the “meme” / “anti meme” terminology just makes no sense to me and I hope it does not spread. I’d rather we just talk about the unit (which is, the meme), and the degree to which it spreads is a completely different property (and is not part of the meme itself). The same idea can spread extremely well in one context than another. It doesn’t make sense to classify something as meme/antimeme
This runs counter to the idea that “if something is important, we’ll hear about it”
To me this is the real juicy question. I want everyone to understand that it is NOT true that “if it’s important, you’ll hear about it”. The follow up question is to then ask: how DO things that we hear about get decided? What is the pathway of ideas look like? (the answer is: it is something that is alive and constantly changing. Mapping this is what I want to do with The Human Memome Project)
making conventional documentation both impossible and dangerous
I’d like to give a real world example of an infohazard that makes sense to the average reader. I think something like the following can be understood by most people: “to what degree is civilization hanging on a precipice?” Or put another way, if you are on a ship, and there is imminent danger of it sinking, telling everyone about it causes panic and causes the ship to sink. Whereas telling the people who can fix it, gives them time to try and solve it (and if they decide they can’t, then they can tell everyone). I also tried to reflect on this a bit in Suppression of Truth is Necessary for the Best Possible World
Take handwashing, for example
Better example might be a scientific breakthrough that was easy to prove and could save lives, but that failed to spread, such as getting surgeons to wash their hands before surgery.
Like we assume that things that are good & true and are standard now everywhere became that way as soon as they were discovered, but that is almost never the case.
under the right conditions, antimemetic ideas can escape containment and become memetic
See like this is just silly, is it an antimeme or is it a meme? it transformed into a meme? Isn’t it just an idea that struggled to spread, and then conditions changed and then it became viral? I don’t think we should use the word “memetic” to mean “high viral spread”. Something is genetic if it is related to genes. Something is memetic if it is related to ideas.
Gay marriage feels like the norm today, but it helps to realize it was once a fringe topic relegated to niche corners of the internet
Not sure how Nadia treats this in the book, but I really enjoyed how Blaise Aguera described this in Who Are We Now (which in my opinion is the memetics book everyone should be reading)
See chapter 6 where he identifies the moment that this shifted, when the APA was trying to appease both sides on the question of “is being gay a disease” https://whoarewenow.net/chapter-06/
The DSM-II, published in 1968, made no significant change, but amid mounting pressure from gay rights groups to de-pathologize homosexuality, the APA issued a rather tortured revision memo in 1973. The memo tried to split the difference, keeping “Sexual orientation disturbance (Homosexuality)” (emphasis mine) listed as a disorder:
Re:supermemes
The lack of specificity makes supermemes hard to pin down
I think this is describing something different than just “memes that have high spread”, but something broader? I think Blackmore (or others) describe this as “memeplex” (a collection of memes that work together and reinforce each other. A religion is not a meme, but it is made up of memes). I’ve also been trying to make “memome” a thing to describe a consistent collection of memes that can be found together.
these ideas may fail to inspire concrete action due to their complex and abstract nature
This is I think a failure to understand the purpose of these memes. They do inspire action, it’s just not “what it says on the tin” so to speak (the action is often group cohesion). All beliefs do something for the host. This is what makes them sticky.
their gravitational pull degrades our ability to think
This is not really correct, it is not the meme itself that has this effect, it’s the group cohesion that does. We don’t actually care about left wing or right wing causes, we care about our friends & family and we don’t want to be ostracized by them. And we care about being “a good person”, this is our identity. THAT is the stuff that has the gravitational pull.
This is REALLY important to understand because fighting the meme doesn’t do anything. And worse: getting rid of it makes things worse. What you want is group cohesion and identity. You need something to perform that function, some group belief or shared symbol.
I articulate that a bit here:
look it’s simple: (1) humans need tribes (2) tribes need walls (3) “the other side is evil” is an effective way of reinforcing those walls, but it’s not true (4) finding a way to reinforce walls that IS true is better for everyone https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1858204201211334690
We know this strategy has potential based on events from There Is No Antimemetics Division
This seems like a funny claim to make (“we know this strategy should work in the real world because of what unfolds in this fiction book”) ?
obscurity can be useful.
This is great and a really important dynamic to understand. This gives essentially a “lever” to control how fast and how far ideas go. If we want to use a biology metaphor it’s like a targeted enzyme that will only latch onto to a specific category of minds.
It is a serious intellectual discipline that has great implications for the way we think about the transmission of ideas
I think this is a good claim to make, but again I wouldn’t call it “antimemetics”. No one who actually does this work calls it “antimemetics”, that’s just the popular term among one internet subculture. It’s just “memetics”, that has a much longer history and a lot more people actively writing on it, inside academia but also independently on the internet (because memetics was historically a classified domain of the government). See for example it’s time to embrace memetic warfare. And this military memetics compendium https://www.robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Memetics%20Compendium%205%20February%2009.pdf
we are not oblivious participants in the matrix. We have agency
Does the book not talk about epistemology at all? I feel like that is the core lever that all humans have to change the “rules of the game” for how all memes spread. I’ve been using the term 💡 Meta-memes to describe ideas that change epistemology (because those then affect the spread of ALL other memes). But if there’s one message I want people to have, if they feel despair about the current rules, is that they can update their own epistemology, and that changes everything.
And the easiest/most obvious change is to ask “where does this come from?” - like people will change their mind from reading some post on reddit, but they have no idea if that random anonymous person is a government, or company, trying to inject ideas into their mind. I wrote There Is No Source as a way to show how ridiculous it is that we constantly read essays without knowing who the author is (except, instead of “an essay” it’s a meme, but it’s the same thing!!! An essay is just a collection of ideas!!!!)