Mediaboss Marketing

By Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country, a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.Pat Buchanan, 17 August 1992

Coming To Terms

Until the last few years, it made sense to talk in terms of a red tribe and a blue tribe when describing political affiliation. The red tribe was right-wing, populist, nationalist, religious, concerned by terrorism, and valued sexual purity. The blue tribe was left-wing, globalist, internationalist, secular, concerned by global warming, and valued sexual freedom. They had fundamental disagreements about what America (or the West) was, what it needed to become, and how to get there. They even had a culture war. 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 of reality, along with its moral imperatives, upon other minds. These tribes are the active players in the new culture war. They possess a multiplicity of competing claims, interests, goals, and organizations. While the red and blue tribes were certainly far from monolithic, in the current decade any claim to unity is laughable. An establishment leftist who squabbles with the right must contend with mockery from the Dirtbag Left. Meanwhile, the Dirtbag Left endures critiques from Social Justice Activists (SJA), who in turn are criticized by the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). The trench warfare of the old culture war has become an all-out brawl.

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, arent we forgetting something? We could be fighting other tribes right now! Digital tribes could not sate a fundamental need for bloodshed. The Internet, ostensibly an opportunity for greater understanding, communication, and collaboration, has instead become the central theater of the new culture war. In the last decade a boundless field for the diffusion of kitten pictures, image macros, and insular forums transformed into a battleground for propaganda, doxxing, partisan podcasts, and public shaming campaigns. While digital tribes still exist, such as the speedrunners or the harmless furries, we have entered the age of memetic tribes.

Though many conflicts can still be usefully analyzed in terms of disagreement between the right and the left, the conflicts within the red and blue tribe are as inflammatory, and will prove to be just as consequential for the future of America and the West. The Establishment Right vs Trumpists. Gender-critical feminists vs SJAs. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) vs the Establishment Left. Some commentators have observed that the left is devouring its own. But this is only a selection from a broader phenomenon. All across the political spectrum, people are cloistering into tribes and defining themselves against the tribes that are most similar to them. Are you a grey wolf? Then establishment liberals probably bother you the most. Are you Alt-Right? Then the Alt-Lites attempts to split the movement surely gall you.

The new memetic tribes share, to varying degrees, a few characteristics. Most are unscrupulously optimistic: They see social problems as soluble through large-scale adjustment. They see themselves as spokespeople for larger groups, whether that be regular people or the marginalized. At the same time, they see their existence, or their prime value, as under threat. They do battle both online and off. And crucially, their memetic warfare is just as much about firing up members and creating converts out of non-combatants as it is about winning particular battles.

From the perspective of the tribal memeplex, the ideal host exists in a state of permanent agitation and interprets all phenomena through the memeplexs 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.

The memetic tribes all share a goal: To win the culture waror at least, to not lose it. To paraphrase Buchanans definitive statement on the culture war, the new war is the brawl between memetic tribes for the soul of America and the West. We define a culture war as a memetic war to determine what the social facts are at the core of a given society, or alternatively, to determine societys boundaries of the sacred and the profane. Political arguments have become indistinguishable from moral arguments, and one cannot challenge political positions without implicitly possessing suspect morals. This makes politics an exhausting and unproductive game to play, and it makes the culture war intractable. A further barrier to ending the culture war is its tendency to spread to previously apolitical interests, from football, to coffee, to rideshares.

At the end of this white paper, we explore ways in which individuals can navigate the culture war tensions. Along the way, we will explore the conditions that give rise to memetic tribalism and the history of the culture war. We also include a taxonomy of todays memetic tribes. While it is useful to look at the battlegrounds upon which the memetic tribes fight, it is also useful (and entertaining) to peruse the myriad ways in which people have organized themselves.

The Six Crises

Memetic tribes are multitudinous, fractious, unscrupulously optimistic, and divide the world into allies and enemies. They are locked in a Darwinian zero-sum war for the narrative of the noosphere, the sphere of human thought. What conditions gave rise to the contentious environment of memetic tribes?

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. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche published his famous epitaph, gesturing at the triumph of scientific rationalism over divine revelation. As Nietzsche recognized, this triumph is a Pyrrhic victorythe meaning system of Christianity cannot easily be replaced by evidence-based reasoning alone, a rationality devoid of narrative and role.

Religion provides meaning. Not only does it provide an understanding of how the world is for the believer, it also informs how the believer ought to exist in the world. Without God, the axiomatic foundation of the Wests historically dominant memeplex, religious oughts are in need of a new justification. According to Nietzsche, without a replacement, a slow slippage to nihilism is unavoidable. And the secularization of our institutions accelerates the collective transition into nihilism.

Secularization theories predict an untethering of religious authority from society would bring about a widespread embrace of a rational and scientific worldview. In the book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor rejects this subtraction theory and claims that our modern age is instead becoming one of pluralism, where multiple viewpoints compete with Christianity for control over the social narrative. This society-wide secularization has given rise to the meaning crisis, which we define as a meaning famine where numerous contenders are competing to satiate our meaning hunger.

Nietzsche foresaw the freedom and danger that came with this situation. We have gone further and destroyed the land behind us. Now little ship, look out! Beside you is an ocean, We argue that 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. Their totalizing worldviews and the roles they provide are an attempt to satiate the meaning hunger in the meaning-famished.

Fragmentation and The Reality Crisis. Scott Adams often uses the analogy of two movie screens to explain how the Culture War is processed. Conservative media such as Fox News have a rosy Trumpist perspective, while liberal media such as CNN and MSNBC adopt a virulent anti-Trumpist perspective. Viewers of these networks experience the same reality but watch incompossible interpretations of that reality. Adamss analogy can be expanded beyond the dichotomous right/left narratives embodied by legacy media. We not only have two movies available to us, we have a Netflix-level variety of viewable material.

Philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard described this as the postmodern condition in 1979. The postmodern condition is not necessarily one of relativism but one of fragmentation. 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.

These little narratives do not necessarily espouse relativism directly, but are localized by their contexts, are ostensibly independent from one another, and have different means of sensemaking. This fragmented array of narratives has caused a reality crisis, for without some semblance of a consensus reality, constructive cooperation becomes extremely difficult. This results in what Lyotard calls a differend, a situation where conflicting parties cannot even agree on the rules for dispute resolution. Moreover, there is lack of agreement on what the conflict even is. Collective understanding problems of what reality is amplify collective action problems of what reality should be.

Thanks to the Internet, we are now fully in the postmodern condition, or as we call it, the reality crisis. 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, without heed for journalistic ethics. This revolution has not led to greater consensus, one based on a reality we can all see more of and agree upon. Instead, information-dissemination has been put in service of peoples tribalism. Anybody can join a memetic tribe and will be supplied with reams of anecdotes to support that tribes positions. Grassroots and underground media production keep the tribes up to date on opinions, with wildly different perceptions of the same event. Memetic armadas are being crafted in neighboring ports. Fake news has only just begun.

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. The freedom that comes from this is accompanied by feelings of isolation, alienation, and depression. In an atomizing society the roles and responsibilities that were the province of kith and kin are increasingly commoditized into transactions with strangers.

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 incentivizes individuals to treat one another as instruments. In Buberian terms, they engage in I-It relating. By doing so the individual transforms himself into an instrument, ready to be used by the other.

When the marketing mentality reigns supreme it indicates that a Gemeinschaft, a society of subjective binding, has been replaced by a Gesellschaft, a society of contractual binding. This leaves us in a new normal of alienation from self and other. As Hannah Arendt says, we are in a collective state of homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. This social domicide and de-rooting makes us long for a place to call home and a group of people to call our own.

This is the belonging crisis. In Maslows 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. To mitigate loneliness, anxiety, and other adverse conditions that lack of belonging brings, people are primed to fly into the arms of others. All they need is an offer of togetherness, and a few convincing memes.

Globalization and The Proximity Crisis. In his article How Tech Created a Global Villageand Put Us at Each Others Throats, Nicholas Carr attacks the techno-optimist narrative that a more connected world leads to a better one. He hones in on Facebook as the central figure in this narrative, exploring how Mark Zuckerberg opened his 2012 letter to investors stating that Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social missionto make the world more open and connected. In 2017 Zuckerberg introduced Facebooks new mission statement: Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. It is clear he has not read Marshall McLuhan. If he had, it might have softened the utopianism of this mission statement.

In 1962 McLuhans 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 medias 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.

Why is this? Philosopher Byung-Chul Han has an elegant answer: Distance, or lack thereof. In his book In The Swarm: Digital Prospects, Han states that distance is what makes respectare [respect] different from spectare [spectacle]. A society without respect, without the pathos of distance, paves the way for the society of scandal. The internet pornifies our private lives, including our political views, leaving nothing to the imagination. When everything is laid bare, respect vanishes, for our proximity exposes all of our ugliness. As Carr mentions in his article, 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 dont like spoils the environment as a whole).

Mutually exclusive memeplexes, or mutex memeplexes, have no distance from one another thanks to the global village. This is the proximity crisis. Good fences make good neighbors, and the power of media has flattened all social fences. McLuhan eventually favoured a global theatre analogy, instead of the global village, to indicate that we are all becoming actors in a repertory of theatrical performances. Thanks to their mutual exclusivity, these performances are becoming increasingly warlike and less theatrical by the day. Twitter, a platform that lends itself to sharing propositional memes, has become a central battleground of the new culture war. It is where mutex memeplexes cannot escape from each other. It is where distance evaporates.

Stimulation and The Sobriety Crisis. Is the image of a beetle hopelessly attempting to have sex with an empty beer bottle the perfect metaphor for the state of humanity? In 2011 Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz won the Ig Nobel Prize for their research on the male jewel beetles proclivity to attempt copulation with littered Australian beer stubbies. They found that these discarded bottles greatly attracted the male jewel beetle because their size, coloring, and dimpled design were similar to the male jewel beetles female counterpart. In fact, according to Darryl Gwynne, the male beetle found the beer bottle so attractive that they ignored the females and their attempts to copulate with stubby beer bottles continue until they are killed by the hot desert sun or by foraging ants.

This phenomenon is known as an evolutionary trap: adaptive instincts turn maladaptive due to exposure to supernormal stimuli; magnified and more attractive versions of evolved stimulus. Nikolaas Tinbergen, the ethologist who coined the term supernormal stimuli, demonstrated that he could trick birds, fish, and insects into evolutionary traps using exaggerated dummy objects designed to trigger their instincts. In Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose, psychologist Deirdre Barrett points out that 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.

Tristan Harris, a former Design Ethicist at Google and founder of the nonprofit Time Well Spent, makes the argument that there is an asymmetrical battle going on for our attention. On one side, we have evolved instincts suited to a bygone ecology. On the other side is an army of high-IQ engineers informed by Ivy League persuasion labs tasked to create algorithms aimed solely at capturing and holding our attention. To make matters worse, the targets of these campaigns arent even aware this battle is going on.

In the interest of appeasing shareholders, large social media companies battle over the attention economy, and along the way they reduce our agency and turn us into memetic addicts. The pervasiveness of social media has created the sobriety crisis. Addiction, simply defined, is the compulsive engagement in pleasurable substances or behaviors despite their negative consequences. This is our new norm and it leaves us highly vulnerable to the predation of self-interested actors. Like the jewel beetle being devoured by foraging ants, our reduced agency leaves us blind and defenseless to actors with misaligned agendas.

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, with one reviewer stating that it reads like a to-do list for Putins behaviour on the world stage. Used as a textbook in the Russian Academy of the General Staff, the book 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 movementsextremist, 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, Dugins strategy has been implemented. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that the Russians interfered with the elections with the intent to undermine public faith in the US democratic process. The Internet Research Agency, the source of Russias apparent sockpuppet troll army, sought to sow maximum discord throughout America. They disseminated fake news to support the campaigns of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Jill Stein, and targeted groups across the political spectrum, from Black Lives Matter (BLM) to far-right gun advocates. They even arranged pro- and anti-Trump rallies to occur at the same time, all in the service of destabilization.

Controversial cybersecurity commentator James Scott calls these campaigns chaos operations. They follow a basic formula: Understand the target audience through psychographic profiling, create messages that are attuned to the trigger points of the audience, seek out real or fake incidents to weaponize, and stoke outrage. A study by marketing professor Jonah Berger showed that anger increases the likelihood to share memes. This naturally selects for outrage porn, memes which provoke indignation and outrage and encourage receivers to spread them throughout the global village. 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. Minds are being weaponized around the world, to advance agendas they may not support or even know about. We find ourselves in a warfare crisis. Without a Geneva Convention for information warfare to govern how unfriendly actors must conduct themselves, we are in memetic anarchy.

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To summarize the six crises:

None of these crises alone created the new memetic tribes, but the combination of all six made it unavoidable. The meaning and reality crises created a longing for a collective is and ought. The belonging and proximity crises put the existentially isolated in close memetic quarters with those they can love and hate. The sobriety and warfare crises turned us into memetic addicts, weaponized for the strategic aims of others. 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

It is worth noting that kulturkampf emerged as a term in the 19th century to describe struggles to redefine the relationship between church and state in Germany and other European nations. While Europe was no stranger to religious and civil war, the kulturkampfs were largely bloodless, and were held between not just different religions but different ideologies.

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. Battlegrounds included abortion, evolution, and the status of women and homosexuals. The culture war got presidents elected, polarized the country, and left the America of the past decade in a dramatically different position from the America of fifty years ago.

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) UnipolarityOne superpower exists that creates order, e.g. Pax Britannica or Pax Americana. 2) BipolarityTwo superpowers keep each other in check, e.g. the Cold War. 3) Multipolaritymultiple 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.

This notion of polarity maps over to the culture wars. The bipolarity of Culture War 1.0 is analogous to the USA and USSRs distribution of power in the cold war: Two opposing superpowers, maneuvering for influence, fighting brief skirmishes, and capturing dissent by forcing ideology into a binary (capitalism vs. communism, Christian morality vs. secular rights). But Culture War 1.0 is over. Thanks to the ongoing revolutions in digital communications and the crises that created memetic tribes, the conditions were set for a radical change in what culture war looks like. A bipolar war, with clear coalitions, clear enemies, front lines and supply routes, the tension of two sumos, has become a multipolar brawl.

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. Attacks can come from right or left, from state power or mob rule, from twitter pile-ons to SWATting. Thus the conditions of 2018: Strange alliances, rearguard action, unstable positions, and everywhere flux and insecurity.

Four main events initiated the leap to what we call Culture War 2.0, whether by wrapping up old theatres of operations or initiating new ones. While other events contributed to it, such as the 2008 recession and the birth of BLM, we think these four were central to the emergence of the fragmentary, postmodern culture war we now live in. It is worth considering these seismic events, to understand the insufficiency of the bipolar frame to describe the current situation.

Event One: November 15, 2011

THE END OF OCCUPY

Simmering resentment towards the financial system after its 2008 collapse exploded into a new kind of public protest. People gathered in public squares to express collective frustration and to explore a new form of justice. For two months, it seemed that questions of economic justice, the power of banks, and the class system would transform America.

Its time had not yet come. The police crackdown on Occupy was swift and decisive, dashing the utopic hopes surrounding it. We propose that the new anti-authoritarian activists baptized by it, disheartened by capitalisms invincibility, gravitated to identity politics and away from class politics. We cannot ignore the explosion in social justice activism post-Occupy, and the relative lack of anti-capitalist activism until 2015. Until Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn rose to prominence, economic justice took a backseat to issues like racial justice, equal representation, and university culture.

Occupy did not just mark a transformation in content for the culture war, but more importantly, an end of a certain form. Occupy was an instantiation of a universalist politicsthe people coming together to practice a communal form of life, forming a polis, speaking with one voice. This type of activism has a rich history in communist and anarchist organizing, but it also contained the seeds of the lefts memetic tribalism. Occupy lived via memes, virality, and digital organizing. The activists that came afterward, like SJA and BLM, ran with these innovations, and have shifted from universalism to intersectional identity. Commentators have even argued that Hillary Clintons 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. This corporate embrace helped accelerate the spread of identity politics throughout society, which in turn led to a backlash from an ensemble of people taken aback by or ideologically opposed to the speed of change. It also served to neuter the anti-capitalist left by embedding issues of social justice into corporate policy through HR and PR departments. If corporations can be allies of social justice, then the radical leftist assertion that all oppression is intersecting has the ground torn out from under it. This helped fracture the left on questions of its goals, its methods, and its true enemies.

Event Two: June 26, 2015

OBERGEFELL v HODGES

After Event One, social justice was in the air. The final chapter of Culture War 1.0 is the landmark decision by the Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage. Secular liberals emerged as victorious protagonists and the Religious Right suffered its final defeat. As Rod Dreher says, Today the culture war as we know it is over. The so-called values voterssocial and religious conservativeshave been defeated and are being swept to the political margins. The Religious Right was unable to reverse Roe v Wade, unable to bring prayer back to schools, and was arguably complicit in nosediving church attendance. Its bluster and funding did not lead to any cultural power for the Right, beyond organizing votes for Republicans.

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

Event Three: July 1, 2015

CAITLYN JENNER

While Event Two was closing a chapter in Culture War 1.0, the stage was being set for the first battle of Culture War 2.0: transgender rights. Though this front had been simmering for years, it was not a battlefield for Culture War 1.0. It exploded into mainstream consciousness with Vanity Fairs July 2015 issue, with Caitlyn Jenner adorning the cover. The transgender question brought with it a host of other issues. Bathroom bills. Non-binary genders and pronouns. The right of transgender people to serve in the military. Puberty-blocking pills for children. Trans women in women-only spaces. All of these points of contention have become culture war skirmishes.

They also contributed to the formation of the new centrist tribes. Unlike the binary Culture War 1.0 paradigm of marriage equality, transgender rights follow Culture War 2.0 logic, whereby tribalism is multidimensional and attack can come from unforeseen angles. 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, who jumped into the culture war specifically in response to non-binary pronouns. Without the current cultural push for transgender rights, Jordan Peterson would not have become a culture warrior, and without his massive popularity, it is unlikely that the IDW would have formed in anything like its current shape.

Event Four: November 8, 2016.

THE CHAOS PRESIDENT

I like chaos. It really is good.Donald Trump

Commentators will be analyzing Donald Trumps election campaign and victory for years to come. What suffices for us is to understand how it shifted the landscape and the rules of the culture war. Trump sent the establishment right and left spinning, self-questioning and delegitimized. The culture war has only increased in fervor since his election, partially due to his instigations and partially due to people abandoning the establishment right and left in favor of memetic tribes.

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.

Donald Trumps focus on neglected workers has galvanized the radical left to refocus on economic concerns, as exemplified by the popularity of Chapo Trap House and the sevenfold growth of the Democratic Socialists of America. Movements like Antifa and other activists have seen a surge in membership in response to a perception of authoritarianism. The skirmishes between Leftist tribes revolve and will continue to revolve around two central questions: Class or identity? Centrism or leftism?

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Viewed in isolation, the implosion of Occupy and the loss of the Religious Right could be seen as closure for decades-old arguments. As observers from the other side of history, we know them to be kindling for the wars of new ideologies, and the attendant proliferation of memetic tribes. We turn our attention next to the taxonomy of the current memetic tribes.

Active 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. 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 tribe. 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.

While presenting the following chart we are adopting a view from nowhere position, in order to demonstrate similar memetic anatomy. However, we do not believe that there is equivalence between the tribal claims to truth, morality, practicality, or even interestingness. This is for you, reader, to evaluate.

It is also important to note that this chart is not intended to be and cannot be exhaustive, complete, or final. Our aim is to create a launching point for further discussion on what and who constitutes memetic tribes. We are also aware of what Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking calls the looping effect, how the act of categorization can change those who are categorized. If you see yourself in one of these rows, perhaps this will inspire some reflection on how and why you came to your current beliefs and attitudes.

As well, depending on the context and flexibility of the tribal memeplex, one individual can find themselves in multiple tribes, e.g. Sam Harris is a chieftain for both the New Atheists and the IDW. Furthermore, memetic tribes do not consist solely of memetically possessed humans. They consist of anything that produces and reproduces memetic content, from cultural institutions to bots. Memes do not care about the species or non-species of their hosts.

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. We have, however, included some small tribes. Some of them, such as QAnoners, have influence discordant to their size, thanks to the attention paid to them in the media. Others, such as the Optimists, are included in spite of size because they are currently growing.

On a final note, in the spirit of charity we have attempted to describe the tribes using terms that they would use to describe themselves. For example, the term Social Justice Warrior is a popular pejorative used by non-leftist tribes, but those who actively identify as activists for social justice only use the term ironically. In cases where tribes do not self-identify, we have christened them.

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

SJA: While this tribe engages in full-out war with other tribes, they continue to make gains in legacy media, corporate HR and PR departments, and government institutions. With increased embeddedness of SJA values in institutions and corporations, expect a right-wing countervailing response. Also watch for a fight to define leftism against class-first analysis.

Black Lives Matter: This tribe has made a large impact on the cultural landscape, but has not yet made an impact on government policy. Watch for potential conflicts with masculinist black nationalists and the leaving the plantation narrative of Candace Owens. Also, keep a look-out for BLM to distance themselves from white allies capitalizing on wokeness.

#MeToo: Perhaps the fastest growing tribe in recent times, it has moved quickly to redefine the social consensus. Watch for further revelations concerning men in power, followed by more conservative and reactionary backlash.

Gender-Critical Feminists: The feminists left behind by trans-inclusive feminists are fighting an uphill battle inside the left. Watch for future mixing with non-left tribes, and more offline culture war.

Modern Neo-Marxists. Neo-Marxists, while still alive and well in a critical capacity on University campuses, have lost significance since the fall of the Soviet Union. Communism is seen across the political spectrum as discredited. However, given the rising popularity of Democratic Socialists, the memes that Marx birthed could see a revival. If Neo-Marxists can offer a compelling narrative and escape the capitulation and nihilism of Accelerationist thought, then they might be able to piggy-back on the DSAs popularity. Watch for Douglas Lains Zero Books imprint to capitalize on this opportunity.

Antifa: Even without identifiable chieftains, Antifa has played an important part in the culture war, and continues to benefit from peoples fear of Trump and dissatisfaction with mainstream responses. Watch for the normalization of a violent offline culture war.

Occupy: The tribe that coalesced around radical leftism, hope, and physical presence has been shattered. Dormant, it lives on in the 99% meme and in the pages of Adbusters.

DSA and Dirtbag Left: The drama of the Bernie campaign and dissatisfaction with the lack of leftism in the Democratic Party has led to a surge in a radical wing of the American left. The ironic fringe still rests at the top of the podcasts, and the push for mainstreaming socialism has been growing ever since Trumps election. Watch for further infighting with Social Justice Activists.

Optimists: In reaction to the polarization and catastrophizing they see on both the left and right, this nascent tribe has coalesced around the idea that the world is in fact improving, and whatever challenges society faces can be solved through the institutions and values we currently hold. Watch for an increased presence as neoliberalism converts libertarians and shifts to be embraced as a contrarian ideology.

Establishment Left and Right. The zeitgeist of our times gives the palpable sense that the establishment left and right are dramatically on the decline, especially amongst millennials and Generation Z. Those in power within the establishment are experiencing increased pressure from rapidly rising elements within their parties. Democratic and liberal parties worldwide are contending with socialist and far-left elements. Conservative parties have seen populists and illiberal democrats take over. And everyone, everywhere, has been blindsided by the rise of white identitarian and nationalist elements. Watch for these tribes to make a last grasp at power during the 2020 elections in America.

New Atheists and Street Epistemologists. The atheist tribes are indirect participants in the culture war. Their shared objective is to attack the religious truth-claims and to plant doubt in the epistemic methodology of believers. The New Atheists lost the relevance they had during the Bush Era when the Four Horsemen had great popularity, but their impact has been felt in the noosphere. They contributed to the religious rights defeat in Culture War 1.0 by weakening it on philosophical grounds. The Street Epistemologists are the New Atheists potential successor in Culture War 2.0.

Rationalist Diaspora: Incubated on Overcoming Bias and LessWrong, this is an observer tribe in the culture war. Though similar to the New Atheists in that they prize rationality, they do not define themselves in opposition to religion. Thanks to the strength of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexanders writing, and the beliefs and epistemic virtues of the diaspora, they command increasing respect in the culture war. Watch for a popularity boost to Effective Altruism, a struggle with the downsides of increased attention, and possible pressure by the SJAs for the Rationalists to commit to progressive values.

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. This observer tribe has the potential to generate innovative solutions to the seemingly intractable problem of the differend.

Integral Theorists. Ken Wilber, who lost some momentum in his Wyatt Earp incident, is steadily gaining a strong following amongst cultural influencers. Like the Rationalists and Post-Rationalists, Integralists are an observer tribe. Unlike them, they have a teleological narrative that instills existential hope. This will be a tribe to watch for if it moves away from its observer capacity and becomes more active in the war.

Sorters and Intellectual Dark Web. Jordan Peterson is the common denominator with these two tribes. One of the most important figures in Culture War 2.0, his central message in the war is an emphasis of free speech and the importance of truth-speaking. His followers, which we dub the Sorters, mostly comprised of young men, are attracted to Petersons style and his message of personal responsibility. The Intellectual Dark Web, coined by Eric Weinstein, consists of a group of thinkers who have experienced what they view as thought-policing by political correct elements of the left. With the ever-increasing popularity of Petersons brand and platforms such as Quillette, the Rubin Report, and the Joe Rogan Experience, watch for both of these tribes to gain further members and make a strong push for a return to a classically liberal centre in the culture.

Benedictines: With a religious right increasingly subservient to Trump, it is becoming incumbent for Christians who put faith first to organize collectively. This memetic tribe is aware of its own mortality and is putting survival before the culture war. Watch for a siphoning of disillusioned Christians and rightists.

Christian Right: The religious right is quickly transitioning into a nationalist right. The culture war goals of the Moral Majority have largely been set aside in favour of punishing the left via Trump. Unless there is a public evangelist revival, watch for this to dissolve into Trumpists and Benedictines over the next few years.

Tea Party: Since its decline began after the 2013 government shutdown, this tribe has largely been subsumed by the Trumpists. Watch for a continued decline in libertarian activism as believers drift towards Trump or neoliberalism.

Trumpists: This new tribe makes up for a lack of experience and policy through power and high-energy. They are engaged in a fight for control over the mainstream perception of conservatism with a blindsided establishment right. Watch for a push for votes from racial minorities and a scramble to stay in line with Trumps thought.

InfoWarriors and QAnoners. These are the conspiracy theory tribes of the Culture War. Alex Jones and InfoWars represent established conspiracies such as the New World Order and Illuminati. With his manic energy, Jones has successfully turned conspiracy into a profitable business. QAnon is a grassroots emergence of conspiracy theories originating on /pol/. Given the intense passion their reality tunnel engenders, we speculate that QAnon will grow amongst Trumpists and will be censored on social media platforms, which will only further fuel its growth.

Alt-Lite, Alt-Right, and Modern Neo-Nazis. These three tribes are concerned with issues surrounding white people and are often lumped together by the mainstream media, but they are actively fighting amongst themselves (punching right), in order to create distance and avoid conflation. The Alt-Lite would be quick to point out that they are less defined by white identity and more by western chauvinism, an unapologetic view that western culture is the best. Watch for massive fluctuations and changes in the composition of all three of these tribes and a continued fight amongst themselves to gain adherents.

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Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0 Intellectual Explorers ...