Memetics – A Growth Industry in US Military Operations (2006) [pdf]
(apps.dtic.mil)56 points by lawrenceyan 18 hours ago
56 points by lawrenceyan 18 hours ago
...must function unfastened from current PsyOps doctrine which prohibits communicating any PsyOps type message or meme to US domestic audiences.
PsyOps doctrine is an interesting way of saying "the law"... at least until NDAA 2012: https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736.
I read this book because I misunderstood a recommendation and thought it was a business book talking about how companies get people to forget negative information (e.g. dump news on Friday etc). Boy was that first chapter a wild ride until I figured out it was not in fact a business book
Fun story, strong recommend
>Managing, employing and leveraging memetic power
This is propaganda, or advertising, not memeing. Propaganda is used to promote specific ideologies; memes arise spontaneously to counter them. Since all ideologies/-isms are by nature wrong, memes are generally-speaking a good thing. They're on the side of reality. They use rhetoric and fiction to point to the truth, often via some form of reductio ad absurdum. By contrast mainstream propaganda uses facts selectively in order to distort the big picture, mislead or simply distract people.
I think maybe you underestimate memes. A meme is a self copying idea that propagates through “sentient” creatures, which can also include many animals. (Animals can become fearful of arbitrary non-threats through social transmission , for example, and populations of animals can develop cultural behaviors that persist generations after the stimulus for the behavior is removed)
Memes are most powerful when they are packaged in complex structures, such as ideologies, cultures, or religion.
Memetic structures can contain formal mechanisms of transmission, proof of infection / identification of in a out group, immune systems against memetic disease (disease from the perspective of the memetic system, not the organism), and even apoptositic isolation mechanisms to prevent out of control mutations. These memetic systems of ideas and ideology are subject to rapid iteration and natural selection, and ones that survive in the wild for significant periods become pseudo legitimized as primary cultural paradigms.
Memes are by far the most dynamic and influential factor in human evolution and development, and have been for quite some time. All wars are primarily memetic.
Yes however I was not referring to memes in the broadest sense but memes as humorous (usually) images with captions, shared online. Unlike propaganda and advertising these are spontaneously created by unpaid individuals (though Omar is right there is a certain amount of overlap as always with general categories).
What puts them 'on the side of reality' is that humour, rather like beauty, has deep connections with truth. It doesn't work otherwise. It's one of the ways we update our model of reality...
memes are not "on the side of reality". memes are on the side of whatever resonates. What resonates is what aligns to your model of reality (which is shaped by the ideology you're inside).
There's no clear distinction between propaganda, advertising, and what you call "meme-ing". Companies can and do create campaigns that look organic, that do takeoff as people feel they are organic (and then they become actually real as people take them further than what the company is pushing)
For example: Barbenheimer was a meme that got people to watch two movies in one weekend (not a typical behavior for most people). Was that an organic meme, or a marketing campaign?
(If anyone is curious, I keep trying to write a good intro to this rabbithole, see my writeup on the New York Times explaining how a psyop works, which itself very significant for them to be spelling it out like this: https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/new-york-times-is-... )
One of my last posts on Reddit before my account was suspended and all my 15 years of posts, comments and private messages were deleted without my approval, was about memetic chaining. I've reposted it on Substack for those interested:
https://webdoodle.substack.com/p/memetic-chaining-and-the-ne...
lol, if it wasn't so dangerous I'd find this hilarious.
You seem to be conflating early propaganda, and ideology with memetics.
While it has some of the same elements and is focused on ideology, memetics is quite different. Its improper to say they are the same, or even that Nazism is an example of it (it wasn't). They also don't properly define the term.
Memetics is 5GW. There is a whole host of other material not under that name turned towards the same purpose which is Counterinsurgency (COIN).
Variations on the idea have been used in the private sector, and public sector for decades to control narrative, target activists, and destroy cultural identity.
Further material can be found on COINTELPRO, and its later derivatives (which were published prior to this), as well as the MKULTRA experiments, Stasi's Zersetzung, etc.
Some have said the COPS act passed by Clinton in 94 includes a continuation of the former (COINTELPRO), informally, and it was just reauthorized in 2023.
The TL;DR of memetics is its about gathering experts for the purpose of reducing, eliminating, and manipulating objective reality in people towards subtle brainwashing and thought reform. It leaves nothing off limits, and centralized empires always devolve to abusing and using weapons they build on their own subjects.
An adaptive system (person), uses feedback to adapt. A creature that cannot adapt, or more accurately is made so they cannot adapt, fails Darwin's fitness when the environment becomes chaotic. In other words, extinction, and memetic's focus is cultural contagion, which jumps from person to person across communications mediums.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250518031649/https://apps.dtic...