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Comment by krackers

3 hours ago

Are there any real-life examples of antimemes? How would antimemes even propagate given that they'd "die out" immediately?

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krackers

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bluewin  1 hour ago

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and the character of antimemes. Even ended up writing a whole taxonomy and mathematical framework for it.

In general a meme is specific to an entity-pair, with self-censoring information as a subset of antimeme that makes the information itself remove itself from the mind that learns it. In general though, information that is an antimeme is not the same thing as a category of information that describes an antimeme.

So, "your parents weird sextape" is generally antimemetic, you are unlikely to share that information yourself and I would not expect to see many examples where someone posted this. Your password is also antimemetic in most cases.

That said, information may contain both antimemetic and memetic components, such as "the game" (I just lost). The rules inherently are antimemetic and self-censoring, however the memetic component ensures this is still transmitted effectively to as many people as possible. A more entity-pair specific meme-antimeme relation is "where the good drug dealers hang out", which is information that is highly memetic or antimemetic under different conditions.

I think the key isn't to think of these things as strict categories, but labels we ascribe to a more continuous measure of memeablity.

__MatrixMan__  1 hour ago

There is a genre of music that my old roommate was into which titled all of their songs and albums in obscure Unicode characters with no known pronunciation. Songs in this genre may not be perfect antimemes, but I think their resistance to reference is an antimemetic property.

Also, chromosomes are nucleotide-encoded memes, and linear ones use teleomeres to impose limits on the number of replications they support, so that's another imperfect antimeme.

I know of no antimemes whose antiemetic nature comes from their ability to interfere with the human mind, but then again, I wouldn't know about them if they existed, which is more or less the book's point.

  • bluewin  39 minutes ago

    A malicious antimeme would be a dark pattern in web design for handling privacy/data/etc. Something designed to satisfy whatever law/regulation requires them to have the option while making the ability to find/remember/interact with it as hard as possible.

    Another candidate is the common usage of memory-holing, where important information is removed from public perception maliciously. The Dubai Chocolate thing technically falls into here, as does the whole "war in Iran to distract from the Epstein files" thing. Frankly the whole Epstein stuff is riddled with malicious memes and antimemes to deliberately muddy the waters. Similar to deliberate attempts to inject insane conspiracy beliefs "the moon controls our brains" into conspiracy theories that are too close to something real "mk-ultra".

    Consciousness for an antimeme is more of a classification error in my mind, as consciousness as a concept is permanently warped. But you could describe a secret society/dark family secret as a form of living antimeme, hiding some information and preventing it from being shared using a variety of means.