Apr 21 2018 14:15:51 (EST) Q !xowAT4Z3VQ ID: b7a0ab 1133464
Fire up those Memes!
Please stand by.
On the clock.
Ready to play?
MOAB incoming.
Q
“It’s time to embrace memetic warfare,”
wrote Jeff Giesea, a widely-known social media and tech guru, in an article in 2015. “Trolling, it might be said, is the social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare, and memes are its currency of propaganda.” Giesea wasn’t writing in Wired or TechCrunch, but rather in Defence Strategic Communications, the journal of NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (or Stratcom COE, because nothing’s complete without an onerous acronym).
“Daesh is conducting memetic warfare. The Kremlin is doing it. It’s inexpensive. The capabilities exist. Why aren’t we trying it?” Giesea asked.
It’s a question many military minds have been asking for years. A Marine Corps Major, Michael B. Prosser advocated for the U.S. military to develop a Meme Warfare Center (MWC) in his 2006 study, “Memetics–A Growth Industry in U.S. Military Operations” (abstract here).
Five years later, a specialized Pentagon unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a study on “Military Memetics,” one of several related research programs into what it calls a “subset of neuro-cognitive warfare.” It argued the “war of ideas” was fundamental, especially when it comes to fighting terrorists, and the key characteristics of a military meme is that it be “information that propagates, has impact, and persists.” Like dancing cat videos, in other words, but with sharper claws.