Putting the “Twitter Files” in Perspective (Part Two)

You can’t understand this without looking at the larger project of people involved in the Meme Wars of the last decade

It’s been quite a few weeks over at Twitter, where Elon Musk has been busy replatforming big chunks of the alt-right and deplatforming reputable journalists and leftwing accounts, along with handing selective access to Twitter’s internal data to a claque of iconoclastic anti-woke writers. In part one of this post on the Twitter Files, I went into what’s been published so far by that latter group. Now, to put this storm into context, there’s no better book for putting this all into context than Meme Wars, Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg’s new tour-de-farce guide to what they call “the online battles upending democracy in America.”

Here’s how they explain our times:

— “Meme wars are culture wars, accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trade outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flattens the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words, a morass capable of swallowing patience, kindness and understanding.”

— “The meme warriors of the past decade were not initially fighting for a common goal like Stop the Steal….Depending on their world-view, those summoned into the meme wars blamed varying enemies: the national banks, capitalism, immigrants coming to ‘take all our jobs,’ Communist liberals who wanted everyone to be gay and socialist, and so on. As the meme wars wore on, they became about replacement anxiety — white Americans’ anxiety that immigrants and people of other races would displace their position at the top of the social hierarchy, and men’s anxiety that women would displace them.”

— Meme warriors evangelize by using “red pills,” provocative ideas that challenge the status quo, which they scatter across the open internet, hoping to destabilize people’s thinking and pull them down rabbit holes of “alternative facts” that, through repetition, redundancy, social proof (look how many likes!), and algorithmic reinforcement, convince people that they’ve “done their own research” and discovered some hidden truth. (The…