Why Twitter is important, and why it can’t never go public !
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This was a small, stream of consciousness thread I wrote on Twitter, and I decide to expand it here. While I am a generalist, the field of memetics, and mimetics could be called my “expertise”.
Why Twitter is important? First, you need a little bit of history. If you don’t understand mimetic, and memetics, you will get lost in the middle pretty fast, so I will use my own terminology and attempt to explain to you what these are. Mimetics come from the theory created by Rene Girard, with the same name Mimetic Theory. From here.
What It Is
Mimetic theory is a concept developed by twentieth-century French anthropologist René Girard, who saw that human desire is not individual but collective, or social. This has led to conflict and violence throughout human history.
Mimetic theory moves through a four-stage process:
Mimetic Desire: After basic needs are satisfied (food, sex, safety, shelter), people move into the realm of desire in which there isn’t a biological “radar” or instincts to guide them. Instead, their radar becomes other people. People want what other people want. Desire is social.
Conflict. Because people want what other people want, there will inevitably be conflict as people compete for the same goods. Mimetic desire leads to mimetic rivalry.
Scapegoating. When mimetic contagion has spread throughout a community and led it into chaos, the typical way that human communities have dealt with the chaos has been the scapegoating mechanism, in which groups (through a mimetic process) single-out a single individual or problem as the source of their problems and violently expel or eliminate this member from the community.
The Cover-Up. After the scapegoating mechanism has been enacted, human culture springs up around it as a way to cover-up the founding murder. Taboos, prohibitions, and other laws are enacted the prevent the spread of violence that led up to the original founding murder, and the founding murder is ritually enacted over and over again as a means of catharsis and a way to prevent the spread of further violence. This amounts to an elaborate, cultural cover-up. This is true of nations, communities, organizations, and even families
Memetics is 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.
Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, patterns of behavior, etc.) that is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus, what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host.
With that out of the way, now I can explain a couple of my own terminology. A nexus, as the name implies, is the epicenter of X, and also a point of intersection, and origin. In this case, the nexus could be described as both a Biosecurity Lab Level 4, and its own petri dish. In this nexus, memes, like genes, went through a process of selective pressure, and adaptation, and became virulent (the viral phase). This is a simplification of the steps.
Back in the 2000s, 4Chan used to be a Mimetic and Memetic nexus. Meaning?
Meaning it affected the behavior of others on the wider internet, and its memes (genes of culture) were more virulent, and dominated the net, cascading into real life. Image boards are complex systems contained in themselves, and when you take into account the rest of the internet, they were the best starters to understanding non-linear cascade dynamics. A fancy way to say “how things behave in chaotic ways that ripple around”.
You can find dozens, upon dozens of examples of this. Arguably the pinnacle of this effect, was in 2015 When “someone” decided to meme Donald Trump into is POTUS, factually making this one of the most successful memes in recent history.
During Trump’s campaign, and especially after his victory, a lot of eyes, mainly from think tanks, and private Intelligence firms went to the boards to understand what the hell was going on. His victory, supposedly, defied the mathematical odds, nobody in Academia, in Think Tanks, Intelligence Community could see it coming. (The average Joe could, that is why I hold average Joe in way higher regard than elitistic liberals who use…rational…labels… more on this in a later post). There was a lot of investment from public organizations pumped into the memetic phenomenon, such as the United Nations, and the Department of Defense.
After a couple of years, they came out relatively empty-handed, no amount of funding and academic endeavor could succeed in replicating what was going on in the image boards, the few results they got from this massive time, effort, and monetary investment were the measurable impact the anonymous community had on public discourse, societal behavior, and world events, in more ways than one (as when 4chan users tracked down a terrorist training camp, contact someone inside the Russian army, and said camp as bombed…).
The only thing the opposing interest could do, to avoid such force to, in some ways, manipulate geopolitical outcomes, and stock the populist fire was, at first, using cheap human labor, then as time went on, automating it using bots, and only then disruption of these places achieved some semblance of success.
But unconsciously, the users that were more “aware”, knew by observation and instinct that something was off, and a massive shift went underway, as the boards got progressively worse (more, and more effective disruption), people went to other platforms.
By doing mere frequency, and linguistic analysis, mixed with some memetics, one could see where the wind was shifting to. Or from. The more time passed, the more memes started somewhere else, and ended up in the image boards, to be discussed, and sometimes “refined”.
One that become of major importance was… Twitter.
Twitter is not merely a social media, it is also one of the biggest battlefields in the next generation of war, and as much as such a thing is of importance, Twitter is also the world's biggest Mimetic, and Memetic nexus. There is extensive evidence, all around, that Twitter can direct effect, and shift elections, it does affect, and control popular opinion, it dictates the cultural evolution, especially popular culture, and it can even impact academia, academic research, and much more. It was the main tool during the Arab Spring, it was used in other social, and civil unrest events.
From the perspective of the elites, and managerial class (what I often refer as the Tyranny of midwits), Twitter is a planetary control tool. Before someone comments about Tik Tok, that is merely a circus, and a very refined, and thoughtful data, and behavioral harvesting tool, with some deep penetration (hacking) angles.
It took billions of dollars of investment for Twitter to become what it is, and another billion in investment so the usual suspects can attempt to control the narrative. There are whole fields in AI, machine learning, networking analysis dedicated to analyzing, and learning from large data sets, how to better… “educate the masses”.
A good portion of the current environment is mediated by bots, big data centers, and massive computing power to, at the very least, disrupt the natural cycle of human behavior, and idea exchange. If Twitter becomes a free speech platform, memes will go to the normal cycle of “adapt or die”.
The regime/elites/whatever name you want, cannot allow this to happen. Their narrative is barely hanging by a thread, sentiment, and other types of analysis clearly show barely 30% of people buy the BS they sell. There is a constant AI-fueled propaganda war going on. The disconnection between reality, and what they want you to see as reality is palpable to the average person, with just a few hours of investment into going through social media. How many times have you thought, or read that people live in two different worlds ?
All tools Twitter has in place are “nudge” techniques and a rudimentary form of linguistic manipulation. If keep nudging them and attempt to control the language of the people, the less aware, a portion of the masses will follow it. The elites can’t have Twitter be free. Either absolute control or atomization by the creation of multiple other “platforms”.
As we used to name them, these are “containment” sites. This is also one of the main reasons big “controversial” accounts are banned, not merely by opposing the MainStream propaganda machine, “the current thing”, but by using different tools, network analysis being one of the main ones, they can pinpoint which of the “big” accounts has the most impact on their on-site, and with certain data, and equations, which accounts are “digital super-spreaders”.
If you want to understand how language, under specific conditions, is so powerful I will give you one example. One that had massive ramifications, it divided the world, and governments themselves for months, and it still has ramifications to this day.
“It’s just the flu, bro!”.
A meme purposefully inserted into the vernacular, and minds of thousands of people, by exploiting specific cognitive faults and using novel form frequency analysis. By me. I have shared this in one of my paywalled (one of the 3) posts. Here a NATO paper, from 2016 proposing the acceptance of Memetic Warfare.
The funny images you see, and the memes you consume are not innocuous. Consciously or subconsciously they are affecting you unless you are mimetically aware. Now you have an introduction to multiple aspects of what is going on, and why there is a massive effort to forbid Twitter from going private.
And for last I leave you, the reader if two things. If brain DNA cells can refold themselves, and affect genetic expression to recall memory, are memes, just memes ? (That article I linked is an amazing read)
Free Speech is natural selection, and like the current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, the current dialogue is synthetic and therefore inflicts selective pressure towards something else…
Buy me a coffee whenever you feel like it.
Deep appreciation for all the supporters !
As a hidden comment for the ones who read the entire text. Memetic Warfare is the first generation of said type of information/net based war. The next step is even worse, and even NATO, and its allies state they can’t stop it. =)