antimemetics

W. David Marx, who bridges mimetic desire and cultural production in his book, Status and Culture, argues that the value of cultural goods like music, fashion, and art usually derives not from their intrinsic merits, but the social status they confer. While social media made it easier to discover and access new, ever-more niche subcultures, Marx

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Vibes are like the sun: we know that they exist, but we can't ever look at them directly. Concepts like community, mentorship, love, happiness, culture, education, progress, and paradigms are similarly resistant to hard definitions. Like the sun, we can feel their warmth, see them skittering around the periphery of our vision...but most of us know

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Taboos have no moral valence. They are not innately naughty or bad, and conversely, taboos that become widely accepted are not necessarily "good" or "right." A society that allows its longstanding taboo on racism to erupt into genocide is mechanistically indistinguishable from a society that allows its longstanding concerns about the ethics of

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But the proliferation of mimetic tribes strained the core assumptions underpinning Girard’s framework, as context collapse made it impossible for any scapegoat — no matter how big— to fully resolve conflicts between tribes. One tribe’s scapegoat was another’s hero…When Girard developed his theory…there was only one public narrative to keep track

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