In 2011, DARPA would launch a new project aimed around the rise of social media as a means for mass communication.

DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a research agency within the US Department of War, aimed at creating new technologies for American warfare and intelligence. It originated as an apparatus for the Cold War in 1957 in response to the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik and boasts about their “game-changing military capabilities” including the development of “precision weapons, stealth technology, nerve implants… and more” through their website. Today many of their projects reflect the changing landscape of technology. Cybernetics and AI developments are two major investments the agency boasts of.

Notably between this transition from Cold War technologies towards modern day surveillance was the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) project. This aimed to research the ways in which social media communication could be weaponised in realms of warfare and intelligence. The project tracked the social environments within which the Armed Forces would be serving. To do this it monitored the development and spread of ideas in online communities, recognising the intent of the media and the ways to counter it within the media of said communities. One focus was on gathering intelligence from social media posts to find positions of enemy combatants or domestic attacks.

Four notable outcomes of the programme was the monitoring of (1) “Linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis” and “narrative structure analysis”; (2) “Meme tracking across communities,” including “pattern detection” and “cultural narratives”; (3) “Inducing identities” by “modeling emergent communities, trust analytics, network dynamics modeling”; (4) “Automated content generation, bots in social media, crowd sourcing”.

Interesting here is the modelling of internet communities and tracking information flow through memes. Rand Waltzman, director of the project, states that this tracking has been implemented at least in the time of the research project within closed networks. Piercing the veil of anonymity and inter-culture shibboleths degrades the decentralisation of internet networks to something that can be peered into by American state intelligence.

Furthermore, he states an intent of the project was explicitly to “Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.” Not only is anonymity here shattered; intelligence is explicitly integrated within the structures of internet communities to present a certain narrative.

Applying this to today, we can understand the very palpable possibility that many forms of communication online are infiltrated by narratives to pacify foreign or even domestic populations. One only has to look at the front page of instagram to see a flurry of politicised memes pushing an explicit political agenda. This proves a fruitful petri dish for content infiltration, given the easily replicable formats many memes have and the popular topics involved.

Despite these very real possibilities, however, DARPA alleged that all data within the experiment happened within a “closed and controlled environment”. The success of the memes produced in these operations is also questionable; the public were given a glimpse into these via WikiLeaks publishing. One depicts a poorly made meme in the format of “Bad luck Brian” that neither produces much humour nor much incentive for the domestic motivation of troops. Nevertheless, the post-research application of said information is unknown.

Intelligence and counter-intelligence was a major source of political destabilisation against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Included alongside DARPA, other agencies such as the CIA were set up with the explicit aim to serve as apparatus for combatting Communism abroad.

Part of the identified threat of Communism was its capture of the “Hearts and Minds” of the people in the early phases of the Cold War. Through superior organisation of political activists, cadres in places such as East Asia, Latin America and even on American soil were able to politicise and radicalise previously unpolitical sectors of societies. While wars had previously been fought conventionally through attrition and state power, a new battlefield emerged; that of the mind. Producing ideologically devoted men undermined national service and the expectation that the manpower of a nation was entirely consolidated naturally. The development of guerilla warfare in Indochina is proof of this; populations fought for ideological cause and not as service to their respective nations.

Alan Grant outlines this in a CIA paper called “A plan for the counteraction against Communism through the establishment of a Free World commission and a Free World academy.”: He argues for the “Academic case against Communism”, supplying funds to institutions globally that would uphold “free democratic” institutions through public manipulation under the belief in Capitalism as the superior economic system: “A new dimension of political warfare, which makes it possible for them to get to the people in each target nation and to control or manipulate them in ever increasing numbers.”

Some may call this purpose noble if one is opposed to Communist ideology, however, since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then the Soviet Union in 1991, these agencies of proxy warfare have not been dismantled despite their stated aim being achieved.

Combatting domestic threats therefore becomes a battlefield of the mind also, not just a purge of groups of Anarchists or Communists that had existed in America during the 1920s’ Red Scare. Innocent populations are now possible combatants if their mindset is altered by either side of informational warfare.

The rise of the internet makes this especially dangerous ground. Every day, the average person is bombarded with consistent information at a rate previously thought impossible. In addition, the control of social media feeds through algorithms with the rise of Web 2.0 means the average person is not in control of what information is presented to them. It could only take one AI generated image of a politician embarrassing themselves to influence the outcome of someone’s view of an ongoing war. Even if this video is obviously fake or humourous, the unconscious association in the civilian’s mind can change future narratives of the seriousness of the situation.

A large amount of internet culture nowadays on platforms such as X, Instagram and Tiktok is descended from humble origins that have grown out of control. Chiefly among these is 4chan internet culture, an imageboard where users post anonymously on a range of topics and their dedicated boards. 4chan grew to controversy because a large section of its user base held right wing political views, and the culture surrounding the site egged people to push boundaries under their anonymity. In its early days, its influence spread through edgy, but minimal harm, trolling campaigns such as “pool’s closed” raids on the online game Habbo Hotel. This then developed into more consequential streams of political activism like several users of the board being implicated in right-wing terror attacks and mass shootings.

A key element of the developing culture was post-irony. This contains elements of absurdism in Camus’ ideal. The applied idea that nothing matters anyway, so one must just enjoy life, onto right-wing topics and political contention created an attitude of brazenness when it came to real-life and historical tragedies. “Troll” culture was essential to this. The act of gaining humour from the act of angering someone mixed well when it was so easy for “anons” to have the absurdist attitude towards tragedies and social taboos. The intended effect is the offense or reaction of someone from outside of the culture.

One has to look no further than conspiracies such as QAnon to see this use of in-culture monitoring to serve a political end. QAnon posed a conspiracy on 4Chan that Donald Trump was attempting infiltration, and was working to dismantle the deep state from within by running for president. The idea that he was a dissident helped align conspiracy communities on 4Chan who distrusted institutions that Trump was something new and worth voting for, instead of being as ingrained within the system as the rest of the political establishment. The very people who feared institutions like DARPA were victims of a SMISC-esque intelligence campaign from either Trump’s lobby or supporters.

The theoretical legacy of the SMISC project survives today in such movements. No longer is it possible to tell the difference between a genuine political movement and a campaign aimed at disinformation or countersignalling.

The tech elite’s shift towards right-leaning political biases only strengthens post-irony in culture. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, showed support for Trump’s cause in the runup to the 2024 election. This came with the loosening of moderation across Instagram and Facebook. A similar situation happened with the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. 4Chan and other imageboard posting sites always had major influence in the creation of internet culture, which would slowly precipitate to the popular culture of the internet. With the loosening of moderation and alignment with political sentiment, this only accelerated its proclivity.

Many creative isolated community cultures have been co-opted into mass media. The mainstreaming of this on popular social media means anyone’s parents can now see memes detached from their original context and communal relatability into a homogenised stream of consciousness building towards a post-national meme mythos.

Included in this is the post-ironic archetype of “Epstein,” usually represented in AI via dance videos and edits. A scandal that rocked the foundations of America as a political entity, the forceful release of the “Epstein files” by the House Oversight Committee destroyed the fabric of societal trust towards the government. The horrors noted in the files, such as child rape, trafficking and murder, was a fracture that had the potential to end the notion of America and its revolutionary system of government that has existed since 1776. The government has no means to hide behind the Cold War mask of free governance, democracy and liberalism, when the files show the authoritarian, closed aristocracy of morally reprehensible demons it really is. One would think that an earthquake of this metric aimed at America would not be something that should be taken lightly. Even if jokes were made about it, they should theoretically encourage outrage or the total subjugation of those responsible.

Instead, Epstein is a jovial figure of the times; no different to his dance partners of AI Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk. He is a sleazy cool boy, an extension of the “Sigma” playboy with power and an iconic outfit: the custom quarterzip. The consistent image of Epstein beamed into the average Westerner’s mind daily is that he is an archetype, a normality in day-to-day life. This AI puppetry is an extension of the old “influencer” role; a figure tied to the internet one cannot escape online. It is funny rather than horrific to the average American to imagine Epstein this way, and so primordial anger is directed away from the regime’s demonic acts and the orchestrator of a child sex ring is something to be laughed at, to be “in on the joke” with.

And so through some twisted algorithmic manipulation, Epstein became a post-ironic meme, suspiciously with the same aims of desensitisation the SMISC project used trying to tackle domestic threats to security. Epstein doesn’t implicate the regime in the minds of the populace when Epstein himself isn’t implicated in horrific crimes in the populace’s psyche.

So is the rise in Epstein memes a top-down manipulation scheme on the lines of SMISC? As easy as it is to believe that these memes are an elaborate psychological operation, however, monetary motives also rivet throughout this content. One of the accounts to publish AI generated memes of Epstein was the Tiktok account “tryunredacted”, who uses the AI visage of Epstein in order to sell replica quarter zips at an extortionate price. In this, we see the motivation could also be outrage profit. Decentralised or not, any attention is a good advertisement.

A similar thing happened to podcaster Charlie Kirk shortly after his death in September 2025. Shortly after, humorous videos began appearing of him flying around in a mech suit inspired by an earlier George Floyd meme, dubbed “The Kirkinator,” an AI caricature of the late man. This was to an end to generate clicks to promote a cryptocurrency scam “$kirkinator”. This usage of popular figures and post-irony to manipulate the exploits of Capitalism must not be forgotten as a possible motivator also.

Furthermore, the US government is not required to release any documents for ongoing operations until an automatic release 25 years later, executive orders are passed, or FOIA requests are granted. Because of this, we currently cannot truly know definitively if the rise of possible counter intelligence on social media directed towards Western populace is an active scheme by DARPA or a similar agency. Nevertheless, it is important to mentally protect one’s psyche from the possibility of these organisations manipulating social media.

As a post truth reality is constructed with the use of post-irony, narratives will develop explicitly to turn the observer’s mind into a battlefield; into a mechanism of warfare that one only consented to in the fine print of app startup permissions. Combatting this must involve establishing a strong personal conviction. One’s sense of morality and honour must come above all and consider anything attempting to breach the soul. With conscious effort, people can resist the mechanisation of humanity by tech conglomerates and shady government agencies. Scandals like the Epstein Files must not be desensitised, and an active conviction will help to struggle for victims’ justice.

References:
CIA Reading Room — CIA-RDP80B01676R003100300016-0
CIA Reading Room — CIA-RDP64B00346R000500030095-4
The DARPA Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) Program
DARPA — About
DARPA — Social Media in Strategic Communication
NBC News — Mark Zuckerberg pivoted Meta to the right
TikTok — @tryunredacted
Dexscreener — $kirkinator token
X — related community