This is what I call a "mercenary meme" or "merc meme".
A meme that has been painstakingly designed and distributed to encourage certain ideas or advertise certain products.
Now, this one's a little clumsy. Probably a rush job. But some of them can be really subtle, well-made memes. I didn't even notice it was happening until a little while ago.
One recent example was the "wanna sprite cranberry" meme, which was kind of stupid.
Another, far more sinister example was "surgery on a grape" meme. This was meant to improve the public image of robot-assisted-surgeries, which has been steadily falling because of all the associated deaths.
I'm hoping that "merc meme" will catch on, in order to expose this practice, perhaps with associated images of Deadpool sarcastically calling it a meme. I'm aware that asking for something to catch on is counterintuitive, but it's for the greater good.
I also believe that these meme-researchers regularly peruse Jow Forums, as well as other sites, to get a feel for the meme-currents. They sometimes "start" merc memes in a coordinated campaign, but occasionally they'll hop on an established meme in their downtime, like pic related. Hello, researchers.
Now, I know a lot of you are going to call me paranoid, or "cool story bro", etc. That's fine. But I can't let them get away with it. Not anymore.
This website is for discussion not memess you fuckong non adpie
Dominic Young
You're probably onto something, I bet that pic has dissuaded a lot of zoomers from buying electric cars or will. There's a word in the marketing world to describe a type of reverse advertising where you're secretly or not-so-secretly lambasting the competition, forget what it's called though. That could definitely be what's happening here.
On the other hand, I legitimately never thought about how Teslas were made so this could just be a genuine critique of that based on evidence. Also, it's pretty foolish to assume this is a pro-electric car meme, dunno if you're doing that here. It's pretty heavily laced with obvious irony but that irony could be for a greater good or it could be some fucked up corporate lie.
The robot assisted surgeries are better, I got one and it reduced my healing time a lot. The alternative was simpler put bigger and more incisions and a longer recovery.
Dylan Evans
It's just called a forced meme newfuck
Connor Morris
memes made by humans can sometimes be satirical and made to express an idea, or make fun of one? what a shocking discovery op, really boundary pushing. but you are absolutely reaching when you say the surgery on a grape meme exists because of a conspiracy, that video came out 8 years ago.
never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. memes are stupidity.
It's called "propaganda" and "advertising". This stuff has been reduced to a science. Jow Forums and Reddit have only recently started to pick up on these techniques.
Zachary Brown
>there is a meme conspiracy to force robot-assisted surgeries because they are allegedly more lethal than normal surgeries
>never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity Haha corporations and governments just show us things that lead us into thinking in ways that that are beneficial to them because they're stupid. No malice involved!
Lucas Harris
the actual truth is much more sinister. there are meme researchers here because they are just as fascinated as you are. they're not spreading anything like this. not yet. internet memetics is an emergent phenomenon that was hundreds of years in the making. there are three main variables intersecting to create the perfect substrate for memes: population size, stupidity, and mass communication. modern memes are an idea-dominance that has completely outcompeted every form of idea-exchange we used to take for granted, like standard information dissemination through newspapers or books. it is the schoolyard banter of children multiplied thousands of millions of times over - and it was supposed to stay in the schoolyard, but now it has spread around the world, and everyone who takes part in it is voluntarily lowering the level of public discourse until it consists of nothing but sound bytes from your youtube videos and meme bytes from your social news feed.
the psychological side of it is something not even the top researchers in the top companies selling you these products would have imagined, nor the biggest and most powerful thinktanks being contracted to come up with ways to control the population would have thought - the notion that people will not only turn their friends and family into slaves to your brand, but that it will dominate their minds so much that they will ACTUALLY continue to reproduce the brand-idea in original works. not only does it contribute to their identity, no, in fact the brand helps form a person's mental map OF THE ENTIRE WORLD. the brand BECOMES a lens through which they interpret and respond to their social reality. it's some next level baudrillard shit for sure.
i'll cut it short here. most people won't understand at all and are so wrapped up in their superficial identities and cognitive patterns that they can be forgiven. you're definitely onto something though OP. i just think it's a bit different from what you believe.
a japanese meme meant to invoke feelings of mystery and uncertainty, questionable meaning, almost a mystical quality. something the western world does not comprehend and never will.
okay, sure thing. i'm going to stop at some point though because i start having a nervous breakdown whenever i think about this shit.
ideas are imposed onto social reality through the mind-as-nexus; consciousness is unique in that it seeks to overcome entropy and direct itself, but because most people do not have a rational method of obtaining knowledge, the mind is incredibly susceptible to interference and manipulation from even the most benign sources. your mental development beginning from the prenatal stages is a sensitive process of discriminating between sources of information which help you make sense of the world and those which lead you into a false sense of security. however, the way that most people develop is fundamentally flawed in that, the older they get, the more they lean on false security in order to cope with the pressures of contradictory information. children for example are unique in that they are essentially freethinkers until compulsory education and naive guidance from ignorant parents forces them to discard "childish fancy" in favor of social minmaxing. autistic and gifted children are often an exception to this and grow up feeling perpetually disconnected because they do not fall victim to social pressure in the same way "normal" people do. yet for everyone else the process of social conformity is an acquired skill they learn to value above even their most sacred personal truths.
memes begin in the schoolyard as i said. this happens when children are attempting to comprehend and systematize the adult world, something they have no frame of reference for. indoctrination begins at around this age. they are quick learners however, and they VERY quickly learn how to internalize and reproduce ideas in the social realm. as they grow older they hone this skill and forget how to be freethinkers.
will continue typing in next post
i might have to start drinking tonight. and i was sober for so long, too.
Jose Ortiz
The bottom half is funny, but the top half is lame
the teenage years are an important landmark in ego development that results in the familiar angst and edginess, but unrelenting social pressure almost uniformly causes them to discard their ideas of individuality in favor of acceptance. it is at this crucial point that the boy "becomes" a man - he takes on the responsibility of his community, begins to fully internalize cultural values, and leaves the child behind. it is also in this stage that, if he was abused, neglected, mislead or otherwise confused in youth, he will repress the damaged child and very often require therapy later in life. ironically, the "adult" is more or less a projection of the damaged child. when people lash out, form autogynephilic tendencies, suffocate themselves with achievements and possessions, begin defining their relationship to others, it is nothing more than their repressed child acting out on the world that perpetually ground them into dust and left them nothing to call their own.
so, by this point you're wondering where internet memes come in.
remember the child in the schoolyard. adult humans never lose that tendency, but instead of making sense of the adult world, their incomplete ego now strives to make sense of themselves and their relation to the world. everything, and i mean EVERYTHING you do is an expression of this. very few people are able to be sufficiently introspective that they are able to rationally define themselves. but instead of bullying, grandstanding, playground dominance and the like, the adult sublimates these behaviors into complicated and flawed cognitions that ultimately begin to govern their every thought, their every action, their every desire.
memes work because the modern human grows up fundamentally severed from themselves. they have not sufficiently cognized their own place in the world, and because the mind is so exquisitely sensitive, it latches onto anything it can to help make sense of itself
once again, will continue typing
Justin Moore
when an idea is formed in the mind, it is integrated into the nearly-infinite psychological complex that makes up everything you know and everything you don't know about yourself and how you see the world. we could start a philosophical debate about this and go on all night but the main thread that runs through every theory of mind is that it perpetually strives to categorize and rationalize and integrate every single iota of information it receives and every tiny blip of a thought it creates. mental illness for example is fundamentally the result of contradictory information being improperly integrated. schopenhauer had some good and easily understandable things to say about that. but even in normal, "healthy" minds, the contradiction is never fully overcome.
the "healthy" mind is a VERY VERY delicate balance of paradoxes. normal people operate and thrive on these paradoxes. it keeps them in check. it causes them to prioritize social rewards and the like. it's worth noting that there is an abnormally high occurrence of mental illness in the autistic and gifted because of their ability to rationalize paradoxes, causing them to be lead VASTLY astray from the current of normal social life.
and this is where the meme takes hold. normal people don't do this. their cognition is constantly being bombarded by paradoxes which they gingerly accept and reproduce without having any idea what they're doing.
still typing. calming down a bit. if anyone is still reading i appreciate you sticking with me
Jason Sanchez
so, we can establish that the normal mind absorbs paradoxes, seamlessly integrates them, and unknowingly (or uncaringly) reproduces them in the social realm. this is also the fabric of social life. unexamined information with a component of perceived truth shared among each other - ideas of "love" and "friendship" and "authority" (slave/master complex, read hegel for more information) which binds them together.
i would have to define several types of memes to give you the full picture but i'll just stick wit the "brand meme" (corporate advertising) for simplicity. the brand meme is, of course, the idea that you have a fundamental need that can only be satisfied by the brand.
remember how i said the mind is really fucking sensitive?
well, advertising works because, of course, your mind is bombarded with the brand meme until you begin to believe in it. as long as you are exposed to it, your mind subconsciously works to make sense and integrate it.
as they say, the only winning move is not to play. but as long as you're exposed to the brand, you are always playing the game. their game. you want the brand. you need the brand. your social life depends on the brand. you become the brand.
now let's talk about the variables i mentioned before that has caused these nefarious memes to explode in the last few centuries: population size, stupidity, and mass communication
continued in next post
Kayden Morris
Out of all the dumbass conspiracy theories I see on the internet on a daily basis, this is the only one I feel inclined to believe.
Josiah Brooks
If you wish to really get into proper applications of memetics, it's basically control-theory applied to the human mind, on a mass scale. However as noted by psychohistory, a lumped model may be used, so long as the subjects are unaware of the applied control.
population size: the meme is integrated into more minds giving it more vectors from which to spread
stupidity: the meme is unknowingly absorbed and reproduced by the normal person
mass communication: the meme gains traction and spreads like a circuit with near-zero resistance. instantaneous memery.
what does this begin to look like on the macro scale?
it begins to look like a single mind with each person as a node (neuron, terminal, axion, what have you), where the meme is integrated and the paradoxical cycle begins anew on a fuckhuge scale.
because of this the meme is now ready to be altered and reproduced in ways not unlike what OP is talking about. this is also what i meant when i said the meme has idea-dominance and becomes reproduced in original works. on this scale, there is an attempt to rationalize the meme, but because the effective activity of the collective consciousness only has the average efficiency of its totality, unless the meme is restricted to a small subset of minds (as on Jow Forums), it never becomes anything really remarkable but only becomes transmuted by small iterations.
so we can begin to see how the purpose of a meme is slightly altered, how its content changes, how all this happens as it is begin continuously reintegrated into every single mind on earth that voluntarily takes part in schoolyard memery.
i can elaborate more if anyone wants.
but that's the gist of it.
also this
Josiah Foster
>lmao "control theory" because the government control us
t. actual controls engineer
Carter Howard
>i can elaborate more if anyone wants. let's keep this going, I'm reading in between cooking but i'm interested in hearing more and having a discussion about this further.
>i can elaborate more if anyone wants. I don't have anything to contribute, but I'll read it just because of the effort you've put into this thread
Jace Hughes
Don't panic. You're right, there will be skeptics but it makes sense, they're trying to pitch an idea in a subtle way expecting that it just flies past your head and you end up convinced. Def wouldn't rule it out that they'd hijack social media or "memes", they are smart and noticed the potential.
Jack Bailey
yeah the surgery on a grape part is probably true. that shit is literally not funny in any aspect. except everyone is saying it and its le random xd. it could be not true because people find le random xd funny though
Ian Campbell
okay, i'll try explaining more. thanks for reading user i appreciate it. not trying to sound like i've "figured it out" these are just the basic patterns of human behavior on a large scale. OP is also on the mark but i'm just not sure whether he's right about the purpose of the memes exactly. it is very true that researchers are trying to "hop onto" this behavior and insert their own ideas as this phenomenon is the single most powerful force in the world. one interesting thing is that by inserting memes you can gather a lot, and i mean fucking a lot, of data by retrieving the meme at certain stages later on. so if you insert a meme on social media with some metadata or identifying information to track it you check back at a later time and measure the way it changed. my guess it that a lot of computing power is going towards this. of course researchers are already compiling gigantic data sets on semantic analysis because the most abundant thing on the internet is text, but the second most abundant thing is images, and programs like google deepmind AI are able to efficiently process images and compare changes in large batches. so they'd compile information on how the meme spread from an initial point to see what influenced it in different contexts like geographical regions, websites, along with information on the groups that got a hold of it. hell they might have done this with pepe even.
i appreciate you reading too. at this point i'm rambling but i'm glad OP made this thread because the topic is extremely fascinating to me
Brody Anderson
also >sissy generals are back dangerous meme lads, very dangerous
Henry Brooks
so your argument is that brands/govt/org/etc are trying to tap into this shared system of communication to use is as a lane for very subversive advertising? I see your point, and I think you can find pretty easy observed examples of this from the whole twitter craze where the official accounts of companies were personifying their brand, i.e. wendy's, jimmy johns, ihop and gaining a lot of positive brand identification from it.
Andrew Taylor
The bottom half is also lame. Most of the lithium's actually extracted from salt water in Bolivia.
Benjamin Allen
a few things to validate OP's point: memes with impact font, non-stock photos, targeted text, subjects coincide with current events. these have the most reach because they are designed for mass appeal - they immediately grab your attention, present you a clear subject, and evoke an emotional response. what the emotional response is can differ from disbelief/incredulous/"odd" or ambiguous humor (surgery on a grape) to excitement, nostalgia, sometimes fear and confusion. these also have the highest potential for absorption and reproduction. they are also likely to implant ideas that might be relevant later on. something like operant conditioning in order to ease you into accepting things you normally wouldn't. not sure about that though. rather i'm not sure how much it's being used. this is dipping into media conspiracy territory and while propaganda campaigns are a given i don't want to risk too much error by implicitly accepting that for the purpose of this argument
yeah, examples like what you mentioned are where the company "bought into" the meme when they noticed its popularity and propagated it further. that's hijacking/appropriation. for the sake of brand memes that's exactly what they would do. in fact i wouldn't be surprised if a long-term business strategy on social media is to wait until these "grassroots" memes are started so they can keep track of them and utilize them when they reach a certain popularity. if they do it too early it becomes obvious and if they do it too late they lose control of the direction it takes.
James Roberts
Good point, but I was mostly referring to the kids dying part Also wonderinf if anyone has some edge I could borrow, I'm running low
Levi Russell
How the fuck is kids dying in a cave bad for the environment?
going to sleep guys thanks for replying. maybe we can talk about this again another time.
OP if you're still there thanks for making the thread. i'll keep this up so i hope you eventually come back and elaborate on your views/theories as well
Oliver Gray
it's not that i don't believe you guys but i'm not reading all of that.
It's pretty hard for me to think of a consumer product you can buy that doesn't involve kids dying somewhere.
Tyler Martinez
Honestly you've essentially articulated into words thoughts that I've had for a long time, but am basically too stupid to cohesively organize or express. Good on you
Carter Brooks
So does this theory account for the seemingly paradoxical memes that our less intelligent/introspective family and friends share on facebook? Take for instance, I'll often see my sister share a meme about how loyalty to your friends is the most important thing in the world, and then turn around and share one about how you should only care about yourself because no one else will. Or something to that effect. I see this sort of thing happen a lot on my facebook feed, and the contradictory memes occur too close to each other to be explained by a gradual change of opinion brought about by life experience. Is this just people being dumb, or is it, as I suspect, a deliberate attempt to cultivate the tendency for doublethink in the general populace?
Hudson Thompson
I think they just don't think it through. People also shift into different moods depending on various factors.
