Some thoughts on Meme Warfare

Language/Symbol-Fag here, just spitballing.

Re the Breitbart article today about Facebook and “troll twilight zones”

Pic related, sauce below.

(((They))) can’t do anything about the memes, so they have to target (“understand”) the source. Right, so, part of their problem (philosophically, ideologically, but not technologically) is how they view memes (Clearly there are technological reasons that they struggle with memes, but I don’t have a handle on that, though AI and computers generally still struggle with the complexities of language, particularly signification. And English is delightfully irregular).

“Meme templates” is a perfectly reasonable way to think about memes, but also a perfectly useless one. Memes are by default templates. The template is the medium but not the message. Memes operate on a variety of levels of signification. Think Barthe’s Mythologies (or layer upon layer of semiotic signification). The template alone (inherently) tells you nothing of the meaning).

Consider the metaphor in use: “meme templates” as “marked bills.” Money is a template. It is something that, at its most basic, functional level, has no complex signification. Just one layer. No mythology. Money functions because the template is the meaning, not the medium. Dollar bills are interchangeable; different iterations of a given “meme template” are not interchangeable. (We can extend this into a discussion of the difference between a copied image and a copied bill, serial numbers, etc., but that goes in a direction other than the one I’m interested in).

So marking a bill tracks that particular, singular piece of paper. Fine. Marking an image (like a watermark) might be somewhat analogous to marked bills. Fine. But marking a “meme template” necessarily fails because a “bad” “meme template” could be repurposed towards a “good” message by way of context, use, signification, Mythology. And likewise, a “good” “meme template” could be repurposed towards “bad” (example: Pepe). If this happens, how do you sort out the “bad” versions of the “good” template?

Were Facebook to introduce this, anons would have a (moderately easy) work around: use only “good” “meme templates” to deliver the devastating red pills. The source would be masked. Our meme-makers are great, and artists often excel when working with constraints.

Constrain us to use only “good” “meme templates” and we’ll probably hit harder because (((you))) forced us to get better without understanding how the fight works.

Sauce for pic: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/02/27/facebook-engineers-proposed-troll-twilight-zone-to-confuse-and-demoralize-with-purposeful-glitches/