Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading

by Nadia Asparouhova

It's easier than ever to share ideas, yet some of the most interesting ideas are burrowing deeper underground, circulating quietly among group chats, texts, and whisper networks. While memes – self-replicating bits of culture – thrive in an attention-driven economy, other ideas are becoming strangely harder to find. Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading explores this paradox, uncovering the hidden forces that determine what we remember, what we forget, and why some ideas – no matter how compelling – resist going viral.

Drawing on historical examples, internet phenomena, and the mechanics of attention, as well as her experiences in the technology sector, Nadia Asparouhova examines how cultural and technological systems shape what enters the public consciousness. She argues that while some ideas spread effortlessly, others are structurally resistant to spread, whether due to their complexity, our personal discomfort with these ideas, or a lack of incentives to share them.

As we collectively navigate a highly charged, memetic world where the hive mind dictates what we see and think about, Antimemetics offers a new way to think about our place in the information ecosystem. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the tide of viral noise, and often it seems like the only options are to either disengage or be swept away. But withdrawing from the conversation isn’t the only answer. By noticing what gets lost in the memetic churn, we can reclaim our attention, find thoughtful ways to participate, and shape the exchange of ideas – rather than letting it unconsciously shape us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy, Psychology, Technology, Science, Theory

166 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2025

Reviews

[Randa Sakallah · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked it a lot, it's giving me a new lens on the world. need to digest more and think about how it applies to my life. in general i feel like the ideas in most non-fiction books i read are antimemetic, maybe, ironically, including this one. they sound great and i want to integrate them into my life and then i ... don't. we'll see!

[Kara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was short, but it took me a minute to get through because it’s a bit academic and I wasn’t necessarily motivated to pick it back up after a work day. I did appreciate the examples throughout to help connect the concepts to real-world ideas and situations. I think there’s a lot here that’s of interest for understanding how/why social media use and news consumption and communication have changed.

[Héctor Iván Patricio Moreno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este libro habla de una idea que nació en la ciencia ficción indie y que es extremadamente interesante: las cosas que evitan que sepas de ellas de alguna forma. En la historia de ciencia ficción ("Theres is no Antimemetics Division") se pintan como entidades, seres o animales que tienen propiedades que hacen que te olvides de ellos, o que evitan directamente que los percibas. Esa idea me gustó tanto que me puse a pensar en ejemplos de la vida real que tuvieran estas propiedades y no llegué más que a la conclusión de que son cosas fabricadas intencionalmente por el hombre, como mensajes relacionados con la criptografía y la esteganografía.

Pero Nadia, se ve que después de haberlo pensado por mucho tiempo, llegó a ejemplos más interesantes de los que yo pude llegar: información que se beneficia de ser poco conocida como los tabús (podemos pensar en mensajes que especialmente buscan estar escondidos, porque nadie se atreve a reconocerlos abiertamente). También hay cosas que todos sabemos y recordamos pero parecen no tener un efecto en nuestro mundo, por ejemplo el cambio climático, el horario de verano, la corrupción de los gobernantes, etc. Nadia propone dos perfiles que pueden ayudarnos primero a reconocer esos mensajes antimiméticos y segundo a actuar sobre ellos: los contadores de la verdad y los campeones. La diferencia entre ellos es que mientras ambos dicen cosas que permanecían ocultas, los campeones lo hacen con la intención de que las cosas cambien y persiguen su objetivo hasta lograr un cambio.

Otro de los puntos fuertes del libro es un análisis que hace sobre dos características de las ideas: su impacto y su transmisión. Esto lleva a crear dos grupos de alto impacto: los supermemes y los antimemes. Esta forma de clasificación me parece una herramienta útil para analizar el discurso público (y privado).

Es un libro muy interesante, creo que las ideas se pueden desarrollar aún más y estoy seguro que este libro va a desatar más escritos, sean de parte de Nadia o de otras personas sobre este tema. Además, el libro trata muchos otros temas interesantes que dan qué pensar, por ejemplo, el tema de la atención humana y cómo esta modifica tu vida. Finalmente, la forma en que hace el análisis y construye los argumentos es una buena lección para mi y me abre un poco más el camino sobre la forma en la que yo quiero aprender a escribir.

Comencé no disfrutando tanto este libro, porque la autora tiene una forma de escritura rara: es muy pragmática, al punto, pero de repente le salen estilos de periodista (estilo que no disfruto para nada). Además siento que la primer parte tiene un subtono negativo que te pinta el panorama oscuro y no sabes si quieres continuar con eso. Sin embargo, las ideas son lo suficientemente interesantes como para continuar con el libro y avanza hasta un el punto en que me olvidé de los puntos negativos que estoy mencionando (o tal vez cambia de tono). Otro defecto para los que no somos estadounidenses es que muchas de las cosas que menciona están centradas en ese país y en su cultura, eso le puede quitar un poco de atractivo al libro mientras más alejado estés culturalmente de ellos, pero creo que es algo bastante salvable.

Conclusión: es un librito que cuesta leer, pero que vale la pena por todos los temas novedosos e interesantes que pone sobre la mesa, por el análisis minucioso que hace sobre la transmisión de las ideas y por los puntos prácticos que pone para actuar sobre esos análisis.

[Jack Warfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot about this book is antimemetic in itself. It is less book that hands you insights, as much as it is a book that makes you think about topics in interesting ways. The effect of that is that it is hard to exactly remember what the brilliant insight you feel like you just had was almost immediately after turning the page.

It is short and easy enough of a read to be worth it, but the entire thing feels somewhat like a lead-up to a point that is never fully reached or made.

[Jacquelyn Oesterblad · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought this was, like, a philosophy book. I did not realize it was written by a tech writer. Unfortunately, my bias against Silicon-Valley-slop-parading-itself-(with-extremely-unearned-confidence-)as-real-Thought continues to be vindicated. This read like a LinkedIn post.

[jasmine sun]

this book itself is an antimemetic project — it communicates more than it says

[Alexander Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

The core idea of this book and some of its framework I find particularly inspiring. The argument that antimemes are a real thing worthy of consideration and the way its schematized are particularly thoughtful ideas here that I might be able to borrow from in my own work.

That said, I think this book subscribes to a lot of the metaphysics that are endemic to Silicon Valley "memetic" thinking more than developing a genuine self-reflection. The issues she's culturally critiquing emerge from almost exactly the same trajectory she's following in the book. Nadia gets really close to rejecting a lot of tech culture tropes, but then it always seems to bend back towards a kind of moral ambivalence such as her subscription to "utilitarian" thinking about memory. This view is problematically neoliberal if not outright capitalist about attention economy. Even though Nadia laments how social media colonizes attention, the utilitarian "solution" and Utopian networked individualistic rationalism implicitly fuels exactly how the capitalization of minds happens. It's not the solution. It's literally the problem. Far from being the "truth-teller" mythos she places herself within, much of this is implicitly siding with the metaphysics of tech sector's tendency towards capitalism, Utopian networked individualism, and even weird western interpretations of yoga that supposedly she's currently researching. (She notes there are western biases about yoga, but like many other topics in the book, she seems to avoid giving concrete thoughts about what this means and appears mostly ambivalent about it, leaving me wondering what she's really arguing for, against, or if she's just describing what most people already know about the west coast's culture.)

This book nudges the current techno-regime to be a little self-reflective, but it often falls back into its own Silicon Valley echo chamber of thought too quickly, and sometimes is even reactionary. There are a lot of ways that I could see the interpretation of this book falling into the same sort of weirdness that she describes about Curtis Yarvin's ideological uptake. Perhaps it's necessary to step away from the silicon to really see the bigger picture this book proclaims.

[Nat]

I'm trying to find grabby ways of updating my now somewhat dusty "Speech Attacks" course on truth, bullshit, and propaganda. I started teaching it in 2016 and it's been updated a couple of times, but a lot has happened in the last couple of years...

This was fun and provocative, and tipped me off to a couple of cool things I hadn't read, like Kevin Simler's "Going Critical" essay, which I think I'll include on the section on how ideas spread. Maybe I'll include some memetics/antimemetics stuff as well, and the cultural anthropology literature that would make it more grounded in experiment and observation (I'm thinking of Olivier Morin's How Traditions Live and Die, one of my favorite books from the last 10 years or so).

[David Wagner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could have been a blog post.

No, seriously, the basic ideas are of course relevant and somehow meaningful. However, the basic problem of the book comes up when you consider where the book gets it's inspirations and ideas - and it's mostly from the rat/post-rat ecosystem. The moment you write about discourses and narratives (which are crucial in the context of "memes and anti-memes") and the main reference point is China Mieville or Scott Alexander, but Foucault or phenomenologists are not mentioned at all the results feel like trying to come up with the very same ideas _again_.

Still being worth a read probably, mostly due to being very short and as an illustration of type of thinking and it's limitations.

[Eric Nehrlich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have followed Asparouhova's newsletter for several years so I was excited to read her new book. Some fascinating analysis here about why it's so hard to stay focused on certain ideas (antimemes) that our minds slide away from, either because they are unpleasant to consider (the horrors of the world like refugee crises or police brutality) or difficult to grapple with (systemic challenges).

I suspect one of the reasons I like her work is that we have many of the same references; in her chapter on the interesting people we need to explore the ideas that are normally unspoken, I thought of Lewis Hyde's book on the trickster, and she started quoting from it two pages later.

Her call to action is that our attention is our way to create the world. By choosing where we focus, we can propagate and amplify existing memes, or we can bring attention and progress to ideas that would otherwise languish as antimemes. The book doesn't offer too much practical advice on how to do that, but I appreciated the labeling of this phenomena because one way antimemes avoid our attention is because we don't have the language to discuss them.

[Neall · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't agree with the implied definition of "antimemetics," which is sort of the core idea here, but this was still a thought-provoking read. In particular, I loved the sections on memetic engineering on the internet, and the game-theoretic oddities that come along with it. The intellectual “scene” she draws many examples from is one I occupy, so those landed well.

Our core disagreement: I think an idea’s failure to spread is not necessarily indicative of antimemetic status.

All ideas have some amount of memetic fitness, which (I’d argue) are composed of:
1. Salience - do hosts remember it?
2. Attention - how much time do hosts spend thinking about it?
3. Transmissibility - does the idea compel its host to share it?

An antimeme, in my mind, is one that scores low on the above three dimensions.
The key difference with Nadia's interpretation seems to lie in #3: is an idea not transmitting because its host isn't sufficiently compelled to share it, or because external forces prevent its being shared (e.g. social penalties placed on the host for sharing)? If I’m understanding her view, she might argue it doesn’t matter _why_ the idea isn’t propagating.

Controversial ideas during COVID are given as antimemetic examples — the hostility faced by promoters of these ideas keep them limited to small circles, making them “antimemes.” I’d argue that these ideas were at peak fitness because of the context: a culture insisting on their suppression.

An example of my own:
- A meme has taken residency in a host who speaks language A.
- The host lives amongst people who exclusively speak the linguistically-distant language B.
- The host is compelled to spread the meme, but is prevented by the language barrier.

In my opinion, the meme's lack of propagation doesn't make it any less of a meme.
As far as I can tell, the only true "antimemes" are ideas so utterly banal, or so painful, that they cannot persist in the mind of a host, let alone be shared.

It seems that there are two ways to understand memetics:
1. By observing a meme's potential — analogizing with evolutionary bio and genetics (a “meme’s-eye view”)
2. By observing a meme's behavior — understood best in epidemiological terms.

Nadia seems to prefer the latter perspective, where a meme's practical behavior reveals its memetic status. I prefer the former.

My highlights:

Cognitive biases, too, like Gell-Mann amnesia (where we recognize that the media reports inaccurately on topics we know well, yet trust their expertise on topics we don’t) or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (noticing a word or concept everywhere once we’ve been made aware of it), have antimemetic qualities.

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Scapegoating doesn’t explain how we finally managed to exit the dreadful loop of the 2010s culture wars. It only explains how we became trapped in a state of perpetual warfare – what Strickler called the “dark forest” – in the first place. But we did manage to exit this dreadful loop, somehow, though it required a different path. Some dissenters quietly unhanded themselves of addictive god-drug and set out to find a better way of living. Private fortresses dotted the horizon, perched among the distant prairies of the web. Memetic tribes, who now reserved their public behavior for deliberate warfare or recruitment, occasionally popped their heads out the trenches to shoot or return fire to another tribe.

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group chats have clearly replaced “backroom meetings among powerful media figures” as the modern successor to “the proverbial smoke-filled room.”[

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Just as in the offline world, we have public streets and private homes, our online world now has public feeds and private chats. After the cities came the suburbs – we didn’t just escape to the countryside.

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Other members of the Monday Mafia share Garfield’s post on public channels, then publish their own statements in support of his position. Similarly, they all appear to represent only themselves, with no mention of their group affiliation. It now appears that many unaffiliated people – not just Garfield – believe that Mondays are awful and should be outlawed. This creates the illusion of broad, uncoordinated agreement, which lowers the social cost for others to join the anti-Monday movement.

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This strategy – presenting as individuals in public, while keeping group membership private – helps ideas spread in a Dark Forest landscape where the public is highly sensitive, and often hostile to, the tribes they don’t belong to. Trying to make the tribe appear bigger and more threatening would only put a target on its back; it’s more effective to weaponize individualism.

=====

Dense, isolated networks appear to be more stable and harmless, but they have weak immune systems. High trust between nodes means that they are more receptive to ideas – any ideas – that are introduced to the group, which can infect its members at an alarming rate.

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When someone donates a large sum of money to a charity, for example, they tend to frame it as selfless altruism, rather than acknowledging motives like gaining power or assuaging guilt. These hidden, selfish motives are antimemetic: they remain invisible to the perceiver, because noticing them would present a challenge to how they see themselves.

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When confronted with the noise and unpredictability of the public web, it can feel good to retreat to quieter spaces, whether that’s the private web or our local communities. If our attention is truly ours to spend as we wish, there should be nothing wrong with this behavior. But retreating from the chaos only protects ourselves. It is akin to fleeing to gated communities or the suburbs to avoid the dangers of cities, burying ourselves in the comforts of “local community,” while avoiding the hard work of getting things done at civilizational scale.

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Obscurantist writing is also called “Straussian” writing – named for the scholar Leo Strauss, who argued that throughout history, heterodox ideas were often cloaked in obscure, tedious rhetoric to avoid censorship and persecution. A thick coat of Straussian paint can help sensitive ideas travel across the public web, while also escaping detection.

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Just as the Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates to control inflation or stimulate growth, social platforms adjust their algorithms and moderation policies to manage the flow of information. The goal in both cases is to maintain a delicate balance. Too much openness, and harmful ideas could spread too easily, destabilizing the system – just as runaway inflation can destabilize the economy. Too much control, however, stifles healthy discourse – just as excessively high interest rates can stifle economic growth. And, just as there is no “ideal” interest rate – because rates are dependent upon a constantly evolving, unpredictable system – there is no “ideal” moderation policy. Both require continuous monitoring and adjustments to foster a system that can thrive without tipping into chaos.

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Mnemonic devices can help us, as individuals, keep slippery ideas at the forefront of our memories. But networks, too, use cultural norms like rituals, traditions, and storytelling to keep themselves from forgetting. How do we collectively decide which ideas are worth remembering?

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photo apps like Apple’s Photos or Google Photos – which could have easily become a black box of memories – are designed to resurface photos from our past. There is nothing innately ephemeral about social posts, any more than the countless photos we’ve taken are innately memorable. The difference is in the design of our systems, which have downstream effects on how we engage with the ideas contained within.

[John Andrew Szott III · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read about the spread of ideas (or lack thereof) across nodes in our digital age. In a world of memes, supermemes, and antimemes, Nadia makes a case for the power of attention in constructing our realities (chapter 4 is my favorite chapter). Also, her examples and illustrations are very thought-provoking in a fresh way (e.g., dark forest theory). I’ll be ruminating on this one for a bit!

In the end, Nadia’s overly optimistic perspective concerning our ability to master our own attention (through the jhanas?) and the presupposition that there is no help coming from outside of humanity desperately need a robust injection of the noetic effects of sin, the disordering of desires, and Christian eschatology.

[Victor Forissier · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a book that begs more questions than it answers. This shows it is a work belonging to the frontier of ideas.

A thoroughly interesting topic, I'd recommend anyone to read it. I personally would want to read anything else she'd write on antimemetics.

You can feel that book is an experimental research. It feels as a 166 pages essay, where you can feel Nadia Asparouhova trying to grasp at something that isn't really there yet.

Some things left me a little bit unfulfilled, but I suspect it's got more to do with the newness of the field than the book. I would have loved a more detailed exploration of the various types of antimemes, more on the biology around how people forget, and why, and the structure of antimeme networks: more taxonomy, and more examples, more science, a deeper comparative analysis of Girardian memetics: it's not a criticism, but this book felt like an introduction to the field, une entrée.

It would be absolutely lovely to live in a world where Mrs. Asparouhova elected to embark onto the project of writing a 800 pages addendum textbook diving much deeper. A complete study of antimemetics. But I suspect she has a family life and plans for the next 5 years. It could be done in 2 or 3 though!

I got a feel for antimemes with qntm's book, their shape with Nadia's book, now I desperatly want X-rays and a complete description of their immune system.

As it's such a new concept, it would be nice to have some kind of registry of antimemes, to map definitions and abstract shapes to practical objects. But I understand the author's reluctance to intersperse her writing with "50 ideas most people find utterly abject and immoral but that I think are true and antimemes and I'm going to tell you why".

I wonder if the book wasn't written in an antimemetic style, because I am having a hard time remembering everything I read 3 weeks ago. The author having no memory of what she's written (in her own words) will find this hard to swallow.

It was also very lovely how she weaved in bits of her personal life and stories, touching personal anecdotes, secrets on her psychology, and a journey in Silicon Valley, through ideas, and a specific zeitgeist. This in itself made it a really good book, tasteful and enjoyable to read. It goes way beyond the strength of the subject studied.

I felt like I was navigating though Nadia Asparouhova's way of thinking, experiencing intimately the world through her eyes. For that I felt so clearly that her brain worked differently than mine, from the way she wrote, there must be something right in the way she did. Far different from the experience of reading her first book, Working in Public. It made me want to read all her essays, which I will, having read none so far.

I have another book request: an analysis of what make some people predisposed to antimeme discovery through an historical review of the great antimemes of history and their respective pathfinders.

I'm very happy I pre-ordered this book and read it. Only giving it a 4 (better than average) and not a 5 (especially great) because I was still a bit hungry at the end of the meal.

[Mikhail Kalashnikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Это книга об антимемах — идеях, которые не хотят распространяться; и она сама в каком-то смысле антимем. Она недлинная, но читал я ее прямо долго, и спустя несколько месяцев даже сложно вспомнить основные идеи (впрочем, зато легко вспомнить начало, оно тут мощное). Я давно подписан на рассылку Нади; книга выглядит как ее продолжение, набор разных интересных тем, которые до конца не складываются в единую идею. Но выписал себе много цитат, и несколько книжек уже прочитал благодаря наводкам отсюда, так что вполне рекомендую.

Цитаты:

«We tumble down YouTube rabbit holes, peering deeper into the abyss, until we find ourselves caught in the crosshairs of a stranger who is ranting and raving about frogs or tankies or the longhouse or nazbols – obscure online microtrends that never quite break into the mainstream. We subscribe to newsletters about things we’re too embarrassed to tell others we want to know about: COVID conspiracy theories, what women really think, my self-help journey to eternal bliss.»

«Cringe is more than just internet slang: it’s an entirely new, and dangerous, way of operating. Before cringe, people just… tried things, some of which landed, and some which did not. Cringe suppresses the truth-tellers: the chaotic, creative idiots who gleefully prod us to reassess what we think we know and believe. It raises the cost of taking risks and makes it socially expensive.»

«Disney World’s parks are rife with this sort of infrastructure, which supports some 120,000 visitors per day. One of the reasons we don’t notice these things is because Disney has coated them in an unremarkable shade of grayish green paint, nicknamed “Go Away Green.”»

«Another soft tactic is to paint spicy ideas in Go Away Green: in other words, make them less interesting to others. Bostrom calls this tactic obscurantism, and it is a form of intellectual camouflage, just as animals in the wild use patterns and colors to blend into their surroundings and avoid predators. One can effectively divert eyes away from an idea by making it seem either totally repulsive or totally boring.»

«While the line I’d drawn around my world was mostly imaginary – anyone could read my public newsletter archive – I liked that it created an intimate, semi-private space for me and my readers. I preferred speaking to a room of a few thousand people who genuinely cared about what I had to say, instead of lobbing my ideas into the void of a hyper-public platform.»

«Group chats are like social islands. As fast as the internet’s public highways might be, ideas evolve even more rapidly in private online environments. Ideas are tested, iterated upon, and refined, with little outside influence to temper the process, as they adapt to the unique dynamics of their members – much like Darwin’s finches.

(Picture, if you will, that one friend with crazy uncle energy who’s always dropping memes and links in the chat. Their friends might find them entertaining, but don’t take their ideas seriously.)»

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read like a long conversation with someone whose worldview and mind I find fascinating. Though the book is explicitly about antimemetics, I loved the supermeme chapter and how it explained why certain ideas (which all happen to be problems/crises) have made it to the forefront of everyone's minds. The analogies between ideas and viruses just work so well.

This book also explained a chapter of my own life back to me, though not explicitly. In 2020 I left Coinbase because of the apolitical workplace reform, during which the CEO politely but firmly declared the company will no longer tolerate political talk or demands unrelated to the company mission. At the time, there were rumors of an a16z group chat that encouraged this reform, and a crowd of semi-right-leaning founders came out to support it the moment it was public. This instance wasn't named in the book, but it was quite perfectly the textbook antimeme to meme transition. I'm so curious about all the other antimemes left unsaid!

Though I speculate Asparouhova's politics aren't an exact match to Vitalik's, the notes on the diversity of charity compared to government spend were the same line of thought. Makes me want to seek out this class of ideas that are being explored by our thinkiest thinkers before anyone else. The call to action in this book was inspiring and deserves more personal reflection (what problem DOES make my heart expand with possibilities?), and I am glad this book was written.

[Matthew Willox · Rating 2 out of 5]

dark forest = "it's quiet, too quiet"
antimemetics = taboos (not an original idea, nor is it connected to any existing body of work on the topic)
private chat rooms = people talking to each other non-publicly (invented by silicon valley apparently)

and other well studied concepts, tried and true methods of communication, and trodden cliches rebranded as clever new ideas for the silicon valley pseudo-intellectual.

can't make a decent scientific contribution to sociology or anthropology by engaging with the already established body of work? simply rebrand your topic to something new and the wax philosophical.

there are, as with any book, at least an interesting thought or two in this book, but really nothing worth saving unfortunately.

i would say that almost any book on ideas would cover taboos better than this book. an essay from a high school student. regurgitated ChatGPT "epiphanies." epistemolgiwhat?

neo reactionary slackademia dissolved in neoliberal bilge water.

lovely cover, print and format can't make up for the emptiness inside.

[Ritam Mehta]

Easy to read, clearly written, and very personal. The idea of the "antimeme" continues to be slightly illegible to me because I feel like many of the ideas used as examples are liberatarian / right wing, in which case it makes sense that they spread like antimemes if they're not the dominant ideology -- they're about getting buy in for dominance of a specific ingroup, not necessarily spreading an idea for its own merit. The book in general didn't really touch on the fact that the sphere of ideas is heavily manipulated for power consolidation and gain, and there's a constant cycle between ideology and material. HOWEVER, I found a lot of the individual passages very compelling, and the whole thing was insightful in the way that a lot of Silicon Valley thinking and writing is insightful. It's funny; I'm willing to talk about reading this book openly but it might be a bit of an antimeme itself in my social world because of its origins in Silicon Valley and not academia or left thinking.

[Duncan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A quick, easy read, not badly written and contains some interesting stuff. But also, not about antimemes. It's mostly about the factors that cause ideas to spread more quickly and more slowly, and probably should have been called something like "The Modern Ecology of Ideas". It is VERY on-line and very modern, and would have benefited from less TPOT-ology and some historical backing; as far as the author is concerned, ideas started happening c. 1950. If you were near the TPOT Twitter drama of the last decade, but didn't follow it and wanted to know more, this is a good book. If you want a quick overview of media that TPOTers are consuming, this is a good book. If you need an introduction to memes, this is a pretty good book. If you want to know about antimemes, ███████ ███ ████ ████████ ██ ████ ███ ████ ███.

[Anusha Datar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting analysis of the role of the internet, historical/social forces, and the dynamics of individuals' intentions in spreading some ideas while suppressing other ones. I appreciated Nadia's perspective and found her point of view and storytelling style different enough from my own to be compelling and grounded enough to be easy to connect to.

I appreciated the breadth of topics covered in this book, but I did feel like some sections felt unexplored or sparse. I can appreciate the way that it makes this book feel more like a stream of consciousness (or the kind of extremely long and thoughtful message in a group chat that makes you worry a little about the sender), but it left me wanting more.

[Arjit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antimemetics was a fascinating, unusually academic read, and I mean that in the best way. It’s rare to find a book that treats ideas with this level of rigor while still leaving space for playfulness and reflection. The concept of anti-memes made me stop and think more than once about how ideas spread (or resist spreading), both online and inside organizations.

One of the most enjoyable aspects was the references. They were almost as interesting as the book itself, like an intellectual breadcrumb trail I wanted to keep following. I’ve been a reader of Nadia’s blog and essays, so the voice here felt familiar and consistent with her broader work.

Enjoyed it enough that I ordered the physical copy, this is the kind of book I want to have on a shelf and pull down again later.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really interesting conceptually, and I appreciated how concise and to the point it was. I found it quite thought provoking, but even so I'm not sure how well I understood the basic concept, and I can't decide if I'll find it a very useful framework for thinking about certain issues or if I'll immediately forget it and never think about it again (which I guess would suggest that antimemetics themselves are rather antimemetic). I think more likely it'll be something that I keep in my lexicon, and I was glad to have read it.

[Selma Khenissi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one that I'm glad to have come across, especially the quadrant about supermemes, antimemes, memes, and dormant.

I don't enjoy perusing memes online, but I'm aware of the consequences surrounding supermemes and dormant. Hopefully antimemes are the sweet spot that I'm looking for when it comes to ideas and ideation.

Well. The journey continues...

[Andie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked thinking about group chats/networks and the value of context and trust when grappling with “taboo” ideas that are worth having a nuanced convo about. Was left wanting for a single “antimemetic” example that went through the whole book. Felt like I was missing some context that could have pulled the narrative thread together

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

intriguing but confusing

Nadia wrestles with an important idea for many pages. Another reviewer said he’s read the book three times. She mentions but doesn’t exploit viewing idea-processing networks as graphs with weights on branches and biases on nodes.

[Jessica Pin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was a bday gift so I read it. Don’t recommend

A few interesting ideas.

I prefer David Deutsch’s rational versus anti rational meme framework. Based on that, anti-memes would be more likely to be anti rational memes because they are shielded from dissent. That’s a bad thing.

The question of how to turn an anti meme into a super meme is a relatively useful framework.

[Miikka · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book reads like a Ribbonfarm blog post - interesting, but afterwards I'm not sure what it was about exactly. Culturally very San Fracisco.

[Joel Ye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compelling theorycrafting.

[Guy Altman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel seen

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

quick read very tpot coded many good snippets related to ideas ive been thinking about recently but not sure what to take away overall

[Jason]

this book was fine, interesting even, but i've returned to the hellscape that is goodreads just to say that there is a wild misreading of Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing in this book that lasts a quarter of a chapter in which the author i guess interpreted the title literally and says instead of doing nothing 'as jenny odell suggests' we should actively engage in the world as it is and produce goodness amidst chaos as an act of resistance. Which is literally what How to Do Nothing is about. Like, that's the whole thing of the book. if you read even like. 2 chapters.

i say this to say the book felt very Medium article at times, and stuff like that ^^ just reinforces that feeling.