“Behind the hypnotic grimace of official pacification there is a war being waged. A war that can no longer merely be called economic, social, or humanitarian. It has become total. Although everyone senses that their existence has become a battlefield upon which neuroses, phobias, somatizations, depression, and anxiety each sound a retreat, nobody has yet really grasped what is happening or what is at stake. Paradoxically, it is the total nature of this war-total in its means no less than its ends-that has allowed it to remain invisible. Rather than open offensives, Empire prefers more intricate methods, chronic preventative measures, the molecular diffusion of constraint into everyday life. Here, internal police conveniently takes over for general policing, individual self-control for social control. Ultimately, it's the omnipresence of the new police that has made the war undetectable.”[1]

A world to come.

[1] Tiqqun. “Theories of the Young-Girl”, 2007, The MIT Press.The interlinked social spaces we grew accustomed to through the various portals of our screen spaces, are manifesting into another plane of reality, with an ever increasing correlating flight path to what we once described as the real world.

The meatspace that featured the deeply encoded sensations of a coherent reality is being augmented by a new layer of planetary dimension, scaling down to the granular existence of a singular user. A new terra incognita to be conquered by the machine that is capital. The devices and systems of the world-to-come will refactor and re-imagine the conditions upon which we build the modern society. The once open and utopian network space my generation grew up with, has become the new battleground for an old tale of conquer and divide.[2] [2] It became increasingly clear in the last two decades that while utopian in its promises, the Internet is becoming more and more claimed and compartmentalized by old and new hegemonic powers. I'm referencing here the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow

Yet further, new languages have emerged that allow one curious observer to experience a new vocabulary, adequate to describe and express contemporary mythology onto the terrain ahead of us. This memetic gravitational lensing allows for a mapping of the cultural unconsciousness, yet unseen to mankind. The global village Marshall McLuhan envisioned after all, has come true. And in this village it is an endless circle of realizing.

I - THE MONETIZATION OF AFFECTS

THE SILICON IDEOLOGY

It is the year 2022 and most of the web’s services have been monetized, while maintaining a pseudo-utopian spirit of earlier iterations of the web as web3 lingers on the horizon. While not a consequence of pure technicalities, but of deeper economics this has changed to a more invasive apparatus of indexing, tracking and monetization. After all, the pioneering spirit of the Californian ideology originates from neoliberal ideals rooted in competition and the free market. An extension of the hyperobject of capital, reaching for a new frontier. Disguised under the hacktivist, utopian umbrella that shaped the public view on the internet as a ‘neutral’ playing field, akin to libertarian ideas where everybody is free to exchange ideas and participate in the accumulation of wealth from one’s own personal computer and access to a larger network. As Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote in 1995:

“Their politics appear to be impeccably libertarian - they want information technologies to be used to create a new `Jeffersonian democracy' in cyberspace in its certainties, the Californian ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market.”[3]

The combination of the late hippie counterculture that dwelled in (superficial) utopia’s outside the reach from corporate power, combined with a technological determinism, would promise a new destiny to build a radically new world upon.[3] Barbrook, Richard. Cameron, Andy: “The Californian Ideology”

“Responding to the challenge of the New Left, the New Right has resurrected an older form of liberalism: economic liberalism. In place of the collective freedom sought by the hippie radicals, they have championed the liberty of individuals within the marketplace.”[4][4] Ibid.

Ironically, this idea of an economic –– libertarian –– “belief” in the free market, combined with a technology and genius-centered driven cult, would later resemble the notions of theological spiritualism the counterculture movement would try to bypass in the form of the old and rigid structures of 1950s americana.Over twenty years later, what is described by Barnbrook and Cameron as the “Californian Ideology”, has become a technological apparatus encompassing and rewriting all modes of society, ranging from the accumulation of wealth, invention and distribution of technologies, geopolitical conflicts and moderating the social on a granular level. The platform(s) (companies) that have emerged from the singularity that was originally the desire for weather prediction[5] [5] Lynch, Peter: Richardson’s Fantastic Forecast Factory, have now become the backbone of a planetary machine that (by now) encompases and governs absolutely every human interaction and its subsequent monetisation. The American sociologist and design theorist Benjamin Bratton defines this as a model with his 2015 released book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, as Planetary-scale computation.

THE PLANET IS A NETWORK

While primarily a speculative description (or blueprint) for a vast technical apparatus (hence: planetary) that is partially existing right now, The Stack is also laying the groundwork for a much more invasive pivot in geopolitics from seeing governance previously only divided by land, air and sea, to now including the virtual realm. For this, Bratton proposes a layer system that he borrows from the TCP/IP stack[6][6]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite , consisting of six layers where a particular user can occupy multiple positions at once. The six layers; earth, cloud, city, address, interface and user layer forms The Stack and “[...] refers to a transformation in the technical infrastructure of global systems, whereby planetary-scale computation has so thoroughly and fundamentally transformed the logics of political geography in its own image that it has produced new geographies and new territories that can enforce themselves.”[7] [7] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 375 The internet has indeed — as Bratton describes — evolved as a planetary, all of modern life encompassing and regulating “entity” since its inception as the ARPANet[8] [8]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET, that now regulates and governs the economy and the social sphere. As mentioned the Model Bratton is proposing with The Stack consists of six layers stacked on top of each other being interlinked through various nodes and cross connections. A user can hereby occupy multiple points in this framework at the same time and and finds itself of new forms of enacted sovereignty spawned by and from The Stack:

“Refers to a transformation in the technical infrastructure of global systems, whereby planetary-scale computation has so thoroughly and fundamentally transformed the logics of political geography in its own image that it has produced new geographies and new territories that can enforce themselves.”[9] [9] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 375.

The Earth Layer provides physical resources for The Stack to run on, providing natural resources to be used through various conversion processes and providing a power grid to run on. The Cloud Layer encompasses the infrastructure we engage in via networks, social media sites, information networks all stored on data centers that make up the cloud element on the Stack. The City Layer further down the stack consists of urban centers or rural exclaves, though all or most of them being part of the same planetary network of nodes and switches. The Address and the Interface Layer provide computational devices and standards for them to communicate and “address” through various interfacialities. Lastly, the User Layer is where a particular user (human or non-human) represents the endpoint of the system at large. Bratton understands The Stack as an descriptive model, as well as a speculative design brief, looking into a potential evolution of the planetary network we commonly describe as "the Internet".

The functionality of the Internet at large can be defined as collect, categorize and deconstruct. It is the quantification of every possible data point and interaction between nodes of individual users (human and non-human) that is the basis of this planetary machine. A network by now reaching so vastly into the social sphere, establishing new modes of connectivity that –– as Bratton argues: “[The Stack’s] agglomeration of computing machines into platform systems not only reflects, manages, and enforces forms of sovereignty; it also generates them in the first place.”[10] [10] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 373. The struggle for sovereignty is now not only a question of states dividing land, sea and air, but now also of (private or state sanctioned) cloud platforms delineating the virtual.

AD-BASED-EXPLOITATION

Much has already been written [11]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html about the “negative” effects of manipulating users on social media by outside forces, regarding disinformation[11], fake news[12] and hatespeech.[13] However, it is important to note here that [12] https://www.wired.com/video/watch/inside-the-fake-news-factory-of-macedonia the activation and conversion of affective surplus value by tech companies is not an accident or glitch in the system, but rather the absolute core of its design. After [13]https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-deceptive-math-when-it-comes-to-hate-speech/ all, it is an inherent feature of capitalist exploitation to specifically identify new resources to commodify and extract surplus value.[14] [14] Fuchs, Christian, 2020, Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory, University of Westminster Press, p. 148. Following Marx:

“Passion drives the accumulation of capital: the capitalist is not interested in the use value of commodities, but in the appropriation of ever more wealth.”[15] [15] Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1976), p. 248.

In this case, the identification of emotional affects and the conversion of these affects into (economic) surplus value is the sole purpose of social media networks and platform companies that collect user data.[16] [16] Narrators voice: They all do. This can be observed in two stages; Firstly, the introduction and definition of a terrain to enable participatory social interaction –– the interfaces and technical frameworks we use. The prime example here would be Facebook as the largest (and in a limited sense most “relevant”) social media network globally and specifically in the western hemisphere. As Bratton describes Facebook within the cloud layer of the stack:

“In the reconstruction of the social networks that link the social-psychological capital of hundreds of millions of people, Facebook represents a voluntary and highly limited simulation of human culture (...)”.[17] [17] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 125

It is the construction of precisely this virtualized yet interactive meetspace, that represents the oil-well for the subsequent extraction of affective capital. The Indexing of all user interactions within the walls of facebook, is the raw material of this particular platform model, the personalisation and distribution of ads, is the extraction (or conversion) of said ressources into more tangible forms.

“(...) Facebook captures that social capital and guards it from strangers, displaying it through limited interfacial prisms. In turn, it leverages that capture into metacapital to be sold to microtargeting advertisers.”[18] [18] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 125

As Facebook proved to be one of the most profitable endeavors of late stage capitalism –– while together with other companies spawning from the californian ideology –– establishing a new paradigm of libertarian techno-determinism, it becomes clear that it is just an evolution of the extractive nature of capital and not about meaningful social interactions.[19] [19]https://www.facebook.com/business/news/news-feed-fyi-bringing-people-closer-together

The second stage; The feedback loops of controlled exposure to attention and continuous measurement of the interests of a particular user are not something that is a mere side effect of social media but an intentional design feature.[20][20] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media

The activation of affects and subsequent extraction of affective surplus value by ad-based feedback loops is inherently of semiotic nature, as signs structure the interfaces and virtualized terrain we inhabit. The overproduction of signs we find on the increasingly monetized web is precisely what further enhances the production of affects as Franco Berardi remarks:

“Overproduction is an inherent feature of capitalism because, rather than to the logic of the concrete needs of human beings, commodity production responds to the abstract logic of value production. However, the kind of overproduction manifest in semiocapitalism is specifically semiotic; an infinite excess of signs circulates in the info-sphere and saturates individual and collective attention.”[21][21] Berardi, Franco: “Precarious Rhapsody: Semocapitalism and the Pathologies of Post-Alpha Generation”, Minor Compositions, 2009, p. 108.

The monetization of affective capital by cloud platforms, is the transformative shift of power that these platforms of social interaction represent and enforce. They construct and define new virtualized borders and enact a form of governance across various open and closed systems. Bratton argues here with the concept of cloud polis where:

“These entities [cloud platforms] may operate at the scale of a true state and may come into political geographic conflict with states accordingly.”[22][22] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 369 The disruptive consequences of exploiting and manipulating social interactions, narratives and affects enmesh with geopolitical interests as cloud platforms become more like states and states become more like cloud platforms.[23][23] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 369 This meshing of privately owned companies that base their business model upon the extraction and manipulation of social relations and as a consequence acting like a governing apparatus, is a paradigm shift of magnitudes for society.

AFFECTIVE EMOTIONS MATRIX

As discussed, affective emotions are one of the fundamental resources in an ad driven social economy. Affects are the activation of impulsive emotions and the resulting actions as a consequence.[24] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/affect These affective emotions produced by means of marketing psyops, algorithmic control regimes and manipulation of narratives are what keeps the system of attention extraction and also of liberal capitalist politics in a stable state, by constituting and maintaining controlled affective discourse. The “seemingly” stability here is to be manufactured by depoliticization and insertion of a false antagonistic relationship between the left and right fringes of the proletarian class. Afterall it is the precise goal of advertising to manufacture the desire for commodity consumption, and not for a public discourse about the resource implications of a product.

“These changes, which have strengthened the applicability of the propaganda model, have seriously weakened the "public sphere", which refers to the array of places and forums in which matters important to a democratic community are debated and information relevant to intelligent citizen participation is provided. The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused "the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture” [25] [25] Chomsky, Noam: “MANUFACTURING CONSENT - The Political Economy of the Mass Media”, 1988, p. 18.

As society is getting more compartmentalized and micro-targeted by the Californian tech-hegemony, the Idea of a marketable “mainstream” may someday sound absurd in the sea of micro narratives, this system is producing and enforcing. Further, the exploitations of capitalism –– the growing wealth inequality and various culture wars we engage in –– shape a “memetic terrain” that is littered with inside-jokes, post- and meta-irony. The semiotic terrain social media platforms consist of, produces the affects we as users engage in. The result is a myriad of conflicting narratives that define what meta-modernity is all about. A web of disinformation, post-ironic modes of communication, subversion(s) of a “perceived” status quo that can be harvested for more affective surplus value on a particular plattform. The outrage we participate on these platforms is the activation and subsequent harvesting of affects. Sarah Ahmend describes this in her essay “Affective Economies”:

“That is, emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation.”[26] [26] Ahmed, Sarah, 2004, Affective Economies, Social Text 79, Vol. 22, No. 2.

This circulation of emotions is precisely what keeps the engine of social media like facebook or instagram oiled and running to convert affect into economic capital via the micro targeting and distribution of tailored advertisement from the cloud layer down to the user layer.

“Its Cloud model economics is based on the successful transformation of the web into a massive peer-to-peer advertising platform, and the transformation of advertising into a meshwork of computationally micro-targeted points and clicks.”[27] [27] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 137

With the accumulation of social capital (likes, followers and reach), that can be later converted to economic capital, the platform is keeping the user(s) engaged in dopamine feedback loops for its own conversion process of capital; namely the transformation of emotional affects into (first) engagement, (second) content production and finally advertisement (targeting, placement and influencing).[28] [28] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-do The manipulations of affective states and the subsequent distortions of the social sphere are one of the reasons for the culture war(s); the spectacle that is the battleground on social media between liberals and conservatives about the moral endgame of which version of the bourgeois dictatorship is to be enforced. Observing closely, this is simply a more contemporary technologically mediated flavor of the old class war. Keeping the proletariat occupied with in-fighting masks the real class antagonism between them and the bourgeoisie as the owners of production.

“Social capital becomes visible in particular as the expression of relation-oriented networks that are constructed in connection with economic and cultural capital. Social capital is a kind of investment strategy in the sphere of relations that sooner or later is meant to result in some benefit. In particular, this capital arises through membership in specific groups that can be more or less institutionalized(...).[29][29] Reich, Kersten: Surplus Values – A New Theory of Forms of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cologne: University of Cologne; Chapter 1, p. 24

INVERSE RECUPERATION

Social Media Platforms that base their revenue stream off of capitalizing affective surplus value by amplifying extremist echo chambers, participate — by accident — in a kind of inverse recuperation. As capitalism has the ability to absorb radical ideas and commodify these movements by recuperating and shifting the narrative in context of the spectacle that is the consumer society, in favor of a discourse with no effective change to the hegemonic power, thus de-fanging them. The inversion happens at the precise moment a plattform is established within a mainstream context but loses control about what is the “allowed” horizon of interaction on that particular plattform. The bourgeois dictatorship is maintained by limiting the acceptable opinions on the extreme fringes but allowing very intense discourse within these confinements. Even though platforms tried to regain this control about what content is allowed and what is not, they find themself — ironically — in a neoliberal predicament; of limiting free speech while promoting “connections that matter”. For example, Facebook introduced the concept of “Coordinated inauthentic behavior” in order to narrate the “softhackings” of their platform. Coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) is defined very vaguely by Meta:

“We view influence operations as coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central to the operation.”[30][30] Meta’s stance on what exactly “coordinated inauthentic behavior” is, remains ambiquious at best

The “accident” happens here as follows: Since these platforms thrive off extremist content (generating affect), the platform companies need to narrate it in such a way that there is enough extremist discourse happening to drive profits from ad-revenue but not enough to introduce state legislation that would potentially undermine their business model. The extremist content they mostly allow to “happen” is primarly still anti-semitic, racist and neoliberal in its core, whereas extremist content from the left[31][31] With "the" left I mean anti-capitalism; Communist and Anarchist movements that reject the materialist circumstances imposed by capital and not performative liberal leftism. is inherently threatening to the status quo by questioning the legitimacy of material conditions and the existence of the bourgeoisie itself.

II - TERRAIN

Perhaps the nature of communication itself changed, with the possibilities that the internet as an entirely new infrastructure of communication brought along with it. Never before could one communicate with a large group of people directly, yet unfiltered and anonymously and as a result, new modes of Communication emerged that are specific to a particular user group or niche, not appearing in another. Communication freed from the constraints of physical media[32][32]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing and near instant accessibility, spawned new Languages –– visual and narrative –– even before the internet with the rise of television and radio.

The human genome inhabits millions of lines of code transcribed into its DNA[33][33] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA that will be inherited and modified by each successive generation (or iteration so to speak), passing on selective genes that “prove useful”. Through genetic replication we, as a species, evolve and pass information in the form of physical building blocks onto the next generation, but what about the artifacts we create during our lifetime that are not inscribed into our genes and passed along? Cultural Information such as Literature, Music, Movies and Memories are also objects that define the materialistic, social and ontological terrain we inhabit and interact on. These cultural pieces of information –– that shape our society –– also transmit via specific methods of replication onto the cultural geist of later generations. Attached to these physical artifacts is also a metaphysical component, that of the meme of an object, the underlying idea of a thought that also replicates over generations and evolves.

Originating from the Dawkinian definition of memetic virality, the idea of the cultural replication is tied to the communication infrastructure and interfacial regimes we constructed as a global apparatus that spawned its own (accidental) feedback loops and circuits, creating and defining what cultural production is. While the commodification of affective surplus value may be nothing new, it accelerated with the sheer speed and connectability of this network and may have crossed a rubicon with the advent of The Stack that is planetary computation.

THE GREAT CULTURAL REPLICATOR

In a mere subchapter, Richard Dawkins described in his 1976 released book The Selfish Gene that cultural information behaves most likely akin to genetic material as in the replication of genes which are in constant battle within another to replicate and evolve. He describes memes here as little pieces of cultural information blocks that transmit by imitation through various carrier vessels. Cultural Information is not inscribed and transmitted via our dna, but carried over generations through cultural inheritances within human society like books, movies, words and images –– the culture we produce and reproduce.[34][34] Perhaps one of the greatest contemporary explanations of a meme, can be found in the self-promotion video of voice artist Tom Schalk. Here an important scene from the 1998 game Metal Gear Solid is overdubbed in a very accurate in-lore fashion to articulate the concept of a meme via the meme of big chungus. Another layer adds to the immersion as Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series is in itself revolving around the concept of memes, genes and legacy. Particularly the 2001 released title Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg As Dawkins writes:

“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.“[35][35] Dawkins, Richard: “The Selfish Gene”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 144.

Dawkings claimed that the replication process is analogous to the natural selection of genes. Memes that prove more capable of invoking imitation via hosts, will then replicate to a larger degree.[36][36] Dawkins uses here the idea of religion as a very old meme: “Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent 'mutation'. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself?“. The social spaces we inhabit are where ideas are replicated, re-imagined, modified and imitated. These ideas are after all cultural information and The Stack as a framework to transmit, distribute and govern information, is precisely the framework on which memes operate and replicate. A virality we often find around on social media is in the indeed foreshadowed by Dawkins:

“When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking-the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'”[37][37] Dawkins, Richard: “The Selfish Gene”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 143

Fast forward over forty years, as the post-trump, post-Cambridge Analytica world de-masked economically reinforced formation of enclosed antagonistic enclaves that rely on engaging in elaborate fantasies to construct and reaffirm a coherent worldview or narrative for their own. These are the ponds and cesspools where very virulent memes can grow and leak into the mainstream.

“Like a computer virus, the meme proliferates simply by programming its own retransmission.”[38][38] Žižek, Slavoj: “Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences” New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 109.

Social Media and the Internet as a whole, with its theoretically unlimited storage capacity, accelerated this process of cultural dominance of various pieces of (sub)cultural information. Not unlike life started billions of years ago in the oceans, planetary scale computation is a new primordial soup for cultural ideas to replicate as it provides a vast infrastructure whose network architecture with near instant communication (and thus replication) enables ideal circumstances for the viral nature of cultural information.

“In the same way memes, misperceived by us, subjects, as means of our communication, effectively run the show (they use us to reproduce and multiply themselves), productive forces, which appear to us as means to satisfy our needs and desires, effectively run the show.”[39][39] Žižek, Slavoj: “Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences” New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 110.

Language as a parasitic entity that is attached to the host encompasses the thinkable and expressibility for ideas that turn into culture. Who shared the local tongue spoken in a region, was part of that particular cultural niche of a particular locality.

Memetic replication created such a language of its own. A meta language of the collective (un)consciousness augmented by the pop cultural prism using aesthetics as a carrier. It is mostly only legible by those living in the current cultural age, although references to the past bleed through, they remain largely readable for a “young” audience. Only “they” (within this culture or the in-group) potentially get the context specific to the meme. Language forms and deforms borders, physically and mentally it delineates the thinkable. The act of sharing a meme is an act of communication and thus a specific language of its own.

Even though somebody has to create a “meme” in the first place (as in shareable image macro), authorship is commonly not of interest by the recipients of said memetic content. The society itself is the author of a meme or particular image macro and not the individual since the specific cultural information is always a reference to a reference in the sea of cultural production. The accelerated shareability sometimes disregards the citation of an author. Although the accumulation of social capital is of interest to the individual user depending on the niche of the particular content, the shareability and virality of memetic content is what dictates the replication factors. For the accumulation and eventually (later) conversion of cultural to economic capital the platform provides interfacial options embedded in them.

“Cultural capital can be converted to economic capital, economic capital has always flowed into cultural capital; but cultural capital also has an inde-pendent effect. (...) Cultural capital increases the differences between individuals and their opportunities. It is not enough to consider supposed natural abilities or state assistance to the educational system when we speak of “human capital” as an expression of the opportunities available to an individual.”[40][40] Reich, Kersten: Surplus Values – A New Theory of Forms of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cologne: University of Cologne, p. 23.

The primary vector of the belief is posting, images, words, videos, etc. The virality comes from the usage of the network. Memes as in image macros, often have progressed beyond the need for authorship and will appear on different platforms at different times allowed by the inherent and infinity duplication capabilities of digitality itself. They are –– so to speak –– born in the sea of collective unconsciousness. The image macro we share is the viral carrier for the expression of this shared unconsciousness.

All of these entangled, memetically replicated and evolved narratives from its singularity in the early web, molded by outcasts that claimed and defined a new terrain for them to sprawl. The meta narratives we find here are an interface into the collective unconsciousness of memetic –– cultural –– production on The Stack.

IRONY VECTORS

The further increasing contradictions of living under neoliberal ideology (wage-slaving for the surplus value of the owners of production, rentier capitalism, increased class austerity politics, etc) demand the need for a new kind of language to express resentment or a coping mechanism. Memes in the form of images shared on social media –– specifically shitposting and shizoposting –– exist predominantly in a mode of post- and meta-irony. Ironic distancing is key in trying to comprehend the narrative structure in which a large part of online discussion is taking place. The plausible deniability[41][41]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability of engaging in online discussions on social media networks and image boards is a strategy to justify the arms race of maximizing engagement on a given platform. The ironic phrasing and distancing from sincerity is what can be considered a new language that emerged through and from the adoption of digital networks. The internet (and social media by extension) in this case is not only the infrastructure as in websites or social media apps, but also its entanglement with capital and the described monetization of affective surplus value. A post or interaction with the specific network or in-group generates social capital within an online enclave (think of twitter for example) for a user, but also every click, like, comment and interaction on this platform creates surplus value (monetary via ads-revenue and also data to sell) for the platform that is providing this framework. The commercialized interactions and contradictions of the network are clearly visible for most of the users, yet they engage in it willingly as the usage of these platforms are by now an integral part of the interacting with the social sphere. Irony here becomes a literary device of constructing a coping mechanism under these contradictions.

As Christy Wampole writes in a 2012 article regarding the ironically self distanced archetype of the millennial phenomenon, the hipster:

“Throughout history, irony has served useful purposes, like providing a rhetorical outlet for unspoken societal tensions. But our contemporary ironic mode is somehow deeper; it has leaked from the realm of rhetoric into life itself. This ironic ethos can lead to a vacuity and vapidity of the individual and collective psyche.”[42][42] Wampole, Christy: “How live without irony” https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/

The early 2010s hipster embodied cultural citation on a personal level. At still the early stages of social media interaction, where the accumulation of followers for clout was barely at the horizon, the hipster was already the embodiment of a carefully curated and crafted individual, rooted in materialism. Performing a stylised character that is both defined by ironic distancing and a sincereness of specific and niche quotations of past eras. An archetype of neoliberal ideology, that also stems from the technological utopianism out of california with a naive approach of “tech will fix it”.

Yet within this neoliberal ideology that is the predominant one in the technological framework of (western) nation states connected by layers of networked infrastructure, the hipster is also self-defining as non-ideological, as the negation of existing under “an ideology” is an integral pillar of contemporary neoliberalism.

Here, Slavoj Žižek remarks on ironic distancing:

“If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way - one of many ways - to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”[43][43] Žižek, Slavoj: The sublime object of ideology, Verso, 1989, p. 30.

Looking at the contemporary social plane we inhabit, what characterizes shitposting generally is an ironic distancing that acts as a barrier of plausible deniability to (supposedly) neglect accountability. It is again the process of a media apparatus (the participation on and with the image board itself, but neoliberal ideology in general, as in “everyone for their own”), converting critique and subversion as a commodity in the end. The anonymity of these image boards incentivises the engagement in the performative “discourse” we find there in a "race to the bottom" of offensiveness. The performative aspect of this extremist humor based in resentment and alienation, camouflaged with ironic distancing is in the end a coping mechanism for misidentification of alienation (by capital) itself. But nonetheless as Žižek points out, even if we are doing things ironically, we are still doing them. That is after all true for hate-speech and the resentment these user-spaces thrive on. Ironic distancing only goes so far and in the end, this resentment spills over into more mainstream spheres and the rest of social media, generating entropy for the culture war.

As irony is not merely a disregardable part of communication but often an integral part of (systemic) critique, it is at its core a stylistic and narrative device that can be dialectically weaponized.

“As opposed to “reasonable debate”, jokes are political weapons that deny an opponent control over the terms of the exchange by ignoring those terms entirely. Jokes are a protocol weapon of democracy, unsettling the structure of the encounter between oppressor and oppressed. Jokes can unsettle the “terms of service” to which political exchange is bound by its ruling ideology.”[44][44] Metahaven - Can jokes bring down governments, p 24.

Subverting the predominant ideology –– that of bourgeois dictatorship –– requires a certain degree of abstraction. Irony as a narrative and stylistic device can be used to provide a literary device that can engage and de-mask the abstractions of the (ideological and bureaucratic) system that governs us and organizes the social.[45][45] “The modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual (have codetermined) each other’s emergence.” - Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France , 1978 – 1979, Picador, 2010.

“Irony can indeed allow one to express distrust or dissent under taxing or outright perilous circumstances that preclude other forms of political expression. But irony can also mask complicity. Above all, irony is a defense mechanism. Psychoanalytically speaking, irony minimizes its object while maximizing the subject’s self-contentment and sense of superiority.”[46][46] Pinto, Ana Teixeira: “The Psychology of Paranoid Irony”:

Trolling is seen by mainstream “culture” and news outlets as intentional psychological harm that is raging in fringe online networks and social media. Online Troll Culture is more of a misguided reaction to the Trolling is seen by mainstream “culture” and news outlets as intentional psychological harm that is raging in fringe online networks and social media. The phenomenon of online troll “culture” is not some arbitrary form of “new media bullying”, but some deeply pathological symptom of a system of alienation and exploitation. Shitposting and trolling –– ultimately –– is a direct consequence of the exploitative nature of capitalism and neoliberalism. It is a vehicle for communication; a metalanguage of resentment.

The degree of paranoia and ironically-enacted resentment that online trolling has reached is in turn a great measuring tool of the growing rift between political and economical promises, upheld and sustained by the ruling ideology and power structures and the continuous class warfare from above.

MODES OF IRONY

Integral to the transmission and replication of memetic ideas across contemporary network spaces, are the evolved terms of post- and meta-irony. Within the framework of affective surplus value extraction, new languages of ironic expressions have emerged from and with the interaction of particular users and user-spaces.

Not only is a large part of communication on social media platforms happening through memes that in itself (can) compress a complex web of cultural information, but also often function in different modes and forms of Irony.

The “Philosophers Meme” (TPM) is a community organized around studying memetics and researching epistemological models of memetic behavior.[47][47]http://thephilosophersmeme.com/about/

According to the TPM Glossary we find the following definitions for meta- post and pre-irony:[48][48] https://thephilosophersmeme.com/2016/01/18/glossary-1-dot-0

Pre-Irony: “Simple memes; popular objects making up the lexicon of reference humor–what you see is what you get. They do not rely on the violation of memetic conventions for their humor. The majority of ‘normie’ memes fall into this category. They are highly normative and stress the importance of ‘using the meme right’.”

Post-Irony: “Highly Complex memes that reconcile Pre-Irony and Irony. Instead of outright violating established conventions, the narrative works with the structure in an internally consistent manner. They vary in meaning depending on whether the observer is familiar with Ironic meme culture or not, and simultaneously convey two layers of meaning. Unlike in the case of Ironic memes, it is not irony (i.e. meaning the opposite of what is being said) that is missed when the viewer lacks familiarity with the tropes involved. What you see is some of what you get–but not all. Numerous factors such as the history and associated nuance related to the meme’s stylistic choices can be taken into account to add nuance to the meme. The locus of humor in post-ironic memes is what sets it apart from simpler memes: the absence of ironic subversion. The viewer requires a broad knowledge of the memetic lexicon, especially regarding ironic memes, in order to fully appreciate post-ironic memes. A simple rule of thumb for the identification of post-ironic memes is whether the humor is in what is being left undone or unsaid; this makes them more complex than other memes, as well as resistant to normification.”

Meta-Irony: “Complex memes that prey on less complex memes; forms the same relationship with the meme(s) it derives its humor from as Ironic memes do with Pre-Ironic memes. They violate the structural conventions of the memes they reference. They often fall into an infinite regress of successively more ‘meta’ memes that make fun of slightly less Ironic memes, ad infinitum unto incomprehensibility, when the normalization process cannot keep up with the rate of deconstruction.”

As memes continue to evolve in the cultural zeitgeist and replicate themselves as carriers of culture. Who gets what meme –– delineates users fluent in memetic subcategories from users who don't undestand the specific cultural niche of signifiers . The modes (and layers) of irony here run adjacent to the complexity and compression density of the cultural information they transmit. TPM proposed a widely cited and shared model of the relationship between modes of irony that run parallel to modernity, postmodernism and metamodernity: The quadrant model.[49][49] https://thephilosophersmeme.com/2016/01/18/the-revised-quadrant-model

CATEGORIZING THE SELF IS A WAY TO REPRESENT THE SPIRIT

If history is constructed by the replication and the re-telling of memetic (cultural) information that upheld enough viral energy (or prove to be a “fit” meme to borrow the darwinian metaphor) and to manifest in the cultural consciousness via vessels that carry this information, then memetic replication through algorithmically enforced and commodified feedback loops is the engine as well a vessel itself to generate new fictions and and provide an infrastructure to spread them.

One of the most contemporary forms of this fiction making are astrology apps like Co-Star that use technology to re-commodify the “old” memetics of astrology as a sense-making tool for the neoliberal subject. Astrology apps became so popular because they provide a personalized (and fictionalized) narrative to their respective user that lacks education and class understanding to cope with the opaque and confusing mechanisms of exploitation a worker (as in class) is confronted with. A beacon of sensemaking amidst the neoliberal agenda of alienation and accumulation of capital in the search for meaning in the desert of the real.

As digital systems and social media become more invasive in their quantification of our private lives, “coincidence” can be mistaken for a spiritual entity that guides one through their lives. What was known as coincidence is now a complex system of quantified data coming from the interfacing and interaction of a much larger system (see The Stack).

“Predictive analytics, algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) have taken up the post of divination tools to fit in a cosmos that is digitally regulated. We thought the open future would allow us to make up our own destiny, but algorithmic predictions are actually depriving the future of its open possibilities.”[50][50] https://networkcultures.org/longform/2021/11/15/digital-esoterism-or-to-be-a-witch-in-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/

The behavior of the user dissected into advertisable pieces and the data gathered, sold to the highest bidder.[51][51] https://theoutline.com/post/4185/mercury-retrograde-horoscope-app-scamming-privacy-policy-data The attention economy as a pseudo religious “big other” governs hereby the social sphere and cloud polis to capture and extract more capital in the form of datasets.

AI powered astrology apps combined with a “scientific backing”[52][52] The app Co-Star is advertising with the tagline: https://www.costarastrology.com/ pseudo-legitimizes this large scale data grab that arose from spiritual displacement and growing class austerity. The Californian ideology demands the integration of technology in just about anything, so the spiritual plane is a logical new frontier to be captured by technocapital. [53] [53] As Mark Fisher described Nich Lands Accelerationist vision: “In Land's work, a cybernetically upgraded invisible hand is progressively eliminating centralized state power. Land's 90s texts synthesized cybernetics, complexity theory, cyberpunk fiction and neoliberalism to construct a vision Capitalist Realism of capital planetary artificial intelligence: a vast, supple, endlessly fissile system which renders human will obsolete. In his manifesto for nonlinear, decentered Capital, 'Meltdown', Land invokes a 'massively distributed matrix-networked tendency oriented to disabling ROM command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System'.”

The quantified data aided by machine learning, transforms this technological object towards a spiritual entity as the blackboxed nature of machine learning itself is akin to a spiritual –– otherworldly –– entity of “worship” that reasons the contradictions under neoliberalism as a big other. The mapping of the self via astrology apps like Co-Star reaffirms the Main Character Syndrome[54] as the network is imposing upon the definition of the self in the network. The real gold rush here is also the data extraction that gets redirected into the advertisement feedback loops. The mapping of the self in late stage capitalism fits perfectly into the establishing of alternative or a singular –– overarching –– narrative(s) [54] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Main%20Character%20Syndrome to find the individual path in the pond of an all against everyone free market. As Toby Shorin remarks:

“Can we say that this world is rational? That computational devices are free of ideology or that materialism is irreligious? By now it should be obvious that we cannot. The surface-level infallibility of these ideas may be comfortable but they are neither pure nor factual. They too are just systems of meaning—social productions whose acceptance as “objective” fact are culturally determined. Retreating to self-determination and scientism allows the twisted logic of the spectacle, no more sensical than that of the mystical, go unobserved and unchallenged. The ancients believed the universe operated according to mysterious divine principle. But neoliberalism is the ultimate cabalistic regime of power. From the trivial to the highest level of abstraction, from how we hold our pencils to how we define personhood, its designs are immaculate, unknowable, unaccountable.”[55][55] Shorin, Toby: “Mapping the Self in the Desert of the Real” https://subpixel.space/entries/mapping-the-self-in-the-desert-of-the-real

Another way to self-define in order to represent the spirit are the sixteen personality types by C.G. Jung and the subsequent gamified versions of the myers-briggs personality tests.[56][56] https://www.reddit.com/r/mbtimemes/ Scrolling on social media, (e.g.Instagram or dating platforms) people often categorize themselves into the various personality types and consequently applying various traits to their idealized character.

One could speculate if memetic communication of complex social circumstances within late capitalism, via sharing of image macros with very specific niche content may be the first direct tap into the (by C.G. Jung theorized) collective consciousness, let alone a particular group. Only an AI could wade through this pop cultural sea of meanings and relations to “make sense of the whole” and the self in it.[57][57]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA That being said, what is sensemaking here on out is to be debated. Does the production of culture needs to make sense in the first place or is it ultimately the materialistic circumstances that dictate this sensemaking? Semiotics tell us that signs (read “memes”) get their meaning based on their relations and differences to other signs in structures of signification, which are (of course again) social and cultural products.

ARCHETYPES

As the mapping of the self via new age spiritualism accelerated with data-driven astrology apps, the need for normative indexing of particular character traits also manifested in the memetic realm as we see in the various depictions of the wojak character.[58][58]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wojak The Wojak is furthermost a memetic template, a vessel for the compression of a deeper web of meaning and narratives within a given subculture.

The doomer wojak[59][59]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doomer represents an extreme hopelessness as a manifestation of economic precarity with no hope on the horizon. Akin to the doomer we find the bloomer[60][60]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bloomer, the zoomer[61], the [61]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zoomer-wojak scrooler[62] and the coomer.[63]

The npc-wojak[64] represents [62]https://www.are.na/block/15961152the numb masses of the cultural normie [63]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/coomerthat is the victim, as well as the gear that keeps on enforcing the system of the “mainstream” [64]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/npc-wojakand always supports the current thing of liberal agenda as seen from the perspective of /pol/.

These memetic templates serve as archetypes to categorize and represent. Here find can observe the compression of complex cultural relations and expressions condensed down to the carrier vessel of the meme. Again, the notion of various modes of irony are very important as they mark and delineate the production of memetic material in any given space. All of these archetypes are often used in a meta- or post-ironic framework that enacts ironic distancing as a coping mechanism but engages and spreads the cynicism of living in a society that quantifies everything into normativity.

The pill memes directly imply the existence of a shared reality we participate in, under the umbrella of an ontological system governing us via a false reality and extracting surplus value from us. Spawned from The Matrix (1999) the various meme templates of either taking the red (seeing the “true” world) or the blue pill (staying in a comfortable false reality) offer us a non-choice by implying are pre-manufactured (constructed) reality, pre-defined under the neoliberal order.[65][65] Here, Žižek's remarks from “A perverts guide to cinema” are interesting: “I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake, fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself. If something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalise it.” This pill metaphor has been captured by the alt-right to shift the perception of “their” reality on the state of things against the “liberal ideology” as Angela Nagle describes:

“The Reddit subforum The Red Pill has been central to the online development and resurgence of this anti-feminist politics online. At the same time as these anti-feminists were using the term to describe their awakening from the blissful mind prison of liberalism into the unplugged reality of societal misandry, the hard alt-right was embracing the term to describe their equivalent racial awakening. On AlternativeRight.com ‘the red pill’ and ‘being red pilled’ was one of the central metaphors and favorite expressions.”[66][66] Nagle, Angela: “Kill all normies”, Zero Books, p. 77.

In this pseudo epistemological framework of social-darwinism we find the reduction of complex narratives into the vessel of a memetic archetype for the sake of expression and representation.

This indexing and quantification into archetypes or the reduction into pill suffixes, stems again from a cornerstone of the market driven ideologie –– “tech will save us” as this implies that there is a point of salvation in the end. After all, as The Stack runs on computation and calculation of gargantuan data-sets the indexing of everything is not a conspiracy, but how the modern world governs itself and from itself. Users get categorized in order to make use of the systems they want to interface and interact with. Accounts, handles, IDs and addresses, all of this constructs a new persona or sense of self on a particular network. The wojak memes that are used to classify and abstract certain users stem directly from this identification and definition of the self on the network.

NARRATIVE ARCS (a fork in the road)

Multi-Narrativity as experienced by social media participants along their respective bubbles or fringe ideologies is deeply interlinked with the media consumption of Millennials and Zoomers.[67][67] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z The respective entertainment milieu both of these generations grew up in, were largely driven by the gaming culture from the 00s onward.

Role Playing Games (RPGs) like the Mass Effect series or Skyrim, establish (through their game design and also interfaces) a choice in dialogue options tied to the plot or the narrative of the game and as the genre implies offer a chance to roleplay. Though these are scripted and pre-manufactured dialogues, they provide the player with a sense of control over the story and the development of their ingame character or avatar. These games are marketed with the option to experience the same game multiple times over with a new perspective to add replay value and making each playthrough in a limited way unique.

While playing those games, the feeling is implied that with every dialogue option there is a parallel experience and narrative unexplored –– endless possibilities of parallel lives happening at the same time. The replaying of the game is incentivised, to experience the same story, though with a slightly different character arc, leading to a different ending. Of course this multi-narrativity is a false one, as the game has to be crafted with a set of prewritten endings. The technological conditions of modern game making have not yet enabled a generative mode of this multi-narrativity.

Netflix, as did tv-shows in linear television did before, keeps us hooked by employing narrative devices like cliffhangers to ensure the continued subscription to their services as we want to know how the ARC of a particular character evolves and the show unfolds. The negation of the unfolding of the narrative is the driver in capital accumulation here.

All of this transcends into the social sphere, politics and everyday discourse via memetic replication. Games, movies and shows are cultural objects that produce content that eventually manifests in the cultural zeitgeist. They become an extension as their object, in the form of image macros we share on social media.[68][68] https://theboar.org/2018/06/does-the-future-of-popular-shows-rest-on-a-shows-memeability/ The meme-ability is a factor for the success of all sorts of media and that meme-ability comes from the branching and fragmentation of narrative arcs, just as memes mutate and deform over their replication processes.

The spectacle of crossover episodes, that carried the nostalgia of characters that appeared on past iterations of the particular universe, also ensures the memetic literacy of multiple generations of users. They “get” the reference and with crossover happenings, maximum marketability is ensured.

Memes, with their capability to act as a vessel for complex societal information structures that are interlinked and sprawl out from a singular idea or narrative, into multiple ones. Ideas absorbed by the individual can be reintroduced as a variation within the feedback loop of society at large.

“Digital databases are unparalleled memory machines that have radically transformed how information and stories flow between grandparents and children, students and teachers, politicians and voters, journalists and citizens. What Marshall McLuhan called the perfect memory of computers has, in our time, spawned a garden of competing narratives and conceptions of the past/present/future. Digital media serves up an inhumanly large corpus of data that becomes raw material for new subcultures, ideologies, and alternative histories. In today’s chaotic media environment, not even a global pandemic can restore a shared sense of Reality.”[69][69] Lewis, Aaron Z.: “THE GARDEN OF FORKING MEMES: HOW DIGITAL MEDIA DISTORTS OUR SENSE OF TIME”

Memeticly shared information lingers in the collective consciousness, which outputs image macros through various authors (users) on a particular platform.

Neoliberal productions like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) confronts us with the multi-narrativity of crossovers but also indoctrinates the viewer as a passive observer, powerless to the spectacle of inhuman beings. The premise is that everything is connected in ways one might normally not see or grasp and can become a crossover to establish new revenue streams.[70][70] https://www.reddit.com/r/CrossoverMemes/

At the center of this subject is authenticity in politics. The neoliberal order that enacts and engages in the spectacle of the culture wars with no meaningful changes to politics for the increasingly exploited proletariat, leaves this generation in the collective feeling to be a mere observer of a scripted narrative arc. Isn’t this what we have long internalized to the consumption of RPGs, knowing that ultimately our choices don’t matter and won’t change the plot in a meaningful way?

The notion of “progression” has become a pillar for every media interaction by now. Again, the “cliffhanger” from television and netflix series to keep the viewer hooked for the next season is also an element of progression. Then, there is progression found in online gaming where you “progress” and unlock new items in to level up your character, or “learn'' new skills. Here progression gatekeeps you certain game mechanics for you to unlock, increasing your potential time (and spending) with the game as some items can be hidden behind monetized lootboxes.[71][71] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box The endless (scroll-)feed we know from social media is also a progressive element, as well as it is an “investigative” element that allows you to uncover the character arcs of your friends in the timelines of social relations and events.

By engaging with these interfaces, media and feedback loops we construct our own narrative arc [72] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Main%20Character%20Syndrome to be displayed on the virtual social sphere. The Question of who is the main character[72] and who is a mere NPC[73] stems from the postmodern notion of the deconstruction of narrative structures. [73] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/npc-wojak

“Today, everyone is subjected to an aesthetic evaluation—everyone is required to take aesthetic responsibility for his or her appearance in the world, for his or her self-design. Where it was once a privilege and a burden for the chosen few, in our time self-design has come to be the mass cultural practice par excellence. The virtual space of the Internet is primarily an arena in which my website on Facebook is permanently designed and redesigned to be presented on YouTube—and vice versa. But likewise in the real—or, let’s say, analog—world, one is expected to be responsible for the image that he or she presents to the gaze of others.”[74][74] Groys, Boris: “Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility“ https://www.e-flux.com/journal/07/61386/self-design-and-aesthetic-responsibility/

LIBERAL PERFORMANCE ART vs MAGA-CHUDS

The extraction of affective surplus value in social media gave rise to a reduced sense of class consciousness, as this can be observed in nihilism, emotional detachment and passivity fueled by excessive entertainment consumption.

“The economizing side of neoliberalism added force to the nihilism of the age and also quickened it, first in leaving nothing untouched by entrepreneurialization and monetization and then, with financialization, submitting every aspect of human existence to investor calculations about its future value.”[75][75] Brown, Wendy: “In the Ruins of Capitalism”, Columbia University Press, 2019, p. 163.

Geopolitical catastrophes that are the result of complex entanglements of capital, are not seen as such, but of the causes of a few bad actors and individuals. The root cause for bad things happening in the world are portrayed in mainstream media not as systemic, but as individualistic.

As users on social media networks are engaging in gamified experiences such via likes, dislikes, comments as commercialized feedback loops. The reward lies in the interactivity with the platform’s social sphere itself. The spectacle is renewed every second and bottomless at the same time, manifested in an endless scroll, hijacking the limbic system of the user. The excessive sharing of infographics on instagram for example is nothing except (neo)liberal chase for social capital and clout, masquerading as performative “activism” that –– in turn –– creates a feedback loop, back into the ad-revenue stream of that platform. The “I did my part” in liberal activism. [76][76] Here we can observe applied memetics; As Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) is a satire of an authoritarian and culturally oppressive society that equalizes opinion. It is no coincidence that the “I’m doing my part” meme spread into the collective consciousness. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_7FaWnlhS4 and https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-doing-my-part

In the US, the battlelines in the culture war are most clearly visible. Traversing along a resentful trench war both US parties (the democrats and republicans) are seemingly stalled in. A resentful trench fight of who owns the other side the most on social media as this is the terrain where the contemporary spectacle is exercised.

“It was amid this ironical in-jokey maze of meaning that the online culture wars played out, that Trump got elected and that what we now call the alt-right came to prominence. Every bizarre event, new identity and strange subcultural behavior that baffles general audiences when they eventually make the mainstream media, from otherkin to far right Pepe memes, can be understood as a response to a response to a response, each one responding angrily to the existence of the other. Trumpian meme-makers ramped up their taboo-breaking anti-PC style in response to gender-bending Tumblr users, who themselves then became more sensitive, more convinced of the racism, misogyny and hetero-normative oppression of the world outside of their online subcultures. At the same time, the ‘deplorables’, from the Trumpian trolls to the alt-right, view the Hillary loyalists – the entrenched identity politics of Tumblr and the intersectional anti-free speech campus left – as evidence of their – equally bleak view of a rapidly declining Western civilization, as both sides have become increasingly unmoored to any cultural mainstream, which scarcely resembles either bleak vision.”[77][77] Nagle, Angela: “Kill all normies”, Zero Books, p. 77.

The culture war becomes an ontological terrain where the battle is not only fought against “the other side” but also of how to navigate the self under the exploitations of capital within the multi-narrativity of metamodernity.

“[...] mainstream media may have become ignorant of history as a psychological defense. The development of multihistories and memetic competition is just another way of saying the culture war. While we’ve all gotten used to living in a persistent conflict zone, it’s not exactly fun. Under these conditions, the mainstream world of lukewarm takes and forever-breaking news cycles, this Disneyfied universe of crossover events, characterized by the ambient listlessness of memory lapse, provides a sort of dull respite for the mind strained by ideological battle.”[78][78] https://subpixel.space/entries/re-garden-of-forking-memes/

This multi-narrativity is what keeps the controlled discourse on platforms up to masquerade the mentioned real class antagonism hidden behind the spectacle.

The ideological rifts that seemingly divide the right and the left are actually on a deeper level a class war, waged downstream from the bourgeoisie as they dictate the material circumstances that both sides (the left & the right) fight over.

The spectacle staged by capital shows itself thoroughly in the identity politics (nonetheless also a consequence of the individualization of system issues) the (liberal) left entangles itself in, and the endless crusade of the right to "own the libs".

The culture war is in full swing here, accelerated by the feedback loops of engaging in the rage machine that is social media, activating the (resentful) affects of the social.

ALTERNATE REALITY CONSPIRACIES

In a market framework, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are usually deployed as a narrative tool to enhance the “marketability” of a certain product.[79][79] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game They are a more sophisticated form of advertisement, involving the consumers participation (and also activations of affects). The engagement in this particular user experiences, hypes up the product and establishes an intimate connection. The user (or consumer of these) becomes an active part of the story that is unfolding on the very same interfaces that particular user engages with, everyday (browser, online boards, social media etc.). The interfacial terrain stays the same while fantasy and reality merge together as a marketing ploy in the background.[80][80] Here, Jean Baudrillard's remarks on simulation are of interest: “Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself.” The ARG, one engages with, runs 24/7 in the background and employs non-linearity as an opt-in narrative tool to leave the choice when to engage in, to the user. This interfacial familiarity ultimately makes it so comfortable and accessible to dwell in an alternative reality that can be conveniently accessed in one's spare time.

Conspiracy theories and movements can also be understood as an Alternate Reality Game for alienated, marginalized, disenfranchised or individuals caught up knee deep in the culture wars. As the majority of the participants are lacking the necessary tools to identify and embrace a class consciousness necessary to describe the exploitations of late stage capitalism due to a neoliberal mainstream media apparatus that completely neglects the existence of such. The resentment that is accumulated by this misidentification of class belonging, is manifesting by engaging in conspiracy theories like QAnon.

“But this personification of digital technology also elides class antagonism. Not all social tensions find political expression. (...) Trapped in the double bind of the “gig economy,” millennials in particular are nudged to align their identities with start-ups and social media platforms (much as their parents did with the American Dream or with upward mobility) and to misrecognize entrepreneurial modes of subjectivity as evidence of freedom and autonomy.”[81][81] Pinto, Ana Teixeira: “The Psychology of Paranoid Irony“ https://red-thread.org/en/the-psychology-of-paranoid-irony/

Conspiracy theories and “discourse” on image boards like 4chan, form a pseudo-epistemological framework (or object), a user can actively participate in that has casual accessibility (near instantaneous participation) and is secondly, very immersive. You are a “real” character that is actively involved in the plot of a grand narrative, as the “real” world with its geopolitical conflicts, control mechanisms and ideological encapsulation, offer a story-rich playground to engage in. Things need to be uncovered by you, as you are certainly not an npc but the main character of this narrative arc.

QAnon here functions exactly like the mentioned commercial ARGs whose incentive is to hype up a product for surplus value generation. The “mysterious” figure of Q provides cryptic information on image boards like 4chan, 8chan and 8kun, so called “drops” that seemingly contain information about the adrenochrome harvesting deep-state that engages in a global child trafficking operation. The cryptic nature of Q-Drops enable the followers of Q to participate in a mapping operation of their own to uncover the “truth” behind this, piece by piece by themselves for themselves as it is the reaffirmation of other users and public figures [82][82] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-trump-timeline-conspiracy-theorists-1076279/ and that keeps the wheel spinning and evokes the confirmation biases one already internalized through the consumption of years of consuming media. Predictive programming is at work here. [83][83] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-trump-timeline-conspiracy-theorists-1076279/ Q serves here as the puppet-master keeping the QAnon’s hooked by guided apophenia. As apophenia describes pattern misrecognition, the ability to recognize seemingly meaningful connection in a larger and more abstract network of relations and nodes.

“QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.”[84][84] https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5

The beauty of QAnon here is; With its obscure vagueness of mapping the cryptic Q-Drops the collective investigation the community engages in, uniting it's members against the supposed deep-state, can go on forever. It is the active myth-making that is water on the wheels of the affect-machine of social media as only this provides a framework to form a ”coherent” narrative for the individual node (user), engaging in these lore-building exercises.[85][85] As Alenka Zupančič remarks in “A Short Essay on Conspiracy Theories“: ”The investment, the passion, involved in ‘conspiracy theories’ is not simply on the side of conspiracies and their revealing, but at least as much on the side of fabricating, forming, producing the theory, assembling or recognising the things that attest to it, interpreting and connecting the clues.”

Conspiracies and internet lore primarily distributed on social media and image boards, serve as an easily escapable interactive alternate reality game. While masquerading and evading discourse around class struggle, conspiracy theories serve as entertainment and diversion smoke screens for an audience that lacks the vocabulary to decipher and name the complex workings of an algorithmically controlled, planetary scale infrastructure and capital.

“In 1991 Frederic Jameson tied this gap between phenomenological experience and the economic structures that determine it to the historical obsolescence of Marxist hermeneutics. Conspiracy theory is the poor man’s institutional critique, a degraded version of dialectical materialism marked by a slippage into “sheer theme and content.”[86][86] Pinto, Ana Teixeira: “The Psychology of Paranoid Irony”

What gave the proletarian class of the western hemisphere spiritual guidance of how to map the self in the desert of the real, was religious practice primarily in the form of christian worship. As the memberships of religious groups have steadily declined in the past centuries, it left a spiritual void to be filled with the grand narratives of online conspiracy theories like QAnon.

Summarized; conspiracy theories functioning as alternate reality games, are an elaborate coping mechanism enforced by technocapital for the sake of what capital does; extracting surplus value while simulating antagonism within the proletarian class. The participatory act of engaging in the grand mythmaking taking place on the interfaces of the social media networks is the main point of this Conspiracy Theories. The become entertainment complexes as ARGs are just that:

“Indeed, there is something that we can find in all conspiracy theories and that is inherently connected with enjoyment – connected with what Lacan called joui-sens (a word play with jouissance [enjoyment]), ‘enjoy-meant’ or the enjoyment of meaning.”[87][87] Zupančič, Alenka: “A Short Essay on Conspiracy Theories“.

PARALLEL TIMELINES WITH ALTERNATE OUTCOMES

Growing up in an all-encompassing entertainment complex with effective unlimited access to games, movies, tv (and later netflix) 24/7, that offered a myriad of fantasys to escape and experiences outside of the “boring realness” the structured day (like, school, work etc.). Especially in video games, this accumulates to the normalization of interactive narratives to be experienced and consumed. A fantasy to grow into more imaginary fantasies. Slavoj Žižek writes on this:

“So, what is fantasy? Fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way; rather it constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates – it literally teaches us how to desire. To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that, when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is rather, how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me.”[88][88] Žižek, Slavoj: “Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept”, Melville House.

So what does it mean for a particular (human) user engaging with society in the age of platform economies on the virtualized plane? When the desire for a stable narrative in one’s own life stems from precarious economic circumstances that pushes one to consume more entertainment as a coping mechanism and at the same time provides one with a participatory feeling of engaging with society, where there is always a plot to be uncovered, this user finds itself again as the subject of capital as in both of these are operations of generating surplus value.[89][89] “In today’s world we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers. Bombarded with cultural propaganda ready to instill in all of us the notion that lies are more important, that truth does not matter, we are all potential victims. Consumer culture in particular encourages lies. Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy.” Hooks, Bell: “All about Love; New Visions”, William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018, p. 52.

The construction of fictions is after all nothing new. We write stories, poems, tellings, direct movies, create games for means of expression and entertainment but on one hand but also, to create economic surplus value. The commercial entertainment complex is the engine of cultural production and with that also of mythmaking. The machine of capital produces these tellings as a commodity.

The pastiche of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, drenched in nostalgia may serve as an contemporary exemplary case here. While at the same time quoting the fiction making machine that is Hollywood, as another product of Hollywood itself, it is the re-telling (or reframing) of history that is interesting here. Two of his movies stand out particularly here; In both Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Once upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) an alternate version of historical events is depicted and embedded in a self-referential Hollywood meta-framework. In Inglourious Basterds, Hitler and the innermost circle of the third reich are assassinated during a movie premiere, thus rectifying and re-imagining the course of history. In Once upon a Time in Hollywood the Tate murders are averted thus implying a continuation of the dreamland esque aura that partially (and superficially) constructed much of the Hollywood-ian lore that clinges in the cultural zeitgeist.

“What would’ve happened if Tate hadn’t died? Where would we be if the positive ethos of the ’60s blended naturally into the socio-political, cultural, and technological changes of the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, etc.? Sure, style and aesthetics would’ve continued to shift. But the murders of Tate and others didn’t signal the obliteration of ‘60s fashion and design. They signaled the loss of a communally guiding ethic that triggered the explosion and exploitation of the free love movement. They ushered in the birth of harsh, well-earned cynicism on a national scale.”[90][90] Hicks, Luke: “How Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood rewrites the Manson murders to make a point“ https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/29/20734546/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-ending-explained-real-history-manson-murders-sharon-tate

As a framework Tarantino’s movies are in itself a network of quotations and cross-references of cinema’s history, it could be argued that the essence of his body of work is a good example of the replication of certain memes within that particular niche. The references quoted by Tarantino maintained a certain presence in the pop cultural sphere leading to them being reiterated and repurposed in a new context. Of course also the technological advent of home movie distribution (VHS and DVD’s) served as a vessel for the archival and (literal) replication of the cultural information at hand. Another interface for the conservation and distribution of cultural information.

“The explosion of alternative histories hasn’t just eroded the influence of 20th century media institutions, it’s also damaged our ability to build collective futures. We’re lost in the garden of forking memes, and the idea of linear progress along a single historical time line seems like a quaint artifact from a much simpler era. Grand visions of the future are few and far between; the pop cultural landscape is littered with post-apocalyptic dystopias. If we want to make sense of how we got here, we have to understand how the vast archive of the internet disrupted the feedback loop between memory and imagination.”[91][91] Lewis, Aaron Z.: “THE GARDEN OF FORKING MEMES: HOW DIGITAL MEDIA DISTORTS OUR SENSE OF TIME”https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2020/07/07/the-garden-of-forking-memes/

The construction of alternate fantasies, retellings of stories with a different historical narrative may be a valid exercise in creative expression (the term “revisionism”, could eventually be applied here), but we should not forget, that these products of culture also exist in an economic framework of neoliberal ideology that has an interest to enact a framework of fantasy that can be commodified.

The representation of one’s persona and all the other personas one interacts with on the most widely adapted social media network that is Facebook, happens on a Timeline after all, implying the parallel notion of multi-narrativity on the network.

The Metamodern framework enacted and enabled by platforms that categorize and index users and their respective behavior into bubbles for the maximization of interactions, lends itself to the collective fiction writing to provide a coherent worldview for (extremist) fringe communities to manufacture weapons grade copium. [92][92] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/copium

WORLD BUILDING (ARGs)

To build or construct a world where the subtle repressions of capital can be communally subverted or evaded, a framework has to be established. Since eon’s collective lore building was a way to make sense of the world and escape the real in the form of spirituality, religious practices and fiction writing.

Now that the technological framework of planetary scale computation has enabled the collective mode of mythmaking, by connecting everyone to every possible community, the mythmaking also became planetary.

„This brings us to Heidegger: when Heidegger speaks about the ‘essence of technology,’ he has in mind something like the frame of a fundamental fantasy which, as a transparent background, structures the way we relate to reality. Gestell, Heidegger’s word for the essence of technology, is usually translated into English as ‘enframing’. At its most radical, technology does not designate a complex network of machines and activities, but the attitude towards reality which we assume when we are engaged in such activities: technology is the way reality discloses itself to us in contemporary times.“[93][93] Žižek, Slavoj: “Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept”, Melville House.

Following Žižek’s remark on Heidegger’s technological enframing of Gestell, we find this disclosing of reality in our efforts to virtualize society on the Internet or more broadly in Bratton's model of The Stack. The technological terrain we navigate upon has reached a complexity and level of abstraction has become our relation to reality itself. The social sphere is increasingly being shifted to interactions on virtual networks we engage with, through the devices we use and our user-personas we inhabit.[94][94] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 344. See Brattons remarks here regarding users in the stack to come. We are in the middle of a paradigm shift from defining ourselves as a physical being and centering our persona in the “real world” to inhabiting multiple users on different platforms. We carry the interface for this relocation in prime identity with us everyday and become dependent on it. How much of one’s social or work life is organized via the smartphone or platforms on the web?

After all, Phantom Vibrations[95][95] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome indicate that we have thoroughly internalized the technological feedback loops that govern us.

„And this then brings us to Heidegger’s notion of Event (Ereignis): for Heidegger, Event has nothing to do with processes that go on out there in reality. Event designates a new epochal disclosure of Being, the emergence of a new ‘world’ (a horizon of meaning within which all entities appear). Catastrophe thus occurs before the (f)act: catastrophe is not the atomic self-destruction of humanity, but the relation to nature which reduces it to its techno-scientific exploitation. Catastrophe is not our ecological ruin, but the loss of home-roots which renders possible the ruthless exploitation of the earth. Catastrophe is not that we are reduced to automata manipulated by biogenetics, but the very approach which renders this prospect possible. Even the possibility of total self-destruction is just a consequence of our relating to nature as a collection of objects of technological exploitation. This brings us to our next stop: from Event as enframing – as a shift in our relationship to reality – to Event as a radical change of this reality itself.“[96][96] Žižek, Slavoj: “Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept”, Melville House.

The Event has a central place in every conspiracy theory. A ground zero of some sort of happening somewhere, someplace that is obscured by forces unknown. An Event marks the slight shift in a timeline, forking into another direction, branching off with an alternate plot with the potential to shape and rectify reality. Taking QAnon as an example here; the inability of conservative of the working class to accept both the portrayal of President Trump from the liberal mainstream media after he won the election, as well as aligning their “movement” with the idea of not being in the opposition and thus keeping a marginalized and victimized image of the self up led to a narrative collapse of their prime identity that Trump spend rallying on. How can they be winning while at the same time being continuously exploited in low-wage jobs while the liberal yuppies downtown accumulate even more wealth? In similar fashion, the Pizzagate conspiracy that not only localized the event to a particular space, but also created its own events to be covered up and mis-portrayed by the mainstream media (the supposed in-group misrepresenting the out-group, “the deep-state” is covering it up and so on).

„The paradox of technology as the concluding moment of Western metaphysics is that it is a mode of enframing which poses a danger to enframing itself: the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human; it loses the very feature of being ecstatically open to reality.“[97][97] Žižek, Slavoj: “Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept”, Melville House.

The reduction of the human is precisely what is taking place within The Stack. The pivotal shift of the main identity to “on” the network and “in” relation to the network marks an acceleration towards a further indexing of the self and restructuring of the interaction loops, through which we construct the hyperobject[98][98] Timothy Morton’s definition of a hyperobject is of reference here: “Hyperobjects are not just collections, systems, or assemblages of other objects. They are objects in their own right, objects in a special sense that I shall elucidate as we proceed through this book. The special sense of object derives from object-oriented ontology (OOO), an emerging philosophical movement committed to a unique form of realism and nonanthropocentric thinking.” from: “HYPEROBJECTS - Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World”, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, p. 2”. of reality. Users become numbers on networks to be manipulated and governed, whether by algorithms or shaky policies enacted by the surplus oriented management board of platforms. Of course outside the digitized network and economy, a subject (as in worker for example) has been long also reduced to an abstraction of a set of certain numbers and quantifiable data since the advent of industrial capitalism. Also this has been the case in the communist and socialist economies of the post-war era. In every conspiracy theory, there is indeed a grain of truth regarding the network that is enmeshing with the physical sensations of the real world. Everything is –– literally –– connected. There is always an other[99] in control[100] of the infrastructure we use to interface with the system and other users. This other is an abstraction of mathematical formulas, economical policy decisions, indexes and non-human control regimes that is indeed even for digitally literate users hard to grasp and comprehend. [99] Regarding “the Other” from the Lacanian Triad (the symbolic, the imaginary, the real). Niels-peder Osmundsen Hojollund writes regarding the Other: “Furthermore, what constitutes the subject of desire is its place in the symbolic order. The symbolic being the place or more specifically the order of public language and also the order of signification. This symbolic order is, in Lacan's theory, a sociocultural 'place' ruled by the law of the Other. The Other can be seen as the position that guarantees the functioning of the symbolic.”

“In structuring reality and thereby also meaningful dissemination of information we unconsciously use fantasy as a co-structuring force. This means that fantasy is not the opposite of reality itself but also the libidinal and unconscious motivation for our structuring of the symbolic functioning of reality.“[101]

This world building is what is constantly [100] See Alenka Zupančič remarks in:“A Short Essay on Conspiracy Theories“ : “Conspiracy theorists thus have a very interesting and intricate relationship to what Lacan calls the agency of the big Other. On the one hand, they are convinced that a big Other very much exists (they believe in the existence of an agency which is in itself consistent, operates purposefully, pulls all the strings and coordinates them).” happening on networked social media spaces for its a collective tool to construct a shared reality. The narrative's forged there, serve as ontological devices to make sense of one’s place under the neoliberal order, precisely because this order is inherently alienating in its processes to extract surplus value. Memes are the carrier vessels for modern folklore and mythmaking, encompassing shared values and ideas that are constructed and codified through cultural artifacts such as the text/picture combination of the image macro.[101] Hjollund, Niels-Peder Osmundsen: “The role of fantasy in social media use“.

III - MEMETIC WARFARE

The combination of an economic infrastructure of exploitation, manipulation and conversion of affective surplus value, with and from the memetic replication of cultural information on the Internet or The Stack, gave rise to new forms of establishing and weaponizing narratives. The post-truth age does not signify that there is no objective “truth” itself anymore or that scientific provability is a concept of the past, but the acknowledgement that “truth” can have a different meaning for a different actor, for a different purpose at the same time. Ideology is at work here. The notion of post-truth is closely tied to the term of metamodernity, which refers to a broad range of epistemological and sociological concepts, in this case the acknowledgement of a “multipolarity” of narratives that run parallel and have a truth vector in them that is different for a different user.

“Usefully, metamodernism allows space for multiplicity and ambiguity - to think more divergently and less naively about what a 'positive' might mean in a complex context. In other words, there is never just one narrative. Life can be absurd and meaningless, but we can still believe in hope”[102][102]Simon de la Rouviere, “Exploring Metamodernism and Optimistic Nihilism in SciFi”,

The idea of (different) narratives to follow “down” is essential in the digital attention economy, as these form the basis of keeping people interested in the content production of a particular user, digital enclave or conspiracy theory. It is the personalized making of meaning as a commodity to consume. As social media networks became more widespread and culturally relevant within an mainstream adoption cycle[103][103] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle, the virality of niche meme echochambers, mixed with post- and meta-ironic modes of subverting sincerity became a new battleground for real political and socio economic conditions. All of this is enforced and accelerated by the hyperobject of capital in various forms and manifestations on a physical framework consisting of datacenters, satellites, smartphones and power grids.

Trolling, shitposting and their entanglements of subverting ("owning") the other side in the culture wars is what drives fringe and extremist ideas into the mainstream (liberal/bourgeoisie) and then spills over into consequences of geo-polical dimensions. The culture wars after all, is just another term for the spectacle we engage in, through our various interfaces and devices. That engagement is another resource for late stage capitalism in itself. As Guy Debord declared in La société du Spectacle in 1967:

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”[104][104] Debord, Guy: “The Society of the Spectacle”, Hobgoblin Press Canberra, 2002, p. 1.

If the social relations in a networked society are what the neoliberal platforms are extracting for profit, then we live in the era of a spectacle mediated by algorithms to maximize the affects of every user to fan the flames of the spectacle. No matter if it is livestreaming a brutal conflict over geopolitical hegemony on TikTok[105][105] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/watching-the-worlds-first-tiktok-war, marvelizing the protagonists of this conflict[106][106] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/marvel-fans-turning-ukraines-plight-dark-entertainment/ or reducing it to the neoliberal entertainment complexes most favorite tellings of good and evil[107][107] https://twitter.com/StratcomCentre/status/1501604638721998850. The spectacle drives engagement by activating the affects of the quantified social relations on the network, with the network.

THREAT VECTORS

On December 6th 2013 the National Reconnaissance Office, an agency of the United States Department of Defense, launched a reconnaissance satellite with the designation of NROL-39 from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Complementary to the vast surveillance apparatus the USA is maintaining and continuously expanding, the launch as well as the satellite itself were of no extraordinary rendition. However, the mission logo showed an octopus engulfing the globe with its tentacles and the caption “nothing is beyond our reach” under it.[108][108] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247 The openly aggressive cynicism of this visual representation in the aftermath of the snowden reveals[109][109] https://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html, regarding the massive spy operations by the US intelligence apparatus was also the ideal template for memetic evolution and the production of a cultural artifact to be memed. The logo was subsequently adapted by 4chan’s infamous /pol/ board, with the same caption but instead of the octopus slinging its arms around the globe, it was a variation in the form of a pepe[110][110] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2114707-pol suggesting that the trolling of /pol/ reaches even the furthest corner of the globe.

Indeed, as /pol/[111][111] The “politically incorrect” sub-board of the imageboard 4chan.org. claims, the meme magick[112][112]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-magic they collectively inserted into the mainstream by “manifesting” and sending energy to Donald Trump, leading up to his win during the 2016 presidential election against Hilary Clinton can be considered a factor in this shift on the global stage. When Donald Trump twittered a pepefied version of himself[113][113] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1029115-cant-stump-the-trump, all of /pol/ was virtually knighted by the god emperor himself, confirming that he is the chosen one.[114][114] https://pepethefrogfaith.wordpress.com/

The concept of hyperstition may be applied to the collective energy relay operations /pol/ is engaging, injecting fringe and extremist ideas into the cultural mainstream thus, actually inducing “real world” consequences.

“Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’ to describe the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Akin to neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes, hyperstitions work at the deeper evolutionary level of social organization in that they influence the course taken by cultural evolution. Unlike memes, however, hyperstitions describe a specific category of ideas. Coined by renegade academics, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), hyperstition describes both the effects and the mechanisms of apocalyptic postmodern ‘phase out’ or ‘meltdown’ culture. Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams hyperstitions are ideas that, once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles.”[115][115] Carstens, Delphi: “Hyperstition” http://xenopraxis.net/readings/carstens_hyperstition.pdf

Since interworked operations of producing and replicating culture within The Stack are fundamentally complex and opaque, an ironic deification of celebrity personas to narrow down and simplify the complex narratives produced by the networks around us, to a singular, more grand narrative becomes a logical conclusion. Perhaps here we can observe a nostalgic element that is also part of the mainstream political sphere in the form of populism; that of nostalgia back to a more coherent –– all encompassing –– narrative idea of modernity. Postmodernity deconstructed those narratives we found in modernity and now metamodernism validates the existence of several parallel running narratives at the same time, transgressing the concept of time and space on the internet. Here; everything is always preserved, never fading away and always happening. Where the construction mechanisms of the social sphere before, have have known "disgestive periods" in which cultural information is being filtered and by carious control regimes and apperatuses, on the Net there is noch such filter. These constructions happen all the time, with an immense reach. Culture is “made” through politics and vice-versa. When the production of culture has become so commodified –– as it is the case right now under the neoliberal order of platform capitalism –– then it comes as no surprise when a cultural entertainment "meme" of Donald Trump, subverts the predominant form of political establishment (in the US) to gain actual political power. 4chan, 8chan and all the other image boards on the fringes of the cultural vortex, trolling by injecting contradicting narratives into the mainstream for the lulz[116][116] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=For%20the%20lulzare not the sole reason for the populism of recent years, but add to it by enacting and spreading the resentment neoliberalism waged upon the social sphere. Meme Magick spills into the mainstream by using the technological terrain, platform capitalism is built upon. It works well because the anonymous keyboard warriors,[117][117] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-keyboard-warriors-election-1504290 Incels and Chudcells populating not only the image boards but also other social media platforms, grew up with this particular framework.

“Consider; a mass leaderless online movement organized around open source digital images which create cultural agitations and contribute to a major shift in public discourse at a volatile time in history”[118][118] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-keyboard-warriors-election-1504290

Meanwhile on another social media network — one attached to Zuckerberg's empire — Instagram, a similar fringe injector of cultural content can be observed; Politigram.

Here, in a more mainstream sphere of cultural interfaciality, users began to engage in political and pseudo political discourse on a platform that was originally meant to allow the sharing of holiday snapshots. As post-internet artist Joshua Citarella writes in his analysis of the phenomenon:

“Among these accounts was a group of libertarian teenagers whose online activity began to rapidly heat up in 2015 alongside the American primary races. This particular community had an odd set of political ideals. Mostly intent on shitposting ironic or trollish content, they were self-described Anarcho-capitalists. These kids were obsessed with various philosophies centered around property rights. Everything in the world had to be analyzed through the principles of non-aggression and homesteading. They would describe capitalism as “a highly ethical system of voluntary transactions between mutually consenting parties”. From their perspective, the true source of tyranny and oppression throughout history was the monopoly power of governments. Now don’t let the capitalism part throw you off just yet. While they were deeply right-wing in their property views, they were also radical individualists and subsequently pro-diversity.”[119][119] Citarella, Joshua: “Politigram & the post-left”https://www.are.na/block/3019683

The contradicting positions, mixed with half-baked philosophical theories ranging from anarcho-libertarian to authoritarian right wingers and anarcho-primitivist views spawned a whole subculture of meme accounts engaging in arguments and post-ironic discourse. Every political ideology could be found on politigram, since it was also at that time (about 2015 until about now) the most widespread social media network in the western hemisphere. Although technically not quite anonymous, these accounts never use the clear name of their admin and don’t mind about losing their account over too extremist content, as it is easy to rack up new followers with a new one. As with 4chan and image boards the anonymity here unlocks the potential for subversive content as accounts are set up fast and reach a large audience. The accessibility of Instagram provides even more inertia, regarding injecting political fringe discourse into the mainstream, thus shaping narratives and worldviews.

“Every political ideology you can think of is thriving and memeing on Politigram. While the far right’s impact on social media and public debate is more visible, there exists a great diversity of opinion in these spaces which remains largely unexplored. At a time when the rest of social media had gathered into ideologically quarantined filter bubbles, Politigrammers were intentionally following their political opponents. They loved to argue. These kids would constantly troll each other at all hours.”[120][120] Citarella, Joshua: “Politigram & the post-left”https://www.are.na/block/3019683

The trolling here is not as quite resentful or extreme as the found in places like /pol/ for example, nonetheless also because instagram is enforcing a more restrictive filtering of user uploads, thus actively policing its delineated nomos of the cloud. As a highly commodified platform where likes and the following provide an established user with social capital that can be converted into economic capital, the ability to easily create and post content to a larger audience is the endgame of this platform. This gamified interaction via the interface, accelerates the spillover into the mainstream.

The affective surplus value generated by platform capitalism through the engagement feedback loops the culture war playing on, are nothing new after all. Exploiting and fostering resentment in marginalized groups, societal niche enclaves and austerity politics are an inherent mechanism of capital. Žižek explains this on the example of facism: “

“[...] fascism is, at it’s most elementary, a conservative revolution. Revolution – economic development, modern industry, yes. But a revolution which would none the less maintain or even reassert a traditional hierarchal society. A society which is modern, efficient, but at the same time controlled by hierarchal values with no class or other antagonisms. Now, they have a problem here, the fascists. Antagonism, class struggle and other dangers is something inherent to capitalism. Modernisation, industrialisation, as we know from the history of capitalism, means disintegration of old stable relations. It means social conflicts. Instability is the way capitalism functions. So how to solve this problem? Simple. You need to generate an ideological narrative which explains how things went wrong in a society not as a result of the inherent tensions in the development of this society but as the result of a foreign intruder.”[121][121] See Slavoj Žižek's: A pervert's guide to ideology” (2012)

For social media platforms –– the primary battleground for the culture wars –– manipulations of affects and in turn, narratives is their business model. These networks paradoxically emphasize the Individualization of the self in the network (clear name policy on Facebook, non-anonymity as a user) but also categorize this constructed self into groups for economic purposes. The paradox here turns out as a non-paradox when you consider individualization as a pillar of neoliberal ideology. The “social” in social networks is after all a mirror image of society, rooted in neoliberalism. The constant bombardment of notifications, algorithmically-sorted timelines, likes and downvotes provides an infrastructure on a massive scale to exploit the inherent tensions in the very present class struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat. The inherent instability that Žižek describes, plainly sits in the open here. The “disruptive” potential of silicon valley and tech start-ups is ironically,[122][122] Indeed, only one layer of irony :)))) a very earnest acknowledgement of this unstable nature of neoliberal ideology. “Move fast, break things” can also be read as the epitome of “everyone for themselves” on the hunt for profit.

The technological framework spawned by a liberal techno-utopian thinking, enmeshing and rerouting the planet's resources, as well as all of the social sphere we engage in, serves as the infrastructure for cultural manipulation down to the granular level of what it means to define and engage in reality. Enter PsyOps.

PSYOPS TO CONTROL THE SUBCONSCIOUSNESS

The possibilities of automation[123][123] https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/1.html and the spread of false narratives for either economic and/or ideological purposes does indeed wreak havoc upon the social sphere. Already fragmented by the new spaces, our first generation of users of this virtual terrain had to experience a rift between the possibilities of the early web and the commodification of it. As capital also reigns of the imaginary (and alternatives), it does so by limiting the fantasies of potential subversion and the introduction of combative narratives like the culture war. A terrain opens up for manipulation here.

„As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs. Under the regime of neoliberalism, it has been the chief weapon in the arsenal of what David Graeber has characterized as “a war on the imagination,” a relentless assault on our capacity to envision an end to the despotism of money. Insistent, in Margaret Thatcher’s ominous ukase, that “there is no alternative” to capitalism, our corporate plutocracy has been busy imposing its own beatific vision on the world: the empire of capital, with an imperial aristocracy enriched by the labor of a fearful, overburdened, and cheerfully servile population of human resources. Every avenue of escape from accumulation and wage servitude must be closed, or better yet, rendered inconceivable; any map of the world that includes utopia must be burned before it can be glanced at.“[124][124] McCarraher, Eugene: “The Enchantments of Mammon - How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity”, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 28.

As representatives and enforcers of hegemonic capital, the military industrial complex identified the weaponization of affects way before the accessibility of a global scale information network. Winning the hearts and minds[125][125] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_hearts_and_minds was after all, the backbone of imperialist narratives exporting democracy into the “uncivilized” corners of the globe. In contemporary times, memetic warfare is a concept, researched and practiced by militaries for quite some time. What is more commonly known as propaganda, the term psychological operation (PsyOps) describes the undermining of the enemy’s morals through the manipulative nature of media, disinformation or even false flag attacks. A war has to be won and the war over global hegemony is one that runs 24/7 in the background of the spectacle.[126] [126] A study released via NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT) describes an outlook in the introductory text to the study: “As written in the Warfighting 2040 Paper, the nature of warfare has changed. The majority of current conflicts remain below the threshold of the traditionally accepted definition of warfare, but new forms of warfare have emerged such as Cognitive Warfare (CW), while the human mind is now being considered as a new domain of war.” - “Cogitive Warfare”, 2020, François du Cluzel.

“In a presentation at the 2011 Social Media for Defence Summit, the DARPA-associated researcher Robert Finkelstein described the possibilities of ‘military memetics’ and how this paradigm might be deployed in domains as diverse as PSYOPS, counter-intelligence, recruitment, public relations, and even nuclear deterrence. While we might take comfort in the feeling that the most successful of these specific memetic efforts was likely the hysterical injunction to ‘Press F to pay respects’ in the video game and US military recruitment tool Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare—that is, as far as we know (who is to say that the psychic architectures of our corporate platforms are not aspects of a PSYOP being done to us all?)“[127][127] Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson and Daniel de Zeeuw: “Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image“, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2021, p. 12.

In another study released by NATO called “Cognitive Warfare”, we find the same description of the importance of gaslighting a population for battlefield dominance. A lot of these papers exist and the military is well aware of the implications of data-driven manipulation schemes for the sake of sovereignty.

“In democratic societies, advertising has quickly become as important as research. It has finally become the cornerstone of a new type of business that depends on large-scale online monitoring. The target is the human being in the broadest sense and it is easy to divert the data obtained from just commercial purposes, as the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal demonstrated. Thus, the lack of regulation of the digital space - the so-called "data swamp"- does not only benefit the digital-age regimes, which “can exert remarkable control over not just computer networks and human bodies, but the minds of their citizens as well” “

Partially growing out of the gaming scene of virtualized combat experiences, frequent users of 4chan and other image boards lean to a military –– some may call it conservative –– worldview that includes an idealized understanding of hierarchical power structures. The memefied alpha and sigma male[128][128] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sigma%20male archetypes of macho-esque hard-boiled militarism are a cornerstone of these image boards after all; hence why those users traditionally lean to military speech and aesthetics. Thinking back to the pepefied logo of “nothing is beyond our reach”, the collective “discussions” on /pol/ not only drench in the guided apophenia of Q-drops, but also take pride in weaponized autism[129][129]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/weaponized-autism by carrying out PsyOps onto the liberals.

After all, 4chan (generally speaking) takes pride up until today to have memed Donald Trump into the office by enacting meme magick and massive troll operations.

One of the tactics /pol/ users exercise is being described as the “slow red pill”; coming from “ideological” awakening a user experiences when choosing the red pill and following the rabbithole of liberal brainwashing. While running meme accounts on Instagram, trolls running this PsyOp would post slightly conservative content to accumulate an already politically right leaning user base. Suddenly the accounts would post extreme content that could be considered extremist and then shortly after that revert back to generic “normative” content. As the extremist content would regularly pop up on one's feed, it would be consumed just as the rest, integrating into the memetic influx of one’s subconsciousness.[130][130] https://donotresearch.net/posts/memetic-tactics-the-slow-red-pill

False-Flag operations are another cornerstone of /pol/ as the terrain of media manipulation runs parallel with the “autistic” nerd origins of tech-savy trolls. Using the “ok” hand sign to trick the mainstream media into declaring this simple gesture as a symbol of white supremacy, thus demasking the need for simple narratives of the mainstream media outlets.[131][131] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1249757-ok-symbol-%F0%9F%91%8C

“Far-right users masquerading as feminists began to wage a pretend war with far-right users masquerading as caricatured versions of themselves (Fig. 5.). Soon enough, actual feminists caught wind and joined in to defend the faux feminists. The media picked up the story and was immediately ridiculed. Meanwhile, the alt-right celebrated their newfound power to control the media narrative.”

The already present cognitive dissonance[132][132] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance induced by the contradictions of neoliberalism with its upheld infighting over resources and capital produces the adequate substrate for PsyOps to foster in the collective mind.[133][133] https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/370149675

The entering of Clown World[134][134] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/clown-pepe-honk-honk-clown-world is another example of contemporary trolling that represents a new narrative arc when telling tales of trying to come up with elaborate coping mechanisms of collective fiction writing. The Honkler is hereby a variation of the Pepe meme which embraces a cheerful nihilism confronting our world, which is becoming more of a grotesque freakshow. The Honkler acknowledges the absurdity imposed under late stage capitalism. The elaborate cope[135][135] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dhZbLEon_o here is again a reaction to systemic material conditions, as also can be observed in the spillover into the physical reality that was The Honkening.[136][136] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/canadian-freedom-convoy-convoi-de-la-liberte Meme Magick is at work again, manifesting the arcane nature of memetics into the political when /pol/ injected the honkler pepe into the mainstream narrative, again proving that running PsyOps against and with a mainstream narrative is how superficial and sensationalist said media is to exercise and retain the spectacle.

The control over the narrative is indeed –– as papers coming out of the military complex describe –– the new battleground over the infosphere. As the distinctions between state sanctioned operations and the trolling from far-right incels continue to blur we will observe more severe battles in the culture war. Here the conquest is for the hegemonic sovereignty in a particular part of the cloud. Whether the influencing of the subconsciousness via PsyOps on social media may end up subverting the neoliberal order by taking everything beyond the realm of the absurd and thus accelerating the collapse of the system (collective psyche) has yet to be determined. Until then, this will continue to serve the need for technocapital to extract surplus value by prolonging the spectacle by the under the lore building of owning the other side or the jouissance of trolling for the lulz.

SOVEREIGNTY FILTERS

The engagement of discourse on social networks and message boards accelerated the production of cultural ideas –– memes –– to a level beyond what was the case before on “less sophisticated” technological infrastructure. The exchange and distribution of thought and agency is not only limited to “culture” here of course. Culture in this context has to be read as politics, ideology and economy. Since the web is becoming more centralized, platforms as a (primary) technological actor become more powerful. Liberal ideology might see the platforms coming out of the silicon valley as an even playing field where the laws of the free market encourage to “develop” for the greater good, but in reality the inversion is often the case. Platforms govern and filter cultural ideas to boost profits, keep users hooked in feedback loops, generate ad revenue and so on.

The various filter mechanisms embedded on social platforms act out as a tool of governance and ideological filtration systems, limiting and defining what is considered “acceptable discourse” on the particular platform.

In late 2018 Tumblr introduced a ban on adult content (genitalia, female nipples etc.) after the iOS app was removed from Apple’s appstore over accusations of child pornography distribution on the platform. Instead of implementing a system to specifically target child pornography to remove such content from the platform, Tumblr opted for an AI driven system generally banning adult content altogether, resulting in implications for people creating (legal) adult content for a living.[137][137] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mjxg/apple-tumblr-porn-nsfw-adult-content-banned Tumblr in this case, fearing a loss in revenue, bowed down to Apples germ-free white walled garden where an increasingly strict content narration is becoming the cloud polis.

“Companies—especially large ones—are risk-averse. So, when you’re being cut off from potential customers and you could be liable for things related to sex, it’s much easier to just institute a blanket ban on sexuality and nudity as much as possible. And it’s much easier to do such by using a filtering tool that is over-inclusive — so much so that it winds up flagging your own examples of acceptable content.”[138][138] https://www.eff.org/de/tossedout/tumblr-ban-adult-content

Facebook / Meta is in this case also quite ambiguous with its policy introduction of the term Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior, which can be found within Meta’s Inauthentic Behavior section:

“Engage in or claim to engage in inauthentic behavior, which is defined as the use of Facebook or Instagram assets (accounts, Pages, Groups, or Events), to mislead people or Facebook:

Originating from the public and political pressure of combating fake news,[140][140] The term _Fake News_ describes a multitude of manipulation tactics on social media platforms regarding economic and ideological/political interests in mind. In this case Facebook/Meta’s incentive to implement the _Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior _policy was stemming from the scandal around Cambridge Analytica; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal the term of Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior can be applied to a large degree of cases that would rally against the cloud polis of the platform, creating a tool for Meta to not only enact sanctions against accounts (or behavior) from a publicly moralizing standpoint, but also to suppress and shape discourse around it.XXX[141] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/29/facebook-banned-me-because-i-am-leftwing-i-am-not-the-only-one After all it has been documented that Meta is profiting from incenting rage and resentment on its platform and from a market perspective, would miss revenue by dismantling the very infrastructure it profiteered from.[142][142] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower-facebook-frances-haugen.html Ironically, Meta also engages in inauthentic behavior by themselves, running fake news operations against TikTok (another platform) via a proxy firm.[143][143] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ Perhaps we are witnessing the dawn of what be described as the first platform wars; privately owned companies that enact broad pseudo-jurisdiction over a virtualized terrain across the global network, engaging in narrative sabotage for not only the upperhand in who gets the biggest slice of market share but also who is able to maintain and expand their borders in the cloud.[144][144] See here Bratton’s definition of _The Nomos of the Cloud_. Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 373.

The filtering-mechanisms platforms have access to, literally limit the language in which discourse is possible on a specific platform and thus exercising an autocratic form of governance over the users of said platform.[145][145] In this particular case, Amazon censors the usage of certain words like “union”, “restrooms” or “ethics” on an in-house app, workers use to communicate within Amazon Logistics Centers. https://theintercept.com/2022/04/04/amazon-union-living-wage-restrooms-chat-app/

As Bratton described, platforms enact sovereignty of a particular slice of networked infrastructure within its respective borders, governing the users within. Through various interfacial regimes users are not only affected one way downstream from the platform, but also in their affects towards the platforms and other users, limiting their ability to interact (algorithmically sorted feeds, rights of users from a certain following, verified users) and also actively shaping discourse on the platform by implementing filtering methods (upload filters, human content moderation etc.).

“Algorithmic Governance: A reflexive cycle of intentions, sensation, filtering, and decision-making that can govern the social, economic and computational cycles to which it refers and is referred by. Reporting agents in such a system both send and receive information to a higher order governing abstraction: a measured swarm in relation to how algorithmic governance feeds back to them, resensing their reactions, and so on. Users observe that cycle through Interfaces ,which in turn govern User actions by delineating and filtering their options.”[146][146] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 368.

Neoliberal ideology is replicating itself more and more through precisely these filter and governing mechanisms and mirroring itself in the affective economies of social media. The cybernetic order of capitalism with all its cultural and economic feedback loops reproduces capital-as-subject; the neoliberal individualist is manufactured by the system, for the system. Cultural ideas are codified information after all and subsequently, memes are pure cultural information in transmission. Culture in the neoliberal sense gets condensed to consumerism with the edges of critique polished off. This is also known as the big flattening. In this neoliberal mindscape, information and discourse that is critical regarding these systems (or capitalism) gets filtered out by the centralized and monopolized information — or literally meme — exchange highways. This works on multiple levels and the actors are not always present in clear sight but one could discern between tangible systems such as AI upload Filter, human content moderators, state legislation and internalized ideology that is limiting the discourse within ourselves.

NARRATIVE SCHIZOPHRENIA

The inherent schizophrenic tendencies enacted by Capital have not only spawned a resentful trench warfare of who owns who, in the culture war but layers narrative combat that is ultimately the inability to comprehend the mechanisms of capitalism (in marxist terms; class conciousness). Coming from image boards like /pol/ and specifically /x/ (the paranormal sub-board) and spilling over to more mainstream platforms like instagram, shizoposting can be seen as continuation to the more occult end of theorygram. Here we find one of the places where the shitpostings of theorygram that critique the workings of the neoliberal economy mix with the mystic and the neo-theological –– a form of world building.

On Shizogram (schizophrenia / instagram), the term “schizophrenia” has to be differentiated from the clinical definitions of paranoia, delusions or split personalities.

Deleuze & Guattari were using the term of schizophrenia as a psychoanalytical metaphor for disjuncture and fragmentation under late stage capitalism, describing the effects on an individual under the conditions of capitalism.

Shizogram posters are using post- and meta-irony as literary devices on instagram, acknowledging the inherent schizophrenic tendencies of performing a character on a highly commodified platform, while being perfectly aware of the extractive nature of ad-based feedback loops governing the interactions (cloud polis) and participation in the spectacle that is social media.

“The origins of schizo-posting are uncertain. Clearly, the core of the genre’s tone and language were formed in the nihilistic corners of the chans, depicted in the era of Newgrounds animations and wiki page creepypastas. It's also easy to see how conspiracy theories and new age spiritual influences might be influencing the cultural stew that schizo-posting bubbled out of.”[147][147] https://donotresearch.net/posts/millenarian-dreams-of-the-schizo-scene

Shizoposting falls perfectly well with our transition from post-modernity to meta-modernity as the acknowledging of contradicting narratives and the meaning beyond the meaning confabulations are an adequate literary device to express these schizophrenic tendencies in society. The mind viruses of memetics are at full swing here, matching different aesthetics influences and theories in a pseudo-intellectual framework, spilling into the mainstream.

A return to Hyperborea[148][148] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hyperborea for example stems out of the trad-wife lusting incels from 4chan, mixing these with vaporwave like color shifts and animations.[149][149] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhQ-b1-JLqc As active /pol/ users would describe themselves as autists, users engaged with posting shizo memes, post-ironically take pride in “seeing numbers” everywhere –– meaning; seeing hidden connections and patterns. The drift into the occult here is not only a mere aestheticization but goes much deeper since theorygram is often the entrypoint for coming into touch with shizogram.

“Schizo-posters should not be seen as individuals who authentically believe all exaggerations in their memes. Rather it is a semi-fictional identity from which underlying assumptions about facts and narratives can be discovered. Posters' use of psychological terminology like “schizo” or “autist” should not be seen as descriptive of actual illness’ or conditions, but a crude metaphor, meant to shock, offend and convey meaning. In some cases, there is a reclamation through the self-labeling of these terms.”[150][150] https://donotresearch.net/posts/millenarian-dreams-of-the-schizo-scene

The spawning of schizo memes comes as no surprise as the inherent instability of capital intentionally produces conflicting narratives via the social platforms we engage in –– a means to produce a resource to be converted into capital. An “ironic” case of schizophrenia in the form of shizo memes can be considered a natural byproduct of the performances within the affect-economy.

Beyond or perhaps through these contradictions, theorygram presents a mode of being online enveloped in anonymity and shaped by contingency. As the user subject of the system becomes a user object to be governed by the system, that acts from far reaching nodes and schizophrenia overlayed by capital.

The notion of shizoposting practically consists of the establishing of fictions with a myriad of contradicting narratives that in a way openly acknowledge the contradictions imposed on the individual by the workings of technocapital. As already discussed, collective fiction writing serves as a literary device as well as a tool to subvert these contradictions through a post-ironic prism.[151][151] https://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/31469987s

“The imaginary plays an important role as it is fantasy or more precisely our phantasmatic framing of desire that to a large extend structures our interfacing with tools, in this case social media, and also how we interpret the information given to us by the screen. Transfer of meaning through mediated practices can be seen as a virtualization of self and medium, where information is interpreted through the imagination of the subject and brought onto the social stage as something in between stages; as a 'negotiation' between our conscious and unconscious interpretation of reality.”[152][152] Hjollund, Niels-Peder Osmundsen: “The role of fantasy in social media use“. p. 59.

The collective unconsciousness is accessed daily via the endless scroll feeds of social media, dipping into a multitude of narratives and folklore. The imaginary now has a direct and accessible front end in the form of memetics through social media as memes, as they carry a complex array of compressed cultural information with them. The collective unconscious replicates itself using image macros as a vessel.

“Meme and chaos magic, the concepts of hyperstition or hypersigils, theosophy and other strains of Western esotericism, Silicon Valley transhumanism, and Scientology are all loosely predicated on the idea that thoughts are things, or are obsessed with the materialization of psychic phenomena.”[153][153] Pinto, Ana Teixeira: “The Psychology of Paranoid Irony” https://red-thread.org/en/the-psychology-of-paranoid-irony/

Shizoposting as well as meme magick are manifestations of another form of lore- and worldbuilding as they provide a retreat into an elaborate collaborative effort to construct a different reality that caters to the imagination of whoever participates. The void here left open by the retreat of old religious practices that provided a societal framework and coherent narrative for the construction of one’s character. Lastly it is again the precarious materialistic circumstances of neoliberalism that accelerate the desire for such narratives to fall back to.

EXPONENTIAL COGNITIVE LOAD DISASTER

It is said that in a single twitter session you are subject to more conflicting and contradicting narratives than our grandparents in their lifetime. Social Media wants to keep you engaged in profitable feedback loops, slowly conditioning you to spend every conscious minute consuming content and thus providing advertisable data in return. A descent into fringe societies can be extremely harmful to the individual and dangerous to the greater society but is a direct consequence of the workings of this system, pushing people “deeper into the rabbit hole”. Radicalization as seen on platforms such as 4chan’s /pol/ and /x/ or telegram groups of the alt-right have a corrosive effect on democracy itself when the (cultural) mainstream gets dissected into lucrative echo-chambers.

But not only extreme content is a drain on the mind, but literally every form of content consumed daily by millions of viewers. The endless scroll is a perfect metaphor for the information load our mind is constantly occupied with. Where the mind's pre-social media could be rested between activities, this is not the case anymore with the devices and surfaces we engage in. This invasion of the mind stems directly from the Californian “move fast, break things” idea of pushing out new prototypes of optimized code by the second. Push notifications literally push new narratives and content into the mind, incenting a user to engage with the larger system at hand all the time, continuously. The dopamine-driven-feedback loops[154][154] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12/former-facebook-vp-says-social-media-is-destroying-society-with-dopamine-driven-feedback-loops/ capture the user in a sphere of comfort and anxiety at the same time fostering FOMO.[155][155] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out There may be a technological gain here in distribution of knowledge and more instantaneous communications that has a practicality to it. Though the slope is equally steep on the other side.

“We’re now living in the age of info-proliferation. The saturation of the info-sphere provokes a stimulus overload, and this has an obvious cognitive effect: time for attention decreases. But affective attention takes time, and cannot be shortened or fastened. This leads to a disorder in the emotional elaboration of meaning. Affective attention suffers a kind of contraction, and it is forced to find ways of adaptation: the organism adopts tools for simplification, and it tends to smooth out the living psychic response, to repackage affective behavior in a frozen and fastened framework.”[156][156] Berardi, Franco: “Precarious Rhapsody: Semocapitalism and the Pathologies of Post-Alpha Generation”, Minor Compositions, 2009, p. 101.

There may also be a link between the Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that combat drone operators suffer from, content moderators feel from “seeing too much”.[157][157] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona Consuming excessive amounts of content is after all a feedback loop not only regarding the economic infrastructure going outwards, but also going inwards into. This certainly leaves its mark on the mind too. The meme Slang Overload [158][158] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/slang-overload transmits this idea in the cultural sphere, visualizing exactly the consequences of this potential catastrophe. Memes of course here, also serve as the ideal vessel for this as they have the ability to compress a specific knowledge into an easily transmittable visual representation. After all this is done by replication, the re-posting of these viral carriers expresses the shared alienation of a social sphere governed by algorithms and market driven feedback loops.

“We can read as many facts as we like, but if we try to add them up, they refuse to become a system. We struggle to keep track of all the information that approaches us, making it hard for most info bits to be properly digested. This is the passive indifference that Jean Baudrillard celebrated during his lifetime, and which has now become the cultural norm. The result is “epistemic closure.” When we are constantly exposed to real-time interactive media, we develop attention fatigue and a poor sense of time.”[159][159] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/45/60109/after-the-social-media-hype-dealing-with-information-overload/

The conclusion of this epistemic closure at work here we find in the exercising in Conspiratorial constructs as Alternate Reality Games enacted digitally and also in the analogue space. The planetary network produced in and from itself an epistemic rupture in the non-digital native user base, that found a new frontier to experience a new world but lacked the tools to decipher its meanings.[160][160] After all it is often the baby boomer generation that engages in wild conspiracy theories on platforms like Facebook. This digital il-literacy is not necessary one of content, but also of Interfaciality.

CLOUD POLIS CONTENT POLICING

Shadowbanning became an almost mystic word at the core of every conspiratorial fringe community. The nemesis of a monetized online presence, lingering above oneself ready to strike when content is posted that “does not adhere to the community guidelines''. Since Facebook keeps the algorithms a secret we don’t know if shadow banning is actually a thing, but it is likely since it is an easy way to suppress non-profitable content and ensure a sense of control. We can only observe the consequences and effects it may produce and link them with one another. Evidence based research of a system that governs our social and (to a certain extent) economical relations is beginning to be discussed.[161][161] https://cdt.org/insights/spotlight-on-shadowbanning/

Much like an archaeologist discovers traces of fossils and then reconstructs a version based upon this evidence we see the shadows of this ominous technology lingering over the social spaces. The threat of shadowbanning or de-monetization is a tool of governance of a specific platform to rule their claimed slice on the internet and with this, narrate the content and acceptable behavior. The outcome is a compression of said content into a shiny flat consume aesthetic to maximize engagement within the confines of neoliberal ideology. You're only supposed to share content that stabilizes the system, except of course when you are a privileged user with a large following, though controversy can help the system grow after all.

“The goal of future wars is already established: control over the network and the flows of information running through its architecture. It seems to me that the quest for global totalitarian power is not behind us but is a true promise of the future. If the network architecture culminates in one global building then there must be one power that controls it. The central political question of our time is the nature of this future power.”[162][162] Groys,Boris: “ Form”, Metahaven, “Uncorporate Identity”, 2007, Lars Müller Publishers, p. 262.

AI based systems that police cloud systems and social media spaces by limiting what content is uploaded or visible is not a mere glimpse on the horizon anymore but a politically welcomed project to be adequate to the control mechanisms of the neoliberal order. YouTube’s content moderation system is one of the only ones being already rolled out on a larger scale, scanning every upload regarding copyrighted material to uphold the material conditions of neoliberalism.

REJECT MODERNITY, EMBRACE TRADITION

While the contemporary cloud polis seems to represent and extend the current neoliberal hegemony, a speculative model of the order to come seems to be a fallback into a feudal caste system. The current topos of maximizing surplus value (through affects, engagement, ad-revenue and so forth) will centralize and consolidate power and economic resources to a singular actor or platform. The consolidation of power is by no means inevitable but possible as the relationship between users and platform owners (as the owners of production in marxist terms) drifts apart as Bratton writes:

“Under such regimes, platform economics works to monopolize power and wealth into centripetal consolidations of extracted value, such that the ratio of value realized by those Users who collaborate with the platform commons ( User platform value) to those who own claims on infrastructural profits (platform surplus value) is grotesquely misaligned.”[163][163] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 309.

The modern world has grown used to these digital systems and global infrastructure of instant communication and accessibility. Almost every business is dependent on access to the internet and various cloud services, which in turn expand their sphere of influence and governance on the larger terrain that is the net. The delineation to democracy becomes apparent here as cloud platforms –– driven by capital –– aim to consolidate users under their cloud offerings and since the cloud offerings increasingly impose a dependency on businesses and private users, a new form of serfdom forms within the technological underbelly establishes.

Yanis Varoufakis describes this economic transformation –– or even market evolution? –– with the term “techno feudalism”:[164][164] Varoufakis, Yanis: “Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over” https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalism-replacing-market-capitalism-by-yanis-varoufakis-2021-06?barrier=accesspaylog

“Then, after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.”

As the scandal around Cambridge Analytica showed, data collection on a massive scale combined with advanced and highly funded Machine Learning systems, can create feedback loops that allow an outside actor to manipulate political events on the world stage. The sovereignty those new feudal lords can enact over their serfs is growing in return by the serfs providing labor in the form of data they provide to the cloud platforms. The consolidation of Cloud Platforms in neo-feudal serfdoms although will probably not be akin to the old geographically tied ones, as Bratton argues.

“[...] for Cloud feudalism, Users are untethered from specific locations and migrate from one provisional labor interaction to another. Cloud feudalism may arise in relation to automation, but automation may also lead to entirely different macroeconomic outcomes.”[165][165] Bratton, Benjamin, 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press, p. 369.

IV - ENDSTATE

“There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”[166][166] American Psycho (2000).

The path that lays in front of us is that of cartography. The networked society –– The Stack –– will be the battleground for the generations to come, combating in narrative trench warfare while scouting the terrain ahead. These mappings will not only be of a “where”, but also of a “when” as time has a different meaning on the network which acts rhizomatic[167][167] Central to the post-structuralist writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is the concept of the _rhizome_, describing non-linearity in networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy) and not linear. The current thing[168][168] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-support-the-current-thing shifts in the weathersphere that is social media, yet can resurface as an artifact from the past, years later. As the ruins of early Web 1.0 tell us, the network preserves cultural information, but is yet fragile. Some memes withstand the fall of time and are preserved in the network capsule and keep on re-iterating, while others are filtered out by an increasingly moderative apparatus of control and policing. The coordinated cancellations of constructed personas and avatars within the defined walls of virtual social archipelagos will be akin to, and of equal importance in geo-political struggles as tactical cruise missiles strikes that take out key infrastructure. Which memetic idea will survive, replicate and manifest over generations? A tweet accumulates social capital and with that, the capacity of a precision strike in the culture wars initiated and exploited by capital. What cultural information will be passed on to the next generation of users? Yet The Stack is also an apparatus of mythmaking. It spawns stories, narratives and lores that form the Zeitgeist of a particular chan, drifting from one island on the network to the next.

But how can one map a terrain that is ever shifting and keeps re-modeling itself by the second? It is less a mapping that seeks to define the boundaries of another plane we just interact upon, but one of the enmeshing with our thoughts and the network. It is cartography of the self and the network at the same time, yet also of the self in the network and vice-versa.

While the distribution of image macros (read: memes), via an ever increasingly repressive social media apparatus can be a micro-revolutionary, subversive and agitative mechanism, it is specifically the engagement in these modes of communication that have the potential to be a factor in dismantling the ever growing entity that is capital.

Weaponizing affects works both ways by using post- and meta-irony in subverting the narratives of a mainstream apparatus that aims at stabilizing an exploitative yet unstable system, by gaslighting the masses into thinking things are bad because of a few bad individuals. Subverting this instability masquerading as stability (the current neoliberal order) that is inherent to capitalism, can be a way of regaining agency and autonomy against the hyperobject of capital oriented technology. By hijacking (or softhacking) the affective feedback loops present on these platforms a user contributes to the accumulation of surplus value for the platforms, but also exercises the ability to subvert the current mechanisms of power or cloud sovereigns. These modes of engagement lay open a more hidden and metaphysical layer of the status quo and with this comes a myriad of pattern mis-recognitions, that give way to paranoia and schizophrenia. A tweet can move an army, destabilize a market, create a thunderstorm in the social sphere whose essence is the affective influencing of others. The confusion this brings to the individual will wreak havoc upon the fragile mind that was evolved to seek for patterns of danger. Yet when all we see are patterns everywhere, because there are –– indeed –– patterns everywhere in the form of a planetary apparatus that exploits our affects and enmeshes them with an endless array of data points for the accumulation of surplus value, is this new normal under an all encompassing network evoking our primal instincts? Should we be afraid of the net? Has it even de-masked the dangers of memetics, akin to language?[169][169] “For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.” ― Žižek, Slavoj. From “How to read Lacan”. Is it madness to be suspicious of the techno-utopian premise of a networked society we grew accustomed to?

The duality of viral memetic content that uses the planetary scale infrastructure to transmit and infect, combined with the entity that is capital and only seeks to accumulate, has become an enormous abstraction beyond the ontological capabilities of an individual. The result can be observed in a fallback to mythology and a deification of the algorithm, as the sovereign cloud polis –– the technological infrastructure that governs our social fabric –– that has become so opaque that we may have reached an epistemological tipping point of the systems we created.[170][170]“An easy-to-spot subsystem is what might be called “techno-spiritualism.” Collective identity, formerly achieved through the worship of gods (the symbol for god is “star” in Mesopotamian cuneiform), is today consummated through the worship of computation. Each spring and fall, ceremonial assemblies come together to prostrate themselves at corporate cathedrals.” Shorin, Toby: “Mapping the self in the desert of the real” https://subpixel.space/entries/mapping-the-self-in-the-desert-of-the-real/ A system that is sprawling beyond the comprehension of even its creators still needs a method of description and simplification for the human mind to “grasp the whole of it all”. If its workings have become so obscured and abstracted, a mystification becomes inevitable and contributes to an alienating rift in society's cybernetics.

A fallback to less technology as the Anprims[171][171] Anarcho Primitivism: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=anprim or conservatives crave for, seems only like a retreat into regressive nostalgia. The technology of planetary scale computation has unlocked and set free new horizons for the entity that is capital to expand onto unprecedented scales and manifest as an technologcial apparatus of unseen control regimes. The question at the core will be if this entity can be severed from a society that is a technological one; if not, it will be a dark descent into a future where nothing human will prevail and the promises of the Landian Accelerationism will be the default topos.[172][172] I'm referencing Nick Land and his famous quote from Meltdown: “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

The conflicting narratives and fragmented ideas of the self, this system is extracting for the accumulation of surplus value, is fostering a society that constantly engages in antagonistic conflicts for the benefit of a small technocratic elite and the upward flow of wealth and power. The scheme is always the same; construct a binary and antagonize the other. The brutal onslaught of the uncaring mechanisms of surplus value production will spawn even more invasive and repressive methods of control. A new class of user may emerge; one completely enmeshed with the feedback loops that govern the social sphere in proximity. For this user –– most likely a post-anthropocene one –– the primary realm of existence will shift onto the virtualized plane as the boundaries of organic and inorganic information will blur even further. The ruptures that follow will be unprecedented.[173][173] It was revealed to me in a dream.