The ideology virus

From The Aspen Institute:

In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” which he defined as “a self-reproducing and propagating information structure analogous to a gene in biology.” 

Just as a gene carries instructions that determine a physical characteristic that is passed down through succeeding generations, a meme encodes an idea or other information that can be transmitted from one person to other people.

Of course, memes are not new. In fact, they have been around as long as humans have had the ability to communicate with one another, which made it possible to capture and transmit knowledge across generations. Instructions for how to make a flint cutting tool or how to grow wheat provided sparks that helped energize the evolution of human civilization, while memes like the Garden of Eden, Pax Romana, the crucifix, the divine right of kings all played profound roles in shaping our civilization.

What is new is the emergence of modern electronic media that make it possible to propagate memes far faster and wider than had previously been possible. 

As Nova Spivack, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Magical, noted “the growth of the Web, social media, texting, and the adoption of smart phones, the ease with which anyone can create and spread memes, and the potential audiences they can reach, have radically increased.” 

As awareness of the potential of memes increased, the goal of meme makers became to have them “go viral”—to replicate rapidly by being shared multiple times. 

Many memes took the form of a simple image along with a bit of text that was attention-getting and easy to share. The use of hashtags on Twitter also became an effective way to encourage the wide sharing of an idea.

This was all largely harmless fun until memes became coopted as weapons as part of what Nova Spivack described as a “war on trust”—the deliberate use of “military-grade information warfare and psyops” by both governments and non-state actors aimed at civilian populations “to overwhelm and ultimately degrade, societal faith in institutions, democracy, the free press, science, leaders and in each other.”

The openness, pervasiveness and relative anonymity offered by the Internet has made it a perfect medium for carrying on this type of warfare, and the self-replicating power of memes has made them an attractive weapon for spreading doubt and disinformation. 

Ironically, open societies, with their traditions of free speech and democratic dialog, provide the ideal “petri dish” for memes to spread with little or no government interference. The ultimate goal of these cyber-attacks, according to Spivack, is to “disarm the societal immune system...by degrading faith in institutions, democracy, the free press, science, leaders, the rule of law and in each other.”

The purveyors of disinformation have an inherent advantage over the defenders of fact: While the accuracy of a true story typically gets established within two hours, it can take up to 14 hours before a false rumor gets thoroughly fact checked and discredited, leaving considerable time for it to circulate and have a wide impact. 

And the generation of fake news now seems to be a predictable response to every big event. In the immediate wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017, a spate of “hoaxes, completely unverified rumors, failed witch hunts, and blatant falsehoods spread across the Internet,” some of which got amplified by the algorithms used by social media to promote stories “trending” with users....

See also Orwell and Ideology and BikeThink: The Ideology of bicycles.