive visuals, I cant help but feel that the series that inspired The Matrix deserved better. Perhaps it is unfair to search for the philosophical excellence of the original in the remake, but without its broad, very human questions, the movie reverts to a standard Hollywood sci-fi thriller. Watch it if you enjoy technology, gunfights, and spider-tanksbut if you wanted something with the depth and detail of the original, youre better off just re-reading the original 1989 manga.

See original here:

Film: Ghost in the Shell - The Yale Herald

Good news. NATO is no longer obsolete, according to President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, during his meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump touted an alliance he once bashed because, after fifteen-odd years of alliance operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the former reality television host just realized now they fight terrorism.

But if the most powerful political-military alliance has the real battlefield on lockdown, some worry its floundering in the battlefield of the internet, where ideas go to clash, Kremlin trolls go to spread half-truths, and ISIS goes to recruit foreign fighters.

The answer, some experts argue, lies in memes those strange jokes and references that come out of the internets woodworks from seemingly nowhere, and seem to end up everywhere at once. A small contingent of academics and experts want NATO to get in on the action to confront pro-Russian, anti-NATO trolls, or to push back against internet jihadists in the cyber space.

Its time to embrace memetic warfare, wrote Jeff Giesea, a widely-known social media and tech guru, in an article in 2015. Trolling, it might be said, is the social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare, and memes are its currency of propaganda. Giesea wasnt writing in Wired orTechCrunch, but rather in Defence Strategic Communications, the journal of NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (or Stratcom COE, because nothings complete without an onerous acronym).

Daesh is conducting memetic warfare. The Kremlin is doing it. Its inexpensive. The capabilities exist. Why arent we trying it? Giesea asked.

Its a question many military minds have been asking for years. A Marine Corps Major, Michael B. Prosser advocated for the U.S. military to develop a Meme Warfare Center (MWC) in his 2006 study, MemeticsA Growth Industry in U.S. Military Operations (abstract here).

Five years later, a specialized Pentagon unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a study on Military Memetics, one of several related research programs into what it calls a subset of neuro-cognitive warfare. It argued the war of ideas was fundamental, especially when it comes to fighting terrorists, and the key characteristics of a military meme is that it be information that propagates, has impact, and persists. Like dancing cat videos, in other words, but with sharper claws.

The problem is that NATO, like governments everywhere, are pretty terrible at the internet. Memes arent really part of NATOs arsenal yet, even if the alliance is desperately trying to tap into ideas from the private sector about how best to use social media.

Kremlin-backed trolls and internet-savvy ISIS supporters run circles around government social media programs, often run by stodgy diplomats with no authority to be creative. (The quest for funny memes is particularly tortured: In March, NATOs Stratcom COE published Stratcom Laughs: In Search of an Analytical Framework, which included a chapter on Humor as a Communication Tool: Designing Framework for Analysis.)

And government attempts at weaponizing humor can lead to some awkward moments.

Such as the time NATO instructed its public diplomacy staff to create a viral video (nothing says military bureaucracy like ordering internet virality to be magically conjured up.)

After half a million Euros, heres the result:

What looks to be a horror film shot on an iPhone turns out to be a nice family reunion because of NATO, of course. (The other two videos in this weird PR series are equally strange and, based on the page views, conspicuously un-viral. The project was quietly dropped after it was rolled out.)

Or then theres the State Departments own Think Again, Turn Away program to win the hearts and minds of would-be jihadists with snarky retorts to the America-bashing, pro-ISIS brigades on Twitter. Alas, it turns out an official State Department social media account arguing with jihadist supporters about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal over Twitter doesnt actually amount to a plan for defeating ISIS.

But if these awkward attempts fail, at least theyre trying. And who knows, now that Trump has discovered what NATO does, maybe he can lend the alliance some of his own social media magic.

Photo credit:WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images

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Can NATO Weaponize Memes? - Foreign Policy (blog)

A meme is more than just the humorous images that you share online, and in fact, encapsulates any cultural idea or trend that is passed on from person to person. And in case, we got you thinking if there is some underlying phenomenon deeper than what is observable with a cursory glance - hats off to us *cue self back pats*

But the real task lies ahead. There is something deeper and more organic underlying the entire meme culture and internet behavior in general, something that distinguishes what a meme is and at the same time connects all the memes into a single, giant, amalgamate that does way more than offer you your daily dose of humor. To truly grasp this idea, we have to go down the proverbial rabbit hole.

While the analogy between memes and genes is surely one that makes it easier to grasp the definition of the meme as given by Richard Dawkins, it is not entirely true, or rather, it is not the entire truth. What comes in handy, though, is an alternative line of thought in memetics one that perceives the meme as a virus.

Dont reach out for your hand sanitizers and air purifiers just yet; this isnt a typical virus we are talking about. This isnt biological or computerised, at least not in itself. So why do we need to think about it this way? First of all, subscribing to the gene theory is prone to a couple of misconceptions. First, genes dont spread only through replication. In fact, it is the repeated errors that introduce mutation - a key factor in evolution, the reason you and I exist. A simple exercise in observation and thought tells us that a meme actually exists because of transformation or manipulation of a base idea before it is spread - even if the manipulation is nothing more than the addition of ones opinion to the idea (Case in point - almost no two meme images that you see online are the same, even if they are based on the exact same meme). Genes mostly replicate unaltered, with a modification or mutation creeping in as a rarity. Memes mutate more frequently. It makes more sense to understand that like the process of evolution with genes, memes actually mutate in majority, and in this mutation lies the key to an evolved, persistent fit meme that survives.

Will there be a time when ideas no longer need humans to spread and persist?

While showing why a meme is mostly like a gene is a step in the right direction, it doesnt get you all the way. A similarity between memes and viruses lies in the way that it behaves with you the individual, the consumer, the reader. A typical parasite needs a conductive medium to spread you usually do not catch a cold in the middle of the summer or contract a deadly virus in a squeaky clean locality. And never before has there been a more suitable environment for the spread of ideas than the internet. But even before that, ideas always had their own ways of getting spread around be it through libraries, public gatherings, entertainment media and more.

A typical virus enters your body, reacts with it, attacks it or alters it, and either gets rejected and quarantined or accepted and forwarded. Just like that, an idea, once it reaches the end point of your mind, either persists there or gets dismissed. In the case of the former, you become the host to that idea, comprehending and interpreting it, in turn changing your own understanding of it. In the end, it is you, the host, that is affected by the idea while the idea still lies out there in its initial unaffected-by-you form and also in your own variation of it, in either case looking at being spread further as Daniel Dennett wonderfully said, a scholar is a librarys way of making another library.

We cannot get away with establishing that a meme is like a virus and then not explaining how it can behave. Since, undoubtedly, there are specific, underlying rules that govern it and, in turn, you. While not exhaustive, there are some maxims that have been identified which shed some light on this collectively sometimes referred to as the rules of the internet. Memes create stereotypes, stereotypes create the memes and so on it goes. Just like genes, it is not possible to comprehend the characteristics of a meme in isolation. Genes usually have phenotypic effects in the presence of other genes. Similarly, memes spread in the presence of certain favorable behaviour patterns. And to understand these patterns, one needs to look at the underlying rules mentioned earlier. Keep in mind though, that these rules represent a small part of a much larger system of maxims constantly being modified and updated to reach absolute ideas, so what appears funny to you today, might be a grave and serious truth tomorrow. But for today, these memes inform you of numerous stereotypes and go on to point out how they ideally behave. For instance:

Dont get us wrong stereotypes have always existed. But things work a bit differently when they are spread on the internet. Urban legends have always been a meme, but they are now spread to way more people with access to the internet and receive much more credibility thanks to technology aiding false evidence. For example, Slenderman was a fictional creature created for an online contest in 2009, the mythos of which was further expanded in the years to come. After reading a creepypasta (which itself is simply creepy stories copied and pasted all over the internet) about him, two 12 year olds in Waukesha, Wisconsin stabbed a third one 19 times to appease the fictional creature and keep their families safe from him. The girl barely survived and the trial is still ongoing. And this was a faceless man who had tentacles coming out of his back.

Urban legends are memes that have been taken a bit too seriously

If youre pondering on why they would do that, the 1% rule of the internet in combination with Poes law (both being part of the maxims that were referred to earlier, mentioned in separate box) makes it much easier to understand that a fake idea, no matter how outrageous it might be, if presented well on the internet (i.e without the obvious disclaimers that Poes law specifies) might just be perceived as gospel truth. If you use a meme to describe a person repeatedly, at one point of time there will be people who would have formed that opinion about that very person, without verification. But you dont have to reach out to a lesser known case to see this in action.

Weve all heard the statement Dont feed the trolls, or one of its modifications (once again, a meme) and have generally accepted it as the right course of action against the spreading of obvious misinformation or plainly stupid arguments - for example, comparison to Nazis as outlined in Godwins law. But this has led to a very interesting phenomenon that has impacted one of the most important events in recent times - the 2016 Presidential Election.

Without memes, there might have been a completely different person in the oval office right now

The general consensus (online) about the alt-right (or conservatives or whatever you might call the side that won) was that their arguments are silly, baseless and easily seen through A.K.A trolling. Hence the widespread reaction to those very arguments was outright dismissal. But not doing anything about that eventually led to the general populace of the country into believing the satire-laden trolling to be genuine facts in most cases. Just like how Facebooks fake news problem, triggered by switching trending topics to a purely algorithmic process from human curation, was unable to distinguish baseless trends from genuine news and ended up influencing a lot of people. If this does not instate the validity of Poes law, we dont know what will.

On the other hand, outright denial or declaration of your victory online also loses you any argument that you might be involved in because of the exact same reasons. Danths law (see box) comes into action more often than you think it does, and if you stay behind to check whether your declaration has been accepted by others in the argument or not, even after youve declared youre leaving, youd be fulfilling Shakers law. Still believe that there isnt an unseen set of rules that govern the memes, and your, behaviour?

While some of the maxims that apply to the internet have been mentioned in the article, here is an expanded list of what we believe to be the governing rules of online behavior:

Badgers Law Websites with the word Truth in the URL have none in the posted content.

Danths Law If you have to insist that youve won an Internet argument, youve probably lost badly.

Godwins law As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1

Poes Law Without a clear indication of the authors intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.

Rule 34 If it exists, theres porn of it

Skitts law Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself

Law of Exclamation The more exclamation points used in an email (or other postings), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters.

Cohens Law Whoever resorts to the argument whoever resorts to the argument that... has automatically lost the debate has automatically lost the debate.

Shakers Law Those who egregiously announce their imminent departure from an Internet discussion forum almost never actually leave.

Skarkas Law On internet messageboards, there is no subject so vile or indefensible that someone wont post positively/in defence of it.

Shanks Law The imaginative powers of the human mind have yet to rise to the challenge of concocting a conspiracy theory so batshit insane that one cannot find at least one PhD holding scientist to support it.

Wiios Law Communication usually fails, except by accident

Sturgeons Law 90% of everything is crap

The 1% Rule The 1% rule states that the number of people who create content on the Internet represents approximately 1% of the people actually viewing that content.

Cunninghams Law The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, its to post the wrong answer.

While most of our mental schema is wired to keep us focussed and occupied with whats at hand, memes, with their inherent imageability and repetitive nature, help us process abstractions faster. While this is beneficial, abstraction also leads to an unavoidable problem: we begin to view memes as concrete units, where they are not. This is what lets us be able to wage an actual war against an abstract idea (terrorism) or a particular class of chemical compounds (drugs). This leads to belief systems that are not entirely robust against questioning or dire situations, in which we unconsciously propagate those very memes. And generally, these are simple, catchy, easy-to-grasp ideas - just because they are easier to retain and rehearse.

Acknowledging the meme in its true form as a connected pseudo-organism that influences individual, and in turn, social behaviour can be more beneficial than you think. As an analogy, the first step you take against a virus outbreak is acknowledge that there is an outbreak. Its just that in this case, the outbreak can be controlled to influence certain people in certain ways. And these unseen rules, which perhaps now youll be more perceptive tobenefit the understanding, hence predictability, of how memes behave. This underlying system, this blueprint to the organism that now lies on the fringes of awareness when it comes to the general populace, will someday be viewed as what shaped the world as we will know it.

This article was first published in March 2017 issue of Digit magazine. To read Digit's articles first,subscribe hereor download the Digit e-magazine app for Android and iOS. You could also buy Digit's previous issueshere.

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Continued here:

Memes could be the key to predicting the future | Digit.in - Digit

[Editors Note: Memeology is a new bi-weekly column in which Megha Goel will explore the different effects and consequences memes have on our different yet shared lives.]

When was the last time you looked at a meme? How many hours a day do you spend talking about memes or looking at them? The reality is that we live in a world full of memes; it has come to a point where we compare every aspect of our lives to memes. Rather than using words, we are more comfortable using memes to describe our mood and feelings.

I know I have spent countless hours tagging my friends in memes on Facebook, laughing at Ned Stark, Arthur, and our local favorite, This is library. The other day, I went to show my mom the This is library video filmed at Odegaard Library, and the accompanying remix that went viral, and told her it was a meme. To my surprise, she asked me to define what a meme was, and in all honesty, I didnt know how to describe it except for saying Its a funny meme.

Have you ever wondered how these little images that you relate to so well are described? Or have you wondered how they began and how they have become a cultural phenomenon? Everything that goes viral on the internet is now a meme.

In a book by Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, Shifman talks about the meme being an expression of digital culture wherein an image or video can go viral in a way that multiple iterations are created, resulting in a shared cultural experience.

The experience you have when you look at the meme of Ross from friends squealing Im fine is the same as the experience I would have. In every definition, as I scoured the internet, memes are defined by this shared experience as their foundational basis.

But while the answer to our questions is the internet in the 21st century, before the internet age, people turned to books and newspapers for this shared cultural experience. The satirical cartoons in early publications had the same effect as memes do today.

The word meme in itself can be dated to a 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, who describes the meme as an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.

As a matter of fact, Dawkins compares memes to Darwinian evolution, theorizing it under memetics: the evolutionary model of cultural information transfer.

With the internet, the speed at which memes travel has increased exponentially. Today the number of memes in the world is uncountable, and the way the same picture is used to convey different emotions is outstanding. One undeniable truth is the fact that memes inhabit our lives.

We use memes to communicate with one another, to spread ideas, and most importantly, to define the cultural context we live in. As memes propagate satire and comedy, we look to them as an important piece of pop culture, much in the same way we look at Drake or Meryl Streep.

Reach columnist Megha Goel at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @meghagoel97

Read the rest here:

Memeology: Where did memes begin? - Dailyuw

This is the definition page for What is a meme? The main page for The Daily Meme is http://thedailymeme.com/

People often ask, What is a Meme? so heres a more than a little information on that. I pronounce it so its rhymes with dream; some pronounce it so it sounds like mem (from mem-ory).

First off, technically many of the sites here are not actually memes. Most of the sites listed here create new questions all the time and removes the whole evolving viral concept of a meme. But most people call them memes and I liked the word meme so I used the word when creating this site.

In the context of web logs / blogs / blogging and other kinds of personal web sites its some kind of list of questions that you saw somewhere else and you decided to answer the questions. Then someone else sees them and does them and so on and so on. I generally consider these to be actual questions and not some multiple choice quizzes that determine some result at the end (what color you are most like, what cartoon character are you, what 80s movie are you).

By some other definitions memes are viral and propagate around sometimes mutating as they propagate. Someone proposed something along the lines of some blog posts are viral, they write about something they see on one blog and the next person does the same sometimes their interpretation varies slightly changing the story (I cannot find this original reference).

Eventually some people decided they were going to creating weekly questionnaires (memes) and post them every week. Some are monthly, a few are daily and some are always there. Some suggest that you get five other people to do the same meme and they have to get five people (and so on), which sometimes increases their propagation. This probably stunts their mutated growth, having a permanent storage place where people go to find them but many people copy them from the site where they see it and theyll still change a bit.

Personally I liked these sites; sometimes they give me things to write about that I would have never started the topic on my own. So I started collecting them here at The Daily Meme http://thedailymeme.com/.

A meme is:

The term and concept of meme is from the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Though Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation, memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous definition of what precisely a meme is remains one of the principal criticisms leveled at memetics, the study of memes. (from the Wikipedia)

See the original post here:

What is a Meme? | The Daily Meme

The greatest of Bachs 224 cantatas is BWV 109, Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben. Its subject the title translates as Mark 9:24, I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief is that strange cognitive dissonance of believing something yet not believing it at the same time. Daniel Dennetts new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, is aimed at those who suffer from this intermittent unbelief, though not about God Dennett is, after all, one of modern philosophys most prominent atheists but about his specialist subject: evolution by natural selection.

Of course, most educated people nowadays accept Darwins great insight. But, Dennett argues in his typical avuncular style, they only do so up to a point: the point at which anyone applies it to the human mind. Even the most rational among us feel the pull of Cartesian Gravity, the force that warps our scientific intuitions whenever we get close to thinking about our own minds, drawing us towards dualism and other philosophically naive notions. Surely, so the faulty reasoning goes, there must be something special about our intellects that doesnt admit of a purely Darwinian analysis?

Dennett treats this confusion with a dose of immersion therapy, applying Darwinism universally and far more liberally than most would dare. He goes so far as to encourage scientists to talk about design in evolution despite the lack of a designer, to think about reasons even though there is no reasoner (Dennett calls these free-floating rationales), and to consider competence without comprehension: like a computer, evolution can perform tasks competently, but without any need to understand what it has done.

This uncompromising adaptationism treating no feature of life as immune to evolutionary logic leads Dennett on to his Darwinian theory of human culture. Over thousands of years, culture has moved from bottom-up to top-down; from the mindless generating and testing of multiple ideas some of which happened to be successful and were thus replicated, often uncomprehendingly, by other people to the mindful, directed design we see in art, architecture, science and music. Similar to Dennetts notion of free will, expounded in his book Freedom Evolves, culture exists on a continuum of complexity; in a strangely satisfying inversion, as culture has evolved via Darwinian processes, it has effectively de-Darwinised itself (though not completely: even the greatest designers like Bach didnt create ex nihilo, often going through immense Dennett would say evolutionary drudgery, trial and error before their masterpieces emerged).

Can culture really be unconscious? This is where memes come in. By this I dont just mean those pictures of cats and frogs on the internet although those are memes in Dennetts conception. For Dennett, a meme is essentially any piece of information that spreads from person to person: indeed, even individual words are memes, and (by analogy with genes) we can study their fitnessby seeing whether they reproduce themselves into different peoples minds (again, often without those people making any conscious effort). This might seem like mission creep: Richard Dawkinss original conception of memes included fads, chain letters and other viral phenomena, not language itself. But Dennett extends memes along another continuum, from single words all the way to the complex cultural ideas that have shaped civilisation by infesting our minds. Memes are the handholds on the climbing wall of culture, allowing us to move towards ever more purposeful, ever more conscious design.

Dennett is well aware of the scepticism that the idea of memes engenders. Indeed, he spends a chapter fending off the various criticisms that have accumulated over the decades since Dawkins suggested it. Perhaps ironically given its focus on virality, memetics has never really caught on as a science, and I rather doubt whether Dennetts case here will convince the non-believers. I found myself wondering what a would-be memeticist would do with their day. Which scientific hypotheses would they be testing? Where would they gather their data? How would they analyse it? The memes-eye-view is an intriguing perspective on cultural evolution, but the concept seems too woolly to inspire hard science (history bears out this concern: the Journal of Memetics, which had its first issue in 1997, closed down in 2005 for want of research papers).

From Bacteria to Bach and Back is one long argument, employing Darwinian logic with often counterintuitive results. Decades of developing his theory has allowed Dennett to anticipate most of the objections readers might have, and he works methodically to defuse their concerns. Those who stick with him will find the books strange inversions of reasoning beguiling and its vast scope enthralling, even if theyre less than compelled by its payoff. Ultimately, philosophical thought experiments arent enough to buttress Dennetts memetic view of life and culture: perhaps Im still suffering the ill effects of Cartesian Gravity, but a little more empirical evidence would have helped my unbelief.

Read the original here:

Do Daniel C. Dennett's memes deserve to survive? - Spectator.co.uk

In recent weeks, the meme trash dove took the world by storm, flopping its way across Facebook into dms, statuses and comments. Trash dove became an actor in animated videos and was even brought to life through real world reenactments by talented costume makers and headbangers. Merely an online sticker, trash dove came to embody so much in so little time and was able to say much of what we were thinking but not quite ready or able to articulate.

While our reasons for using trash dove on social media may vary, what is evident is that memes are meta; they can encompass a variety of emotions, thoughts, feelings, actions and even political discourse and humor. In abstracting the world at large into content, everything becomes more digestible, even consumable across one of the most accessible mediumsthe internet.

While the internet has in many ways proliferated the usage of memes, they have existed since human beings began to share information with one another. The internet has globalized memes and has allowed people to absorb information from those sharing content on the other side of the world at exponential rates and add their own spin on them. In the past, long before the internet, memes were shared as far as one could travel across land and water and over the course of longer periods of time. Contrary to popular belief, memes have been here with us all along.

The Historical Origins of Memes Memes have existed since the dawn of civilization and have been used to share and exchange cultural information between human beings for thousands of years. The word meme, coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 novel The Selfish Gene, describes the transfer of cultural information from one person to the next. Similarly to genes, memes have competed for survival throughout history and only the dankest become viral. As cultural units, memes are vessels of information which have journeyed across human civilization to popularize certain ideas and in turn, ensure their continuity.

Our ancestors used memes for cave drawings and to teach one another to create fire. Wherever there has been an opportunity for learning and sharing knowledge, memes have enabled us to replicate concepts and ideas and build upon them. While human endeavors such as art and music may not enable us to survive genetically, they are fantastic examples of how memetics have developed. Our brains are oversized and have the ability to store vast troves of information for later use. Becoming an incredible violin player may not be conducive to spreading ones seed, yet it is a meme that has become revered amongst humans in their pursuance of the arts.

Ultimately, human beings have evolved genetically to replicate information and be extremely good at making memes. We are such excellent meme-makers that we no longer use them explicitly for sharing concepts and ideas vital to survival. In the past, memetics allowed us to learn quickly from one another how to carry out tasks that would provide us with greater capacities for hunting, foraging, gathering, finding fresh water to eventually writing, reading, creating vast agricultural systems, building shelter, traversing continents and even more amazing feats. In becoming next-level copycats, human beings have collaborated with one another to create innumerable memes, both for survival and consumption.

A major defining characteristic of successful and not so successful memes is the extent to which they last and mutate. While some memes, such as learning to boil water to ensure no dangerous bacteria lingers in it or wearing animal furs to keep our naked bodies warm in the midst of winter, have remained relevant and largely static for centuries if not thousand of years, while others, such as a unicycling frog named dat boi, come into existence swiftly and disappear altogether just as quickly. Furthermore, instances of memes such as Hand Me the Aux Cord draw on other memes and mutate to become meta. When these memes mutate into warp drive, at some point they no longer become funny and vanish between the surface of newer memes. Given this, memes of the internet age, while existing on a greater scale, are not as successful as those who have remained relevant since earlier times.

Memes of Today The memes of today are Kermits, spongegars and trash doves. Those of the not-so-far-away past were lolcats, challenges accepted and forever alones. We use memes not only for absurd humor but also for societal and political commentary. At this time in human history, every single thing that we think or do can be turned into a meme and is likely a meme already. Memes can be jokes about miniscule everyday observations or the endless woes of mental illness. Memes are cathartic and allow us to process information through the abstraction of tragedy and global events. Whatever our interests or needs, a meme exists for us.

In the age of the internet, the ways in which we communicate with one another and share cultural information change every day and do so at alarming rates. We can speak with anyone anywhere at any time and relay information about the space and time we are situated in in moments or as it happens. This ability to virtually participate with billions of others in meme-making means that the sharing and exchanging of information is limitless. Memetics is an emerging discipline and as the way we communicate and share information continues to be ever-changing, this will be an area of study for decades to come.

The concept of memetic engineering, similar to genetic engineering, describes a process of careful selection of memes to be created and distributed for successful replication. In doing so, the memetic engineer would purposefully construct memes to influence others to replicate them. These memes may be anything from political ideology used to sway voters to commercials enticing potential customers. Regardless, memetic engineers can seize the memes of production to draw in supporters.

Both memetics and memetic engineering can be used to better understand memes as simplistic and absurd as trash dove but also as complex and nuanced as the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Having existed as long as humans have transferred cultural information from one to the next, certain memes have remained largely unchanged and survived the ages while others mutate exponentially yet come and go at a moments notice. With the rise of the internet, our attention spans have shortened and the amount of available disposable content has increased. As a result, we require an influx of memes to remain entertained while navigating this technological era.

Main and lead images via twitter @striffleric and @WHATINTARNATlON

Deidre Olsen is a Toronto-based writer, blogger and poet with a love affair of social justice, technology and dank memes. In their spare time, you can find them learning Jiu Jitsu and how to code.

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On Memetics and the Transfer of Cultural Information - Paste Magazine

Memes are used as a way of representing an idea, belief, or culture, and if used in the right way, can be used to win over anyone. Even the recent election used a plethora of memes to grab the attention of voters and keep them on the side once captured. However, they can also be dangerous little creatures of mass destruction if used in the wrong way. But one thing that is for certain is that memes do pose a challenge to the United States.

One person who can see the issues coming is Jeff Giesea, the former employee of Peter Thiel, tech giant and Trump donor. He said in an essay on power memes, Its time to drive towards a more expensive view of Strategic Communications on the social media battlefield. Its time to adopt a more aggressive, proactive, and agile mindset and approach. Its time to embrace memetic warfare. But, hes not alone in his thoughts. Others within the US military wanted to know how memes could be used in warfare in the early 2000s, partly as a result of the warring against jihadist terrorists.

A paper entitled Memetics: A Growth Industry in US Military Operations was published by Michael B. Prosser who is now a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps. In it, Prosser explains his vision for weaponizing and diffusing memes that would be created to understand and defeat an enemy in ideology and win over the masses of undecided non-combatants. The paper also talks about a proposal for a Meme Warfare Center whose main function would be to provide advice to the Commander on meme transmission, enemy analysis, and population information.

DARPA too have been looking closely at memetics and are part-way through a four-year study themselves on the subject. But, despite government research, it still seems to be insurgent groups that use memes in the most efficient manner. One example of this can be seen during the early stages of the ISIS war where memes were used to grab the attention of their audience and get their message across to both potential recruits and enemies.

According to John Robb, former Air Force pilot involved in special operations and author of Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, the US military will always be disadvantaged when it comes to using memetics in war as the most effective types of manipulation all yield disruption. He adds, The broad manipulation of public sentiment is really not in [the militarys] wheelhouse because all the power is in the hands of the people on the outside doing the disruption.

Donald Trumps campaign is an excellent example of how a meme insurgency can occur. His campaign was largely about creating disorder among the voters to gain popularity, and hey, it worked, Donald Trump is the new president. Perhaps when Jeff Giesea released his paper in 2015 about memetic warfare, it should have been a warning of what was to come. He said, For many of us in the social media world, it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies. Now we can only sit back and see what else is to come from the world of memetics.

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The Meme Culture of America is Taking Over - TrendinTech

LD50, an East London gallery that has come under fire for promoting fascism, says the cultural sphere has become the preserve of the Left and anyone who opposes this political viewpoint is now publicly vilified, delegitimated [sic] and intimidated with menaces. The statement, posted on the gallerys website on 21 February, comes amid calls for the space to be shut down over an exhibition and series of talks it hosted about the alt-right movement. Last summer, the Dalston-based gallery, which is run by Lucia Diego, held a neoreaction conference featuring speakers including Peter Brimelow, Brett Stevens and Iben Thranholm. Brimelow is known as an anti-immigration activist and author and is the president of the VDARE Foundation, a white nationalist organisation based in the US. Stevens edits a far-right website and has previously praised the racist mass murderer Anders Breivik, while Thranholm is a Danish journalist who writes about Christianity and theology and is an outspoken critic of European immigration policy. LD50 then organised an exhibition, titled Amerika, that included Pepe memes (Pepe the Frog is an online cartoon character that has been branded a hate symbol after racists depicted him as Adolf Hitler and a member of the Ku Klux Klan) and a cardboard cut-out of Donald Trump. The show prompted artists and campaigners to start the Tumblr blog, Shut Down LD50 Gallery, which says the gallery is using the cover of the contemporary art scene and academia to legitimise the spread of materials [that have drawn on fascist traditions] and the establishment of a culture of hatred. The blog says that LD50 has been responsible for one of the most extensive neo-Nazi cultural programmes to appear in London in the last decade. The gallery has posted all criticism on its website, including Tweets by artists denouncing its programme. LD50 has defended its programme, saying it has found itself in recent months increasingly interested in the political ruptures in the West: America and closely observed events there throughout the extraordinary and dramatic election cycle. The gallery says it presented a very liberal audience with a speaker who was knowledgeable in alt-right and NRx [neoreactionary] discourses to create a dialogue between two different and contrasting ideologies. Of its exhibition, LD50 says it explored some of the topics currently faced by our generation, including themes of memetics, the occult, male frustration, artificial intelligence [and] algorithms. The gallery maintains that the role of art is to provide a vehicle for the free exploration of ideas, even and perhaps especially where these are challenging, controversial or indeed distasteful. It continues: Art should have exemplified this willingness to discuss new ideas, but it has just become apparent to us that this sphere now (and perhaps for the last few years) stands precisely for the opposite of this.

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Row erupts as East London gallery accused of showing 'alt-right' and 'racist' art - Art Newspaper

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."

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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.

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Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare? - Motherboard