Another fun conversation! Ved shared how anime and manga has taken France by storm (this is an example of culture! And a great example of how antimemes, memes, and supermemes are all hugely geolocation-dependent). Lily shared she recently just quit her job and is embarking on a new adventure. 🔥 And I mostly just rambled a lot. 😅 (Still working on tightening up how I speak; listening to myself recently on Substack Live has been a (cringe-inducing 😭) epiphany for me on how not to speak on a recorded medium.)
Here are some random highlights I recall though. (Note: these bulleted summaries may not exactly be verbatim of what people said —please goto the tape for that!— but it’s how I remember what I heard. I believe these summarized points capture the spirit of what folks were conveying though!)
• Ved (Bordeaux 🇫🇷):
“Thumbs up on the book! It’s one lens for reading the internet. I like the frame, ‘mind virus’.”
“I like the ‘infectious model’ of ideas, at least on a surface level. But I don’t know how accurate it is. To me, a lot of how infectious an idea is has more to do with whether it’s long form or short form, and also the receiver’s own individual para-social relationship with the author of the idea.”
“I moved to Bordeaux a month ago and the anime/manga culture here in France is massive. And the reason is because twenty years ago, there was one anime show that took the entire country by storm. One show! That’s all it took! A single show unilaterally changed the entire attitude of an entire country towards the entire genre of anime.”
• Robert (Ohio 🇺🇸):
“I totally judge books by their covers. The only reason I even know Nadia existed is because I’d read her first book, Working in Public, which was published by
and had an absolutely gorgeous cover.”My one takeaway: “Despite good intentions,
and are actually, unwittingly, destroying culture with Substack. Culture is predicated on a collective experience that a community has lived through together: a common epistemological experience that serves as a common cultural touchpoint for the proverbial water cooler chitchat that happens on Monday at the office. Think about Game of Thrones or Taylor Swift. Culture is created when we —a people— live and experience the same reality with the same cast of characters, subplots, and narrative arcs. What Chris and Hamish have done is pour gasoline on the conflagration that is our already fragmenting informational ecosystem. Substack’s entire model is to exploit Chris Anderson’s Long Tail: to connect various creators with all their respective niches and micro-audiences. Look at us, for instance, gathered here today to discuss Antimemetics. We’re discussing a (relatively) small book put out by an small, indie press instead of focusing our energy and attention on some other NYT bestseller or whatever Other Important Book in the zeitgeist. Nevertheless, ultimately, I’m here for the ride though! (I’m just here to meet new friends and learn cool new stuff! 🥳) But make no mistake, participating in Substack is further contributing to the fraying of our national fabric as a whole. This is how one builds infrastructure to destroy culture. When everything is culture, nothing is culture.”
• Lily (Arizona 🇺🇸):
My one takeaway: “I have a more negative opinion of the book. I felt that Nadia didn’t take enough risks. I’ve read some of Nadia’s essays before and really liked them. But for this book, I was just expecting more. For example, I think suicide is mimetic. If you’re going to talk about antimemetics, you should just more unapologetically talk about antimemetics! Also, this book needed an editor. There were also too many caveats. The part that stood out to me was when she was discussing Curtis Yarvin though.
“I’ve moved past the ‘infectious model’ for thinking about idea dissemination and propagation. For certain things, like suicides, that model works (viz. “suicide clusters” are a thing!) but ideas seem to follow a more “parallel invention” paradigm where there isn’t really a single patient zero. (eg. the ideas of natural selection, calculus, and electricity were all invented independently.) I think Nadia’s wrong here; the viral metaphor cannot explain this.
“Regarding COVID, back in 2020, I bought into the ‘China Lab Leak’ theory and was cast out of society!! But now, look at how the tables have turned!!”
Robert: “Yes! This is a great point! I agree with you here. I feel Nadia’s big blindspot with Antimemetics was adopting a “Cronkite-era-monoculture-view” of reality - her worldview stems from a quaint and bygone age when "the culture” was more monolithic and memes and supermemes were more defined. But what she misses —like with this COVID lab leak example— is that one group’s supermeme can be another group’s antimeme, and vice versa. Also, I literally spend zero percentage of my life force thinking about climate. I asked all of my friends and they’re similar too. Does anyone here actually think about climate? Is it actually a supermeme for any of you?
Lily: “I don’t think about climate either!”
References
“Dialectic #22: Nadia Asparouhova - Ideas That Infect” (July 2025) - Jackson Dahl
“Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral” (May 2025) - The New Yorker
Robert’s random notes about Antimemetics (Oct 2025)
