This is war
Infowar, to be precise
Warfare has not been the same since the Atom Bomb. Things change once what’s on the table is not recoverable losses but mutual annihilation. That calculus shift occurred 80 years ago this year and, since then, a variety of non-kinetic methods of warfaring have blossomed.
Non-kinetic warfare is the use of indirect, non-violent, and non-physical methods to influence, destabilise, or coerce an adversary. It includes cyberwarfare, economic warfare, diplomatic warfare, space warfare and, most relevant for our purposes, information warfare.
I want to talk about information warfare here in a slightly looser way than what is engaged in by state actors. By it I mean “an adversarial information environment where the units of communication aren’t neutral but strategic.” To understand the difference think of “this”, “that”, “a”, “who”, “why”, “when”, “because”, “so that”. All of those are neutral units of communication.
But not all units of communication are like that. Especially online, seemingly innocuous units are often strategic.
Memes
“All crows are black birds, but not all black birds are crows.” So goes the old trope meant to illustrate the notion of logical entailment. Correspondingly, although many funny online pictures are memes, not all memes are funny online pictures.
In fact, funny online pictures are but a subset of memes. Memes are units of thought that spread. And those are frequently linguistic, not pictorial at all.
Consider a few widely-circulating linguistic memes found in the wild (Twitter):
“Ragebait” / “Clickbait” / “It’s bad on purpose to make you click”
“It’s not happening and it’s good that it is”
“Current Year”
These aren’t innocent internet tropes. They’re defensive moves in an adversarial game being fought at the linguistic layer:
“Ragebait” and its relatives exist to defang and weaken the incentive structure of the online economy by making it obvious. All of them scream at you “Stop! You’re getting played!”
“It’s not happening and it’s good that it is” names a pattern in how uncomfortable truths get slowly rolled out. Because this pattern relies on denial (“It’s not happening”) the fact that people not only claim to see the denied phenomenon but also see one another claiming to see the meta-pattern—by tweeting the meme out—is particularly powerful.
“Current Year” serves to puncture a certain kind of progress-justification that relies on… ‘because it’s [Current Year].
Note how every single one of the above (1) is a meme, (2) is not a funny picture, (3) spreads from person to person, and (4) works as an operational unit in a conflict, their casual—almost funny—presentation aiding their real function, by obscuring it.
Although these originate online, they have bled profusely into real life and, with them, so have a number of offensive linguistic memes like:
“Fascist”
“Racist”
“Denialist”
“Science-denier”
These have lost their original meaning and now function as semantic stop-signs meant to shut down inquiry. Strategic units of communication intended to corral rather than describe.
Why should I care
Two reasons.
One is personal. Most people think through language. The concepts you use to form beliefs have come overwhelmingly from outside yourself. If language is the medium of your thought, and that medium is being tampered with, then your beliefs are just someone else’s incentive structure, playing out in your head. This might understandably upset you, on a purely selfish level.
The other reason is shared, and has to do with what is being fought over.
But that’s for tomorrow.