A repost from Feb 3, 2018
A memeAnon’s notes on
Memetics—A Growth Industry in US Military Operations by Major Michael B. Prosser, USMC. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Operational Studies, academic year 2005-2006 (dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a507172.pdf)
My notes are not inclusive. I’m focused mainly on my side of things – meme making – and how this paper applies to /Qresearch/. There is a second PDF I haven't studied yet.
Memeanon's Notes
→To attack an ideology, assault a transcendant or central idea, or group of ideas
→Memes are cultural bits of info, transmitted mind-to-mind (via whatever media are prevalent)
→How do you persuade/dissuade enemy combatants? Persuade/dissuade the undecided?
→Analyze cultural ideas, isolate their parts
→Also includes means of spreading the ideas/memes
→Clinical disease analogy to the spread of ideologies: adaptive response of both disease and host organism
→Intentionally persuade large audiences through subtle or overt contact
→Disciplines of sociology, anthropology, cognitive science, behavioral game theory
→Military killing of “infected” people to eradicate an ideology sometimes backfires, transitory effect or even opposite of intended effect (martyrs, hardens opposing position).
→Nonlinear problem
→Requires more than token efforts and resources
→Feedback loop between meme makers, observe effect on target population
→Understand target audience’s aims, mindsets, ways of achieving their strategic objectives
→Metaphysical battlespace fought over culture and ideals.
→“Enemies” are already highly organized and weaponized in the meme warfare space
→Ought to be formalized and resourced within U.S. military + allies, rather than ad hoc as now [circa 2007]
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Memeanon's further observations
→Similarity between memes and what the advertising industry has been practicing (weaponizing!) for >50 years
→Feedback loop is essential between meme-makers, those disseminating them, and those observing/analyzing changes in the target population: not only how well it’s spreading, best vectors of spread, recruitment of new spreaders, immediate reactions, but more broadly how to discern/measure actual changes in target pop’s ideology, and feed this data back to meme generation unit.
→Continuous adaptive improvement loop
→Ideas and concepts are subjective and hard to quantify
We could do more in the area of the feedback loop.
There is also a potential division of labor between - autists with deep cultural knowledge (movies, TV, games.)
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autists with psychological insight into target pop
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autists who know how to frame ideology-challenging ideas in a way that is funny, sardonic, ironic
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graphic artists who can convert these ideas into visual form
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meme distributors (droppers) who are in a position to observe immediate feedback and adoption of the ideas by target pop
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autists who can analyze changes in target pop's ideology