Conspiracy theories are popular and there is no doubt that the internet has fuelled them on. From the theory that 9/11 was an inside job to the idea that reptilian humanoids rule the world, conspiracy theories have found a natural home online.

Back in 1990, when MONDO 2000 magazine promised Screaming Memes on its cover, it was more or less a secret argot winking at our technohip Mondoid readers.

Remember when “epic bacon” was the height of comedy? Thirteen years ago, a man was sitting at the Denver airport. Bored, he turned his attention to his favorite website: “I see a lot of people on laptops around using the free wifi,” he wrote on the popular subreddit r/AskReddit.

Science fiction tells us that a change in a past event, caused by the intervention of a time traveler, will open up a parallel timeline that leads to an alternate present. The example that comes to mind, for some reason, is Back to the Future, Part II.

In the 2010s, Hitler memes and “ironic” racism filled the internet. What if we had taken them seriously? Updated at 4:00 a.m. ET on Oct. 4, 2020.

As the decade began, there were rea­sons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and despite a global recession just two years earlier, the world hadn’t cascaded into total financial collapse.

Beginning with the figure of Roko’s Basilisk, a hypothetical vengeful future AI that emerged in online forums, Ana Teixeira Pinto launches her analysis of the psychological state engendered by online interaction that has led to a seemingly paradoxical set of views: totally paranoid yet ironically

The framing of the term “fake news” orients you toward thinking whether a claim is true or false. By this logic, it assumes that people share things online because they’re 100% concerned about accuracy—but people share because of deeper political allegiances and viewpoints.

Conspiracy theories are popular and there is no doubt that the internet has fuelled them on. From the theory that 9/11 was an inside job to the idea that reptilian humanoids rule the world, conspiracy theories have found a natural home online.

We have entered a post-truth, post-authenticity era, in which dichotomies like true/false or real/fake no longer serve us very well, especially on social media platforms.

Back in 1990, when MONDO 2000 magazine promised Screaming Memes on its cover, it was more or less a secret argot winking at our technohip Mondoid readers.

Memes and social networks have become weaponized, while many governments seem ill-equipped to understand the new reality of information warfare. How will we fight state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda in the future?

Culture matters. Mainstream culture reflects and shapes the dominant ideas and behaviours of our society.

“It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.

Editor’s Note: This article includes an in-depth inquiry into the online activities of political groups for which misogyny, racism, and anti-semitism become defining features; as such, images and mentions of those topics are found in the text. Estimated read time: 29 minutes.

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him. Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque.

Memes, as any alt-right Pepe sorcerer will tell you, are not just frivolous entertainment. They are magic, the stuff by which reality is made and manipulated.

Looks like the geniuses who run UC Davis never Googled the words “Streisand Effect.

Erik Davis’s TechGnosis is considered the classic text on the relation between technology and the occult. This “Afterword 2.0” was written for a new edition, just out from North Atlantic Books.

Memes are viruses. In 1976, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins defined the term as a “unit of cultural transmission” that will “literally parasitize” the brain, “turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation.” The same is true of internet memes.