An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.
Antimemes are a kind of meme →
While working on some worldbuilding, I had a thought.
Antimemes would need to be a kind of meme, wouldn’t they?
I dont mean this in some trivial “look, it has meme in the name” way, but an antimeme would be exactly the same kind of a infectious agent with highly evolved virality.
Well, unless you handwave antimemes as a privileged part of your setting, where “things that look like this are inherently antimemetic” is a fundamental law of magic or whatever — in a situation like that, this assertion doesn’t hold.
But I dont want something like that when worldbuilding something reductionist; I want antimemes to be something that arises organically, somehow.
So, if antimemetic properties aren’t global, then I’m pretty sure the most natural way to make an antimeme is to have it be a cooperating pair of symbiotic memes. One that I’ll call a cloak (which is not itself antimemetic) and the enigma that refers to the antimemetic idea/artifact/creature. Importantly, the enigma is the idea of the antimemetic thing — knowledge in working memory, photographic evidence, etc. — rather than the thing itself, if the thing itself isn’t an idea.
For a normal meme, it exists to facilitate its own transmission; its payload is itself. For a cloak-type meme, its payload is not just itself (well technically it must be, but) it also carries some instruction, exploit, magic spell, whatever, which prevents the spread of the enigma.
(Consider a computer analogy: it’s hard to create a file that inherently deletes itself, preventing itself own spread, but I think it’s easier to create a virus which scans for the file and deletes it.)
Thus, the antimeme emits the cloaking meme at some point in its life cycle, and the cloak virally spreads, undetected. Then later, when compromised minds or devices try to store the enigma, the cloak hinders them.
Framed this way, I can think of two ways for an antimeme to arise from selection pressure. One is that there are meme predators — this falls naturally out of settings like my own where memes are inherently magical, where memes are diseases that literally destroy your brain like a virus exploding a cell.
But meme-predators (infovores if you will) are anything which applies selection pressure against memes maximizing their virality. To respond to this pressure, you can become a conventional meme, arms racing directly against your predators, spreading faster than they can stop it, or you can try for crypsis — hiding from your predators.
That’s one possibility; I mentioned two. The other actually contradicts my initial description: here, the cloak is not created by the enigma. Rather, the cloak and the enigma are in competition, or once were, and what seems to be an antimeme is in fact the result of the cloak trying to get rid of its competition.
Perhaps instead of a virus, the cloak is actually akin to an antivirus, and the phenomena of antimemes is no more than downloading a file and wondering why your browser deleted it.
← Mesomemes are not antimemes
If you bring up antimemes among nerds — I speak from experience, this is what happened when I first posted the passage above — then you’ll get one wise guy who says actually, antimemes exist! Turns out they aren’t a fiction!
Go read the phonebook. How much of it do you remember? See, real-life antimemetics. We have SCP at home.
This is inane. The idea that simply being complex or boring makes something an antimeme just seems like an abuse of terminology. It’s taping a pencil onto a horse to argue unicorns exist.
It’s the duck test. You should call it an antimeme when you treat it like an antimeme. If your job was to deal with weird shit, hearing that something is an antimeme means you need to start operating as if your memories and/or records are unreliable. What utility do you gain by calling an EULA an antimeme? Mundane things that are merely hard to remember are just ineffective memes.
Of course, if you follow the links at the top of the post, you’ll notice that my beloved Antimemetics Divsion series, which popularized the concept anomalous antimemes, boldly states:
Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn’t share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…
Maybe I’m being too strident, if I disagree with the guy whom I literally got the idea from. But to me, this is just the SCP keyfabe. Antimemes are real is a trick to lend verisimilitude to a speculative element.
In practice, whenever someone speaks of antimemes, they are evoking the vibe of anomalous antimemes. That’s the association that sticks.
So let’s introduce the concept of a neutral meme. I considered a straightforward name like ‘semimeme’ or ‘submeme’, but I like the alliteration of ‘mesomeme’.
By this I refer to infomation that’s neither particularly viral nor particularly anti-viral.
We can talk quasi-mathematically about a meme’s ability to spread from host to host. Statistically, we could define the average number of new hosts a meme would jumps to when spreading through a large enough population C.
The things we generally go out of our way to call a meme — perhaps we could say “supermeme” for clarity’s sake — would be cases where C is greater than 1. Often anomalously so.
What I’m calling a mesomeme is one whose C would be small, potentially less than 1. This is your phone books, your hundreds of irrational number decimals.
Finally, if C were 0 or negative (number of hosts descreases) then it’d be an antimeme.
Alternatively, since perhaps an antimeme that actively erases itself could still slowly spread, we could define a second axis for the rate of hosts becoming non-hosts again, and say an antimeme is the mirror of a supermeme, having an usually high rate of forgetting — under that definition, mesomemes would be bad antimemes similar to how they are bad memes.
It also raises the intriguing (though probably not unprecedented) idea of something that’s both a supermeme and an antimeme.