Meme Wars Book Review
The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America
I acquired Meme Wars … on November 16th of 2022 … and just finally got going on it last weekend. All I can offer in my defense is post midterm work, irregular health, and a perpetually overflowing reading queue. Once I got past the title page things moved along quickly; this book is full of things I saw, or participated in, so like Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations it’s very much refreshing my memories.
What Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg have done here is an accessible accounting of how things evolved from the 2009 formation of the Tea Party through the January 6th 2021 Capitol Siege.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If you need to know how we got to where we are today, this is a very good review. I knew it was going to be review, hence the fifteen month wait it had in my reading queue. Don’t take that as a criticism, this is a very well done book.
Devolving Towards Dictatorship:
Donovan & Co. divide their coverage of a decade of online conflict into ten chapters.
We Are the 99 Percent (2011)
A Safe Space for Hate (2012)
Gamers Rise Up (2014)
Troll in Chief (2015)
He Will Not Divide Us (2016)
Unite the Right (2017)
Joker Politics (2017)
These People Are Sick (2017)
Fuck Around and Find out (2020)
Stop the Steal (2021)
This book often mentions the earlier prehistory in this area - the image board culture that nursed Anonymous, but it completely avoids Chanology and Arab Spring. That’s OK because it’s U.S. focused, but I think it would be helpful to know the lore.
Usually I will go through each section and offer a bit of information about the contents, but that doesn’t seem precisely right here. This books is … not quite a war diary, since it’s neutral observer based, but it does cover all the things, often going into the background and motivations of the various strategists.
The most valuable part in all of this for someone seeking to counter right wing extremism is the careful dissection of how fault lines arose, particularly after Unite the Right. Any social movement will fall prey to infighting, the book offers a guided tour of what the fault lines were and how the various players used them to define themselves and their portion of the collective.
An Evolving Hazard:
There is a bit of litigation sprinkled throughout the book, mostly to do with successful action against or failed strategies by the various players profiled in the book. Long term things are running the opposite direction.
Joan Donovan was ousted from Harvard by Meta, and then found a new home at Boston university. These events have to be seen against the backdrop of Congressional Republicans assaulting political disinformation research. Musk’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate is similar in spirit, but it’s foundering.
This is an area of development; the right’s cash advantage will drive a lot of frivolous litigation seeking to take advantage of the pack of loons McConnell gaveled through the Judiciary Committee. And that will ramp up if the justice department actually manages to do it’s freakin’ job.
Conclusion:
I have been keeping detailed records since 2010 and I got a literary agent in 2021. I’ve been busy and times are uncertain. Depending on how the 2024 election goes I may actually publish something. If I do, about half of the book will fairly closely parallel the story in line Meme Wars. There are a lot of things I experienced that were … closer to the action, more to do with the nature of small group conflicts than the overall messaging strategy that is the focus here.
Even so, it’ll be nice to have some guard rails on one side of things when that storytelling begins in earnest.