Moloch: first of the new technogenic viruses

7 August 2021 (Desdemona Despair) – The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus is widely understood to be the most recent virus to have jumped the species barrier to humans^[1]. In this post, I propose the idea that COVID-19 is the first virus to jump the platform barrier also, from natural biology to human technology. COVID-19 exists now as two symbiotic, coevolving viruses: the molecular COVID-19 virus, which is transmitted by contact between human bodies, and a memetic virus that’s transmitted by social media contact between human minds.

Together, the biological virus and memetic virus comprise the first species in a new class of technogenic, or “cyborg”, viruses. The memetic vector causes infected minds to avoid the vaccine and group together, enabling the biological vector to spread through unprotected hosts, and the gathering concentrates memetic signals for propagation through social media coverage. The tight coupling between molecular and memetic propagation conveys evolutionary advantages to both viruses. Defeating one requires defeating both.

COVID-19 has opened an entirely new space for evolution to operate in, and now that the memetic space is available for variation and exploration, other viruses can exploit it and compete with COVID-19 for control of human biomass and minds. Old, purely biological viruses will be at an extreme disadvantage and will be selected against strongly, which may explain the complete disappearance of influenza and other respiratory viruses in 2020 and 2021^[2]: influenza hasn’t amassed an army of millions of meme-infected human minds to defend it.

Acquiring access to human information technologies delivers an enormous advantage over other purely biological viruses: COVID-19 harnesses human brains to provide cover and protection, even if the human is vaccinated and immune to the molecular attack. In this sense, COVID-19 is like other parasitic organisms that hijack the brain of their host, e.g., the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus, which seizes control of ants, and the jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) which takes over cockroaches^[3].

Evolution has optimized COVID-19’s memetic attack along the fear axis to broadcast twin messages: “Don’t fear the virus/Fear the vaccine.” Given the stunning number of Americans who refuse to be vaccinated and the skyrocketing rates of infection in unvaccinated U.S. states, it’s clear that the memetic attacks are devastatingly effective.

Because COVID-19 hijacks human minds and commands them to throw themselves on the pyre, I call this novel technogenic virus “Moloch”, after the Canaanite god who is traditionally held to have demanded child sacrifices by burning them alive.

Puppeteer parasites

There are numerous examples of parasite species that hijack the nervous system of a host and force the host to undertake self-destructive actions that benefit the parasite^[4]. Some of the more spectacular and disturbing examples:

• Hairworms and crickets: A young hairworm (Nematomorpha) infects a cricket or similar insect, like a beetle or grasshopper, and forces it to walk randomly until it finds water, then commands the host to jump in and drown^[5].
• “Zombie” wasps and orb spiders: The Costa Rican wasp larva (Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga) takes over the brain of an orb spider (Plesiometa argyra) and commands it to weave a special web cocoon and then wait in the center of the web while the larva devours the spider^[6].
• “Zombie” flies and honey bees: Zombie Fly larvae (Apocephalus borealis) take control of honey bee brains and force them to abandon the hive and fly randomly toward light sources, causing a “Flight of the living dead”^[7].

The combined chemical and memetic attacks on human brains enable Moloch to command humans to commit similarly self-destructive acts. When the biological vector infects a human host who has political power, Moloch’s power to command self-immolations increases immensely.

For example, after the President of the United States was parasitized in October 2020, he tweeted to thousands of human minds, “Don’t be afraid of Covid”, hugely amplifying the power of Moloch’s memetic vector. The initial tweet by the infected host and leader of the U.S. “garnered more than 275,000 retweets and more than 556,000 likes. On Facebook, the post was liked at least 1.2 million times and shared more than 100,000 times.”^[8] Moloch had spoken and was now in control of U.S. pandemic response policy.

Moloch-Delta variant and anti-vaccine messaging

Moloch-Delta is an upgrade that throws confusion into the meme schema. In earlier Moloch versions, messaging was aligned along the fear axis; Moloch-Delta’s messaging adds uncertainty and increased cognitive dissonance, which serves to paralyze host minds into inaction and increase host resistance to the vaccine. Moloch-Delta commands the infected minds of powerful politicians and media personalities to include “Vaccine good/But Freedom” messages embedded between “Fear the vaccine” messages. The contradictory signals cause increased cognitive dissonance in followers. Dissonance reduction strengthens the resolve of followers to avoid the vaccine.

On 20 July 2021, AP reported:

The mixed messaging can come from the same media outlet — and even the same source. On Fox News Channel on Monday, host Sean Hannity looked straight into the camera to deliver a clear message: “It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated. I believe in science. I believe in the science of vaccinations.”

Yet Hannity followed up his statement by interviewing a woman protesting her college’s requirement that students be vaccinated, a segment appealing to people skeptical of the immunization push. His prime-time colleagues, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, opened their own programs by questioning vaccination efforts.

“Conservative media offers mixed messages on COVID-19 vaccine”, AP News, 20 July 2021

Manipulating cognitive dissonance is an important principle of cult indoctrination, so new variants of Moloch may be able to deploy confusing and contradictory messaging that locks in human minds as strictly as any People’s Temple or Aum Shinrikyo.

Because Moloch is evolving rapidly in both its molecular and memetic components, I expect that Moloch-Lambda or another upgrade will find more sophisticated political messaging to deliver into infected minds. Healthcare workers are a natural enemy of Moloch and are the obvious next target, so a “Kill doctors and nurses” message may be integrated soon. We’re already seeing calls to violence from infected hosts at super-spreader events, for example in Trafalgar Square on 24 July 2021, where Moloch transmitted a message that healthcare workers fighting COVID could face Nuremberg-style trials. Soon after, at a private spreader event on 29 July 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) transmitted Moloch’s message that healthcare workers offering door-to-door vaccines should be shot on sight:

You lucky people here in Alabama might get a knock on your door, because I hear Alabama might be one of the most unvaccinated states in the nation. [crowd cheers] Well, Joe Biden wants to come talk to you guys. He’s going to be sending one of his police-state friends to your front door. … Yeah, well, what they don’t know is in the South, we all love our Second Amendment rights. [crowd cheers] We’re big on our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not big on strangers showing up at our front door, are we?

Moloch-infected host Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), suggesting at a super-spreader event that Alabamians shoot healthcare workers who deliver door-to-door Covid vaccines

Rep. Greene is quite correct when she says Alabama is one of the least-vaccinated states in the U.S., which shows the effectiveness of Moloch’s memetic vector there. Because host minds in Alabama have thoroughly absorbed the “Fear the vaccine” message, Moloch’s biological vector is propagating freely through human biomass, and case rates are increasing exponentially, faster than during any of the previous infection waves.

Prospects for defeating Moloch and future technogenic viruses

Anti-vaxx cultism has been around for decades, and with the advent of social media, it has advanced from fringe madness to an article of faith for millions, on both ends of the left-right political axis. By 2019, the ground was fertile for a biological parasite to seize control of this platform and exploit it for its own evolutionary ends. COVID-19 has wrapped an entirely novel “immune system” of infected human minds around itself and now enjoys an enormous advantage over other viruses.

The amazingly fast development of vaccines to fight Moloch’s biological vector is a testament to human ingenuity, and progress in this direction will continue. But Moloch can’t be defeated by vaccines alone. It can be defeated only by a simultaneous, coordinated attack on the memetic vector, which currently is an unsolved problem. Some research has been done on identifying the largest nodes in the meme propagation network (cf. The Disinformation Dozen: 12 people are the source for 65 percent of anti-vaccine propaganda), but much more infrastructure needs to be built. Humans will need automation to identify and de-platform infected hosts immediately after they go live, and current algorithms are very fair from that goal.

One difficulty that social platforms face is memetic messages are amplified by millions of bots, which themselves can be implemented as software viruses, making Moloch a triple threat:

• molecular attack on the human immune system, transmitted by physical contact;
• memetic attack on mass psychology, transmitted by social media and word of mouth;
• software attack on information infrastructure, transmitted by bots.

The big social media platforms collectively have made only halting steps toward interdicting Moloch’s memetic vector. In its report on anti-vaxx messaging, The Center for Countering Digital Hate found^[9]:

Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter’s terms of service agreements, nine of the Disinformation Dozen remain on all three platforms, while just three have been comprehensively removed from only one platform.

1. This is the product of a series of failures from social media platforms:
   1. Research conducted by CCDH last year has shown that platforms fail to act on 95 percent of the Covid and vaccine misinformation reported to them.
   2. CCDH’s recent report, Malgorithm, uncovered evidence that Instagram’s algorithm actively recommends similar misinformation.
   3. Tracking of 425 anti-vaccine accounts by CCDH shows that their total following across platforms now stood at 59.2 million in December, an increase of 877,000 more than they had in June.
   4. CCDH’s ongoing tracking shows that the 20 anti-vaxxers with the largest followings account for over two-thirds of this total cross-platform following of 59.2 million.
2. Analysis of anti-vaccine content posted to Facebook over 689,000 times in the last two months shows that up to 73 percent of that content originates with members of the Disinformation Dozen of leading online anti-vaxxers.

We may anticipate another attack vector for Moloch: hacking the algorithms that are intended to filter out pro-Moloch messages and rewiring them to do the opposite. It might take only one or two infected programmers to “accidentally” flip a sign in a formula.

No progress can be made until we understand the true nature of this enemy. Until we acknowledge that Covid isn’t “just another virus”, we’ll be defenseless against its most devastating attacks.

How serious is the threat?

The human species has never faced a threat like this before. Moloch is a living example of the late Carl Sagan’s warning: “We have arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

It may have seemed like this warning foretold a literal explosion, like a nuclear war or the permafrost going up in flames, but the “mixture of ignorance and power” produced instead a global pandemic of self-destructive delusion, all orchestrated by a tiny assemblage of molecules, with absolutely no consciousness or forethought; evolution finding an entirely new niche to exploit.

Now that Moloch has opened up this new universe for evolution to operate in, we must expect other technogenic viruses to follow, either as mutations of Moloch or as other biological viruses that anti-vaxxers are duped into defending.

Some may ask if Moloch is merely satire. Do you take COVID-19 seriously? Do you take the mass psychology of social media seriously? Then you should take Moloch seriously.

9 August 2021 UPDATE

See this amazing new paper, Triple contagion: a two-fears epidemic model.

ABSTRACT: We present a differential equations model in which contagious disease transmission is affected by contagious fear of the disease and contagious fear of the control, in this case vaccine. The three contagions are coupled. The two fears evolve and interact in ways that shape distancing behaviour, vaccine uptake, and their relaxation. These behavioural dynamics in turn can amplify or suppress disease transmission, which feeds back to affect behaviour. The model reveals several coupled contagion mechanisms for multiple epidemic waves. Methodologically, the paper advances infectious disease modelling by including human behavioural adaptation, drawing on the neuroscience of fear learning, extinction, and transmission.

Joshua M. Epstein, Erez Hatna, and Jennifer Crodelle, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 4 August 2021, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2021.0186

The “two fears” model is relatively simple but captures the now-familiar pattern of pandemic waves, showing “multiple waves of infection and their timing, size, and form. Notably, these waves are generated by endogenous contagious cognitive dynamics, not by top-down policies, or by conscious maximization of utility functions, or by the imitation of observable behaviour.”

The phrase, “endogenous contagious cognitive dynamics”, is precisely what I mean by “memetic vector”. If this model can be expanded with terms that represent transmission through social media, we would have a usable mathematical model of Moloch.