Antimemetics

The world, after all, is more than just what we inherit. It’s what we choose to notice, nurture, and build. Everything around us – for worse, yes, but also for the better – is made up of where we direct our attention. If we learn to channel it wisely, we can decide what type of future we want to see.

A truth-teller is an individual to whom we assign the burden of bringing our shared fears, doubts, and taboos to light.

that where we direct our focus determines what becomes real. Mastering control of our attention is how we “not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.”[42]

Using only our minds, we can make the world as beautiful or ugly as we wish.

Simler uses the example of academic research to demonstrate how this works in “Going Critical.” He distinguishes between Real Science, or “whatever habits and practices reliably produce knowledge,” and careerists, who are “motivated by personal ambition.” Careerists “gum up the works” of Real Science communities, promoting themselves instead of con

This strategy – presenting as individuals in public, while keeping group membership private – helps ideas spread in a Dark Forest landscape where the public is highly sensitive, and often hostile to, the tribes they don’t belong to.

Some taboos – such as stealing, cheating, or lying – don’t budge within most networks.

Antimemes are hugely consequential; they can derail not just our lives, but the communities we belong to, which is why we suppress them.

We had entered, briefly, the era of “memetic tribes,” a term coined by Peter Limberg in 2018 to refer to this rapid speciation of internet-first subcultures. Limberg defines memetic tribes as “a group of agents with a meme complex…that directly or indirectly seeks to impose its distinct map of reality – along with its moral imperatives – on others.