One of the terms I bat around occasionally is the concept of ‘memetic war’. But what, exactly, is a memetic war? It’s a great buzzword, for sure. But it’s actually a complicated idea.

A memetic war is a war that occurs in an information space, between information generated by different v-Memes, or meta-value systems that then in turn generate real life social structures — and conflict. Memetic wars can turn into actual wars, when the information generated in the meme-space boils over and grounds itself in reality. The reverse is also true. Real wars can give rise to memetic wars, that then feed back in consequences on the real world battlefield. Information, and its virality can influence who provides real-world materiel and support for the folks actually shooting each other in the trenches. 

The memetic war, whose boundaries exist only in the noosphere/information sphere, functions on very different statistical principles and speeds than the real world, because spatial separation is NOT the primary decelerator in it. In fact, the ability of like-minded/like-valued others to find each other in the information sphere allows allies who may have absolutely NO physical connection or grounding (or even specific knowledge!) to join in a conflict. I would remark that the modern age is NOT the first to generate societies that have participated in memetic war. I’d guess that the Crusades might have been the first, with the Children’s Crusade being the best example. But the comment on spatial deceleration still stands.

The first time I used the term was to describe what my now-pals, Jay Bhattacharya and the other Great Barrington Declaration authors were facing from all sides when they proposed focused protection as a strategy to minimize the damage from COVID. I remarked back then (it was October 2020) that they were very likely unprepared for the fall-out, being high-status, extremely intelligent professors from famous universities, used to the power of persuasive argument built on reason. That turned out to be true, but all of them also were quick studies, and are still leading the charge on the information war front for public health to this day.

Since memetic wars run on information, the structure of that information, and the social structure that generates that information, matters greatly. A memetic war based on complex informational structures will have a hard time propagating its ideas. That’s bad news for reason- and evidentiary arguments. They require both the ideas, and the people that transmit them, to be highly developed and robust, as well as operating in their conscious minds. No bueno! 

Contrast that to dichotomous emotional appeals. In a world full of strife, these easily map across the minds of people/agents with access to the same communication network. Exactly for this reason, the PRC’s CCP has the Great Firewall across their Internet, and stringent constraints on internal chat systems like WeChat. The leaders of the CCP might have eugenicist tendencies, but they are acutely and intuitively aware of the stage of development of their population, and what an angry mob of Chinese nationals can do. As well as how the Internet can spread this

We are witnessing both a real war, and a memetic war in both Ukraine AND Gaza right now. In the case of Gaza, Hamas regulars staged a real attack, reflecting the pre-medieval value system/v-Memes of fundamentalist Muslims, involving rape, kidnapping and hostage-taking, even going so far as to circulate video of the atrocities. This ran directly counter to more Western v-Meme states, but also due to some belief of decorum as well as obscenity and violence standards, and the video logs of their actions did not virally propagate in any convincing fashion. There’s a crazy-ass lesson there, if you think about it.

Instead, disillusioned Leftist youth, hearing only the top level of the conflict (sans details, folks) and traumatized by their own prophets of apocalyptic despair, turned into the willing memetic receptacles of some belief and longing for a concept of a utopian independent life. Armed with simplistic messages of “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free!” these memes rapidly propagated across the information space, and turned into real protests, shutting down traffic and airports across the world. 

The actual memetic generation functions of the conflict are still intact. Fundamentalist Jewish factions are in part to blame for actions in the real space — I can remember Jewish colonists building kibbutzim INSIDE Gaza, and Benjamin Netanyahu talks about the destruction of his Arab opponents constantly. That meme-plex complements and empowers the high-conflict meme-plex on the Arab side of the aisle. Money matters to reality — both sides have billionaires with essentially medieval v-Meme sets that are more than happy to fund the ideas that have led to the current precipice. And when you add on the almost certain embezzlement of international aid funds into the Hamas treasury from weaponized empathetic fundraising campaigns for refugees, well, you get what we’ve got in that part of the world. It’s just a field day for the psychopathic jet-setting caste. They can eat their caviar, and participate in the craziest LARP they could imagine. All in the name of Allah. Or something.

To summarize, memetic war occurs in the information space, between different value sets/v-Memes in the noosphere/information sphere. This piece explains the rules of conflict.  The death of geography, along with different information topologies made possible with different types of social media, makes it possible. And as with all wars, it behooves us to remember that they are not so easily contained.