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  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/posts/antimesomemes",
  "path": "/posts/posts/antimesomemes",
  "publishedAt": "2022-06-07T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "tags": [
    "ramble"
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  "textContent": "::: related\n- There is No Antimemetics\n  Divsion,\n  one of my all-time favorite stories.\n- [](/essays/false-hydra.html), a longer essay about antimeme\n  worldbuilding.\n:::\n\n> An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea\n> which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from\n> spreading it.\n\nAntimemes are a kind of meme\n\nWhile working on some Black Nerve worldbuilding, I had\na thought. \n\nAntimemes would need to be a kind of meme, wouldn't they?\n\nI dont mean this in some trivial \"hey look, it has meme in the name\"\nway, but an antimeme would be exactly the same kind of a infectious\nagent with highly evolved virality.\n\nWell, unless you handwave antimemes as a privileged part of your\nsetting, where \"things that look like this are inherently antimemetic\"\nis a fundamental law of magic or whatever --- in a situation like\nthat, this assertion doesn't hold.^[In direct correspondence, a friend\npointed out that architectural exploits, such as those made famous by\n[BLIT][], are another well-grounded mechanism.]\n\n[BLIT]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)\n\nBut I dont want something like that when worldbuilding something\n[reductionist][sable]; I want antimemes to be something that arises\norganically, somehow.\n\n[sable]: https://sablegm.substack.com/p/reductionist-magic-1-the-problem\n\nSo, if antimemetic properties aren't global, then I'm pretty sure the\nmost natural way to make an antimeme is to have it be a cooperating\npair of symbiotic memes.  One that I'll call a cloak (which is not\nitself antimemetic) and the enigma (which refers to the antimemetic\nidea/artifact/creature).  Importantly, the enigma is the _idea_ of the\nantimemetic thing --- knowledge in working memory, photographic\nevidence, etc. --- rather than the thing itself, when the thing itself\nisn't an idea.\n\nFor a normal meme, it exists to facilitate its own transmission; the\npayload is itself.  For a cloak-type meme, the payload is not only\nitself (technically it must partly be, but): it also carries some\ninstruction, exploit, magic spell, whatever, functioning to prevent\nthe spread of the enigma.\n\n(Consider a computer analogy: it's hard to create a file that\ninherently deletes itself, preventing itself own spread just by\nexisting on a hardrive, but I think it's easier to create a virus\nwhich scans for the file and deletes it.^[At least one person\nmisunderstood this, and smugly said just create meme.sh with the\ntext rm meme.sh.  But I said file, not program for a reason.\nPedantry aside, this example would actually fit --- it's the special\ncase where the cloak is the enigma --- yet still the distiction\nbetween a binary file and the execution thereof is an important one!])\n\nThus, the antimeme emits the cloaking meme at some point in its life\ncycle, and the cloak virally spreads, undetected.  Then later, when\ncompromised minds or devices try to store the enigma, the cloak\nhinders them.\n\nFramed this way, I can think of two ways for an antimeme to arise from\nselection pressure.  One is that there are meme predators --- this\nfalls naturally out of settings like my own where memes are inherently\nmagical, where _memes_ are diseases that literally destroy your brain\nlike a virus exploding a cell.\n\nBut meme-predators (infovores if you will) are anything which applies\nselection pressure against memes maximizing their virality.  To\nrespond to this pressure, you can become a conventional meme, arms\nracing directly against your predators, spreading faster than they can\nstop it, or you can try for crypsis --- hiding from your predators.\n\nThat's one possibility; I mentioned two.  The other actually\ncontradicts my initial description: here, the cloak is not created\nby the enigma.  Rather, the cloak and the enigma are in competition,\nor once were, and what seems to be an antimeme is in fact the result\nof the cloak trying to get rid of its competition.\n\nPerhaps instead of a virus, the cloak is actually akin to an\nantivirus, and the phenomena of antimemes is no more than downloading\na file and wondering why your browser deleted it.\n\nMesomemes are not antimemes\n\nIf you bring up antimemes among nerds --- I speak from experience,\nthis is what happened when I first posted the passage above --- then\nyou'll get one wise guy who says actually, antimemes exist!  Turns out\nthey aren't a fiction!\n\nGo read the phonebook.  How much of it do you remember?  See,\nreal-life antimemetics.  We have SCP at home.\n\nThis is inane.  The idea that simply being complex or boring makes\nsomething an antimeme just seems like an abuse of terminology. It's\ntaping a pencil onto a horse to argue unicorns exist.\n\nYou should call it an antimeme when you treat it like an antimeme.\nIf your job were to deal with weird shit, hearing that something is an\nantimeme would prompt you to start operating as if your memories and\nrecords are unreliable.  What utility do you gain by calling an EULA\nan antimeme?  Mundane things that are merely hard to remember are just\nineffective memes.\n\nOf course, if you follow the links at the top of the post, you'll\nnotice that darling I love, the Antimemetics Divsion series, which\npopularized the concept anomalous antimemes, boldly states:\n\n> Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you\n> wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty\n> secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to\n> share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of\n> text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…\n\nMaybe I'm being too strident, if I disagree with the guy whom I\nliterally got the idea from.  But to me, this is just the SCP keyfabe.\nAntimemes are real is a trick to lend verisimilitude to a\nspeculative element.\n\nIn practice, whenever someone speaks of antimemes, they are evoking\nthe vibe of anomalous antimemes.  That's the association that sticks.\n\nSo let's introduce the concept of a neutral meme.  I considered a\nstraightforward name like 'semimeme' or 'submeme', but I like the\nalliteration of 'mesomeme'.\n\nBy this I refer to infomation that's neither particularly viral nor\nparticularly anti-viral.\n\nWe can talk quasi-mathematically about a meme's ability to spread from\nhost to host. Statistically, we could define the average number of new\nhosts a meme would jumps to when spreading through a large enough\npopulation C.\n\nThe things we generally go out of our way to call a meme --- perhaps\nwe could say \"supermeme\" for clarity's sake --- would be cases where\nC is greater than 1.  Often anomalously so.\n\nWhat I'm calling a mesomeme is one whose C would be small,\npotentially less than 1.  This is your phone books, your hundreds of\nirrational number decimals.  \n\nFinally, if C were 0 or negative (number of hosts descreases) then\nit'd be an antimeme.\n\nAlternatively, since perhaps an antimeme that actively erases itself\ncould still slowly spread, we could define a second axis for the rate\nof hosts becoming non-hosts again, and say an antimeme is the mirror\nof a supermeme, having an usually high rate of forgetting --- under\nthat definition, mesomemes would be bad antimemes similar to how they\nare bad memes.\n\nIt also raises the intriguing (though probably not unprecedented) idea\nof something that's both a supermeme and an antimeme.",
  "title": "Antimemes and Mesomemes"
}