I have been subscribed to Asparouhova’s Substack for a few years, so picked up her new book as soon as it was available. It then took me a couple weeks to read it because I immediately got distracted by re-reading There Is No Antimemetics Division, a sci-fi novel by qntm that inspired her title, and that she quotes from extensively. Getting distracted like that is particularly amusing because the way I veered away from the book is how our minds veer away from antimemes that are hard to engage with. But I did eventually tame my mind to focus on the book again, and want to share what I took away from its ideas.
Everybody is now familiar with memes, those pieces of content that go “viral” and “infect” the mass consciousness by spreading rapidly across social media. These memes tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator, being light or fun or cute in a way that appeals to everyone so as to increase transmissibility.
But what about ideas that resist transmission and are harder to share? This might be because they are complex or because they challenge social norms in ways that may lead to getting canceled or otherwise shadow banned. Asparouhova describes these ideas as antimemes, high-impact ideas that are difficult to transmit for some reason: “We agree these ideas are important. We are largely aligned on what to do about them. And yet… somehow… when the time comes to doing something about them… the ideas… just… can’t… quite… seem… to stay put.” Antimemes are “objects that you want to remember – in the moment, you found them quite compelling – but don’t seem to stick in your memory beyond a short duration.” This book is her exploration of the dynamics around memes and antimemes in society today.
One key observation is that memes drove an eventual decline in social media. Because of the rush to share memes, context collapsed so that what was meant to be a private joke to friends could suddenly lead to worldwide outrage and shaming (Jon Ronson’s NYT article and subsequent book are a reminder of what that felt like at the time). This led to public posting decreasing as people retreated to group chats, private groups, or walled gardens to preserve their safety (Yancey Strickler described this as the Dark Forest theory of the Internet).
Asparouhova describes this new landscape of private groups connected by shallow memetic public spaces like Twitter and Facebook as a digital archipelago, private islands haphazardly connected into larger formations. But a different arrangement doesn’t necessarily protect us. While “Group chats offer a false sense of protection from the chaos of the public web, they are an even denser, and therefore more transmissible, version of the internet.” In other words, it’s even easier to fall prey to an infectious idea in a group chat because there’s only supporters allowed in, and no easy way to see the objections that might arise in public discourse: “Find enough people who share your views, no matter how extreme or far-fetched, and they will form your new reality.”
She speculates that this network topology has led to the rise of “supermemes”, that spread quickly and feel “highly consequential”, creating “a strong gravitational pull” on people’s attention, “crowding out our ability to think about anything else”. These are ideas like climate change, culture wars, existential risks, fear of foreign threats, woke or anti-woke ideology, etc. These can take over people’s minds because such ideas activate our survival instincts which are designed to narrow our attention to the threat we are facing. Asparouhova’s recommendation: “To protect our attention, then, we must learn to resist the temptation of supermemes. For those who haven’t developed strong immunity, the best cure is prevention: staying far away from ideas that look like supermemes.”
Surprisingly, she thinks the rise of supermemes offers hope; perhaps the spread of such ideas means that “society can now support many different “critical missions” simultaneously. Maybe civilization isn’t distracted, after all; it’s just scaling up, and we now have an increased capacity to tackle more problems at once. … we just need to be careful about which ones deserve our attention.” And this is where we have a choice: each of us is responsible for where we place our own attention, as “it shapes not just our personal realities, but our collective behavior [because] we, as nodes, decide to pass new ideas onto our connections”.
The rest of the book explores how we can more consciously deploy our attention to create “infinite, dazzling realities”. But this depends on us being willing to engage with antimemes, highly consequential “thoughts that are cognitively expensive to process” because they challenge our current reality (the racial history of America is one such antimeme that I have only occasionally been engaging with). “To protect our attention and avoid disrupting our daily lives, our “unseeing” defense mechanism kicks in, and the object slips by undetected.” In this framework, “deciding where to direct [our attention] is a practical question of how to spend our limited resources. We need to decide which uncomfortable truths to prioritize and which to let go.”
Where we direct our attention also shapes more than just our personal realities: it influences which ideas do or don’t spread through our networks. … Networks ultimately rely on their nodes to evaluate new ideas. If we let others hijack our ability to engage with difficult or complex ideas, we risk shirking our duties as gatekeepers.
For a healthy idea network, Asparouhova suggests we need people to step up in two roles:
- Truth-tellers who “say what we are all thinking”, because “they can observe and express the hidden collective desires that others cannot”. “Crucially, truth-tellers also unblock our limiting beliefs and enable us to perceive new, previously antimemetic ideas that can be built and iterated upon.” These are not people who want to wreck the community; in fact, they are only effective when they are seen as sharing the community’s values and are speaking up to draw attention to new possibilities for the community. This is what I do as a coach for individuals, drawing attention to new possibilities that they are unable to see for themselves, possibly due to antimemetic patterns.
- Champions are needed to ensure that the new ideas proposed by truth-tellers “are preserved and embedded into our institutions” so “that we keep paying attention to them”. “They help ideas catch on, and, in some cases, create the conditions for unlikely ideas to take off.” She shares a couple examples of ideas that caught fire within certain communities (e.g. jhanas in the Bay Area tech scene) as inspiration that any of us can be champions that bring attention to a new possibility for our communities.
As an aside, this pattern of truth-tellers exploring ideas that must be accepted by communities before being reified into community institutions by champions is one I’ve described before as learn and latch. Communities that latch onto every new idea would be exhausting. Communities that don’t ever learn new ideas are too stagnant. Asparouhova makes a similar point that we need both forces to “maintain a delicate balance. Too much openness, and harmful ideas could spread too easily, destabilizing the system. Too much control, however, stifles healthy discourse. … there is no “ideal” moderation policy. Both require continuous monitoring and adjustments to foster a system that can thrive without tipping into chaos.”
She ends with this inspiring message:
The world, after all, is more than just what we inherit. It’s what we choose to notice, nurture, and build. Everything around us – for worse, yes, but also for the better – is made up of where we direct our attention. If we learn to channel it wisely, we can decide what type of future we want to see.
You have a choice where you place your attention. What ideas will you propagate? What ideas will you champion and instantiate? By bringing that choice to our attention, Asparouhova serves as a truth-teller, offering new possibilities where each of us can contribute to creating the future we want.
