I want to take a step back from the concept of “meme magic.”  First of all, because I don’t think the majority of people who use the term actually believe it.  I could be wrong on this point, I’ve been surprised by people’s capacity to believe in dumber things.  But perhaps more importantly, ironic, non-ironic, and semi-ironic applications of the phrase seem to me to be one part of a more established tactic, one that Spencer only briefly touches on, “memetic warfare.”

On page 70 of Defense Strategic Communications: The official journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence Volume 1 , Jeff Giesea defines “memetic warfare” as “…more strategic than ‘weaponized trolling’.  Memetic warfare, as I define it, is competition over narrative, ideas, and social control in a social media battlefield.  One might think of it as a subset of ‘information operations’ tailored to social media.”  And he lays out the essence of his argument in favor of the tactic is laid out on the previous page: “Daesh [ISIS] is conducting memetic warfare. The Kremlin is doing it. It’s inexpensive. The capabilities exist.  Why aren’t we trying it?”  He answers some of his own question at the end of his article by exploring the memetic potential of a twitter campaign called “#ISISisgay,” an adequately ridiculous and offensive attack for the 4chan crowd, but specifically designed to undermine ISIS in the minds of homophobic would-be recruits.   Apart from the ethical and legal questions this form of propaganda begs, Giesea says “[p]olitically, #ISISisgay would be a sensitive campaign to execute.  Even with thoughtful coordination with gay groups and other domestic interests, there would still be a risk of media and political criticism” (pg. 75).

By his own admission, memetic warfare can be and has been an effective form of combat, but one which cannot neatly scale within liberal democratic nationstates where propagators may potentially be answerable to constituents.  To conduct memetic warfare on a national front one either has to lack central organization as is the case with ISIS, or internal hierarchies must be stable enough to control internal dissent, as in Russia.  Unlike its battlefield predecessor, guerrilla warfare, in memetic war, scale reverses into a disadvantage about as quickly as it’s felt.

For the individual or sub-national group, however, memetic fighting retains the central advantage which make it appealing to NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, that is, on every level it provides a unbelievably high effectiveness to cost ratio.  Attackers often already have the means necessarily to conduct attacks, no advanced training is necessary, and by the nature of memes, they will replicate themselves by luring the enemy into a fight it can only win by ignoring. 

In a recent interview on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show, the “father of virtual reality” Jaron Lanier offers a fairly compelling explanation of why these sorts of attacks are so effective particularly on advertising driven social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter:

In all those cases that positive fuel [of the Arab Spring, pre-Gamergate push for equality in video game culture, and BLM] was routed into negative energy because that was the most efficient and profitable way to make use of it… In each case the people who were annoyed or fearful or whatever of these positive things were identified, introduced to each other, corralled, and then stirred up more and more in a pressure cooker because that was the most profitable and effective way for to make money for the businesses and it was also the most efficient way for someone coming in as a costumer to spend their money; they got the most results… “

He goes on, ironically enough as this interview was being recorded literally as Leonard Lopate himself was having his #metoo moment that resulted in his firing:

…and #metoo is going to meet the same fate, and i don’t know what it’ll look like but in about a year if the pattern holds there’ll be some backlash that, instead of the normal sort of backlash we see in history, will be something horrendous it’ll be something, we’ll see something vastly more powerful than the original. “

All of this is from 20:40 to 27:10 of the interview, but I would recommend the entire thing if you have the 30 minutes to listen:

Essentially Lanier argues, the behavior which makes memetic warfare possible is also what makes it so cheap and effective; by relying on free to use, but still private social media companies to communicate, Twitter/Facebook/etc. must encourage increasingly conflict driven networks of insular users to build advertising bases.  Memes, in this atmosphere act more like “a software virus in a computer network or a physical virus in a city”  than they did when Aaron Lynch wrote his book Thought Contagion: How belief spreads through society in 1998. He says on page 2 that “thought contagions proliferate by effectively ‘programming’ for their own retransmission. Beliefs affect retransmission in so many ways that they set off a colorful, unplanned growth race among diverse “epidemics” of ideas. Actively contagious ideas are now called memes.”  Today those contagions exist in tightly controlled incubators designed to explode at a rate of about once a year, by Lanier’s estimation. 

To see an act of memetic warfare in action I want to turn to a site that I by no means want to endorse, but which does provide a more rigorous and thoughtful side of the alt-right/neoreactionary/edgy-rightwing internet than one typically gets on 4chan or Breitbart.  In this November 2017 article Nathan Duffy lays out in full the strategy behind the intentionally polemic meme “It’s OK to be white” as a form of asymmetrical memetic warfare.  He begins:

“Engineering an elegant meme is one part art and one part science. Trying to strike just the right chord to both make your point while also harnessing the mysterious chthonic energies that can make the meme contagious.

The memetic hivemind of the right-wing message board /pol/ recently found that magic touch, striking gold with their “It’s OK To Be White” meme”

Duffy argues that the genius behind this attack is its seeming innocence; everyone who hears “it’s ok to be white” knows what it really means as a bit of white nationalist propaganda, but no one can effectively argue with it because, strictly speaking, it is ok to be white.  To call attention to the slogan, to denounce it, puts you at odds with any white person who overhears you but misses the broader context.

In this class, both in our IRL classroom and now virtually in Caitlin’s latest blogpost, we’ve discussed Angela Nagel’s assessment of 4chan and the alt-right in her book Kill All Normies, but that is only one aspect of Nagel’s book.  While the alt-right have become the more prominent and insidious force, social media’s warping power is not restricted to the political right.  “Tumblr,” she explains on page 69:

was one of the most important platforms for the emergence of a whole political and aesthetic sensibility, developing its own vocabulary and style – very much the reverse mirror image of rightist 4chan in this way. It was here that what Walter Benn Michaels criticized as a liberal preference for ‘recognition of diversity over economic inequality’ reached its most absurd apotheosis with a politics based on the minutia and gradations of rapidly proliferating identities, and the emotional injuries of systemic cultural prejudices.”

Where 4chan was a regressive ecosystem that primed users to attack, Tumblr politics sealed users in a bubble of vulnerability almost equally as confusing to outsiders (or normies, although that probably wouldn’t be Tumblr’s preferred term).  “It’s OK to be White” has the off-puttingly racist ideology of 4chan at its core, but the phrase itself isn’t the meme, the real meme is using the phrase as a weapon in memetic warfare against the professionally politically correct “bluechecks,” an unaffectionate name for verified Twitter users, who are often employed as pundits or opinion journalists. Nathan Duffy admits the only proper response would be to ignore the bait; the brevity of the meme has no equal response, anything short of a full explanation only gives the right more propaganda against the “bluechecks” and their leftwing followers:

The message is there exists a significant contingent of stark-raving mad people in the country, to whom your mere existence, dear normal white person, is anathema. If it weren’t so, how could they get angry about such a truism? That’s their propaganda, one that is in service of ideological mobilization. This expansion of the political sphere (“whiteness is a problem with political solutions”) can be attenuated by another kind of propaganda”

Which brings us back to “meme magic.” Even the rightwing, pro-Trump, pro-memes Jacobite freely admits that “No one really thinks that it was the work of creative trolls that brought all the disaffected working class voters to the polls in Midwestern swing states.”  But Paul Spencer’s article seemingly takes rightwing memers at their word, even if somewhat mockingly.  As critics, of either their politics or their rhetorical techniques, and in this case both, we should consider not just what the cartoon frog loving racists are saying but also how and why they’re saying it if we’re to understand what it is they’re really saying.