While this article doesn’t directly mention ads or algorithmic feeds, in my opinion, the dynamic it describes feels deeply tied to them.

The internet’s shift toward tribal, memetic behavior isn’t just cultural, it’s deeply structural and driven by how platforms make money from engagement.

Feeds optimized for engagement and ad revenue naturally favor ideas that are fast, emotional, and identity-driven. The more transmissible the idea, the greater its reach. Slower, non-viral ideas don’t stand a chance in that environment.

To me, the architecture of targeting and personalization isn’t just mirroring tribalism, it’s reinforcing and accelerating it.

Maybe the future of meaningful discourse online isn’t about better moderation or more facts, it’s about redesigning the incentives entirely.

Until we change what the system rewards, unfortunately, we’ll keep getting more of what spreads, not what matters.

John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" wrote:

> The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.

I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".

The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data.

data != information != facts != truth != knowledge

> At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them.

This particular line struck me given that I recently listened after listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with Cenk Uygur [0]

Uygur made the following point:

"More than 80% of the US voting population supports paid parental leave yet Congress won't vote on it/pass it.

Why?

B/c Congress has become captured by corporatism and it's not in the best interests of corporations to have paid parental leave"

Earlier, there is this quote:

> Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things?

I wonder why people ask these questions, almost rhetorically, when the answer is that well organized groups have made conscious decisions and taken real action to modify government/laws etc to do this.

e.g. if one group could do this, why don't more groups do this?

(on a related note, the talk by James D’Angelo, “The Ghost Bill & The Cardboard Box” [1] about how Congress became more tied to corporations is fascinating)

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtPROVsePk (Lex Fridman)

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg (Ghost bill)

https://archive.ph/chPKD

It’s always great to find someone who’s been thinking the same as you have been, but took the time to formalize it.

For years I’ve been calling these antimemes “natural barriers” or “lost truth” (lost in that it’s destined to be lost). I’ve bought the book and hope it goes into further depth because I’ve become very confident that this idea is an entry point into a thought train that ends up uncovering a metric shit ton of important ideas. From antimemetics we get a fundamental problem of all brain development, the subconscious in all its iterations and forms, the basis of religion, and the underlying meaning of all forms of storytelling. It’s a fascinating story that I’ve been trying to put together into one package for years now. It’ll be bittersweet if I find out someone did it better than me.

Edit: one way I disagree with the author is that I don’t think memes are bad at all, and the reason why is because I don’t think the barrier between antimemes and memes is as sturdy as you might think. The process of storytelling and art is the process of encoding antimemes as memes, and the reason why the meme culture seems so violent and cynical these days is because our ability to engage with manifest meme content that have latent antimeme content (to use Freudian terms) was undermined by our older generation, who never properly grappled with antimemes and the implication of their existence to begin with, and therefore normalized the process of engaging with manifest meme content without acknowledging the existence of the latent antimeme content it was formed from.

This entire question to me seems really philosophically confused. The article already leans into the Darwinian framing of communication. i.e. "memetics", "the marketplace of ideas" and so on.

I don't even know what's there to discuss, if that's how you have already agreed to see communication, then it's self evident that it doesn't produce anything good, or virtuous, or if it does at best coincidentally. Evolution and rabid competition, in any market, nature, information spaces doesn't have some Pollyannaish direction, isn't on some path to a truth or what have you. Memes aren't good, they're fit by definition. In a way this is just a really strange Anglo-American thing because there's this ideology of being both committed to civility and virtue but also unconstrained free markets and it doesn't really make much sense.

This utopianism always had to come apart because there's no commitment to reason, truth, virtue inherent to "mimetic reproduction" and if you're willing to talk about it that way you should already know that to be the case.

> It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded.

This is what it comes down to, in my experience. Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information will fall into the trap of aligning with people who seem to have the vibe they’re looking for, rather than examining the facts on their own.

Lately I’m also interested in how people develop parasocial trusting relationships with podcasters, streamers, bloggers, or Twitter users that they really like and admire. I see it frequently in people who get attached to podcasters, I assume because it’s easy to grow attached to someone when you listen to them talk at you for hours every week. I even get in trouble (or downvoted, in HN context) when I point out that fan favorites like Andrew Huberman are known to peddle a lot of misinformation and misrepresent studies. The concept is unthinkable to Huberman fans, but it’s well-known to informed people outside of the bubble. Step into other domains and the same phenomenon occurs with Joe Rogan, or members of the current government. Some people get really attached to personalities and align with them, ignoring or shouting down any information that disagrees with their beloved personalities.

The issue is the same as always, once something goes massive, the statistics of human nature start to dominate.

The abundant dissemination of information tends to average society. Note that local cultural differences have been slowly being erased.

You travel now, and it's not as alien as it was 30 years ago, even languages are borrowing more from each other (why does Europe has so many languages? It was hard to talk to people a couple valleys away, not anymore).

So, given that human intelligence seems to be normally distributed (we can argue about the measurements, but they all distribute normally), this averaging process takes us all toward mediocrity.

Even taking algorithmic feedback into account, those also are trying to maximize engagement, and ultimately, that's also an average.

Seems to confuse the internet (machines communicating via IP addresses) and the web (sites communicating via HTTP). And I found it really hard to read - but that is perhaps just me.

It’s worth noting here, because Thiel comes up so much in the piece, that he works with Nadia’s husband Delian Asparouhov at Founder’s Fund.

Also worth noting that group chats lends themselves to conspiracies. Real conspiracies that end up changing politics, and conspiracy theories fomented in the group and about the group.

This is because they are a means of small-group coordination and concealment.

There is something antimemetic about this article in general, and in a bad way. As Cheever said, “you can write about boredome, but you can’t make it boring.” Gideon is translating the world into an excellent undergrad English essay, but he is not telling a compelling story, as many memes do.

It's cheap to build an AI-bot farm. It's cheap to build a network map with associated psychological profiles for each person in that map. It's cheap to buy an editor, and influence who is hired at coastal publications. There aren't natural viral movements anymore, it's all synthetic now: A battle-ground for warring oligarchs and intelligence agencies. The more you find yourself upset about something, the higher the likelihood that thing is part of a synthetic movement. Bad ideas go viral because someone has paid for them to go viral.

"Abundance" agenda is a good idea, gone about as "viral" as those get.

The TL;DR answer to this question is there is a lot of intellectual junk food out there and our monkey brains are pretty vulnerable to succumbing it just as we crave literal junk food and resisting those cravings is very difficult.

If only we had GLP-1 agonists for our minds too and not just our bodies.

In lieu of that, all we've got is the same as always: nurture your mind by cultivating a good media diet, a healthy skepticism that doesn't drift into reactionary contrarianism, and an openness to new information; especially new evidence that contradicts things you believe.

...Which is basically like trying to solve the obesity crisis by telling people to diet and exercise. It would be nice if we had a more effective tool or technique to help a larger percentage of people achieve it.

> On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it.

The author is describing a widely discussed trend, and using everything but the correct names for the two groups: wing-nuts and woke-nuts.

Two sides of the same coin.

The inter-networked hand-computer era has all but killed attempts at autonomous thought, and even the idea that pushing oneself toward intellectual autonomy is a good thing to do...

EDIT: wrong thread, sorry.

The answers promised by the title are delivered in spades by the paywall.

Because there is no objective way to say whether something is a good idea or bad idea. It's always subjective.

This seems to tie in with Musk's Razor, that the most entertaining outcome is most likely.

Quite a lot of em dashes for the New Yorker...

[EDIT] Several commenters rightly noted that heavy em-dash usage is normal for the New Yorker (and common thanks to OS auto-replacement), so my “LLM giveaway” quip was off-base. Leaving this up for context—thanks for the corrections.