Nadia Asparouhova on antimemetics, nuclear mysticism, and scrolling

I’m a fan of the humble email inbox, which is often dismissed as a clearinghouse for scheduling meetings and unsubscribing from marketing emails. But amidst all that clutter, it’s also an intimate space to trade thoughts with friends and strangers. Technology moves fast, but I find something reassuring in the idea that these older channels of commu... See more

What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?

I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest,... See more

I’ve been going deep on antimemetics – or why some ideas spread slowly, or don’t spread at all. It feels like after we got social media, we came up with a bunch of principles around “virality” and “memes” and then never revisited them again.

But ideas don’t spread the same way they did in the early days of Web 2.0. Now, we sometimes deliberately kee... See more

I wish patronage were widely adopted as an explicit social norm. So-called “gentleman scientists” and patron-funded scientists, such as Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, were behind some of the biggest scientific advancements in the 17th through 19th centuries. I think we got a little confused with the introduction of crowdfunding in the early socia... See more

What tradition or practice from another culture or era do you think we should widely adopt?

I wish patronage were widely adopted as an explicit social norm. So-called “gentleman scientists” and patron-funded scientists, such as Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, were behind some of the biggest scientific advancements in the 17th through 19th centurie... See more