Editing Ontological warfare

'''Ontological warfare''' is a kind of [[w:information warfare|information warfare]] that engages [[the enemy]] with a series of attacks against its 'Being' or [[ontology]], including
its language, culture, belief system, even its tests for success.

One such attack is a protocol attack known as '[[w:embrace, extend and extinguish|embrace, extend and extinguish]]'.

Another example is [[w:namespace|namespace]] pollution, whereby a valuable word or phrase is consumed, its meaning replaced with something trivial. For consumerium, this means every consumer must be vigilant to protect the meaning of words such as "[[organic]] from being redefined.

To [[consumer analysis]], an ontological shift in thinking can produce a shift in spending habits. Corporations attempt to identify with or invent generic names, eg: [[ketchup]] and yet control the [[market]]. 

Examples:
* The edit wars on a [[wiki]], suggesting that an [[ontology]] is a [[point of view]].
* The idea that corporations have the same rights as individuals, effectively giving them more rights due to greater financial resources - an example of violating the [[no confusion with group entity]] rule and creating a [[God's Eye View]] from which corporations and individuals have assumed attributes in common.  This was established over a long period of time by successive court rulings.
* Music piracy and software piracy.  Copying music privately was not always the major crime that current law makes it out to be (DMCA).  The idea that "stealing cable" is a theft equivalent to stealing a tangible [[infrastructural capital]] item like a bicycle is deliberately unexamined for its appropriateness as a [[conceptual metaphor]].
* War on drugs.  Drug use and sales was not always the major crime that current law makes it out to be. But you can still go to the drug store and get your prescription filled - so it is a war on certain drugs and drug dealers but not others.  This unexamined assumption obscures the similarities between corporate drug creators and basement drug creators, their propensity to create [[addiction]] and other [[dependency]], and the cooption of [[authority]] in one set of drugs but not another.
* A hypothetical attack against the [[Consumerium buying signal]] might attempt to alter its [[tests for success]]. This would lead a [[culture]] down a slippery slope of [[unethical products]] until any [[ethical spending]] becomes something no human can do. 
* [[political correctness]]. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the eventual term for what was originally known as [[w:shell shock|shell shock]], and it turns out to be much easier for companies to market pharmaceuticals to.  If it is a "disorder" it is medical and should be paid by [[medical insurance]].  If it is "shock" resulting from "shells" then it is obviously a military thus public problem to deal with.
* [[Microsoft]]'s [http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Articles/GNU.mspx referring] to a so-called "degradation of the software ecosystem", hijacking [[ecological metaphor]]s and redefining them to favor itself, seems to have prompted some [[free software]] activists to build a [http://gnumes.nornia.org/ mythological response] with such elements as "GNUmes", "vampires" and "the [[flora]] and [[fauna]] of the [[noosphere]]". Overall, this use of [[conceptual metaphor]] is quite offensive to these who see an [[ecosystem]], up to and including the Earth itself, as a life-sustaining mechanism deserving of every protection physically possible, and worth risking death to protect. ''See [http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Software_ecosystem&oldid=9789 en: Disinfopedia: software ecosystem] and [[Avoid extending metaphor]] for more on this.''

See also: 
*[[w:revisionism]]
*[[w:adversarial process]]
*[[w:Memetics]]: [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMLEX.html Memetic Lexicon], which can be read as a taxonomy of strategies for ontological warfare