[endoblast]

>Managing, employing and leveraging memetic power

This is propaganda, or advertising, not memeing. Propaganda is used to promote specific ideologies; memes arise spontaneously to counter them. Since all ideologies/-isms are by nature wrong, memes are generally-speaking a good thing. They're on the side of reality. They use rhetoric and fiction to point to the truth, often via some form of reductio ad absurdum. By contrast mainstream propaganda uses facts selectively in order to distort the big picture, mislead or simply distract people.

[K0balt]

I think maybe you underestimate memes. A meme is a self copying idea that propagates through “sentient” creatures, which can also include many animals. (Animals can become fearful of arbitrary non-threats through social transmission , for example, and populations of animals can develop cultural behaviors that persist generations after the stimulus for the behavior is removed)

Memes are most powerful when they are packaged in complex structures, such as ideologies, cultures, or religion.

Memetic structures can contain formal mechanisms of transmission, proof of infection / identification of in a out group, immune systems against memetic disease (disease from the perspective of the memetic system, not the organism), and even apoptositic isolation mechanisms to prevent out of control mutations. These memetic systems of ideas and ideology are subject to rapid iteration and natural selection, and ones that survive in the wild for significant periods become pseudo legitimized as primary cultural paradigms.

Memes are by far the most dynamic and influential factor in human evolution and development, and have been for quite some time. All wars are primarily memetic.

[endoblast]

Yes however I was not referring to memes in the broadest sense but memes as humorous (usually) images with captions, shared online. Unlike propaganda and advertising these are spontaneously created by unpaid individuals (though Omar is right there is a certain amount of overlap as always with general categories).

What puts them 'on the side of reality' is that humour, rather like beauty, has deep connections with truth. It doesn't work otherwise. It's one of the ways we update our model of reality...

[K0balt]

Yeah, humor is a potent antitoxin.

[webdoodle]

The best meme's are also spontaneously created, not produced.

[K0balt]

I’d not say spontaneously, since they evolve over hundreds or thousands of years, but yes, the best memes are evolved to a very high degree of fitness and symbiotic utility. It’s hard to match that on a one-off engineering basis, especially when the desired effect is typically an externality.

[OmarShehata]

memes are not "on the side of reality". memes are on the side of whatever resonates. What resonates is what aligns to your model of reality (which is shaped by the ideology you're inside).

There's no clear distinction between propaganda, advertising, and what you call "meme-ing". Companies can and do create campaigns that look organic, that do takeoff as people feel they are organic (and then they become actually real as people take them further than what the company is pushing)

For example: Barbenheimer was a meme that got people to watch two movies in one weekend (not a typical behavior for most people). Was that an organic meme, or a marketing campaign?

(If anyone is curious, I keep trying to write a good intro to this rabbithole, see my writeup on the New York Times explaining how a psyop works, which itself very significant for them to be spelling it out like this: https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/new-york-times-is-... )

[endoblast]

Not everyone is an ideologue. Some people are just on the side of what is, or what is real.

[mecsred]

Everyone is an ideologue. What _is_ is too complicated to fit in a human brain, so we compress it. Thinking you're a free thinker is a type of ideology you can subscribe to.

[endoblast]

Nah. Compressed ideas are simply very good explanations! Ideologues aren't open to changing their ideas, but some other people do so occasionally. One can have philosophical assumptions and/or preferences without wishing to impose them on everyone else.

[gipp]

Sure, I suppose... The strange leap you're making is in the assumption that Internet memes are somehow inherently on the side of open-mindedness. Memes can be, and constantly are, absolutely used as weapons of propaganda, both intentionally and unwittingly. I'd say in general that's the rule, not the exception, at least where anything vaguely political or cultural is involved.

[endoblast]

Thanks. Yes it is strange. I do accept there's some overlap between propaganda and memeing. Yet whatever the intentions (or paygrade, or artistic ability) of the author of a meme, the fact remains that once it is posted he has no control over its destiny. So ultimately it is the funniest/most beautiful/salutary/plausible memes that get refined and selected for, i.e. which supply the strongest signal, and which inspire new memes in turn.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

Thanks for the link to Tangle!