Antimemetics: An Investigation
This is the first part of a series exploring the concept of antimemetics. The second part is Becoming Meme: Ubiquity and Affect followed by a third installment considering antimemetics as praxis.
Antimemes can be said to exist along a continuum with memes — that is, on a spectrum of information evaluated by its propensity for propagation. At one end are strong antimemes like passwords, conspiracies, indefinite philosophical profundities and unsolved problems in mathematics— all difficult to spread, even under ideal conditions, and often processed only with significant cognitive cost¹. At the other end of this spectrum are ‘super spreader’ memes like ‘treat others as you’d like to be treated’ and ‘I think therefore I am’ — cognitively inexpensive information easily mass authenticated along a cultural blockchain.
In addition to content, antimemetics concerns the structure of information — in other words, the productive ‘environmental constraints’ which can shape and determine the adaptive strategies of particular anti/memetic content. In popular storytelling across various media, for example, narrative structure is often fundamentally antimemetic, like that of genre work — thrillers, who-dunnits, will-they-won’t-theys, etc — where information is meted out not to maximize narrative efficiency or comprehension but rather to inflate the value of the emotional, psychological and aesthetic content via dopaminergic markers such as those built through ambiguity, suspense, rhetorical ellipsis or misdirection. That this obfuscation might paradoxically enhance the overall memetic fitness of the content is characteristic of the dynamic interrelationship² between memes and antimemetics (our modern techno-social media ecology perhaps challenges this traditional paradigm by its selection for brevity).
With these dialectics in mind, let’s begin with an all too familiar glimpse at art, religion and politics through the lens of (anti)memetics: a radical or avant-garde movement is necessarily heavily weighted toward the antimemetic due to the variously subversive, transgressive, contrarian, etc. nature of its principles set against the dominant order. The cognitive or social expense of these principles — the antimemes —may initially act as a natural barrier for entry, and, in many cases, a potentially latent attenuating mechanism activating only when the signal (or bundle of signals) has been broadcast at scale — eg. when a counter-cultural ethos is appropriated as mere fashion, or revolutionary minoritarian politics devolve into thought-terminating cliche and white-washed axiom. A similar process of attenuation can occur with antimemes at the core of religious memeplexes: intellectual development, spiritual devotion and psychological discipline are high cognitive-cost endeavors, while it’s cheaper to simply conform to macro tribal behaviors. In the above cases, powerful antimemes contend not only with prevailing norms, but the noise of the virtue signal and the conversion of social value into (cultural) capital.
Immediately we are led to consider the scope of the antimeme — that is, what is the depth of concept this term can hold? What is at stake? Indeed, what may be lost or salvaged in certain cases is not merely countervailing social values but the propagation of wholly primordial phenomena³ — intimate yet all-encompassing though ultimately, perhaps, extralinguistic and even incommunicable — that which can be gestured toward but is essentially intransmissible: sacred antimemes.
This is where we establish the relationship between antimemetics and information entropy. Also known as Shannon entropy, this term designates a measure of the “average amount of information conveyed by an event, when considering all possible outcomes.” We can operationalize this probabilistic framework thusly: if I understand that “all philosophers are constant liars” then I have severely constricted my representational possibility-space of ‘philosopher’ — I have reduced this event’s information entropy. Alternatively, if I understand that “philosophers are a heterogenous milieu of knowledge-lovers, some of whom are known to lie” then I maintain a dilated possibility-space for the event ‘philosopher’ — I have preserved a great deal of information entropy. An important point, however, is that such a reduction of Shannon entropy via “all philosophers are constant liars” would dramatically lower the cognitive cost of this object. This cost-saving could be socially incentivized for memetic fitness — eg. if my social network is predisposed to mistrusting philosophers then “all philosophers are constant liars” will likely have better memetic fitness than a more entropic representation (ie. “philosophers are a heterogenous milieu…” would be antimemetic here).
Given the association between Shannon entropy and complexity, we can therefore correlate high entropy with antimemes — ie. highly entropic information is antimemetic. However, not all information is fixed in place on the memetic spectrum — secrets can be disclosed, conspiracies unmasked, cultural values and tastes change (ie. no change in entropy), and, since language tries to develop isomorphically with reality as we come to understand it, difficult ideas can take on increasingly transmissible forms (e=mc2; r>g; “This is not a pipe” etc) — such that some antimemes can become memetic with no change to their complexity or evolve through mutation, adaptation (eg. negentropy via simplification) or by coupling with more palatable memes to eventually outcompete others — as liberalism and democracy once overtook monarchy. Yet certain aesthetic or spiritual phenomena, on the other hand, might be timelessly antimemetic — though perfectly familiar, orderly, predictable and simple, hence non-entropic.
Again we note how antimemetics delivers us to matters of experience at the very threshold of perception and knowing, that which is elusive and difficult to define, no less to spread: the Real, the subjective, the subconscious, the shadow and dream world, the alien and the other, the noumenal, nonrepresentational and sublime, that which defies meaning, 無, the chaotic, cryptic and esoteric, the symbolic and the metaphysical. The future is antimemetic. How then shall we speak of the unspeakable? Might we describe a work of art as an antimemetic phenotype due to its ‘embodiment’ of the otherwise incommunicable? For this investigation, let us suffice to quote the great hierophant of 20th century anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, in order to characterize this aspect of antimemetics — “Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began.”
To continue, we look toward more specific and contemporary social dynamics: technology is changing our relationship with the antimemetic as we increasingly offload cognition to artificial intelligence in a social media environment selecting for speed and virality, in a sense engaging a kind of massive cultural compression algorithm optimized for ‘becoming meme’⁴. This, of course, is why we are more often confronting our most reductive and/or scandalous aspects — these characteristics most readily spread. In more thorough terms, however, ours is a torrentially oversaturated, deeply unhealthy information ecology wracked by the apophenial effects of limbic capitalism, algorithmically generated political polarization and advanced cultural schismogenesis, by destabilizing racial and economic inequality, extensive institutional decay and ongoing existential crises. Here, destructive conspiracy theories and factionalism are some of the ‘opportunistic species’ which, like their biological counterparts weeds and rats, fill niches where other memetic forces have vacated from competition: Q Anon, ‘vaccine microchips’ and identitarian fundamentalism — memetic inbreeding — flourish where our interest in rational debate, scientific consensus and solidarity recedes.
We need only briefly mention the insights of behavioral economics — namely, the shortfalls of our decision heuristics within an ‘imperfect information’ (read: high entropy) context — compounded by those aforementioned conditions of social duress in order to improve our understanding of a new memetic equilibrium: the cognitive costs of conspiracy theories, rivalrous factionalism and certainly authoritarianism are now well mitigated by their increasing social value (advantage) in an extraordinarily competitive information ecology⁵, and so these once relatively antimemetic phenomena shift along the spectrum toward the memetic⁶ (ie. ‘palatability via utility’). Their remaining antimemetic element will be the most ‘precious’ component of the memetic bundle, if not the most veracious, sustainable or actionable.
Antimeme is a verb. In this assessment of a global culture ‘becoming meme’ we shouldn’t overlook antimemetic weaponization — eg. propaganda, conspiracy and other predatory information asymmetries — often a dynamic structural interplay of meme and antimeme. A highly transmissible memetic bundle may, for example, serve through obfuscation an ulterior motive (the antimeme), and thus when broadcast at scale this component doesn’t attenuate but rather improves or realizes. Or, forward-facing antimemes might obscure a high-risk or treacherous enterprise, such as the complicated financial instrumentation which lead to the 2008 economic collapse and bank bailouts. The ‘divide and conquer’ plot, of course, exploits memetic rivalries. Notable here, too, is the weaponization of shameful taboo: specifically, the mass weaponization of such antimemes — a kind of absurd arms race — which has accompanied the rapid impoverishment of American political discourse in the post-Trump era — ie. ‘team nazis’ vs ‘team pedophiles’.
Our above examples are all nefarious though certainly a prosocial antimemetics is also implied throughout this investigation (and obviously not all propaganda is nefarious). Consider, eg., how certain shamanic mediation is a kind of ‘antimemetic gatekeeping’ which contributes to a larger social equilibrium via ritualized, controlled disruption — many religious, aesthetic, academic, clinical and legal orders have performed this function throughout history (the CIA’s weaponization of modern art jumps to mind here as a compelling intersection of these coalitions). At the risk of further overextending our terms, one might imagine an antimemetic praxis informed by concepts like negative capability and agnosticism whereby we construct subjectivity through thought habits which work against the increasing neoliberal techno-capitalist drive toward becoming meme (indeed, mantra meditation instrumentalizes a kind of ‘internal meme’ to access the profoundly atimemetic).
Before closing, let’s emphasize a few critical discoveries: antimemetics concerns both structure and content and thus seems to be a fundamental aspect of information evaluation. Its relationship with memes can be relative, dynamic and often catalytic. Perhaps because we may exaptively desire⁷ certain expensive information intrinsically — or simply the dopaminergic effects of confronting the antimemetic — antimemetics can increase the value and reach of otherwise ‘bargain’ memetic bundles even when they obscure the signal. Conversely, their cognitive and social costs might act as a self-limiting constraint in broadcast. Social media, meanwhile, seeks an accelerated, flattening ‘memefication’ of culture while the complex emergent properties of a globalized world pose increasingly antimemetic problems⁸— though not only by virtue of their inconspicuousness, novelty, or complexity, but, as we’ve noted above and as psychological and game theoretic models help explain, in their propensity toward escalating global and local rivalries. Beware antimemetic weaponization. Most compellingly, however, antimemetics delivers us, eventually, to the extralinguistic — to the aesthetic and spiritual, to that which inhabits an uncertain realm behind the eyes.
Finally, we must acknowledge those two ultimate antimemetic forces heretofore unnamed: human memory and the passage of time. By these perhaps we begin to better understand, and with some sympathy, our plight in relation to the sacred. Against the rush of time and birth of distractions our attention is only so strong. Might this be the reason we seem to have passed into a kind of inverted Axial Age — a time of universalized information systems but hyper-atomized consciousness? Consider in closing, then, Borges’ brief but staggering confession after having had a glimpse for himself into an antimeme unfathomable— “Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten it? Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.”
- The boring, mundane and utterly quotidian might also be antimemetic, unless cats are involved. When I think of a platonically ideal antimeme I imagine some hypothetical cryptic suicidal death cult/conspiracy or an existential, ascetic notion leading to eremitic solitude. Perhaps a kind of ideational blackhole or conundrous vacuum. Deleuze and Guittari’s ‘body without organs’ is highly antimemetic (and their book Anti-Oedipus is, as should be evident by the title, antimemetic on a number of levels). As far as I know, the SCP Foundation’s wiki book There Is No Antimemetics Division is the earliest conception of the term albeit in a sci-fi context, from which point Scott Alexander began playing with the idea and that is where I picked it up.
- Contrasted with, eg., the highly memetic structuralization of rhymed verse to ‘carry’ otherwise antimemetic narrative content. Classic Saussurean and Lacanian structuralism as well as Levi-Straussian structural anthropology are suggestive here for their shared insistence on ‘generative binaries’ for meaning making. I sense an intricate relational architecture in our engagement with the anti/memetic in public and private rituals— a sort of grammar — to be explored.
- Here we might recall certain ‘deterritorializing refrains’ or ‘machinic statements’ which, as described in A Thousand Plateaus (333), “may go beyond all assemblages and produce an opening onto the Cosmos.” We thus connect the Deleuzoguattarian concept of the refrain to Richard Dawkins’ original concept of the meme (both texts of which relied centrally upon bird song as an example of evolvable cultural transmission — refrain and meme, respectively — in nonhuman animals) and acknowledge memetics as a materialist approach to culture as the ‘alloplastic strata’. For further exploration of the relationship between memetics and Deleuzoguittarian materialism see Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History.
- Byung-Chul Han’s notion of self-entrepreneurship is clearly relevant here — we become meme to subsist in late neoliberal techno-capitalism. Also by these analogies, however, the accelerationist implications of our investigation become evident: many sacred, spiritual, aesthetic etc. antimemetics are clearly in tension with the ‘becoming-technical’ of Landian machinic desire. However, it is the rivalrous polarization effected by hyper-memefication that I find most pertinent to our project.
- I’ve continually mixed metaphors between ecological and economic models. Another way of stating the above point is that the old ideological monopoly very briefly held by liberalism has been broken up and we are now essentially in a price war in the marketplace of social ideas.
- One could make a similar analysis of mass shootings as partly a deranged capitulation to memefication.
- I‘m sure Lacan has much to say about all this, eg. an innate desire for the antimemetic as we meanwhile increasingly locate ourselves in an alienating process of ‘becoming meme’.
- Recent studies have shown that we have a tendency to approach problem solving additively instead of by subtraction — that is, by initially increasing complexity. Thus, as we encounter already staggeringly complex problems with an inclination toward increasing their complexity all the while immersed in an infinite scroll techno-social landscape which seems to inhibit our very ability to engage with complexity, simplicity may be, in many senses, the antimeme lurking beyond catastrophe.
