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(2018-09-14) Memetic Tribes And Culture War 2.0

Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes: Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0. Until the last few years, it made sense to talk in terms of a red tribe and a blue tribe when describing political affiliation. (Red Vs Blue) However, this dichotomy no longer provides a sufficient map of the political territory we find ourselves in.

Enter memetic tribes. We define memetic tribes as a group of agents with a memeplex that directly or indirectly seeks to impose its distinct map (Model) of reality, along with its moral imperatives, upon other minds... They possess a multiplicity of competing claims, interests, goals, and organizations. see 2018-03-06-RaoAQuickbattleFieldGuideToTheNewCultureWars

Some have used the notion of “digital tribes”, which we might call pacifist memetic tribes, to understand the penchant of individuals to sort themselves into online groups that share interest and beliefs. But historians will see the era of digital tribes for what it was: A brief blip before somebody said, “Wait, guys, aren’t we forgetting something? We could be fighting other tribes right now!” Digital tribes could not sate a fundamental need for bloodshed. (OutGroup)

From the perspective of the tribal memeplex, the ideal host exists in a state of permanent agitation and interprets all phenomena through the memeplex’s filter. In short: A paranoid ideologue. Memeplexes that have not agitated their hosts into reproducing them will lose out to those that do. There is only so much room inside your head, and ideology expands to fill available space. (Positioning)

The Six Crises

We argue that six phenomena are involved in their genesis: secularization, fragmentation, atomization, globalization, stimulation, and weaponization. These ingredients respectively engender six crises: the meaning crisis, the reality crisis, the belonging crisis, the proximity crisis, the sobriety crisis, and the warfare crisis. We will examine each ingredient and crisis in turn.

Secularization and The Meaning Crisis.

Religion provides meaning

numerous contenders are competing to satiate our meaning hunger.

the noosphere has become this ocean, a vast reservoir of chaos and potential as people attempt to make sense of the world after the death of God. Memetic tribes are one solution, a raft to navigate the open seas.

Fragmentation and The Reality Crisis.

Viewers of these networks experience the same reality but watch incompossible interpretations of that reality.

We not only have two movies available to us, we have a Netflix-level variety of viewable material.

Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard described this as “the postmodern condition” in 1979

Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives”, which are narratives that totalize all knowledge and experience, such as religion, the Enlightenment, and communism. These grand narratives, once broken down, give way to what he calls little narratives. (Master Narrative)

without some semblance of a consensus reality, constructive cooperation becomes extremely difficult

Whereas previously traditional media provided a consensus reality, the decentralization of information-sharing technology allows individuals to document events, create narratives, and challenge perceptions in real-time

Atomization and The Belonging Crisis.

Atomization is the reduction of a thing to its elementary particles. It is the state of separateness. Social atomization, or social alienation, is the process by which individuals come to experience themselves primarily as separated individuals who are not part of a greater whole.

In White Collar: The American Middle Classes, C. Wright Mills argued that advanced capitalism has engendered a society dominated by a “marketing mentality.” This is a mentality that encourages Frankfurtian bullshit, uses friendliness as a tool, and is ready to sell and service the other

This is the belonging crisis. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, belongingness is the third innate need required for our psychological health and development. Without it we are bowling alone, longing for a team to play on

Globalization and The Proximity Crisis.

In 1962 Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man was released. In it McLuhan introduced the term “the global village” to describe the globalization of the mind, a process set in motion by electronic media’s power to interconnect minds worldwide, ending in the compression of the globe into a village. McLuhan, a man ahead of his time, was no Pollyanna. He foresaw that the new media would have a retribalizing effect on man. “The global village”, he wrote, “absolutely ensures maximal disagreement on all points.”

When everything is laid bare, respect vanishes, for our proximity exposes all of our ugliness. This manifests in what psychologists call dissimilarity cascades (the more we know about someone, the less we like them) and environmental spoiling (proximity with those we don’t like spoils the environment as a whole).

McLuhan eventually favoured a global theater analogy, instead of the global village, to indicate that we are all becoming actors in a repertory of theatrical performances.

Stimulation and The Sobriety Crisis.

humans are just as fallible to these superstimuli. Whether it be junk food, laugh tracks, pornography, or likes on social media, these artificial triggers addict us and hijack our agency.

... evolutionary trap: adaptive instincts turn maladaptive due to exposure to supernormal stimuli, magnified and more attractive versions of evolved stimulus.

Weaponization and The Warfare Crisis.

Aleksandr Dugin, touted as the most dangerous philosopher in the world, published The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia in 1997

advises Russian operatives to “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements — extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilising internal political processes in the U.S.” After the cold war Russia, no longer competitive with America in hard power, pivoted to aggressive soft power to regain their geopolitical influence.

If the 2016 American elections are any indication, Dugin’s strategy has been implemented

Controversial cybersecurity commentator James Scott calls these campaigns “chaos operations”.

Stoke outrage... Outrage porn is the supernormal stimuli of the culture war.

It is not only Russia who engages in information warfare. Other state actors, terrorist organizations, lone wolf hackers, and big data mercenary firms like Cambridge Analytica all engage in memetic operations

These crises set the stage for a new culture war we were severely ill-prepared for. The crises are dynamite distributed throughout the noosphere. All that was needed were some matches.

History of the New Culture War

By the time Pat Buchanan introduced the term “culture war” to America in 1992, the “struggle for the soul of America” had been ongoing for decades. This culture war, which we refer to as Culture War 1.0, was a bipolar affair, fought between a coalition of Christians and secular liberals over “the soul of America”. (Red Vs Blue)

In international relation theory, polarity refers to the way that power is allocated amongst nation states. There are three types of polarity commonly used to describe a given historical period: 1) Unipolarity — One superpower exists that creates order, e.g. Pax Britannica or Pax Americana. 2) Bipolarity — Two superpowers keep each other in check, e.g. the Cold War. 3) Multipolarity — multiple nation states have competing influence, which is potentially the most unstable of the three, e.g. the Concert of Europe, World War 1 and 2.

The bipolarity of Culture War 1.0 is analogous to the USA and USSR’s distribution of power in the cold war.

But Culture War 1.0 is over.

Multipolar distributions of power do not obey the logic of bipolarity. Agents do not see allies behind the line and enemies in front of it. Instead the lines surround them and are constantly shifting

Four main events initiated the leap to what we call Culture War 2.0

Event One: November 15, 2011: THE END OF OCCUPY (Occupy WallStreet)

the new anti-authoritarian activists baptized by it, disheartened by capitalism’s invincibility, gravitated to identity politics and away from class politics.

Occupy was an instantiation of a universalist politics — the people coming together to practice a communal form of life

but it also contained the seeds of the left’s memetic tribalism. Occupy lived via memes, virality, and digital organizing

Commentators have even argued that Hillary Clinton’s campaign failed for pandering too much to identity politics, leaving space for Trump to capture the conversation on class.

We suspect that this was a recuperative process for capitalism; identity politics can be negotiated within the mainstream, relieving institutions of some radical pressure. Put another way: Corporations can be woke, they cannot be anti-capitalist.

Event Two: June 26, 2015: OBERGEFELL v HODGES

legalize gay marriage

Obergefell v Hodges was an event of consensus — a new social reality quickly took hold, with an ever-dwindling minority of dissenters. But the consensus around sexual politics was short-lived — riding the momentum of Event Two, Event Three burst onto the scene.

Event Three: July 1, 2015: CAITLYN JENNER

first battle of Culture War 2.0: transgender rights

contributed to the formation of the new centrist tribes

Faced with what they see as the excesses of the Left, but simultaneously wary of the viciousness of the right, new centrist tribes have emerged. Their members tend to agree with the left on some of these issues and not on others, leaving them at odds with the more totalizing visions of the right and left. The most important figure in this front is, of course, Jordan Peterson.

Event Four: November 8, 2016: THE CHAOS PRESIDENT

Donald Trump

As Ross Douthat once tweeted, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” Trump effectively captured the remnants of the Christian Right, transforming them into a nationalist right in the process. The radical right has re-emerged, armed for war with “meme magic”, unconcerned with civility, aimed only at victory. (Clinger Party)

Active Tribes

We turn our attention next to the taxonomy of the current memetic tribes.

There is a shared anatomy between memetic tribes. We posit that each tribe has a telos, an objective to obtain or a state to attain (SharedVision). They have sacred values, values which are non-negotiable and inviolable within the memetic framework. If these values are transgressed it will trigger the tribal member. These will also influence the prime virtues that the tribal member will signal. They have master statuses, the dominant identifying characteristic of the tribe as a whole. Each is persecuted or haunted by an existential threat, which necessitates tribal affiliation for survival. Other tribes are combatants in the noosphere. They have campfires, online or in meatspace, where they communicate and cooperate. Each tribe has chieftains who either direct the tribe, provide the theoretical foundation for the tribe, or are apologists for the tribes. They each have mental models by which they conceptualize and navigate reality. And each tribe has forebears, whether they be progenitors of the tribe or personal inspirations of the chieftains.

We have excluded tribes that meet our definition but are not currently participating in the culture war to a significant degree, such as Transhumanists, Modern Stoics, the Hotep Nation, and Anti-Natalists.

Click here to view the full chart.

Below are some further comments and our speculations on how the tribes will evolve in Culture War 2.0.

Post-Rationalists. This is another observer tribe, and possibly the most interesting one. If the rationalist motto is “the map is not the territory, but it is important to create the most accurate map possible”, then the post-rationalist motto is “the canvas is not the territory, but it is important to create the most interesting canvas possible.” (Interestingness) This observer tribe has the potential to generate innovative solutions to the seemingly intractable problem of the differend.

Speculative Proposals

We conclude this white paper by offering speculative proposals that are not meant to treat the culture war as a solvable problem but as an opportunity for personal and collective growth

We view the noosphere as an emergent phenomenon, a consequence of globalization and digitalization

While we are agnostic about whether or not there is an endpoint, we do think that looking at the noosphere as being in the process of evolution can help with regards to making speculative proposals. In this section we shift our focus from seeing memetic tribes as individual entities to viewing them as fragments of the larger noosphere.

Bruce Tuckman, a psychology researcher in group dynamics, established his famous “stages of group development” model in 1965. He believed that there were four necessary stages that newly formed groups need to progress through in order to tackle their shared challenges

If we apply this model to the noosphere, we see all the different memetic tribes currently in midst of the storming stage

These seven speculative proposals are meant as a launching pad for discussion

Hippocratic Oath of the Cultural War.

commitment to good faith dialogue, the principle of charity, and intellectual humility.

Dirty Bias to Clean Bias

being honest about our biases and tribal affiliations

Reinventing Debate

two roles should be formally separated into distinct types of debates, Sport Debates and Sensemaking Debates.

Disrupting and Emancipating Philosophy

Philosophy could be a guard against the pressure to join an existing memetic tribe

Memetic Mediators

ability to communicate across tribes in a way that seems fair and reasonable to each tribe

Grey Pills as Acid Tests

A grey pill, according to Venkatesh Rao, is the process of “relearning the value of questioning and doubt after you’ve been seduced by answers and certainties; it’s leaving comforting “secret” societies for continued intellectual growth.” (Model Agnosticism)

Grey pills can engender an existential crisis, but at the right dose they can provide a confident unknowing and a sexy uncertainty, what Stephen Fry calls “passion and positive doubt.” In a world of tyrannical certainty, grey pilling may be an ethical act.

performative agnostics could inquire with the intention to get mutually, philosophically lost.

Human Skills to Protean Tribalism.

human skills can be understood as the ability to connect with what is “human” about another person. While the “marketing mentality” invokes the need for Dale Carnegie-esque social skills, which are instrumental towards salesmanship or leadership persuasion, “human skills” invokes the framework of authentic relationships with other humans

non-instrumental

Workshops for Depolarization

A promising example to this end is the OpenMind platform

These and other creative measures will be necessary to generate functional alternatives to the maladaptive solutions offered by memetic tribes for the six crises.

Personally, I'm not sure I adhere to any 1 of those tribes. The whole range from Optimists (!) through Intellectual Dark Web (!) has some fit. See also The Craft.

Update: Francisco Carvalho, João Andrade, Paulo Dias seek the tribes in clusters of Twitter mutuals networks, and find 10 communities. Alas no code to figure out which you're closest to...

Also: Menander Soter created TwitterVerse to view a number of graphs of "communities" which are similar to these.... There are way too many communities, and they're way too small.... I fall into the Visakan Veerasamy cluster within Community0....

Edited:    |       |    Search Twitter for discussion

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