User:Yukabacera/MemeShock

MemeShock is a Facebook group run by Johanan Raatz. It promotes dishonest techniques for spreading one's political view on the Internet through the propagation of memes and memorable, but warped, phrases. In March 2010, the group boasted that it had gathered two thousand members and would undergo "mitosis" around 5000. As of March 2011, the group's membership has slipped below the 2000 threshold again.

With the original group defunct, Raatz himself seems to be mostly active on YouTube these days. He has posted a series of increasingly bizarre videos detailing theories on quantum physics, providing the heretofore elusive proof of god's existence and showing off his alien impersonation skills.

Modus operandi

The principal idea is that thought patterns can be influenced by language - the founding principle of George Orwell's Newspeak. So by inventing new words that trigger support for particular ideas, and saturating the lexicon with these words, those ideas will be accepted uncritically - this is where the idea of artificially propagating memes comes in. In this paradigm, eventually it will become impossible to contradict ideas supporting the desired political view. In order to propagate their new words, MemeShockers attempt to use the new terms as much as possible to create what they un-ironically call an "echo chamber".

The Facebook page makes for unsettling reading, and is full of Orwellian words and concepts that are portrayed in a positive light.

MemeShock dictionary

Examples from the "Official Memeshock Dictionary Of Correctspeak" with their proper Oldspeak meanings:

• Aggressive Disarmists (gun control)
• Anti-Faith Bigotry (heresy)
• Anti-Fetal Rights Extremists / Gynocentric Bigotry (pro-choice)
• Anti-War Bigotry (pacifism)
• Cryptomarxists (liberals)
• Dementocrat (Democratic Party)
• Democratic Failure (liberalism)
• Female Supremicists [sic] (radical feminism)
• Heterosexual Social Realities (homophobia)
• Patriarchal Social Realities (sexism)
• Self-Evident (Moral) Truths (bullshit)
• Robust Internationalism (American imperialism)
• Corrective intervention (a coup or invasion, presumably US-led)
• Anti-choice (support for public schools. Oh, the irony.)

Expanded dictionary

As it is hard to judge how serious someone is over the Internet, a possible RationalWiki exclusive:

• Hate (truth or just disagreeing with MemeShock)

An earlier example from Wikipedia:

• Fageism/fegeism ("fetal ageism")

Using the terms

MemeShock also gives instructions on how to use some of the "engineered" terms. For example, readers are told to use the phrase "MURDERING OUR NATION'S CHILDREN" with "self-righteous undertones." Freedom much?

Tactical analysis

Considering the lack of use of any of the above terms, it is ironic that for people who see themselves as knowing about memetics, they are, for lack of a more polite way to put it, complete failures.

On the other hand, the mere existence of such a site/group can be used as a powerful meme by itself in demonstrating the dishonesty, dead-end navel-gazing, and obsessive control tendencies of those with an authoritarian agenda.

Current activity

As of the 10th of March, 2011, the group has fallen almost completely inactive. Wall activity is about 2 posts per month, significantly less than the wall activity of a single individual with an average number of friends. Since May 2010, there have only been two new posts in its discussion forum (one of them on the important topic of "Hacking Obama's Zombie Army with NLP").