I read a 30-page paper on memes

Sup nerds,

On Friday, I read a 30-page research paper about memes.

Why would I do such a thing?

The paper is called “Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on Twitter" and I’m a nut for memetic warfare. You know those gun nuts or WW2 fanatics? Well, I’m that for memetic warfare. I built my whole company around it.

Memetic warfare isn’t just “posting memes”.

NATO defines memetic warfare as “the competition over narrative, ideas, and social control in a social-media battlefield". And in an increasingly online world, the battle over ideas is often just as or more important than the physical battle being built.

While I’ve played the dummy online, fighting memetic warfare for America and important causes is my true motivation for building Memelord Technologies. Using our own software, my team and I have helped governments, public companies, and startups shift narratives and break through the noise with memes and humor. We are living proof of the effectiveness of memetic warfare.

So when this scholarly paper dropped, I knew I had to read it. There’s insights around going viral, clever ways to market your startup, and the power of meme pages.

Insight #1: Ukraine posts different types of memes across 3 accounts

The authors of the paper tracked memes across:

• @ukraine (official government account)

• @defenceu (account focused on defending Ukraine)

• @uamemesforces (Ukraine meme account)

The accounts are all run by the Ukrainian government for different purposes.

The memes posted across each account are very different based on narrative, subject of the meme, phrasing, and more.

For example, on the official @Ukraine government account and the @defenceu, they focus on memes around Ukrainian pride and the “hero” narrative. The authors call this “nation-branding” which is a fun concept I’ve never really thought about before.

Whereas on the @uamemesforces meme account, the account is heavily focused on making Putin the villain and making the Russian army look like “fools”. It’s a very different, riskier strategy—hence why it’s on the non-official government account.

Insight #2: Scholarly proof of the powerful people following meme pages

When Elon tweeted that, most people assumed he was joking.

He wasn’t.

There’s a reason he keeps tweeting it again and again. There’s a reason why he bought a social media network. Whoever controls the memes controls the slant of the conversation. He’s spoken frequently about this. Marc Andreessen frequently speaks about the memes of production and meme dealers.

Memes are the smallest transmittable bit of culture.

Control the memes, you control the culture.

Which leads me to a thesis I’ve had for a long time.

The richest most wealthy elite in the world follow meme pages because they like to laugh just as much as anyone else.

I first got proof of this when I talked to Chris Bakke, former CEO of Laskie, a company he sold to Elon for $100M+. Chris drove $3M+ in enterprise sales from memes alone (my interview with him here). This was further solidified when I talked to the CMO at Hebbia, a finance startup that raised $130M whose #1 advertising method is meme pages because investment bank presidents were contacting them and signing 6-7 figure deals from the meme pages. This sounds crazy, but I hear about this type of stuff all the time from customers at Memelord Technologies.

Now I have scholarly proof of this.

And even though I myself am a dropout, it’s nice to have some PhDs admitting that smart wealthy elites follow dank meme pages.

Insight #3: Tweets with a villain narrative spread harder

Everyone knows anger goes more viral on social media.

There’s scholarly research proving this for years.

But the authors of this paper show something very interesting.

Memes with “a Russia villain narrative” are more likely to go viral especially in countries that are more involved with the conflict-as measured by the share of GDP devoted to economic and military assistance to Ukraine.

Yes, these crazy sons-of-bitches-research-paper-authors literally did an analysis of comparing the retweets of memes in certain countries to the percentage of their GDP they’re allocating to supporting Ukraine.

Insane.

Makes sense. Countries that hate Russia (ex. USA) are going to support more. But still insane they literally proved it lol.

Insight #4: Psychological Warfare v. Memetic Warface

Nations have always done psychological warfare spreading ideas.

But memetic warfare is all about how can you get people to do the dirty work of spreading the ideas for you?

Memetic warfare is fundamentally different than psychological warfare.

In the days of psychological warfare, it was just 1-to-many.

Now it’s 1-to-many-to-many-more.

To be honest, I sometimes wish I was alive back in the 60s when it was easy as hell to influence people. There were 3 tv channels. All you needed was 1 dude jumping on the TV and saying something and boom you shift the narrative. Now you need full-scale campaigns with millions of regular people sharing your content. It’s 1000x harder. It’s not your grandpa’s media world anymore.

We live in the age of memetic warfare.

Everyone is a keyboard warrior (whether you know it or not, you’ve probably taken part in someone else’s memetic warfare — sharing a meme, changing your flag to Ukraine, writing a post about politics, etc.)

In today’s world, it’s not enough to have good ideas.

Whoever makes the most spreadable ideas win.

Who controls the memes controls the universe 😈

Memes of the Week

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Founder of Memelord Technologies