which largely just quotes this which also discusses the now defunct CRS agency of the DOJ:

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/poastocracy

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Gigachads on the official DHS X account only provide evidence of one poaster in the administration, but this is a poaster in a very prominent, public-facing role, who has been allowed to do this for quite some time now, obviously without rebuke. That strongly suggests that the administration smiles upon the memelord, and it also makes it more likely that the chud running the DHS X account is far from alone. An obvious question is why the DHS would be so tolerant of its social media manager posting right wing memes, when this is guaranteed to draw the ire of the left. One possible explanation is that the administration wants its anon army to understand that they have guys on the inside. Memes are a tool for informal coordination; by posting these memes, the administration is winking at the base, telling them “We’re listening to you, and as for CNN … we don’t think about them at all. Now follow our lead …”

The young men powering the new administration were acculturated within the free-wheeling environment of loosely connected online networks, in which irony and ambiguity is simply the water in which they swim, and the only hierarchy is the one established by informal influence and demonstrated ability. They are not accustomed to subordinating their activities to directives pushed down from the summits of rigid org charts. Their basic assumptions are individual initiative, freedom of action, and a magpie willingness to grab good ideas wherever they can be found and put them to immediate use without waiting for permission.

Importantly, at 41, Vance is a young man by political standards. His cultural assumptions are not those of network news, but of digital networks. When the Vance memes making fun of his weight, or riffing off of his remark to Zelensky that he never even said “Thank you”, started circulating, he didn’t get mad about them. He laughed, and rolled with it, because he understood that – coming from the online right – these memes were an expression of affection, the way you rib your friend by calling him a faggot and he pokes you back by calling you a fat retard. Naturally the feminized left does not understand this at all. They think that these memes are humiliating to Vance and so spread the memes themselves, while interpreting the popularity of the memes amongst the online right as an indication that the base loathes him. As always, the left lacks theory of mind for their opponents. Imprisoned within the iron bars of their own ideological-managerial cage, the left has completely failed to learn the lessons of participatory media, and like a general staff doggedly trying to break the trench lines with cavalry charges, continues to try to fight the current war with the weapons they used to win the last one.

There is widespread speculation that Vance’s comfortable navigation of meme culture comes from direct experience, that he maintains a Twitter alt, that he is in fact an anon poaster. There is of course even speculation as to which account is his, although naturally, no one knows for sure, and Vance sure isn’t telling.

If there are poasters in the administration, we might expect them to treat policy the way they learned to handle memes. Any random small-account anon might come up with an absolute banger of post … so why shouldn’t they be able to come up with banger policies, too? Why limit themselves to adopting policies developed inside the long, tedious processes of bureaucratic committees and comfortable think tanks? If rapisthitler1488 has a good idea, well, why not use it? You can just do things. This attitude is at the heart of what Dudley Newright calls the “up-the-chain phenomenon”.

We’d also expect an administration laced with poasters to pay careful attention to the online right, using it to gauge the public mood in order to correct course. At its worst this could turn into audience capture, but at its best this enables a much more responsive reaction to public sentiment than that afforded by polling data since it is both immediate and disintermediated. Rather than waiting for the polling agency to carefully word a question to get the answer it wants, and then painstakingly call up and interview a statistically representative and unbiased sample so that it can provide rigorous Poisson errors for the answers to its biased questions, public sentiment can be analyzed as soon as people start tweeting, and evaluated in terms of the public’s own words. In essence, the poastocratic administration becomes akin to a livestreamer monitoring the chat.

Finally, we might expect to see the administration deliberately trolling the base. Experienced influencers know that outrage bait drives engagement. If you want to move in a certain policy direction but are being pressured behind the scenes not to do that, or conversely if you are being pressured to do something you know will be unpopular, an excellent way of assembling the political capital necessary to do what you want is to announce that you’re going to do the opposite. The howls of outrage from the base then provide you with the excuse you need to do what you wanted to do in the first place. “Let me check with the boss … Well, sorry, I’d really love to help you, but the boss won’t let me do that.”

OK, you say, this is all very interesting, an emergent feedback loop of cybernetic governance linking the networked hive mind to the traditional institutions of government, but is there any actual evidence beyond some meme-slop posted by the DHS in an effort to assure the base that they are getting the Got What They Voted For Award? Well, let’s get into that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5786331&forum_id=2:#49348258)