Antimemetics is the study of ideas that resist spreading [0]. Ideas which are the opposite of memes. Rather than going viral, they go dark. Some antimemes are trivial (you can’t remember your friend’s license plate number), some very serious (the obscene prevalence of sexual assault in (not just) Hollywood that went largely unreported until the dam broke).

Faced with these unknown unknowns, the obvious responses are to either meet the challenge with vigilance or ignore it in resignation.

Nadia’s new book [1], Antimemetics, takes neither approach. It is not a rallying cry to win, nor a panic about the danger that lie ahead. Nadia’s Antimemetics is merely post-war. We have, in Nadia’s view, already forgotten so much. The core of Antimemetics is an attempt to even acknowledge the loss, to take the time to count the bodies, and ask where we go from here.

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Of course, the antimemes you even know about are the ones weak enough to be discovered. Some antimemes are so strong they cannot even be looked at directly. Monty Python gives us one example:

In a few moments, he will have written the funniest joke in the world, and as a consequence he will die laughing… It was obvious that this joke was lethal, no one could read it and live

In the skit, the joke gets contained, translated, and then weaponized for use against the Nazis. This is possible only because the joke was written down. Were it simply effective upon being conceived of, and the would-be author killed on the spot, the cause of death would be left a mystery. The joke, even the existence of the joke, would remain forever unknown.

Infohazards are another kind of strong antimeme, this time on a civilizational scale. If there were a way to, as Nick Bostrom describes, create nuclear weapons at trivial cost and complexity, you would simply never know. A civilization that came across this technology would be left with only two options: successful containment, or rapid extinction.

This is the intriguing, funny, and very dark nature of antimemetics. The idea originated as a sci-fi story, has the flavor of a conspiracy theory, and yes, the antimemes are in the room with us now.

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Antimemes themselves resist spreading, but even as a concept, antimemetics can be difficult to analyze directly. Nadia spends a lot of time talking around the issue instead.

And so Antimemetics is ostensibly about antimemes, but really it’s mostly about the social dynamics and the death of the open web. [4]

Antimemetics comes from this soil: the internet has changed, a certain version of it is dying, we’ve retreated into bunkers called group chats, safe and curated spaces. We’re setting an expiration date on our content. Doing more over voice. Doing more privately. More in subcultures and social scenes are in fact designed not to “take off”.

And it bears these fruits: a desire to take note of what was lost, or at the very least acknowledge that there was loss at all. That the mode we are in does constitute a shift, has happened, and is happening to other people too.

The new post-public age is both cozy and terrifying.

Cozy, because we live increasingly in insular bubbles with gatekeepers and curators.[5] And terrifying of course, because, how fucked up does the outside world have to be for you to live this way?

Imagine taking a teaching job at a high school, only to find that kids kept their entire personalities hidden. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Even without seeing it directly, you could immediately infer a culture of bullying, fear, insecurity, etc. [6]

When I first read Nadia’s blog I refused to read anything else for a month. I didn’t want to be distracted. I had taken on the attitude of vigilance. There is something here. I don’t want to lose it. I have got to be very careful. If I forget I may never remember again. I must hold on tightly.

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Though Antimemetics is a new book, Nadia’s interests/concerns in the way the web is “going dark” have been around for a while. From her newsletter in 2021:

The edgiest ideas are no longer being published for public consumption, which is the next logical outcome of both a hostile public environment and finding your 1000 true fans. Maybe everyone just writes for their own tribes now, but what’s left is a void of writing that’s changing our public narrative, filled instead with memelords leering from dark alleyways and snake-oil salesmen spouting platitudes in abandoned town squares.

I don’t know that that’s bad, necessarily. The notion of a unified public dialogue isn’t guaranteed to every generation. It’s just harder to see where society goes from here—how progress gets made—when we’re all stuck talking to ourselves.

What’s changed since 2021 is that she now provides an answer, if not in the content then at least in the contours.

Nadia’s Antimemetics was inspired by the sci-fi novel There is No Antimemetics Division, which was originally published on a collaborative alternate-reality wiki-style foundation about an organization dedicated to protecting humanity from eldritch horrors. Her book is being published by The Dark Forest Collective [7], a group of friends instantiated as a “label” (channel? producer?) on Metalabel [8], a “release platform for creative work”.

Peter Thiel’s Zero to One lays out two distinct forms of progress:

1. Developing new things (vertical progress, or innovation)
2. Spreading those new things (horizontal progress, or globalization)

These mechanisms are synergistic, but also at odds with each other. If everyone adopts the current best practice, we risk crowding out new experiments. Consider a small country that gets “invaded” by Starbucks, and doesn’t get a chance to develop local coffee culture. In some ways this is good, and shows the system working as intended. Starbucks has created a fantastic product, they’ve heavily optimized it, those benefits should be spread across as many people as possible. On the other hand, these “best practices” have to come from somewhere, and spreading them too widely carries the risk of premature optimization.

Dwarkesh interviewing Tony Blair on his work advising world leaders:

For any one leader you’re probably giving very sensible advice for their country. It’s a positive expected value. To the extent that limits variance and experimentation across countries in different ways to govern or different policies, are we losing the ability to discover a new Singapore?

It’s tempting to homogenize in order to spread good ideas, but we need to maintain enough heterogeneity to keep pockets of innovation alive so that there are new and even better ideas in the future.

In 2012, Peter worried that we had gone too far towards globalization. In 2025, Nadia worries we’re in too deep on balkanization. These aren’t the only axes, but that’s the vibe, and it will become an increasingly familiar one.

Whatever’s coming next will emerge from these shadows. To most observers, these ideas will, as Nadia writes, “appear to come out of nowhere”. But they are lurking even now, biding their time, waiting, holding on.

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Footnotes

[1] If Working in Public was a book so legible (from its title, the context you already have about open source software, the author’s pre-existing reputation), that people did not even feel they had to read it to understand it, Nadia’s new book is the exact opposite. It is a book that I have, in the process of writing this review, now read three times, and still do not feel I understand at all. [1a]

[1a] At least these books can be referenced. I have often found it hard to even talk about Nadia’s blog. [1a*]

When I first found Nadia’s blog, I was hooked. I wanted more, but didn’t know what to look for or how to even describe what I had found. If I had to use a word to describe Nadia, it would be “attuned”. But attuned to what exactly?

Nadia’s writing is ostensibly about software, except when it’s about social deception games, democracy, shame, or one of the other dozen other topics she’s opined on in the last decade. There are plenty of other blogs about all of these topics, but they do not scratch the same itch. In fact, reading Nadia gives you a kind of ongoing background paranoia that makes you suspect most other blogs are getting distracted from what is really at stake when these topics come up.

This is for the simple reason that even after years of reading it, I cannot convey what Nadia’s blog is actually about. [1a**]

This all changed after her first book was released, but not in the way you might expect. It did, for a period, feel like she had become a local celebrity [1b]. Yet despite hearing her a name a lot, even then, I heard very little about the contents of the book. [1c]

It was at this time that I realized an odd truth: the opacity and difficult-to-convey-ness of her writing was exactly the same quality that made it so compelling.

[1a*] This is in contrast to many of my favorite authors who I love to evangelize (my mom knows who Alexey Guzey is) or find it hard not to talk about (I’ve committed the sin of paraphrasing an SSC post from memory at someone),

[1a**] Most writers, whether they like it or not, quickly fall into a shtick. The shtick is an insight that functions as a lens, and by going around and applying the lens, you can generate new insights at a very low cost.

Sometimes the schtick is obvious (“everything is trauma”, “society is stagnating”, “liberals are ruining video games”), sometimes the vibe is clear, but the underlying insight hard to pin down (Scott didn’t even know how to describe what his blog was about until he started his second!).

Having a schtick is in no way bad. As Alexey writes in Cursed omens of exceptional talent:

16. their entire worldview seems to be derived from a single insight

In fact, when I was blogging actively, there were months when if you were to ask me why, I would have said “I am trying to convey this idea, but I don’t know how to do it directly. So I am simply stating over and over how this idea impacts my view of the world, and hoping that if I do this from enough different angles I will have drawn a picture of the whole.”

More succinctly, I might have said that my writing was an attempt to reveal the shape of the intellectual dark matter I know exists but can’t directly describe. As Samo defines:

intellectual dark matter: knowledge we cannot see publicly, but whose existence we can infer because our institutions would fly apart if the knowledge we see were all there was. [1a**2]

Though not bad, having an obvious schtick can limit your intellectual lifetime. This can happen a few ways:

1. You win, but no one cares anymore. Yes okay, I see now that everything is actually trauma. I can see through that lens now, I just don’t think the perspective is actually that useful or important.
2. You lose, the perspective is not comprehensible. You keep saying society is stagnating and pointing to signs of cultural exhaustion. But I liked the new Top Gun, I liked Loki, I’ll see Minions 3 in theaters even though it’s a sequel to a spin off. I just don’t see it the way you do.
3. You win so profoundly that your schtick takes on life beyond your writing. At an individual level it gets internalized, at a societal level, it ends up in the water. No one is impressed that Dawkins coined the term “meme”, everyone gets it already. As I wrote about John Nerst:

Occasionally, upon finding a great new source, I will binge read the best pieces. When I first found out about Everything Studies, I felt nearly enlightened. But after reading his archives, I feel that I’ve properly internalized the blog’s worldview. I still check it occasionally, but the marginal impact of each new post on my thinking is fairly low.

So what exactly is Nadia on about? It’s a little hard to say. And this fact, not being able to “see through”, was a very large part of what compelled me to keep reading.

[1a**2]  Of course, one man’s Modus Ponens… Fully enumerated, the chain of reasoning is:

A) There are pieces of knowledge that do not appear to exist
B) Without this knowledge the institutions wouldn’t function
C) The institutions do function

Samo’s logic is that since B and C are clearly true, A must be false, and the knowledge exists in secret. But one could reasonably choose to instead challenge B or C. Perhaps the institutions are in fact already falling apart. Or perhaps the knowledge is not actually necessary and the institutions function through some other mechanism.

[1b] To the extent that I recall feeling like a hipster, mildly aggravated that other people liked the thing I already liked.

[1c] What little people would say might just be to introduce the book as being about Open Source. Oh, what about it? “You know, like how open source is made and maintained.” If prodded, what proceeded after hearing the title was mostly just a kind of hallucination, one not unfamiliar to all of us now in the LLM era, where someone would explain roughly what they expected a book about open source to be about given what they knew from other contexts about open source. Like “yeah, it’s about how contributors aren’t rewarded enough and these projects need more help… I assume”. [3a]

[3a] I’ll admit, I have an ongoing paranoia about people having not actually read the books they’re talking about, but in my defense, this is often literally true. [3a*]

People don’t read books, and this fact does not seem to dissuade them from explaining the books to other people, criticising the books, or even professing love for the book.

[3a*] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and A Pattern Language are perhaps in competition for, within some circles, being the books with the highest ratio of minutes discussed to pages read.

[4]  What social dynamics? Cancel culture [4a] is the obvious one. A kind of social immune system that goes after and silences certain kind of inflammatory or offensive ideas. But it is not a book about cancel culture so much as about the second order consequences, and where we go from there.

Cancel culture is, by the way, exactly the kind of topic that was impossible to write about until recently. Any commentary one might have could be seen only through the soldier mindset of being pro or anti cancel culture. Any nuance one might try to introduce could only be understood in the net effect it had on this debate, and which side it implicitly landed you on.

But now Nadia sees that the wave has cusped, that the vibes have shifted, and we’re now picking up the pieces and dealing with the fallout. Antimemetics is not a book about cancel culture, it is the first post-cancel culture book.

[4a]  Cancel culture, but also trolls and stalkers and so on, which are maybe like the right-wing version of cancel culture in a lower volume but higher intensity way.

[5]  I used to write stuff, not on this blog but personally, in a hope to meet new people and attract friends. Can you imagine? How barbaric. Now I have group chats run by super connector moderators. Can you believe I used to just give people unfiltered access to my thoughts?

The new “dark” era already feels normal. We’re solidly in a post-Facebook world where the idea of sharing everything with everyone all the time has gone back to feeling repulsive. As it happens, the early Web 2.0 era where it felt reasonable to post your vacation plans / deepest thoughts / relationship status on the internet was just a brief and unsustainable moment in history.

[6] Or imagine instead, living a life secluded in your apartment, never having known the outside world or even that it exists. You could persist this way day after day. Until you notice, in the depth of your closet, an umbrella. You see the shape, you make inferences. This was carried. Seemingly for protection of some sort? Against what exactly? There must be something. You notice mud on your shoes. More questions follow. Even without windows, without doors, you can begin to make inferences. There is something else out there. What you see is not all that there is. Hold on. Hold on.

[7] Speaking of cultural repetition (non-derogatory), Dark Forest Collective is itself a riff on a riff. It stems from (was seeded by?) Yancey’s 2019 essay The dark forest theory of the internet, which attempts to apply the concept of a Dark Forest from Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem to the actual scenario unfolding on the internet.

Yancey’s analogy is loose but impactful: the internet has become hostile, things have quieted (or at least become more sanitized, less personal) as a result, and people have retreated to secluded (private, cozy) havens.

Is there hope for public life?

Let’s turn back to the source material and get more specific.

Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this supersociety…

Like Euclidean geometry, you’ll set up a few simple axioms at first, then derive an overall theoretic system using those axioms as a foundation.

First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant…

To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion, and the technological explosion.

What is the chain of suspicion? Merely that:

‘Benevolence’ means not taking the initiative to attack and eradicate other civilizations… [a] civilization can’t predict that any other civilization is benevolent… Next, even if you know that I think you’re benevolent, and I also know that you think I’m benevolent, I don’t know what you think about what I think about what you’re thinking about me.

And finally: technological explosion:

The potential for technological leaps is the explosive buried within every civilization, and if it’s lit by some internal or external factor, it goes off with a bang. On Earth it took three hundred years, but there’s no reason why humanity should be the fastest of all cosmic civilizations… If at any time I experience a technological explosion that suddenly puts me far ahead of you, then I’m stronger than you. On the scale of the universe, several hundred years is the snap of a finger. That means that even though I’m just a newborn or growing civilization, I’m still a big danger to you.

To sum up, suppose:

0. There are many civilizations
1. Survival is the primary need of civilization
2. Civilizations continuously grows and expand
   2.b) The total matter in the universe remains constant
3. A civilization cannot predict if another civilization is benevolent
4. Civilizations can undergo rapid technological expansion (“Rapid” relative to the timescales on which distant civilizations interact)

Then, you have the dark forest:

Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization.

It is important to be specific here, because when laid out this way, we can see not merely a deterministic outcome, but axioms which may be challenged or context-dependent. And such is the danger of reasoning by analogy. While analogies can be illustrative as a way of remarking on similarities or conveying an intuition from a more familiar world to a less familiar one, this kind of thinking should never be taken as definitive.

Thinking through all the disanalogies between the Cosmic Sociological context and the internet can be left as an exercise (as can thinking about the ways these axioms are not even airtight in the original context), but I will lay out a few key ones:

• Survival is not the primary need of internet citizens. We have desires for attention, for money, for self-worth, for friendship. Only very rarely is literal survival at stake in a way that takes precedence over all else.
• There is not really a danger that one creator “take up” so much of “the internet” (in terms of the attention economy, the literal economy, the traffic) that they leave nothing for others.
• The internet is not limited in the same way as the universe, and especially not in the pockets that subcultures thrive in. For a time, indie writers on Substack were collectively benefiting from making newsletters a “thing” and benefited more from drawing market share from other sources of content (mainstream publications, Twitter, activities other than reading) that they did from drawing market share away from another.

And so on. Though the analogy does illustrate some basic dynamics (the more visible you are, the more you risk becoming a target), those dynamics do not necessarily dominate.

[8] And what is Metalabel really? In terms of features, it’s roughly Gumroad meets Patreon, but in terms of vibes it’s hard to say. What is clear, is that Metalabel is a kind of reaction, one might even say resistance, to the way the internet has evolved.

They do not say this, what they say is “A new space where creative people cooperate rather than compete”, but the implication is clear. Paraphrasing the vibe in my own words: “The web has become hostile, this is a new way of doing things, it’s not really clear what, structurally (technologically, financially, legal) enforces/enables/allows this new way, but damn it, we are going to try”.

And a couple other words: precious and hopeful. Metalabel is the kind of project you want to succeed, and so you want to support it. But implicit in the idea of “support” is the recognition that this thing cannot live on its own.

You do not really expect it to still be around in a few years, except maybe as a kind of social scene for eccentrics, and this ephemerality makes you even more eager to be a part of this weird and fragile thing while it lasts.

You used to comfort yourself with the knowledge that social media is fake. But now the beautiful people are here, in person, all around you, and there is no denying any of it. They perform movements you’ve never conceived of, loaded with weights you never thought possible.

Are they on steroids? Some of them, sure. But the better question is, why do you need them to be? Would it be so unacceptable if there simply were un-enhanced humans of this caliber walking the earth?

You’ve spent years decrying the illusory nature of snapchat filters. The judgment inherent in every act of self-promotion. The body-dysmorphia incurred by exposure to this super-stimulating hellscape.

It was about protecting teen girls, ostensibly. But you haven’t met one in years, nevermind cared for their wellbeing. No, this was always about your needs. And a fear, whispered only in darkness, that these beautiful people might actually be out there.

And now here they are in all their glory. Sweat shimmering in a way baby oil cannot. Sculpted abs popping out of midriff-cuts, deltoids bulging out of tank tops, leggings so tight you could see cellulite, if anyone had any.

Your mind flits from one possibility to another. Sure, he’s bigger than you are, but is he smarter? Is his work as socially impactful? Is he as mindful, aware, and empathetic? Those are the qualities after all, which truly determine one’s value in life. But oh how shameful to even ask these questions. To cannibalize so readily every aspect of your character merely to shield your ego. To set ablaze every virtue you may claim to possess at the altar of the vain god.

This itch not to be outdone served you well, but only in smaller enclaves. You could be the best in your grade, your school, maybe even the country. But to want to be the best everywhere at everything demands a reconfiguration not only of your life but of the value system underlying it. Instead of working harder, you do a perverse kind of emotional labor to explain why, actually, this is fine.

How can one possibly live under these conditions? Let’s not ask merely rhetorically.

One: Return to the cradle of subculture society. Go all-in on your hobby. Ignore the chads and study the blade. Develop allegiance to an all encompassing single-axis theory of value. If they are better than you, it can’t be in a way that matters, and so “mattering” ends up taking the hit.

Two: Develop a specific combination of traits so that for any 1:1 comparison, you can always find a way to come out ahead. Become a polymath. Find your niche at the intersection of an increasingly contorted Venn diagram. Convince yourself that this combination of traits is coherent as a value system.

Three: Do this dynamically and on the fly, deciding only at the moment of battle which axis is the one that really matters. Meet someone bigger? Decide you care about the intellect. Meet someone smarter? Tell them to touch grass. Charizard will always be weak to water, but he can also learn Thunder Punch and counter right back. Adapt to any and all phenomena like a late throw in rock-paper-scissors.

Those are strategies for dealing with the mess, but what if there’s something better? A way to outright escape. To opt-out. You could stop making this kind of comparison in the first place. Accept yourself simply for who you are. Find peace.

Next time you see someone better, just think to yourself “Ha! They don’t even realize that you don’t have to compete”. Just be above it all. And hey, maybe that could be your thing.

There’s a tradition of identifying aberrant behavior, posing a mystery around its existence, and using that as a jumping off point for speculative theories on human nature. From Scott’s review of Sadly, Porn:

Why do people have fetishes which seem contrary to common sense (submission, humiliation, cuckoldry, etc)?.. Teach writes: “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.” This seems totally insane and also I can’t rule it out.

This makes for engaging writing, and it’s a good trick to generate suspense, but it only works if you assume that the behavior in question requires an explanation. That is, if you assume that behavior “contrary to common sense” is at all uncommon.

I don’t think this is true. Across domains and cultural contexts, people have all sorts of weird preferences, and engaging in at least a few of these seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Consider:

• Spicy food made with capsaicin, which literally evolved in plants to prevent animals from eating them.
• Scary movies
• Liquor which burns your throat.
• Exercise in general, including weightlifting which literally tears your muscles, hobbies like rock climbing which routinely involve torn skin, all combat sports.
• Very bitter beers
• Sad music, movies, books
• Strongly fermented foods like natto (fermented soybeans often described as having a “booger-like texture”), blue cheese, garum (made by letting fish intestines rot in the sun), and so on
• Etc.

And ask yourself, does the existence of submission as a fetish really require a particular explanation? Is it so mysterious that I should be willing to accept a highly speculative hypothesis over the default stance that people often enjoy things which don’t seem (to me) intuitively pleasant?

Some of you read the above list and though “you nerd, liquor is good, you just have to learn to appreciate it”. But that’s precisely the point! I do like many of these things, and I expect you do too.

The popular explanations fall into veins like:

• “People just pretend to enjoy those things in order to seem manly/interesting/cultured.”
• “People just pretend to have weird fetishes to have sex with other people who either genuinely have those fetishes, or are just playing the same game.”
• “People engage in unpleasant things as a means to an end. No one likes running, they like endorphins.”

And sure! That might be true. My point isn’t that people are self-defeating and hate pleasure (though this also sometimes seems true), or that the existence of these preferences doesn’t provide an insight into human nature. It’s that “enjoying seemingly unpleasant things” seems to me nearly universal, such that any particular instance of it doesn’t merit much psychoanalysis.