Excerpts: “In these wars, the weapons were memes, slogans, ideas; the tactics were internet-enabled threats like swarms, doxes, brigades, disinformation, and media-manipulation campaigns; and the strategy of the warriors was to move their influrence from the wires (the internet) to the weeds (the real world) by trading fringe ideas up the partisan media ecosystem and into mainstream culture” (p. 9).
“Meme wars are culture wars, accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flattens the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words, a morass capable of swallowing patience, kindness, and understanding” (p. 9-10).
“Their success is largely owed to a few mutually reinforcing coincidences: broadband, mobile phones, and wifi create a ubiquitous computing environment, where we are all jacked in to the matrix all day long” (p. 16).
“Rabbit holes are ultimately just a series of links clicked in succession, and are built into the design of social media. This design confers incredible power on people able to harness what we call the four Rs of media manipulation: repetition, redundancy, responsiveness, and reinforcement. These four Rs are integral to successful memes” (p. 19).
“Meme wars are accelerated by the design of communication infrastructure that favors popularity over quality, a fractured media environment that thrives on sensationalism, and a low barrier to entry and few sanctions for participating” (p. 21).
“A cycle was born; a meme offense would be born on /pol/ or the like; a member of the right-wing partisan media would write about it; this would get it spread to mainstream social media, where it could go viral, prompting the mainstream media to write about it; which in turn would alert more people to the meme offense even as it also undercut is validity. Often before the mainstream news even hit publish on their articles, the meme warriors were already launching another offense” (p. 148).
“None of it would have been possible without the internet’s disinformation economy and the resonance of the two historical political memes QAnon built its foundation upon: the New World Order and the ‘deep state’” (p. 243).
“The algorithmic reinforcement of social media platforms and search engines leads, through repeated and constant exposure to similar ideas, to the intensification of belief systems, and creates community around shared grievances” (p. 243).
“So, what does it mean to be an American today? The answer depends on which group you are in and which group perceives you as their enemy; it depends on whether you view America as a land mass or an idea, as a nation of immigrants or a nation of conquerors” (p. 324).
“But the digital insurgency will continue, drafting soldiers to fight another meme war, exploiting grievances to distract from the real work of governance. To help people, to truly address the common material instabilities and inequities in our nation and in the world, we have to move away from using memes for political communication, and be more critical of those who rely on them to campaign and govern” (p. 332).
Donovan, J., Dreyfuss, E., and Friedberg, B. (2022). Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.