Quote from: https://chaosmarxism.blogspot.com/2019/12/theses-on-new-chaos-marxism.htmlNew Chaos Marxism pivots to building consciousness, and therefore immunity to memes. Memes work by subverting the rational mind ("slow" mind) in favor of the "heuristic" mind, the "monkey" mind, the mind that works on like/dislike; Chaos Marxist aims to marry the two.
But how?
- It can't be done on an individual basis because there is no way for an isolated individual to know whether she is a noble defender of The Truth who sees things that the slack-jawed yokels can't understand; or just a crank (the two look identical from the inside).
- But it's difficult as hell to do it in a group because most groups are brought down by their own internal bullshit: ego-centricity and meme-based thinking feed off and are fed by clique politics and abusive/authoritarian leadership.
Let's discuss how one can develop meme-immunity
Quote from: Cramulus on December 17, 2019, 02:13:19 PM
Quote from: https://chaosmarxism.blogspot.com/2019/12/theses-on-new-chaos-marxism.htmlNew Chaos Marxism pivots to building consciousness, and therefore immunity to memes. Memes work by subverting the rational mind ("slow" mind) in favor of the "heuristic" mind, the "monkey" mind, the mind that works on like/dislike; Chaos Marxist aims to marry the two.
But how?
- It can't be done on an individual basis because there is no way for an isolated individual to know whether she is a noble defender of The Truth who sees things that the slack-jawed yokels can't understand; or just a crank (the two look identical from the inside).
- But it's difficult as hell to do it in a group because most groups are brought down by their own internal bullshit: ego-centricity and meme-based thinking feed off and are fed by clique politics and abusive/authoritarian leadership.
Let's discuss how one can develop meme-immunity
I am unsure that's even POSSIBLE. My brother, for example is a really smart guy, but he never met a right wing viral idea that didn't stick to his brain like stink on shit. So we can rule out "being smart".
I think memes (pictures or otherwise) either work well on you or they don't. I mean, there's a reason people to this day sell cars by sticking a girl in a bikini to it in the ads. Or show the car aggressively violating basic traffic and safety laws.
It would be interesting to find out how many people, as a percentage of the population, become motivated to purchase a car based on those sorts of thing. It must work on a decent chunk of society.
It is ALSO worth mentioning that the right wing understands on some basic level how memes work. That is why they make so damn many of them, without regard for quality or even humor.
The left responds with their own.
Neither side is moved to convert by these memes. Both sides just get irritated. Which seems to be the
actual goal.
Is the goal to figure out how "I" can attain meme-tolerance*?
How "we" get there?
How to get "them" there?
Three very different goals.
But I'd assume a good start is looking at, as Dok Howl mentioned, television commercials. How did some people develop tolerance for advertising? Why do some people seem to fall for a slick ad every time?
*I feel that "immunity" is impossible. The minute one thinks they are impervious to memes, they've almost surely been infected.
When a meme with a horrible perspective MAKE SENSE*, you can FEEL it
(** I don't mean when it's right, I mean when you can understand its logic)
this is a good place to observe how your monkey mind reacts FIRST, and your rational mind comes in huffing and puffing behind it.
(https://rinoswamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/pro_trump_meme.jpg)
If the same point were written out in paragraph form, it would not have the same effect. For it to be effective, it NEEDS to hit your emotions, fast.
it really is an emotional logic
in developing a better immune system, I can think of two roads --
One is an ideological buffer - MAGA memes bounce off of me because I'm a liberal cuck. This also sucks though, because it makes me really vulnerable to memes that lean on my liberal sensibilities. Even if they are stupid, the emotional logic appeals to me. Though this might be what Dolores talks about when she writes about developing consciousness -- like, if you have a lot of friends who post socialist memes, you develop an awareness of that logic, its passions, etc, you become (almost unconsciously) friendly to that logic.
The second is to develop a distance between the observation and the reaction. This is easier said than done. It requires you to recognize emotional hijacking as it's happening, which is hard, becuase your emotions are being hijacked.
But there are ways to put up shields with your slow-rational mind. For example, if you've ever posted youtube content, you know that haters will appear and shit on it. And that's like a law of nature, it doesn't matter what you post, somebody out there will hate it. This knowledge (that shit is like the weather, it happens to everyone) can insulate you against reacting to that on a personal level.
Quote from: LMNO on December 17, 2019, 03:05:41 PM
How did some people develop tolerance for advertising? Why do some people seem to fall for a slick ad every time?
Awareness of advertising techniques can defeat advertising techniques.
Awareness of logical fallacies can protect you against them.
So maybe there is some
ontology of memes which can act like a vaccine
Quote from: Cramulus on December 17, 2019, 03:40:41 PM
One is an ideological buffer - MAGA memes bounce off of me because I'm a liberal cuck.
Or someone could find them ALL cringey.
Interesting observation: That Trump meme you posted above 100% didn't work for me, and not just because it's Trump. I think it was the format.
Either, "Isn't it interesting how [single focus issue] has more agreement from people than [vast, sprawling systemic problems]?" is immediately an identifiable logical flaw, or something about a Political Impact-Font Meme triggers me to look for what's "wrong" with it.
I find myself more suckered by out-of-context Twitter posts. The proof I have of this is I just looked through my meme stash for an example of something I liked before I realized it was jingoistic, and I couldn't find one.
Which means they're in there, somewhere.
Those things referred to as memes nowdays do not seem to convert anyone at all. They just seem to reinforce existing beliefs.
What I've noticed is that consuming enemy memes makes my brain turn on. My brain is so much more critical when I know beforehand that I'm looking for something I disagree with. I think it has also to do with the context and the state of mind I'm in, since I have to go outside my bubble to even find enemy memes.
Friend memes tend to pop up while I'm just trying to relax and figure out what people I know have been up to lately. They strike when I'm comfortable and defenseless. I don't examine them as they pass by, why should I? They seem to be in line with my worldview.
Well, yeah. I think the principle application of memes isn't to convert and unify, but to solidify people's positions and thereby increase division.
For very long I was afraid of looking at nazi shit. For I felt that my views were so feeble and my mind so easily altered, that just browsing through their shit could convert me into a genocidal maniac. That meme from Niechehszhhehhrese about fighting monsters and becoming one kept echoing inside my brain.
So I let the secondhand knowledge about my enemies from friendly memes build my view about them, never getting them, never realizing what is actually going on inside their heads. You don't really get how dangerous nazis are if you just assume they are idiots, don't you.
If it's true that the memes are no longer able to convert people, best way to build up immunity gotta be taking a swim in a pool of shit. The mechanic behind reactionary memes are basically the same, but disagreeing, you'd be much more likely to spot the hooks.
I could also be wrong in a really horrific way.
btw, I think that conversion via meme is alive and well
what happens, I think, is that the Kids These Days congregate in facebook groups and discord servers, where there are "meme dumps". And I think that being in a "friendly space" helps you ingest the ideas behind the meme without triggering defenses. And a lot of it is subtle.
like, this meme, on the surface, is just mocking someone's outrage
but it has a whole ideology connected to it -- and if you laugh at the meme but are ignorant of the ideology, you've been subtly influenced - the next time you encounter that ideology, your brain will continue building a case
(https://i.imgflip.com/2do7n1.jpg)
For me what it is is developing an emotional distance, as Cram said. I do it in a weird way: I let myself be hijacked emotionally, then I map that ride out afterward.
There's a reason I started doing this this way. Hindsight is 20/20, and Pavlovian response means eventually, if you examine every emotional trip you go on, it becomes automatic to examine them. (The initial impetus was to figure out my brain damage which prevents me from stepping into an emotion reaction before it's full bore freak out time, meme immunity has been a beneficial side effect.)
This might sound unlikely because it's a complex meta cognitive process, but the electric meat is nothing if not efficient at automating repeated reactions. Also, it just automates flipping the "let's dissect this" switch, the dissection (at least for me, currently) is still consciously directed.
Let's talk about Memetic Immune Response, rather than immunity.
You can develop antibodies to a specific meme, and you do naturally and rapidly for most. Think about a joke you've heard a million times. This immunity may fade for some things (a joke may become novel again after a sufficient downtime) and for some things you may never develop a strong immune reaction (Richard Spencer getting punched in the face will never not be funny), but for the most part the common cold analogy works.
Where our discussions about Memetic Immunity are flawed is in thinking this is transferable. You cannot inoculate yourself against All Memes as a class. Brains don't work that way, and neither do societies. While one meme may make you more susceptible to others, or increase your Memetic Immune Response to others, you cannot become immune to memes.
So, what can we do? Harm reduction.
> Identify memes that are catastrophic to the individual and to the society.
> Create logical, emotional, and memetic framework that increases the Memetic Immune Reaction to those specific memes
> Expose people to the framework before they have encountered the memes
> Quarantine those exposed to reduce the harm done
Oh hey, all that looks like Doing A Fascism, doesn't it?
Ideas are Inherently Dangerous. They change things. Supercondensed Ideas are super dangerous, and we're swimming in them 24/7. There's no easy answers, fuck there might not BE any answers, but we're here and we have to learn to live in it.
QG, bringing the fire.
as a small point of order, I think the usage of "memes" ITT refers to image macros, rather than ideas in general
That is how I meant it.
That said, I feel like an immune response is a better metaphor than video game immunity. (There's a closer analogy: infection, identification, elimination, in the biological senses fit with my immune response method.)
I haven't seen a meme since nuking facebook and reddit, granted the downsides are a Cask of Amontillado fomo.
PREVENTION
As long as you can get under a person's skin and their emotions, thru slogans and visuals, that person will be able to be "suggested". Added to that: if you know what a person wants unconsciously, you can play with their desire like a dog playing with a ragdoll.
The grand solution to memetic infection is being well versed in reading and writing. Because when you know how to write, you know how and why arguments are constructed, their strenghts and flaws. And when you know how to read and can distinguish trustworthy sources such as books, you have the tools to research what is good and what is just spinning reality. In summary, being skilled in honest rhetoric.
TREATMENT
BTW, an unquantifiable part of psychotherapy is hunting down parasitic ideas... as standard procedure, you always incite them to talk talk talk, and at some point what theyre saying is repetition of whats been previously said... they have repeated a given statement as repetition as an argument or a statement about reality... when that happens, you stop them for a moment and ask them "Who usually says that?" or "Why do you think that is true?".
Sometimes the parasitic idea is their own, but many times it was said by their parents, by their friends, by their lover, or by the news... when you can hunt down the origin of the idea, you find its nest... and even tho its not our job to pull a flamethrower on that shit, the patient itself may or may not do that himself, but at least now that they behold the disgusting nest will probably start relating to it in a different way.
Quote from: Cramulus on December 17, 2019, 08:58:49 PM
as a small point of order, I think the usage of "memes" ITT refers to image macros, rather than ideas in general
Well, those are the ones we
notice.
How about unpolitical memes? Ones that say something like "I always eat my toenails while showering" and then somebody shares it, because "this is so me". Usually it's something abut depression, anxiety or OCD, things that are good to bring to the public view, and difficult to handle or explain, without anecdotes or humor memes provide.
Still, I feel like there's something creepy in the part person goes "this is so me" and presses the share button. Like it digs the mental illness deeper into their identity. Or maybe it helps them express the way they feel bad, making them feel better. I wouldn't know, I'm not into browsing depression memes.
Quote from: Frontside Back on December 19, 2019, 02:43:02 PM
How about unpolitical memes? Ones that say something like "I always eat my toenails while showering" and then somebody shares it, because "this is so me". Usually it's something abut depression, anxiety or OCD, things that are good to bring to the public view, and difficult to handle or explain, without anecdotes or humor memes provide.
Still, I feel like there's something creepy in the part person goes "this is so me" and presses the share button. Like it digs the mental illness deeper into their identity. Or maybe it helps them express the way they feel bad, making them feel better. I wouldn't know, I'm not into browsing depression memes.
It's a type of XXIst century dadaism of normie centrists.
Then the depression memes I'm on the fence... like on one hand it allows people to express their sentiments, on the other hand its an unhealthy release valve instead of getting treatment or actually doing something about their lives.
if one were sufficiently stupid, then one would become "immune" to memes
in a discordian society group, saw this "anti sjw" meme which is intended to innoculate against a particular style of left wing memes.
(https://i.imgur.com/zhN9b2P.jpg)
Should I explain it? I feel like you guys probably understand it - in a facebook comment, you can tag groups. So there are groups whose names function as retorts. So tagging one of these groups is a form of dismissal, an "I'm not affected by this" sentiment.
putting on my analysis hat for a second --
What works about this meme is that it frames the enemy's sentiment not as a genuine original thought, but as a default response picked off a menu of standard responses. It seems to say "you're not actually clever, you're just quoting clever people".
"Immunity to memes"
--------whose memes?
That's the "strawman" vaccine so to speak.
the memes that look like memes are the least effective
the dangerous memes are the ones that don't look like memes at all
You know what, you can split me off to a new thread if its annoying or considered derailing, but even tho meme is a good colloquial term to use, i feel like its a misleading and obfuscating theoretical term.
Isnt it more precise to call them ideological representations? The word "meme" is tainted by pseudo-biological babble i would argue. Like what is this bs about "memes residing physically in the brain".
Quote from: The Johnny on December 21, 2019, 06:34:30 AM
You know what, you can split me off to a new thread if its annoying or considered derailing, but even tho meme is a good colloquial term to use, i feel like its a misleading and obfuscating theoretical term.
Isnt it more precise to call them ideological representations? The word "meme" is tainted by pseudo-biological babble i would argue. Like what is this bs about "memes residing physically in the brain".
are you asking about image macros? or the term Dawkins coined, "units of cultural inheritance"?
if you mean the unit of cultural inheritance, the definition is basically just "something that can be transmitted", something repeatable.. it doesn't necessarily have to have any ideology. Like, the color blue probably counts as a meme--many cultures don't have a word for it, or they "see" blue as a shade of green.
and of course it resides in your brain
somewhere. But like a memory, it's hard to point to.
Well yeah, Dawkins definition... so i guess it can be whatever can be communicated/received, intentionally or not, which is pretty much anything. As i said, i dont like the term, but i guess youre framing the discussion around image macros which is a different scope?
Ill give the entire thread a re-read, im not sure if im the only one that was confused btw.
Because I was just thumbing through it, I want to add a few points from the
Chaos Marxism Primer (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/downloads/A-Chaos-Marxism-Primer.pdf):
- 76. Metaphorical, narrative language can help people understand real although intangible forces better than intellectual jargon.
- 77. An effective political or advertising slogan has all the same characteristics of a meditative mantra.
- 78. The most effective advertising does not say "Brand X has qualities Y and Z"; instead, it presents a meme which associates X with Y and Z and leaves it up to the recipients to connect the dots. All the most virally infective memes require that the readers/viewers/listeners do some work to make some sense of what they are given – they are "pull" rather than "push" marketing.
- 81. If you're not being attacked, you won't be supported.
- 84. A meme will spread if it fills a niche in the materially existing noosphere.
Actively looking for and engaging with accomplished and versatile people with radically different ideas on important things seems to be an activity that boosts immunity.
It seems to me catchy one-liners (or even few-liners, we can include iconic songs and conspiracy-theories, too) are primarily in-group markers to aid identification (a bit like uniforms or dress-codes), but as most of us are now swimming in a sea of ideological mess and get exposed to most everyone's brain-dirt, their role is shifting: in the before-time, by and large you found yourself in a group and then studied and learned the visual, linguistic and other behavioural badges that went with being a member: in this after-time, children who are not forced into a specific group by their caretakers actually build identities out of various badges originating from various groups and matrices. These cobbled identities sometimes have a weird tragi-comic feel, like cargo-cults.
Teaching critical thinking to kids (largely by demonstration) is vitally important. If that parental duty is not neglected, there is a hope that the identities they build for themselves will be somewhat organic and adaptive, leading to autonomy and a level of immunity against the catchy bullshit that now appears to be our common substrate. No guarantees, for sure, but by and large it seems to work better than not doing it at all.
Hugely related: https://www.frontpagelive.com/2020/01/01/ex-fox-anchor-explains-how-to-start-deprogramming-your-fox-brainwashed-friends-and-relatives/
This article (written by ex-fox anchor tobin smith) points at something I suggested upthread - that educating people about propaganda techniques helps innoculate them against it.
a few snips
QuoteOur real superpower at Fox News is that 85%+ of our audiences are just absolutely clueless to the powerful cognitive manipulation techniques that are baked into every 7–8 minute Fox News opinion segment.
QuoteThe other aspect of what I came to describe as Fox News' tribal hate porn superpower is that by delivering compelling new evidence of right-wing tribal superiority and more reasons to righteously and morally hate and demonize their binary existential tribal enemy (or "out-group" in social science speak), we get our tribalized viewers and streamers high.
Why? Because at your subconscious level, tribal hate media is simply a powerful exercise in tribal ego-gratification because the act of hating on your tribal enemy is self-congratulatory. Look — when you consciously or unconsciously say "God — how could those stupid libtards be so ignorant" all your sub-conscious ego hears is "And look how smart you are relative to those idiots, Big Boy!"
Quote from: Cramulus on December 29, 2019, 03:18:36 PM
78. The most effective advertising does not say "Brand X has qualities Y and Z"; instead, it presents a meme which associates X with Y and Z and leaves it up to the recipients to connect the dots. All the most virally infective memes require that the readers/viewers/listeners do some work to make some sense of what they are given – they are "pull" rather than "push" marketing.
I think this is at least partly why Dunkin Donuts is rebranding itself as just Dunkin