A Tactical Guide to Co-opting Memes

Nobody loves re-purposing memes for my own ideological purposes more than I do.

Let me pose a strategic question:

When a bunch of basement-dwelling 14-year-olds got mainstream society to believe that the “ok” sign was actually a white power symbol, what was the proper thing for well-meaning normal people to do in response?

One strategy would be to make a tactical retreat and get normal people to stop using the gesture. Otherwise, white supremacists would be able to signal to each other and spread their ideas under the guise of “just making a hand gesture.”

In the context of ideological and memetic warfare, tactical retreats are often the correct strategic move to make.

For example, the Swastika was originally an ancient Buddhist symbol, but after a certain group of racist Germans co-opted the symbol for themselves, it would be a fruitless endeavor to try and reclaim that memetic territory on behalf of its original benign ideology. It is far better to make a tactical retreat and abandon the Swastika as a meme altogether.

But ceding memetic territory to your ideological opponents has the potential to be a dangerous mistake.

It’s the same mistake as allowing your opponents to set the frame of a conversation, or agreeing to use certain words and phrases that implicitly accept the dictates of their ideology.

For example, simply by using the phrase “sex assigned at birth,” you are implicitly accepting the idea that biological sex is assigned rather than observed.

Memes such as terms, phrases, and symbols are all types of memetic territory, and when it comes to winning a meme war, those ideological factions who control the most memetic territory get to exert the most influence over society.

Fights over the meaning and usage of certain words should be understood as violent territorial wars between rival ideological factions.

Some memetic territory is valuable because of its strategic location within a society’s lexicon, just as a river-crossing might be valuable for its strategic location in a given theater of war.

For example, the term “sex” is critically important because of how embedded it is within our Western legal codes. Changing definition of the term “sex” allows one to effectively change legislation while circumventing the legal process entirely.

The different types of memetic territories

Memetic territory can be categorized in one of three ways. Neutral territory, occupied territory, and contested territory.

Neutral territory describes the vast majority of memes that circulate within a culture. They are not explicitly or implicitly dominated by one ideological faction or another, and all manner of individuals and ideological factions use these neutral memes to advance and communicate their ideas.

There’s an endless expanse of neutral memetic territory, but some quick examples might include:

• The terms “Based” and “Cringe”

• The NPC Meme

• Tik-Tok dance videos

• The Midwit Meme

The following are examples of occupied memetic territory. These are memes that certain ideological factions have more or less seized completely for themselves, and the usage of these memes often (although not always) works to the advantage of said ideological faction.

• “White Privilege” - occupied by the Progressive Left

• “Make America Great Again” - occupied by the Trumpian Right

• “Late-stage Capitalism” - occupied by the Progressive Left

• Pepe the Frog - occupied by the Dissident Right

The following are examples of contested memetic territories that are currently being used by competing ideological factions.

• “Christ is King” - contested between Normal Christians who use it to proclaim the divinity of Jesus Christ VS. the Dissident Right who use it to signal support for more hardline forms of Christian politics.

• “Woke Right” - contested between Pro-Zionists who use it to identify the conspiratorial and anti-Semitic elements on the Right VS. Anti-Zionists who use it to identify those on the right who condemn race-based identity politics except when it comes to Israel and Jews.

When to contest a meme and when to retreat

Waging memetic warfare is an art as much as it is a science, and so knowing when to seize a meme for your own ideological purposes and knowing when to reject it is largely going to come down to individual intuition.

For example, I personally have not made up my mind whether I should be using the term “Woke Right” at all. On the one hand, I think it’s a silly label that doesn’t effectively identify the genuine freaks on the Right, and I don’t want to breathe life into it if it’s going to die on its own.

On the other hand, I do find the prospect of turning the label around on the very people who claim to be against identity politics both amusing and possibly effective if the term is going to stick around anyways.

There are other memes that I think are ripe for conquest by Enlightened Radical Centrists.

“Late-stage capitalism” is a Marxist meme I would have cringed at just a few years ago, but I think it does have enough inherent memetic fitness to it that it can be deployed to effectively call-out the failures of our current socio-economic systems (social media addiction, the loneliness epidemic, etc.) without necessarily advancing other Marxist beliefs like Historical Materialism that are are not very good.

“Zionist Occupied Government” is a meme that many people believe is occupied firmly by the anti-Semitic Right, but true Schizoids such as myself can see how it can be co-opted and used against them, largely because it implicitly draws a distinction between Zionist and Jews, which the anti-Semitic Right utterly rejects.

When it comes to winning a meme war, he who seizes the most memetic territory is in control. Go forth and conquer.