Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: José María Mateos <chema () rinzewind org>
> Date: January 31, 2017 at 1:55:53 PM EST
> To: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com>
> Subject: Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare?
>
> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/meme-warfare
>
> 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.
>
> Image: @altright_es
>
> 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 a recent profile 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 2015—just as the Trump campaign was really building
> steam—entitled “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.”
>
> 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.
>
> Image: "A Brief Overview of Memetics"
>
> 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.”
>
> Image: Hillaryclinton.com
>
> We've just witnessed a successful meme insurgency in America. Donald
> Trump’s campaign was founded as an oppositional movement—against 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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