Infectious Ideas, Attention, and Action | Nadia Asparouhova & Antimemetics

One of the coolest things about this project broadly has been the emergent patterns, ideas, and connections across guests, usually without clear intention on my part. I follow my curiosity and the through lines become visible in hindsight.

This time is no different, but even more explicitly: I was fortunate to sit down with Nadia in San Francisco a few weeks ago and talk to her about her new book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. The publisher? Yancey Strickler (Ep. 20) and his Dark Forest Collective. She also came up in my conversation with Alex Danco.

Yancey Strickler on Creativity, Individuality, and Being a Part of Something Bigger than You

I’ve long admired Nadia’s writing and heard great things about her from many people. I knew our conversation would be special after reading Antimemetics, and Nadia did not disappoint. She is so thoughtful, attuned, gracious, and wise.

I hope you’re inspired to check out her excellent book, which despite its complexity and richness, is easy to rip through. I’m still sitting with many of her thoughts, but I am most inspired by her encouragement to take intention of attention incredibly seriously. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Dialectic Ep. 22: Nadia Asparouhova - Ideas that Infect

Dialectic Episode 22: Nadia Asparouhova - Ideas that Infect - is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and all podcast platforms.

Nadia Asparouhova (Website, X, Substack) is a writer and researcher who has spent much of her career in service of the question: 'what's happening here?' across various parts of the internet.

Nadia recently published her newest book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. She explores why consequential ideas, unlike memes and supermemes, fail to spread. She also recounts the last several years of online public and private life and how we're all less naive than we were in previous eras of the internet. Critically, she suggests a path toward poking our heads out of group chats and silos to engage in publicly discussing or promoting the ideas that matter most.

Her first book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, was published by Stripe Press. Nadia also worked at Substack, Protocol Labs, and Github, and has written extensively on Silicon Valley Culture; the importance of ideas and institutions; consciousness, attention, and meditation; and more.

Nadia's self-described sweet spot is when people respond to her writing by saying,"I read this piece and it gave me words for a thing that I didn't know how to express before." I can attest that is true, both for Antimemetics and for much of her other thinking. And as much as she writes about ideas, I admire how focused she is on how they might produce action.

Nadia believes that important ideas infect us, and the reasonable response to that is to be tremendously thoughtful about our attention. I hope this conversation inspires you to put great care into where your attention goes.

Transcript and all links available here.

Timestamps

• 1:31: Why Ideas Matter

• 9:33: The Last 10 Years of the Internet and Attention Collapse

• 17:07: How The Internet Caused Attention Collapse

• 19:59: Private Coordination in Public Spaces

• 24:01: Legibility and Illegibility as a Tactic

• 28:28: Ideas Are Not Created Nor Discovered; They Infect Us

• 35:17: Defining Antimemes

• 42:00: Ideological Black Holes: Supermemes

• 49:13: Engaging in the Public Square vs. Opting Out

• 54:16: Truth Tellers who Can Bring Anti-Memetic Ideas to Light

• 1:05:06: Champions, or the Great Apostle Theory

• 1:10:57: Institutions, Ideologies, and Movements

• 1:24:51: Attention

• 1:31:30: Jhanas

• 1:38:42: Writing a Book

• 1:46:19: Connecting the Dots in Reverse

• 1:50:29: Lightning Round: Fighting (or Working With) Human Nature, Software as Passion Project, Democracy, Space Away from the Center of Things

Links & References

• Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading - Nadia Asparouhova

• The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite - Tanner Greer

• Peter Frumkin

• Curtis Yarvin

• Nadia Asparouhova - Tech Elites, Democracy, Open Source, & Philanthropy - Dwarkesh Podcast

• Effective Altruism

• Rewriting the Californian Ideology - American Affairs Journal - Nadia Asparouhova

• The dark forest theory of the internet - Yancey Strickler

• The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web - Maggie Appleton

• The End of History? - Francis Fukuyama

• The group chats that changed America | Semafor

• René Girard

• Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott

• Venkatesh Rao

• Title Unavailable | Site Unreachable

• The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

• Supermemes, Antimemes, and more quadrant

• Mitch Hedberg - The Reason We Can't Find Big Foot

• How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell

• Bill Campbell

• Greta Thunberg

• Trickster Makes This World - Lewis Hyde

• Unqualified Reservations, Vol. 01 - Curtis Yarvin

• Nick Cammarata

• ‎The Beatles: Get Back (2021)

• When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut

• Idea machines - Nadia Asparouhova

• The Network State

• The tyranny of ideas - Nadia Asparouhova

• How to do the jhanas - Nadia Asparouhova

• Being basic as a virtue - Nadia Asparouhova

• Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral | The New Yorker

• Working in Public - Nadia Asparouhova

• Silicon Valley’s Civil War - Tablet Magazine - Nadia Asparouhova

• Meditations On Moloch - Slate Star Codex