Joan Donovan

Memes are acorns. Oak trees entice squirrels to carry off their acorns and actually plant them – burying them for the tree, far and wide. Memes are carried off by social media users, enticed by their simplicity and often the laugh they get, spreading them to other users and other media for the benefit of the meme creator. But memes have quickly evolved into weapons of mass destruction, fired into cyberspace to destroy those who might not believe in the politics or religion or rights to hate of the propagator.

Gathering up the acorns, three authors from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Technology and Social Change Research Project have produced Meme Wars, an intensive and worrying examination of memes, the people who exploit them, and the mass armies of the ignorant who promulgate them, and often become their victims. Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg are so comfortable in their topic, it sounds almost normal. But far from normal, memes are a menace and a threat, posing as simplified truths. What could possibly go wrong?

Memes sit over rabbit holes. Once people click around to find more on the meme, they get pummeled with unending extremist takes, “research,” and outright fraudulent websites under the umbrella of the meme. Seemingly normal people get sucked into wacko theories and become (often vile and violent) proponents of them. When Muslims do this, we say they have been radicalized. When young white American males do it, we attribute it to free speech or just dismiss it (though it’s the same disease). It is generally for the benefit of the extreme Right, and it leads to division, violence and rebellion, where most of the country recognizes no such need. From this pool of the radicalized come mass murderers, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Nazis (“Hitler did nothing wrong!”), incels and January 6 insurrectionists.

There is, for example, a chilling chapter on Dylan Roof, a seemingly intelligent teenager who read himself into despising all Blacks. The book follows his online clicks, learning lies, fears and hate, ultimately ending at a Black church, where he gunned down numerous worshippers, who had invited him to join them. Every link he followed deepened his warped understanding of the world. It is a primer on memes and the rabbit hole, and sets up the book just perfectly.

Rabbit holes are so deep, they hook the Dylan Roofs of the country “inspiring people to commit violent acts, abandon their lives, get lost so far down the rabbit hole that their family members had to form support groups to try to pull them out,” the authors say. Aided by tools like gaslighting and dog whistles, memes leverage themselves in the minds of the impressionable.
Memes tend to be visual, thanks to the internet, and the authors have peppered their book with visual representations of the memes and the people they discuss, right below the paragraph where they discuss them, making connections easy. The book is really well organized and effectively presented.

Memes are simplified views of an issue, often employing a line from pop culture – a phrase from a game or song or film, and often used ironically. This leaves it susceptible to doctored images that get laughs galore, causing viewers to want to share them with everyone, and thereby radicalize others.

There are numerous significant memes that the authors cite, develop, and trace to their roots and connect to the real world. Memes like Pepe The Frog, red pills, Gamergate, MAGA, Stop The Steal, FAKE NEWS, alternative facts, Q, Q anon, Kekistan, and He will not replace us.

There is also a long list of meme celebrities, those who leverage memes to gain fame and fortune, often at the expense of others who suffer the consequences of the lies. People like Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn are all profiled in the book, along with many other characters, arrested and prosecuted after Charlottesville or January 6 - memes in themselves.

There is also long discussion of the places where the memes first appear. 8chan and 4chan are most famous for their no holds barred forums, where everyone’s screen name is anon. Reddit is probably the most commonly known by the public. They attract a particular type – young white males, angry and alienated. They do not attract wide audiences like Linked In or Facebook or Tumblr, where everyone has a name and photos, and only too eager to post their status as the originator of whatever creativity they have found or assembled. “They were there to find partners, allies and friends in politics and sex, to share their photography, poetry, art and music and to experiment with gender terminology in memes.” Similarly, Meta/Facebook and Twitter tend to be open and above board by comparison to 4chan and 8chan. Users on those sites hide, allowing them to openly hate. Anything. Intensely.

Sometimes, the memers get a little distance and perspective on what they have wrought: “On November 12, 2017, an anon posted, ‘We’ve become a whorehouse, pimping out slut Q anon vids all over boomer youtube. I hope you’re all real proud of yourselves.’” But such voices fade quickly, and the race to the bottom continues without missing a beat.

Obviously bogus memes get picked up as if they were solidly proven. During the pandemic, a meme regarding adrenochrome (#SaveTheChildren, of all things) caught up young parents into thinking that a shortage of the skin chemical had been resolved by torturing young children and bleeding it from them. The authors point out this is hardly original, that rumor mongers have long promoted the blood libel about impoverished Jews eating children. But mere common sense never stops a good meme. Incredibly, the authors traced it back to images posted by celebrities during the lockdowns – makeup free - making them look worse for wear, like normal human beings. This quickly got attributed to a shortage of adrenochrome, and it was off to the meme races. It fit perfectly among the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers.

Similarly, Pizzagate had the susceptible believing that Hillary Clinton of all people, was running a child pornography and pedophile ring out the basement of a pizzeria in Washington. Anyone who walked in could plainly see that not only were there no children there, but it didn’t even have a basement. Nonetheless, the meme persisted and flourished, to the point of causing an earnest young man to drive hundreds of miles to save the enslaved children and shoot the place up. He could not for the life of him understand why no one had sought to do this before him, since the memes and articles were freely available online.

The book is both fascinating and depressing, with depressing clearly the winner. There are untold millions of Americans who glom onto these memes as if they were gospel. They believe the conspiracy theories as if handed down by God. They trip over themselves spreading them to others, couched in anger, angst and hate. And despite all the proof to the contrary, these worshippers continue to believe in Pizzagate and a New World Order, a Deep State, a Jewish conspiracy and of course, a stolen election. Anyone expressing say, common sense or logic in the face of these theories is hatefully shouted down, harassed into silence and made the subject of virulent public shaming including physical trolling and death threats.

The farce of Q anon is proudly proclaimed from sea to sea. This despite the fact Q has not posted a word since December 2020, and nothing he predicted has come true. That of course never stopped Donald Trump from retweeting Q posts throughout the election (We’re talking about the president of the United States), and never disavowed the movement.

It all served to build Trump’s power over his followers: “Stop the Steal, Trump’s last gamble, showed him ready to exploit the very people who had voted for him and who he surely knew were susceptible to his lies.” They went to prison by the hundreds, while others lost their jobs and split their families. That is the power of memes.

Stop The Steal by the way, has long been an arrow in Trump’s quiver. Roger Stone created a website for it in 2016, in case Trump didn’t win the primary. Trump copyrighted it, along with MAGA, allowing him to profit from merchandise sales. And of course, when he didn’t win re-election, he dusted off Stop The Steal meme and got millions of Americans to donate a quarter of a billion dollars his non-existent charity to fight for reinstatement. The meme business is good business.

What will strike the reader of Meme Wars is the exceptionally low quality of the people involved. Their political and societal theories are absurd. Their human relations are pathetic. Their criminal activity is boundless. Even when they win they lose. After Trump’s election, a huge rally called Unite The Right (UTR) sought to bring all the extreme right factions together. It resulted in arguments, fights, refusals to work together, and unbridled racism, nationalism and hate the participants couldn’t even agree on. They were never able to leverage their gains into anything legitimate, let alone unified. But they all led factions that believed in them totally. An earnest attempt to try again with another UTR fell flat on its face.

It is tragic that it is so easy to manipulate Americans into hate, into ridiculous and intractable positions, into vile and violent actions all in an effort to subvert the whole country into accepting their twisted beliefs as definitive.

Let there be no doubt. After reading this book, readers will understand the meme wars are real. And radicalization is not just for Muslims.

David Wineberg… (altro)

Meme Wars brings together many of the things most of us have come to understand about the online aspect of today's political "discourse" with in-depth analysis and a fuller history than what is on the surface for most of us to see.

You know this book has important information when the fake educator on one of the review sites spews his nonsense without either reading the book or, though this may be beyond him, thinking about what is said. Oh well, stupid is as stupid does. He hides behind his member number, like all those "patriots" hide behind their masks and their compensatory phallic symbols, I mean, their guns.

Like so many books that drill into a specific area, this is not the entire story. This is about the online virtual environment and how it has been used and abused to limit discussion, spread misinformation, and empower weak minds. Do many of the people have some genuine complaints at the origin of their straying into intentional dishonesty and/or unintentional gullibility? Yes, of course. But these aren't historians, they are tech experts explaining what is happening with technology and the communities using them. There are plenty of other books that discuss the social, cultural, and economic reasons these people have opted to do these things. To roll all those books into this one is unreasonable and impractical. If you don't have some idea of what motivates these people at their core, read books with that as the purpose.

Having said all that, this book does an excellent job of examining just how groups that largely have different complaints and different scapegoats for their problems have come together against what they consider a common enemy. It isn't nearly as surprising to those who remember how many relatively hidden groups formed in the early days. I remember a relatively harmless foray into such an environment as early as 1998 and others no doubt can go further back. The online world was more basic then but also easy to manipulate for your purposes.

The takeaways here will hopefully be that through a better understanding we can better combat the harm being done, to both institutions and individuals. That said, we can't ignore that one way to help minimize the appeal of being disruptive is to make life better for all people and not a select few. For me, we need actual real-life change to cut down on the domestic aspect and virtual strategies to combat those from outside who want to drive us apart for their own gains.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (altro)