Memetics – A Growth Industry in US Military Operations (2006) [pdf]

Fun story, strong recommend

To be more concrete:

such technology either already exists now, or has a better shot at preventing stale & shallow (human) takes from hoarding the frontpage.

Ironic, you post in depth about the dreadfulness of psyops and yet you complain about reddit having wrongfully deleted your account, reddit, a perfect thought molding garden which rewards righthink with updoots and punishes wrongthink with downdoots. Seems to me is that they liberated you. Reddit is a strange game. The only way to win is not to play seriously, but rather to troll.

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-... )

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.