“LJ Mojo” Meme Terrorism

Over in the land of Livejournal, the word ‘meme’ has a special meaning. They are activity-chunks completed online and then posted to your journal, where other LJ friends will see it and perhaps do the activity themselves, posting it to their journals, and propagating the meme in so doing. The vast majority of meme activity-chunks are multi-choice questions which you complete to determine “Which Pirate of the Caribbean/type of pie/Spice Girl are you?”, but there are a variety of other formats. (An important secondary type is the list of interview questions you must answer.)
There are many reasons memes work the way they do in LJ. For example, they provide a socially-acceptable prompt to engage in person-to-person comparison – “Hmmm, she’s a cocker spaniel, I wonder what I will be?” and, for the interview-style memes, to reveal things about yourself in a strategic way. (The connection to schoolyard “slam books” and “rating books” and “interview books” and so forth will be obvious to anyone who encountered those phenomena.)
One LJ meme has just been used as a weapon.
The ‘LJ-mojo’ meme asked a bunch of questions about dating activities or preferences and then produced a graph of your ‘LJ-mojo’. This meme has spread far and wide – a google for “LJ-mojo” returns 2,800 hits – despite the fact that it was impossible to interpret. Many of those who posted it expressed confusion about what the graph represented. However, the graph looked interesting and attractive, and so it spread.
It came to my attention last night that this was all a scam, and the payoff was just delivered. The LJ-mojo graphs have been replaced by one of the most infamous and disturbing images on the net. The creators of the meme deliberately made it opaque in meaning, visually attractive, and connected to the “who dated who” gossip treadmill that drives interaction everywhere in order to suck people in – and then they dropped this nasty surprise on a lot of unsuspecting people.
The perpetrators are actually known to some friends of mine. They are tiresome, irrational, and have an inflated sense of their own internet-awesomeness. The word ‘juvenile’ is insufficient to describe the kind of inane activities that have drawn them to my attention before.
It’s a dumb plan, anyway. Memes spread far and wide then disappear into the archives, never to be seen again. They haven’t spammed this image across many thousands of computer screens – they’ve changed the destination of an image link that will sit unaccessed in the backwaters of many thousands of LJ archive indices. Their grand scheme to horrify the masses is a damp squib of failure.
Still, the principles of their intervention make for a really interesting idea – luring people into posting an image far and wide, and then replacing the image. Social hacking. Adbusters-type people are probably sitting up stroking their chins about the possibilities.
If you must dig deeper, start where I heard it first, at xenogram’s LJ. And if you know someone who did the meme, or if you did it, quietly dig into your archive and delete it. But try not to look at the picture. (Seriously not kidding; it’s the kind of thing that would get you fired.)