A new reality has dawned since the pandemic hit us. We're living in a moment with missile drops, bombing and funny videos on the same screen space. One carries physical consequences and the other a perpetual one.
It is a weird matrix to doomscroll, where reels about food are followed by AI videos of the latest missile drop, 1-minute drone shots showing smoke coming from recently targeted airports in the UAE.
‘Memetic warfare’ a term specifically coined to explain our current situation, rooted in Richard Dawkins’ original idea of memes as replicating cultural units, evolving into a serious subject of study within information warfare.
Memes have become shorthand for emotions we cannot articulate cleanly. They distill complexity into shareable fragments. Whether or not they are moral is a different tangent to the debate.
Meme culture is not peripheral to conflict. It is adjacent to power. One must go beyond the existence of concept to asking an urgent question: whether we understand the role that memes play.