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Why memes are so effective


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2022 Jul 22, 6:32pm   56,278 views  555 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (58)   ignore (3)  

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-revenge-of-the-shape-rotators

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-revenge-of-the-shape-rotators-735

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-revenge-of-the-shape-rotators-a5e


lying with taut talking points or evocative images is easy. hell, that’s what they’re for.

but memes that lie mostly do not work.

they are not funny or evocative because the analogy fails. it’s code that won’t compile. only that which draws valid comparison sets off the associational informational cascade that leads to the vast enhancements in informational density that make this modality special.

and without that your meme loses its potency.

you can only tell people so much in a brief span.

that’s why they call it an “attention economy.”

the true meme gets you to run code you already have installed.

that’s why it is so powerful and why its effect cumulate.

we are just starting to see the capability of this jump in communication evolution.

it will shake worlds.

and this is a glorious thing.

it skewers everything.

no one is safe.

(not even if they were promised that there would be a monkey to help them)

the speed with which this can pour a spicy glass of “shut the hell up” and provoke real thought by eliciting and evoking analogy is unprecedented as is the sublime, anarchic free market to select and spread the best means of doing so.

once, the powers that be needed fear only a few cartoonists and voices and could easily suppress their spread. now you must fight against the full force of the insight and creativity of the global myriads and the relentless upvote of the informational instantiations which best work to convey meaning as infallibly adjudicated by an audience of billions that play off one another like jazz night at birdland.


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520   Patrick   2025 Jan 10, 12:37pm  

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14271935/mark-zuckerberg-joe-rogan-podcast-joe-biden-censor-memes-episode.html


Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan how the Biden administration forced Meta to censor a Covid meme - and said the president's staff would scream and swear at his workers to remove content they didn't like.

The Meta chief, 40, said he was stunned when the White House got in touch to demand a photo of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV in his movie Once Upon A Time in Hollywood was taken down.

They were irritated by the caption added to it, which read: '10 years from now you're going to see an ad that says if you took a Covid vaccine you'd be eligible for a payment.'

Zuck said the meme was 'sort of like a class action lawsuit type meme' and personally deemed it little more than a harmless political joke.

After being told to take down the meme, Zuckerberg claimed he and his team responded: 'No we're not we're not going to take down humor.'

Shockingly, Zuckerberg also told of how Biden's cronies would demand to censor information that was accurate, including that Covid vaccines can cause side effects.

Zuckerberg said the White House 'pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly true', and 'said anything that says vaccines have side effects, you need to take down.'

'Basically, it just got to this point where we were like no, we're not going to take down things that are true,' Zuckerberg said. 'That's ridiculous.'

The Biden administration spent much of the Covid crisis trying to downplay a rare but serious heart condition called myocarditis that was linked to vaccines to tackle the virus.




... In Friday's episode, Zuckerberg said a turning point for his approach to censorship under Biden came when the president publicly said social media memes combatting his pandemic narrative were 'killing people.'

'All these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company,' he said.

'It was brutal, brutal.'

Zuckerberg added that the threats from the Biden administration to take down content 'sounds illegal' and potentially breached posters First Amendment right to free speech.

Rogan said the demands were clearly a 'massive overstepping' from the federal government, adding: 'And also, you weren't killing people.

'This is the thing with all of this, they suppressed so much information about things that people should be doing, regardless of whether or not you believe in the vaccine.'

'Did you record any of those phone calls? God, I want to listen,' he added.

Rogan, who was an outspoken sceptic of the Covid-19 vaccine, seemed stunned by Zuckerberg's claims over the 'brutal' approach the Biden administration took to censorship during the pandemic.

The comedian and podcaster argued that one of the most striking aspects was the White House's suppression of health remedies that would benefit people's daily lives anyway.

'They were suppressing this stuff because they didn't want people to think that you could get away with not taking the vaccine, which is really crazy' he argued.

'It scared the shit out of a lot of people.'
521   Patrick   2025 Jan 14, 12:09pm  

A friend of mine who works at Google says that they have an internal site for posting memes, but the goal is to measure employee attitudes by noting the content of the memes.
532   stereotomy   2025 Mar 10, 12:56pm  

That is a top tier meme!
533   Patrick   2025 Mar 10, 12:59pm  

Thank you.

I think the metaphor is a good one, because the right meme can spread truth like a fire. Once the truth is out in public, it becomes hard to contain.
534   stereotomy   2025 Mar 10, 1:55pm  

Breaking the Overton window is like the final scene in "Videodrome," when the TV explodes and a mass of animal guts spew out.
543   Patrick   2025 May 29, 10:35am  

https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-asks-its-anti-trump-meme-expert-to-leave/


February 3, 2023

Harvard University has asked its anti-Donald Trump meme expert to leave the university, according to the student newspaper.

“Harvard Kennedy School Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf is forcing out online misinformation expert Joan M. Donovan from her role at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy,” the student newspaper reported. ...

Donovan (pictured) has claimed that Trump and conservatives were victorious in 2016 because they were better at making memes.

“Hillary Clinton was not memeable nor was she meme savvy and even when she launched memetic campaigns online, even with her branding, as my class knows, it’s been hijacked by the right,” Donovan said at a September 2022 panel, nearly six years after the presidential election of 2016.

“So when she came out and said things like the alt-right or basket of deplorables or wrote about Pepe [a cartoon frog] on her website it was just like anything online that had to do with Hillary Clinton was incredibly corrosive,” Donovan said.




555   Patrick   2025 Jun 29, 1:07pm  

https://thedukereport.substack.com/p/new-world-humor


Spangler grounds his humor in pattern recognition. He watches the construction and repetition of official narratives, tracking the subtle manipulations that shape mass perception. These patterns do not appear in a vacuum—they take root in the cultural soil of news, government statements, and viral events. Spangler’s comedic lens sharpens on moments when institutional messaging veers into the absurd or the self-contradictory. ...

When a news agency inflates a threat or a political leader deploys language that doubles back on itself, Spangler isolates the twist. He then amplifies it, pushing the logic to its breaking point. The satirical article becomes an experiment: How far can official logic be extended before it collapses under its own weight?

Comedy, in Spangler’s view, generates cognitive dissonance by forcing a collision between lived experience and received narrative. Laughter arises when expectation ruptures. The mind, momentarily unmoored from habit, resets. Spangler and Duke probe this break in conditioned thought. They agree: the act of laughing punctures rote mental habits, opening a fleeting gap for critical reflection.

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