Re: <nettime> The Meme Wars

[Edmund Berger <edmund.b.berger@gmail.com>]

   Interesting stuff, David. As somebody who spends a bit too much of
   their time distracting themselves on far left-oriented Reddit boards, I
   can easily see the way in which the "meme war" was been lost to the
   alt-right. In many respects, there is a hesitancy to engage much in
   'memeing', as the usage of it is considered, in many respects, to be
   the domain of the alt-right at the level of practice itself. The
   iconography that the "fash" (as they are called in left internet
   subcultures) utilizes is the dominant iconography of meme tendencies,
   so an effective (and more importantly, affective) counter-attack more
   or less requires the building of meme systems from the bottom-up.
   The one point I can thing of that pushes back is the utilization of Max
   Stirner memes, which parallels a much wider diffusion of Stirnerite
   ideas and lingo into far-left internet discourse. While this is not
   comparable to anything the alt-right is doing, this diffusion is
   extremely significant and is going to have long-term repercussions in
   the way the far-left will shape itself. To date, this has been almost
   completely unnoticed by commentators and academics, save for a brief
   article that came out last July in Bunker Magazine that suggested that
   the rise of Stirnerite philosophies (which critiques any form of "fixed
   idea") is a direct reaction to the overt 'fashy-ness' of the
   alt-right. http://bunkermag.org/max-stirner-and-me/

   -Ed

   On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 10:13 AM, David Garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk> wrote:

     The Meme Wars

     Although it has not been flagged up on the list I am sure that many
     will already know that just over a month ago the writer and researcher 
     Florian Cramer gave a lecture in which he shared his extensive research 
     into little known factors influencing the rise of Alt.right.
 <...>

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