Fictive Kinship
Networked tribes are hacking our online information system to wage perpetual war. Here's how they do it, and what it means for our future.
During the initial stages of the terrorist attack on Israel, something interesting happened online. Within hours:
Thousands of images, videos, and first-hand accounts of the horrific attack were uploaded to social networks.
Network influencers quickly bundled these images and stories into a moral frame, turning them into viral empathy triggers.
The deluge of empathy triggers flooding the network soon did what they were designed to do; millions of people began to connect to the victims at a deep level.
The empathetic connection forged in that moment went beyond sympathy for the victims;
it created a fictive kinship with them,
a close, almost familial relationship, not based on blood relations.
Suddenly, for those impacted, it wasn’t some poor child in a distant land being killed by a terrorist, but a child in their extended family, neighborhood, or country being killed by pure evil.
The sudden emergence of fictive kinship didn’t just increase sympathy and support for Israel; it turned millions of unrelated people outside of the Jewish community (both in Israel and the diaspora) into active partisans engaged in moral warfare with an existential enemy.
A Growing Number of Examples
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen. Over the last three years, we’ve seen viral empathy triggers create a bond of fictive kinship with millions of people three times.
COVID. The networked war ‘on the maskless that want to infect us’ and the war ‘on those who want to enslave us with mandates’.
George Floyd and the famous viral video. BLM protests/riots. The war on systemic racism.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine. The war on Putin (‘interference in our election’ to ‘Hitler reborn’).
Hamas's attack on Israel is now the fourth in this series, and now that empathy triggers are flowing out of Gaza, we are likely to see another form as new fictive kinships are forged. To understand what’s going on, let's dive a little deeper.