Why Does the Internet Love Ron Paul?

So there’s been a lot of Internet buzz about 2008 Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul. U.S. News recently published an article titled Ron Paul’s Online Rise, which mentions his status as the #1 searched term on popular blog syndication website, Technorati. I’ve read a lot of other news stories about this phenomenon, but none of them have asked a rather interesting (at least to me) question: why does the Internet love Ron Paul?

The Internet is a great conduit for transmitting memes thanks to its speed and large user base. A meme, as defined by Richard Dawkins, is a unit of cultural information that can be spread from person to person much like a gene, which it’s essentially analagous to. Sometimes memes rise without any rhyme or reason, but in some cases, upon further inspection, the underlying reasons for why they take shape and form memeplexes are actually somewhat obvious.

Libertarianism is a good example of an Internet memeplex with an obvious explanation. Tech-savvy people seem to be inexplicably drawn to its superrational model of absolute, decentralized personal freedom. This is because the Internet rewards introverted thought and behavior, which is a central pillar of Libertarianism and its evil, Down syndrome-affected spawn, Objectivism. Internet Libertarians are generally the only type of people who have the will and endurance to engage in lengthy and inane online debates (see: any YouTube video or Digg post) and their hope for victory is sustained by their unrelenting e-hubris and the army of trolls who strongly identify with their ultimately shallow, selfish logic. While these groups of people tend to be small in number, they’re vocal enough to decidedly shape the discourse on many popular social bookmarking and news/blog syndication websites, such as Digg, Technorati and Newsvine.

As a meme spreads, it can often propogate itself like a virus, acting as an independent life-form which continues to get passed on, even at the expense of its host. The so-called “selfish meme” is evident in how Libertarianism spreads through the Internet. The appeal of viewing society as a logic puzzle rather than a complex system, reducing even the most complicated, abstract ideas into mundane modal statements, is a fairly compelling one, especially for people who spend a large amount of their time arguing on Internet forums and reading Slashdot.

The world would be a much happier and safer place if all problems could be solved by “debugging” them, so to speak, or by simply answering any perplexing moral, ethical, political or philosophical quandry that has no easy answer with pre-packaged Libertarian rhetoric (which typically places them as heirs of the American Revolution by using phrases like “original intent” and “freedom-loving”). This eliminates the need for actual understanding and replaces it with evangelized, Pavlovian response mechanisms that turn groups of individuals into cogs in a machine, operating like the very code some of them write (typically the slightly more educated ones). They then flood the Internet in droves, endorsing candidates like Ron Paul (the meme within the memeplex of ideology) who preach to the choir of free-market, free-state ideologues, and reap the virtual rewards, like this retarded YouTube video below:

Thankfully, as Wonkette reminds:

We probably gave him one of the coveted Wonkette presidential endorsements, too, but Internet buzz rarely translates into anything in real life, as the nation learned from the tragic failures of Ned Lamont and Snakes On a Plane.