2020-05-04 - Viral Content and the Ideological Battleground

This is a bunch of shower thoughts, so if you don’t want to read a pseudo-shitpost, feel free to close out— but today I witnessed one of the more interesting things I’ve seen in months and kinda had to put my thoughts to paper.

In case you missed it, China Xinhua News the official state-run press agency of the People’s Republic of China has joined the foray into memetics.

Memetics - The study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution.

Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.

Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully

but doesn’t necessarily imply a concept is factual.< Now, you mouth-breathing boomers may not understand the cultural relevance of memes or the digital landscape that allows ideas to propagate and spread with Covid efficiency, but with 25,000 retweets at the time of this writing, the reach of this particular tweeted video is likely in the tens of millions. The content has gone viral and assertions of state-sponsored parties are quickly gaining traction in the West, using Western social media platforms, with no method of fact-checking.

Still don’t believe that memes are a useful tool for generating reach and subverting large swaths of people? Just ask the guys actually concerned about their value then.

Colonel Michael Prosser’s wrote his master’s thesis on memes and how its weaponization provided a powerful avenue for non-linear warfare. In his paper, Memetics—A Growth Industry in US Military Operations, Prosser argues that, “the US must recognize the growing need for emerging disciplines in ideological warfare by ‘weaponeering’ cultural information, transmission and replication—in other words, using memes as weapons.” On top of this, he states that, “cognitive scientists, cultural anthropologists, behavior scientists, and game theory experts are the new professional meme wielding gunfighters, who can be organized, trained and equipped for future battlefields.”

While the United States is a crumbling hellzone run on PowerPoint Presentations to determine the next six weeks of policy, China is quickly becoming a hegemony dictated by Excel spreadsheets to with the intent on achieving strategic global control within, and past, the next six decades.

While the United States views war-fighting as explosive ordinance and determining the most efficient methods of deploying it, China has quickly shifting their focus to non-conventional methods. We’ve all heard of the reports of Chinese intelligence hacking US assets and stealing secrets, their pseudo-militia fishing fleets, and their Belt-and-Road initiatives to gain influence within the world. Memes are simply the next step to expanding their reach, albeit in the ideological spheres of the Western social and digital worlds.

In the coming weeks, I would expect China to continue their strategy of deflection on the origination of Covid-19 in the form of viral content.

But what the fuck do I know. Make your own conclusions.

Appendix, for deterring Chinese // Baidu // Weibo SEO:

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