Ferréol is detailing what he calls "memetic warfare." The technique involves charging a symbol, which will then act as a proxy for a clandestine plan. In occult tradition, this is known as chaos magic. The image could be something as abstract as a hieroglyphic doodle, which a group decides will bring them, say, jobs or food or spouses. The image just has to be widely seen, even subliminally, so that it can seed the minds of the larger population and bring about real world results. (If you think this sounds a bit like hypnotism, you're right.)In the case of Trump's victory, though, the supposedly responsible image is Pepe, who's widely seen on social media. This is a new era of chaos magic, fueled by viral sharing: enter the world of meme magic. According to this occult online army, Trump is set to be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States thanks to their viral efforts. Not the economy. Not voter psychology. Not Paul Horner, purveyor of fake Trump news. But a frog meme.Read more: Hillary Clinton Is Right: Pepe Is a White Supremacist
Via TwitterOren Segal is director of the Center on Extremism, a wing of the Anti-Defamation League. Segal maintains a database of over 200 memes which he says "put hate on display." Pepe is one of those memes, but Segal is working closely with Matt Furey, the frog's creator, in order to "reclaim" Pepe for less contentious causes."I know him well," Segal said, referring to Pepe. "Even in our database we mention that there are so many ways to use the symbol. A lot of good people use this frog. That's the concept of a meme, it can be manipulated."Segal said he first looks at the frequency and volume of a meme being broadcast on various social media channels, especially Twitter. "Once extremists started using it, we added it to our database," he added.When I asked Segal if these groups were in fact extremist, he didn't miss a beat."Uh, yeah," he said.I am Lawrence Murray, Alt-Right blogger, TRS columnist. AMA | #AltRight #AMA https://t.co/YXc5jSCpGz pic.twitter.com/09eou38uzZ
— Lawrence Murray (@AtlanticCent) November 17, 2016
These practitioners of meme magic include Lawrence Murray, a prolific "alt right" blogger who's posted FAQs about white nationalism and whose Twitter avatar features Pepe riding a white horse. Motherboard reached out to Murray to find out whether he and others like him were linking a Trump vote to a larger agenda. Fittingly, Murray and several of his peers replied to requests for comment only via Twitter by sending multiple examples of what they considered to be the most potent meme magic."A lot of good people use this frog. That's the concept of a meme, it can be manipulated."
The rabbit hole goes deeper. Pepe's followers look for synchronicity everywhere, building up a mythos from something that began as an innocuous cartoon character. This is the power of meta-history. When residents on notorious image-based online bulletin board 4chan dug up an Egyptian frog god named Kek, they learned he was a disruptive deity that shakes up basic etiquette and assumptions. Thus they reasoned: Pepe is just a modern day Kek, and both of these frog gods are like the iconoclastic Trump.@PostScriptorium This is meme magic. It is literally this. ALL of meme magic is in this one .jpeg pic.twitter.com/PsAt96Yt6F
— Jameson Greene (@greene_jameson) November 16, 2016
Is meme magic real, or pure delusion? Whatever the case may be, there has been no shortage of warnings about computer intelligence advancing to a level where it mimics humankind's need for religion and interconnected meaning. Take HyperNormalisation, a recently released documentary that's partly about the impact of computer intelligence on present day politics.Adam Curtis, the widely respected documentarian and meme aficionado behind HyperNormalisation, opens the film with Trump's younger years in the 1970s, a time when New York City was bankrupt and transitioning into an era of algorithmic stock trading on Wall Street. Similar technology paved the way for Trump's future rise, Curtis suggests. We also learn that Judea Pearl, who developed the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence, is the father of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who became the first viral beheading victim of Web 2.0, in 2002. From that point on, Curtis argues, nearly-unbelievable scenes of gore were transmitted into every American household. This kicked off a new discourse on terrorism, which some theorists have relied on by arguing that the media-saturated West has "invented ISIS."Read more: Scientists Invented a Tool to Expose 4chan's Racist Trolling Campaigns