A meme you won’t laugh at

How culture suffers due to our addiction to virality

Just a few hours into the start of WWII, British troops loaded hundreds of hot air balloons with millions of leaflets of propaganda to be flown into Germany and dispersed behind enemy lines. At the time, airborne leaflet propaganda was the cleanest way of attacking enemy morale and was a major military tactic for both the Axis and Allied powers. Overall, an estimated six billion leaflets were dropped in Western Europe over the course of WWII.

We’ve come a long way since these “paper bullets of psychological warfare”. However, humanity is still deeply entrenched in a War of Ideas. In fact, I don’t think that we’ll ever not be in a War of Ideas. But, that doesn’t mean it won’t evolve.

Today, the term we’ve come to adopt is Memetic Warfare.

“Memetic”? As in Internet memes?

Sort of. A meme is actually a general term for a “unit of cultural ideas” coined by Richard Dawkins back in the 70s. It just so happens that Internet memes took over the moniker…