The antimemetics (and memetics) of making ideas happen -- in crypto and beyond

Ideas, memes, and vibes are some of the most important drivers of modern technology adoption, marketing, and much more — and have been much-covered by everyone from Darwin to Dawkins to Girard to many others. Yet the topic of antimemetics — self-censoring (vs. self-propagating) ideas — whether something fringe, forgotten, or forbidden — haven’t been studied as much, especially in the context of modern networks.

So in this special book-launch episode, we cover the important concept of antimemetics (and memetics) — focusing on:

• where and how ideas take off in groups, whether in online chats or other high-shared context communities;
• how ideas not just spread but are contained, or mutate in strange ways;
• why packaging ideas matters; and
• what we can all do to move ideas to action.

Where do bureacracy, institutions, and protocols come in? What about tacit knowledge that lies in these communities, how (or do) we make it explicit? What roles — from truth tellers to champions to individual nodes in networks — can and do people play in making something go from mere commentary to reality? After all, ideas — or ideas as viruses — are how movements happen, how innovation happens, how things change… or don’t ever change despite being discussed all the time.

Our expert guest in this special book episode (following in our long tradition of sharing what we’re reading) is Nadia Asparouhova, the author of the new book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading; she is also the author of the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. a16z crypto’s Sonal Chokshi — who previously hosted Nadia’s book-launch episode for the a16z Podcast and almost a decade before that on the changing culture of open source — interviews Nadia on these themes, how they connect, and why they matter for the crypto industry and beyond. We also dig into some critiques — and opportunities for builders — too, including what happens to the public commons; network propagation including across networks; reality distortion fields; hidden knowledge; and cultural stagnation vs. cultural abundance. All this and more in this episode of web3 with a16z!

shownotes/ links

• The dark forest theory of the internet, Yancey Strickler
• The extended internet universe, Venkatesh Rao
• The dark forest and the cozy web, Maggie Appleton
• Dangerous Protocols, Nadia Asparouhova
• Idea machines, Nadia Asparouhova
• The tyranny of ideas, Nadia Asparouhova
• Going critical, Kevin Simler

full transcript

Sonal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the a16z Crypto Podcast, I’m Sonal, and I’m so excited to introduce one of our special reading-book episodes. It’s been a really long time since we’ve done a book launch episode (I used to do them all the time in the a16z Podcast) — and it’s very fitting because, we’re a culture of readers; we recently published our annual summer reading list; we also publish one in winter — It’s a tradition my team started here years ago , and, it’s because we’re a culture of readers, as mentioned; but also because books and ideas are a way to shape and-and adapt our thinking into what we also make and build.

And that is actually going to be the theme of today’s episode — which is all about ideas, how they spread, how they don’t spread. And then what to do to move ideas to action.

And so joining as our special guest, we have researcher and writer, Nadia Asparouhova — formerly Nadia Eghbal (only I’m mentioning her former name because she was on the podcast under that name). And her writing has appeared everywhere, but most notably, she’s the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software — which is very fitting for this audience and theme. I actually did the very first episode on that book, which was published by Stripe Press, with Nadia a number of years ago; and then, more recently, she’s written a book called Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. And her work has been supported by Emergent Ventures; Ford Foundation (actually, Ford Foundation supported her original research into the culture and communities of open source); Schmidt Futures; Ethereum Foundation, where she also contributed to the Summer of Protocols — and has written about protocols, and more.

So, welcome Nadia, and welcome back to the podcast for the third time, in like a decade!

Nadia: <chuckles> Thanks for having me back!

Sonal: I’m so excited about your new book — honestly, I’m not just saying this because I’m pretty critical about books these days; I was just telling my colleagues recently that I actually don’t even like nonfiction books anymore, because: I just think they’re terrible… Most of them should have been an article. They’re not interesting. They’re stuffed with stupid anecdotes. Like I’m just over nonfiction mostly; I’d rather read fiction at this point.

And, your book truly — I actually added it to our best-of recommendations list this year — is just remarkable. I absolutely love it. And I’m truly not just saying that, I think you know me well enough to know that.

Nadia: <laughs> Tha-yeah, I think I have similar sentiments about nonfiction and fiction books; I mostly read fiction these days… So if I had to write a nonfiction book, which I felt like I had to do — I think I’m drawn to topics that I feel like no one else is looking at. Or that, you know, there’s some folk knowledge or understanding of how a thing works, but then that the way that it works is not more broadly understood.

That’s definitely what drew me to open source software, even though I didn’t have a background in it at all at the time. <Sonal: yup> And, yeah, I think there is some anti-memetic quality to a lot of… problems around maintenance and infrastructure, where we’re all sort of relying on these things, but; and using them — and we know that they’re important, but somehow can’t seem to pay enough attention to them, <Sonal: Yes!> even though we should be.

Sonal: So this is a wonderful throughline to even connect the episodes we’ve done together, is: You talked a lot about how open source, it’s remarkable how there’s entire very important systems that even hospitals rely on, and only one or two people are maintaining it just to make that concrete. And, in this book, there’s a funny anecdote you mentioned (which I think is really funny): You talk about how Disneyland has these bright things — and then against the background, there’s this don’t-look kind of green shade that hides all the maintenance and the invisible infrastructure? ‘Cuz like they don’t want you to see it, but it’s hiding in plain sight.

Nadia: Yeah, it’s a paint color called “go away green”.

Sonal: I love it. I’m also obsessed with colors — and I have- you know we’ll talk about this offline, as an, as an aesthetic property —

But it’s a great example of what you’re talking about: about kind of this thing that you can forget things that are hiding in plain sight and that are very important, but yet somehow our minds won’t capture them.

I think we should start with you now just defining “anti-memetic”. Like I didn’t even know what that word really meant until I read your book. Just what does that even mean?

Nadia: Sure! So “anti-memes” are self-censoring ideas — so, that’s in contrast to memes, which are self-propagating ideas. They’re ideas that we can’t seem to hold onto in our minds — even though we find them interesting and compelling in the moment. So it’s not that the idea is boring or uninteresting; it’s like, you know, if you’re directly engaging with it, you think, oh, this is really important and I should remember it — and then somehow it just seems to fade from your memory.

And that, that sort of anti-memetic property can happen on both an individual level — so, things like cognitive biases or motives, difficult truths that we just don’t really want to admit to ourselves. But then it also happens on a collective level — so things like taboos, where everyone knows that a thing is true, but for some reason you can’t say it out loud.

Sonal: Mm, interesting. And when we talk about memes, you describe examples of like symbols, customs, and rituals, all as things that can spread memetically. So those things spread memetically, not anti-memetically?

Nadia: Yah, I think in both cases for memes and anti-memes — even though the term “anti-meme” was coined you know in the last decade or two — but I think the-the dynamics of both memes and anti-memes have been around for forever, right. So yeah:

Memes have passed through aphorisms, rituals, norms — you know shaking people’s hands, popular sayings, things like that — those are all examples of memes that have existed looong before the internet existed. <Sonal: Absolutely>

And then similarly with anti-memes, there are you know taboos; whisper networks; sacred knowledge that you know requires some sort of, yah, religious ritual sort of <yah> to unearth or something. You know like all these things have also existed for a really long time, before we had the internet; but I think recent dynamics and changes in how the social web is evolving has just made this concept of anti-memes more prominent.

Sonal: Would you say that fringe movements also qualify as anti-memes?

Nadia: Yeah I think the ideas that are contained in those movements can be anti-memetic — If we are looking at sort of like, how are they spreading more broadly. It’s like okay, they’re being confined to a group of people that are particularly primed to engage with it, and look at it; but it can’t seem to spread beyond that smaller group. <mhm> And so I talk a lot about group chats in the book.

And yeah, group chats are, in a sense you can see as kind of like fringe groups in their own right, right — it’s like these small segments and balkanized kind of groups. And sometimes ideas can spread very rapidly within a small group, <Sonal: mhm> but then not jump to a broader network.

Sonal: Got it. Now, well, it’s funny because, yah — I’d say group chats… one of the things I took away from your book is: They’re not, they’re not actually necessarily fringe; they might actually now be the core… body of where discourse is happening. Like they’re-they’re actually maybe the center now — because the public square, the so-called common, shared, singular space is kind of fracturing. I don’t know if that’s what your thesis is, but when I read your book, that was one of my takeaways…

Nadia: Yeah, it’s sort of like a “centerless center”, <mm!> I guess I would say, um that exists in parallel to… you know, I think one of the points I did want to drive home with this book was that it’s not that group chats have replaced the public feeds — we still have public feeds — and these two dynamic- these two modes of information spread continue <mhm> to work in tandem with each other.

Sonal: Yes, yes; I agree. And that was actually a very key idea I took away from your book too, is that these things need each other — the public internet, the private groups, even the discourse… If you think about media as an example (quote-“mainstream media”) you even make the observation that a lot of these groups need the public media in order to talk about those things in their private media, etc., etc.

Nadia: It’s almost like yah the information ecosystem has expanded now, it’s not that one has replaced the other.

Sonal: Yes, totally.

The other definition, though, which I thought was very vibrant and interesting <chuckles> — and probably the very first time I’ve ever seen this word defined, ever! — is the word “vibes”…

And you actually say in your book that “vibes” combine the qualities of both memes and anti-memes. And I’d love to hear you, like, expand on that — and actually, it’s probably quite literally, indefinable, which to your point, is maybe the point — but how would you define them, cuz crypto is all about the vibes.

Nadia: So I talk a lot about the interplay between memes and anti-memes in both the you know the private and public web — and one of the places that I talk about that is this concept of vibes, which has become more of a thing let’s say in the last five-ish years <yah> that anti-memes have also become more popular.

And a “vibe” is, I would think of it as: an anti-memetic idea that is wrapped in memetic wrapping paper <chuckles>… or something like that. <Sonal: I love that!> <both chuckle>

So it’s able to sort of spread through the public web or spread through public channels — but you don’t really know what the- what the thing is, and that’s kind of the point.

Like we all kind of agree, we’re not going to look too closely at it, but we’re giving it this thin veneer of meme, just enough that we can continue to pass it around without ever actually looking what’s, what is the present inside the gift wrap. <Sonal: That is… so good!>

And I think, again, all these ideas sound new, and trendy, and internet-y — but I actually think all these things have existed for a long time. And so, I think the concept of a vibe has… it’s encoded in a lot of our own language where we use a word without really knowing what the thing is: So I talk about examples like “community”, or “love”, or “mentorship” — These are also, in a sense, kind of vibes on their own, right; it’s really, really hard to define what love actually is. <Sonal: Yes!> It’s really hard to define what community actually is.

And that’s kind of the point. Like we don’t want to get so specific with it that it can be sort of measured or exploited… and so we all kind of agree that you know, this word love is a stand in for some concept/ vibe/ feeling. And we’re kind of just going use it to pass the idea around, right.

Sonal: Yes! And to be clear though, there is still a thing — like even if we can’t quite define it when you say love, -<Nadia: yes!> when you say community — it’s not like anything can be community and anything can be love. Like we kind of still know what the “it” is, even though we can’t define it quite precisely.

Nadia: Yes. Yes.

Sonal: Yah, totally.

Your book talks a lot about group chats, and that was one of the phenomena you talk about; but: Loosely speaking, we’re talking about small communities that form around a shared interest or high-shared context. Basically, it’s just a metaphor also for just any small group <Nadia: yes!> — or community that has a shared interest.

Yah. Which is why I think it’s very relevant to this audience, for the record. Because I think otherwise people think group chats, and they’re like well I’m not in a lot of group chats.

Nadia: It is funny, I’ve had a number of people who’ve read the book already be like “I feel kind of sad because I’m not in group chats” <Sonal: oh; laughs> I’m like, but you’re in a lot of small communities — if they think about it in a different way, it’s like actually everyone’s in them.

Sonal: Exactly; that’s how I think about it. So this leads me to my next question, Nadia (this is a perfect segue actually) — So the reason I care about this, and I think why our audience should care about this — is this is very much related to how ideas propagate, what doesn’t –

This is very top of mind for people, not just in the crypto community, but anyone for crypto and beyond, for all the whole builders. So that’s really what I’m very interested in: Which is, like, how these ideas spread, what makes them happen, what makes them work.

Actually, and I also want to add another point about vibes — and it connects to why this whole podcast and this topic matters, and why your book matters: Like, vibes actually can move economies. I don’t know if you’ve read Kyla Scanlon’s book, In This Economy, she has a whole chapter dedicated to kind of measuring vibes, informally. And you know that memetic and anti-memetic things can actually generate physical value.

Because one takeaway is: Are all these just conversations? Like we should maybe give a little bit more of the thesis — but one of the big themes, which we’ve seen, and you observe and outline this in your book, along with Kevin Simler and a few other people — is how a lot of these conversations are happening in group chats. Like, do you want to kind of quickly share your thesis on that more specifically? And then I’ll- I have a follow-up question for you around that.

Nadia: Yah. I’ve been saying that memes and anti-memes have been around for a long time. And if you look at sort of the history of how memes became household word — it- the term was popularized by Richard Dawkins in his book in the 1970s. But it didn’t really become internet-relevant until the let’s say 2000s, 2010s — where this concept of a self-propagating idea became just much more visible in how people were using the internet, and how information was passing around.

And so similarly, I think something happened with anti-memes in the late 2010s let’s say — where, things just got a little bit too public; sharing ideas on the internet started to become a little bit more of a liability at times when things got too popular. <Sonal: yah> And so you see people sort of reflexively starting to burrow down; starting to reserve their most cherished and interesting ideas for smaller groups, for more high-context settings.

And so that’s where you start seeing this like bifurcation happening where: We’re continuing to use our public social feeds; but then slowly, imperceptibly, more and more people are starting to use group chats, people are using newsletters — just looking for more semi-private spaces to share their ideas.

And that’s where we kind of got to in the last five-ish years or so. And I think it’s interesting because group chats didn’t have this moment of an explosion: There was no like “group-chat moment” where everything took off — in the way that you could say you know Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook had these like defining moments. Because it’s just you know, because these things happen on messaging apps. <chuckles> And definitely COVID helped increase the adoption of group chats — but these big trends are happening and no one can even see or perceive what-what is going on because it’s by definition not happening in public.

Sonal: Exactly, yeah. Eugene has also made this point (and he’s I think written about this too), where, that we’re not really meant to have large public squares. And that if you think about what public squares have historically been used for, they’re actually used for things like mass punishment, like you know flogging, you know tar and feathering, hangings. <Nadia: hm>

And I don’t know if you have any thoughts on… — You-you do make the point in the book that it’s important to not abandon the public spaces; but I also wonder if you have any thoughts on the evolution of the public space, before we move into a little bit more of these private/ smaller groups.

Nadia: Yeah, I think that’s broadly right. I think what’s changed is just our expectations of what we think the public square should be or what it should do for us. <Sonal: Ah!… Yes> I do think that you know that, that sort of globalization influence/ Pollyanna-ish optimism of the late 2000s (when we saw the advent of the consumer web) — that was also sort of like the early open source kind of culture of just you know: “more public is great, and we should embrace that”. I think that, we’ve seen that play out now, and… yeah, maybe it’s not not great in the way that we expected it to be.

That doesn’t mean that we should just do away with it entirely — I still think it’s useful, sometimes you need to broadcast to a much broader audience — I mean, it is the (hehe) information superhighway.

But maybe it’s a way for us to get from destination to destination: Ideas can fly through these public channels to jump around from one place to another. It’s still a useful mode of transportation; it’s just maybe that’s not the place where nuance happens. And that’s okay.

Sonal: That’s- I’m so glad you brought that up. I would love to hear you more explicitly connect where you see the parallels between what you saw happen in the changing culture of open source.

Nadia: Yah; in some ways, I think Working in Public was a precursor to this book. I’ve thought about this book as you know “Working in Private” basically as the compliment to <Sonal: mm!…mhm… totally!> the first book.

But the thesis in Working in Public was that there’s this widespread belief that open source is all about you know widespread collaboration among lots and lots of open source developers — and we have this sort of like happy, bucolic kind of view of what it means to make open source software on the internet.

And… what had sort of kicked off my interest in that was actually going and talking to open source developers and realizing that wasn’t the case, that there is actually a lot of nuance in different projects and how they’re structured: They’re not all always big communities. Some of the ones that we assume are big communities are actually just a couple of developers that are kind of toiling away, on their own.

And so there’s something that needs to be added to the conversation about open source culture there <Sonal: yup> — it’s like, you know, they’re not all just Linux-sized projects: Some of them are kind of more like hobby/ hobbyist-type groups and clubs. Some of them are just one developer who’s working across tons and tons of different projects, and kind of like broadcasting that out to the group. And all of those are open source projects, but they’re just open source projects in different ways.

It required looking back a little bit on what were the original promises of open source and what we think it is (I still think a lot of this rhetoric continues to persist today, even though we should really be moving beyond it at this point) — “highly, highly public and collaborative” is not always what it’s cracked up to be in practice. A lot of times quote-unquote “collaboration” can look like people filing lots of open issues, or bugs, or feature requests. And, they think that they’re contributing to an open source project; they’re actually just adding a lot of support burden to maybe like a single developer who does not have the time to go through all this stuff in their spare time. <chuckles> Even if it’s a widely used project.

So, yeah, we-we hide behind this idea of like the public web as being this ultimate good — and, I think we’ve already sort of moved past that in like the broader social-web kind of context — but I still see it live on in a lot of places in open source, and I think, I think it’s just not realistic.

Sonal: I’m so glad you brought that up, because it actually does fit what we see in a lot of decentralized autonomous organizations.

Like, there is this thing that it’s like “everyone’s open and sharing and its community” — but there’s a lot that our team has obviously written; and we have a wonderful researcher who’s at Stanford, and he’s a political science professor (Andy Hall) who studies decentralized governance in great, great detail — including in real-world systems, online, and DAOs in various forms.

And, it’s very interesting because it parallels what you described and what you saw in the cultures of open source. ‘Cause really, Working in Public (and you even say this in this book) was also hinting at like why classic democracy may not work in its current form. And, that’s something similar to what people saw in DAOs — like in their initial wave of DAOs — like hey, this isn’t working.

So what we’re finding is people are doing these like laboratories of governance, like “living labs” of governance with DAOs, where they’re iterating and finding new models. And so one of our partners (Miles Jennings) wrote this series called “Machiavelli for DAOs” which leans in to the *reality* of people’s kind of self-interested motives — not in this happy, collaborative open source feel only — to actually better incentivize competition, empower rivals, and using non-token-based voting to like fix decentralized governance.

<Nadia: hm> So it’s very similar to what you saw — I’ll send you the series, I think you’d find it really interesting <Nadia: yah I’m curious> Yah! As I was reading, as I was reading your book, I feel like you kind of imply, at multiple points, that we need to be realistic what people’s motives are… And so, that’s basically what his series is about, like just kind of leaning into that.

But the other thing which you didn’t mention just now (when talking about the link to open source) is not just about like the size of the project — and like you know big/ small, collaborative/ not — but also the clash of the old guard and new guard. Which I wonder if there’s something memetic and antimemetic about that too.

Nadia: Yah, the old guard/ new guard dynamics… So I mentioned that part of why I was drawn to open source in the first place was realizing there are these “truths” about <chuckles> how open source culture works that were really widely understood by a lot of developers who were deeply in it <Sonal: yup!> — but then somehow it did not make the jump to even broader software-developer culture (much less tech, much less the world).

And, when you dig into a little bit of, you know, why is that happening — why is this information not spreading beyond the people who are like in it and experiencing it themselves? — There is definitely (and I think this dynamic is true in a lot of other communities, not just open source), but yah, old guard/ new guard dynamic, where it’s not even a always like a specific people trying to suppress things, but also just there is just a common wisdom about how open source works.

And it’s to the benefit of the network that this idea continues to persist. <Sonal: yes> — because it’s- you know, we don’t want to talk about open source in a negative way, of it’s meant to be this poster child of democracy and poster child of what the internet could be, right. But then it gets in the way of like who ends up suffering in the end: It’s like people who can’t get support for their projects, or who are struggling under the burden of high support volume or whatever — and they’re going completely unseen because, because no one really wants to see the truth that is like right in front of them.

So yeah, I think there’s some anti-memetic quality around these like uncomfortable hidden truths that are right there for the taking — if you just go and ask people about their experiences. <both chuckle> <Sonal: Yah!>

But for, yah why do we suppress them; it’s again, kind of going back to how consequential it is to the rest of the network: What would it mean if open source turned out to not be the poster child we expected it to be?

And, at the time when I- I published Working in Public in 2020; and that was, I think, during a time where it still felt a little bit strange to talk about that as a parable for the social web more broadly — <yup> and I was sort of trying to talk about it in a somewhat sanitized way in that, in that book. But I think that’s sort of what we saw happen more broadly.

And all these promises that we had about sharing information more freely online, turned out to not be true. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth striving for. It doesn’t mean that democracy is not worth striving for. It just means let’s be realistic about what we’re looking at <Sonal: Exactly> — and then from there, we can build upon it to figure out how to- how to achieve the goals and the values that we still think are really important.

Sonal: That’s exactly why I brought up the Machiavellian DAOs — it’s literally just leaning into the reality, like let’s just face these truths; and then you can actually build and address.

And, and I love that you connected the dots there, Nadia — because it also connects a throughline from your past few books, our past podcasts together — but also things that are really relevant to our audience.

Now, one of the other things you propose in the book: You specifically use a phrase “sediment” — that you’re kind of almost, like, chewing up the idea… you have a great analogy, water-filtration analogy actually that you should share (‘cause it’s your analogy) — but I think it’s a wonderful way of kind of crystallizing this way to kind of pre-filter almost? Before you like masticate, like chew on the thing in a bigger group/ public discourse.

Nadia: <chuckles> Hm, I like the chewing metaphor.

Sonal: That came from my therapist; <Nadia: yup> I’ll talk about that in a moment. <both laugh>

Nadia: It’s a, yeah! I talk about networks — so any network where information is spreading through it — as these sort of sediment filters: If you think about a physical filter for purifying water, you can put like gravel in it, you can put stones in, you can put sand… and then you pour the water in and then it can like slooowly drip down to the bottom… and then your water is theoretically somewhat cleaner. And there’s-there’s something like that that happens with how information kind of drips through a network.

And, group chats are a version of this, where you’re sort of workshopping, and then it’s slowly slowly seeping out to a broader network. But in the course of that happening, it’s being refined and tested – ‘cuz you know something we haven’t talked about yet is maybe sort of like on Why do anti-memes not spread easily, even though they are so interesting to us in the moment?

Part of it is that they’re perceived to be highly consequential, right? <Sonal: yah> And so if I spread this too easily, there’s a potential hit that I might take to my own reputation, or it might harm my network. This is, you know if you think about taboos as a type of anti-meme, if you say the taboo out loud, that can make you look really bad; and maybe worse, maybe it doesn’t make you look bad and everyone just gets really excited about it (and now you’ve introduced this you know info hazard to a broader network).

So, I think it’s useful to have some sort of filtration system — and that’s sort of what networks naturally are, right?

And if we think about it in terms of adjusting the porousness of that- that kind of sediment filter: Is it passing through very fine sand or is it passing through big rocky pebbles? Some networks let more ideas through, and some networks are a little bit more tightly held.

And, I make the argument in the book that even taboos, I don’t think are innately good or bad, right; we can all think of examples of taboos that are really good that we don’t say them out loud. <chuckles> And then there’s also taboos where it’s like, I wish I could say that out loud! But it’s more of this spectrum of, you know, having to constantly… consider, you know: Are we letting too many ideas in or are we suppressing too many ideas; sometimes we are holding things a little bit too tightly, sometimes we’re being a little bit too loose with it. Both of those have consequences <mm> in different directions.

Sonal: I love that, and to build on your very sophisticated filtration metaphor, I will bring up the masticating one — which I did for the record steal from my therapist <Nadia chuckles> —  ‘cause she describes it as a little bit like the job of someone who’s like a mediator helping you think about things and reflect on tough things: is to kind of pre-chew it, like masticate it the way a mama bird pre-chews the food before feeding it to a baby before their digestion fully develops.

So there is kind of like a combination of filtration and kind of “chewing it up” — iterating on it (as you say in your book) — before you really can… you know refine and have the thing that you’re talking about; which may or may not spread. And we will get to the question of why some things don’t spread.

But before we do, I also have this question for you — because one thing I wasn’t fully satisfied with, was: Are we also in an era with group chats where people are just commenting and not making things? Like they’re not really acting, and they’re just chewing on things, and filtering, and recycling, and… I don’t know, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this because I’m entirely sure you wrestled with this too while writing the book.

Nadia: I think, part of why I wrote this book was because I was grappling with that myself. I think a lot of people had this experience in somewhere around 2020-ish, where everyone starts hunkering down, and you know, a lot of people are withdrawing from public/ super-highly public social interactions.

And… you get to this state where you’re just like, oh I’m comfortable and I’m cozy: I’ve got my little group chats, I can talk to my friends, I don’t need to interact with the you know public stage; that feels really good for a little bit. And then after a while, you’re just sort of like — yeah, exactly as you’re saying — Am I just commenting?

You know I used to be more participatory; I used to like put things into the commons so that other people could benefit from them. I’ve noticed this even with my own writing: Like I write less frequently and more long form, but I don’t write as often as I used to…and I don’t publish things in public as much as I used to — Because I just share them with my friends now, and that’s good enough for me. And I think I started feeling uncomfortable with this of like, is this the future? That doesn’t feel right for me. <Sonal: Right!> That feels like kind of a bummer.

And I think a lot of the discourse about where the social web is going, sometimes seems to imply that this is a good thing. As if, we… found a way to put a band-aid solution on here; and we just aren’t as public as we used to be, and that’s fine. And I’m just, I’m just sort of dissatisfied with that answer. <Sonal: yes>

And I think part of why I wanted to write this book was not to frame it as — there was, first there was the highly public social web; then we withdrew into the private web, and now everyone is happy — that’s not the end of the story.

I think there are uh two big critiques I have of sort of the group chat era.

Sonal: Ooh, I want to hear those. <chuckles>

Nadia: <chuckles> Well yeah, the chapter about sort of this “memetic Galapagos” that I talk about, where, there’s this false sense of security that we have about only keeping our ideas in these smaller, more private spaces — because we think they’re protected somehow from memetic contagion.

And I draw this analogy to you know the COVID pods that everyone had, where it’s like okay I’m just going to hang out with my 10 friends, and you know we’re going to avoid getting any other sort of contagion — but that doesn’t actually work in practice if you’re say, living in a city, <Sonal: yup> because people still interact with other humans just by nature of being around them.

And so similarly with group chats, it’s not that you are only spending time in your group chat and not consuming any other information or ideas outside of that. <Sonal: Right> People take stuff… — what do we all talk about in group chats; we’re always sharing links, talking about things that are happening on Twitter or whatever happening in the news — so you are introducing these memetic contagions in very highly compressed, high-trust, high-context settings.

And, just like how the Galapagos leads to greater species biodiversity — because you have these little islands; and within each island, a species can evolve much more rapidly; and also in really strange, mutated ways — that’s sort of what’s happening with ideas… Where ideas are actually getting stranger and stranger because they are in these segmented group chats. Because you’re in a small setting where your friend now introduces an idea and you go, oh! that sounds pretty reasonable.

And then the speed at which those ideas can get warped in a smaller setting, it just happens much more rapidly than something on the public feed. <yah>

So, that’s one of my critiques about the group chat era, is that it’s not actually as cozy and safe as we think it is.

Sonal: Okay, so that’s one of the critiques. What was your second critique?

Nadia: Second critique is just, if we take the idea of being comfortable in our group chats to their most logical conclusion — What happens to the public commons?

And… <Sonal: exactly> You know, I mentioned that at least for myself, I feel much less of a need to keep putting my ideas out in public because I get the same sort of satisfaction from smaller settings (group chats, newsletters, whatever). And I think a lot of people are experiencing something like that. But. And so, does that mean that the most… nuanced or thoughtful types of ideas — instead of putting them out in public, we’re just sort of holding them private? —

And then what does the public commons look like? It’s kind of just left to people who are willing to play the super memetic game, or are you know doing things to kind of juice up their audience; that’s kind of a sad future to be in.

And so part of even writing this book — this was something I’d sat on for a couple of years and, felt like a little bit self-indulgent; you know <yah!> I had my own doubts; every writer does about everything, you know, something that they write — And part of it was me trying to force myself to say, no, you should keep putting things out there, even when it makes you uncomfortable, even when you feel like you don’t necessarily have to… Because, yeah, we all have some kind of responsibility to do that.

And so, I try not to overly moralize in one direction or the other of… <chuckles> But I at least want us to look at the phenomenon of what is happening today. And try to offer some inroads into, okay: if this is the way the world works, how can we make meaning out of it? I didn’t want it to feel like we’re just in a hostile environment and now, you know, just hunker down and pray you don’t get hit by a memetic crossfire.

Sonal: That was a fantastic summary, Nadia, and I did, for the record, see that come through in the book. In fact I found it very satisfying because you didn’t, you weren’t self-indulgent. And frankly, as an editor, I’ll tell you, I find too much writing — particularly in the crypto space early on (I think it’s improved quite a bit in the last few years) — but, it can be very self-indulgent. <Nadia: Thanks!> You also said something that really stuck out to me, which is that (I’m quoting you): “What I finally come to understand is that how we think directly influences how we act. Though this may sound obvious, it is not widely believed in practice.”

And then later on in the book, you come full circle and talk about how one of the only ways we can change — ‘cause this moves to how we actually move beyond just discourse, and into moving ideas to action — is to actually change how we like control our attention and what we direct our attention towards.

And we’ll talk more about the solutions, but I really thought that that is the key thing. Cuz you’ve written a lot about ideas: You wrote about idea machines. You wrote about other idea essays… It’s also about how to actually *change* things, which I’m glad that that was one of your impetuses for writing the book.

Before we go more into some of the action and some of the other observations you had, I do want to pick up on a couple of things you just said —

So one is, you describe the “super memetic game”. I think that’s so funny because that is what’s kind of happening in a lot of the public-square discourse. Kevin Kwok, I’ve heard him describe this (to me personally, at least) as like “cult building” — where everyone is just kind of building cults; and that’s creating a very different kind of online discourse. (I also have not found a lot of joy on these big public-square type social networks any longer because of that phenomenon.)

So I think that’s a very good way of putting it: That the super memetic game is also cult building.

Nadia: I haven’t heard Kevin talk about the cult-building, but I would definitely agree with at least the way that you’ve- you’ve framed it.

Yeah! I think cult building is definitely another way to think about it… And just briefly to summarize what “super memes” are: I describe them as ideas that are highly consequential, and spread very rapidly.

So, if memes are sort of these, you know, quick mental sugar… you know you consume a meme, you pass it on, and you kind of forget about it.

Sonal: Yes. Simple sugar <chuckles>

Nadia: Simple sugar, right?

And anti-memes are kind of this like high-fiber, dense thing, where it’s like you chew on it for a really really long time, and you don’t spread it.

Super memes kind of combine the most dangerous of both of these qualities <Sonal: mm> where: it is both a dense idea, but also one that is spreading around — or a highly consequential idea.

And so, the category of things that I would put into super memes are- often has some sort of apocalyptic quality to them, which means they really demand our attention — So things like the climate crisis or population decline, or existential risk from AI. It feels really really highly consequential and these are types of things that speak to our personal value systems, so they feel really important to spread: Some horrible crisis is going to happen in the medium-term future, and I need to do something about it. And that can marshal a lot of attention very quickly around it — and it can also attract a lot of talent and resources.

And so you have these entire ecosystems that are forming around all these different super memes. (I go a little bit into a brief history of super memes in the book.) But, war was kind of the main super meme that everyone rallied around. <Sonal: yup> And there was one war at a time, and everyone who was expected to kind of drop everything they’re doing, redirecting their resources/ time/ attention towards that effort. And then then we kind of moved to having more like culture wars — but there was still sort of like a main culture war that was happening, and again, that’s sort of like where everyone’s mindshare was going. But right now it feels like that has even further fragmented into you can kind of like make your own super meme.

And I think it does come from this innate desire for all of us to- you know, we have individual drives, things that we want to do; but then there’s also a drive to dedicate yourself to a cause that’s bigger than yourself. And that-that’s sort of what drives us to find super memes to pledge our lives to, right <yup>.

But right now there are so many different super memes floating around that we almost have like a marketplace of them: and it’s, you know, are you a climate person? Are you a fertility crisis person or whatever?

Sonal: Nuclear energy… or <Nadia: nuclear energy, yah!> Yah!

Yeah, no, exactly.

I do also want to hear any of the critiques that you may have even heard on testing out, iterating on this thesis — like what ARE some of the critiques that you’ve heard of like, you know, the anti-memetic theory and the work that you put into this.

Nadia: I think a question that has come up (that I’ve heard come up) from a few people… is around sort of like: Where does the anti-memetic quality lie…? Is it in the idea itself? Or is it in the network that it’s being passed through? <Sonal: I love that question! ooh!>

And yeah, I probably don’t flesh it out as much as I could have in this book. But, we talked about vibes, right — it’s like an anti-memetic idea could be made memetic if it’s packaged differently; the way that you frame an idea could be received very differently by people depending on how you talk about it. I think the idea of you know eat a healthy diet or something or exercise, like, you can package that very differently for a group of 22-year-olds versus people who are you know maybe older and dealing with chronic health issues and want to exercise for different reasons.

There’s different ways to package ideas, and that caused them to spread in different ways; and so — is it that the core idea is anti-memetic or is it that it’s just anti-memetic relative to the network that it’s in?

I think there are things that we can do to make ideas more or less anti-memetic. You know we talked about the-the “go away green” paint that Disneyland has <Sonal: yes> — and I do spend some time talking about, about that of: How do you make ideas more obscure? How do you bring them more into the foreground?

But I think like ultimately, my interest lies more with the context that an idea is situated in, and, and with the network. Because I think to really understand like why is an idea being resisted, or why is it not spreading beyond like each node in the network, you really have to understand that broader context. So I think that’s probably more of where the anti-memetic power lies.

Sonal: So, it is in the network in your mind.

Nadia: I think so, yeah.

Sonal: And actually just to respond to… you did say very specifically in the book, quote-“Even though the core concept is roughly the same in both circumstances, changing how its message can help it spread more easily through different networks.”

And I immediately thought of — just to give an analogy that relates/ connects to our audience — of *stablecoins*, which is kind of a hot topic right now in the crypto industry, fintech, and beyond; there’s been a lot of activity around it lately.

And it’s fascinating ‘cause the ideas have been around for a very long time; they’ve gone through multiple iterations and forms. And, the value prop is very different for institutions, as it is for small businesses, as it is for like a Stripe, as it is for like a builder, as it is for just someone who’s crypto-degen… Like, it’s like the same core concept, but it, to your point, is packaged very differently.

But the other point you make — which I want to also just pause on — is that the same idea might be memetic within certain networks, but anti-memetic and others. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Nadia: Yeah I think maybe conspiracy theories are an example of this. <Sonal: mm!> Where, for some reason, an idea that seems sort of like fringy or you know just questionable could really take hold of a very specific network, based on how receptive they are to… to that idea — but then it doesn’t necessarily jump outside of that group, right? <yah>

And I think the difference between a conspiracy theory versus an idea that was just sort of ahead of its time is: Can it make the leap out of that one network (where it like spreads very memetically), can it make the leap to other networks? Can it continue to spread on its own? Can it make it to super-public social feeds?

So yah, you can think of less extreme examples of that — but yah, if an idea can be very memetic within a certain network, but, anti-memetic if it just can’t spread beyond that.

Sonal: I wonder if NFTs fit this. Because I wondered when I was reading that line, it immediately struck me like in a way, NFTs became memetic — like they kind of jumped across networks and they hopped and they caught the imagination of many, many people more broadly… Like people almost thought like, it’s interesting: is culture the way that crypto adopts more broadly?; <Nadia: mm> we thought it’d be the other way around, or something else. And then they just took a different form: like the same idea that can be memetic within certain networks and then anti-memetic in others.

Nadia: Yeah, I mean crypto more broadly has gone through these waves, right — the booms and the bust cycles are themselves sort of when you’re in sort of like a quieter cycle, I hear a lot of people in crypto saying, that it’s nice because all those sort of grifters and self-interested people went away; and now it’s just the people who are here are the people who really, really want to be here. <Sonal: Exactly> And from the public- the outside view, people will declare crypto dead, or they’ll say oh it’s over now — and we’ve seen that happen over and over again, right, <yes!> where it’s like it’s just cyclical. And so it just means it kind of gets obscured from broader view, but it’s still alive in a smaller group, and then it’ll kind of bubble up and escape that group again.

Sonal: Yes! I love that you said that, this is very much our group’s thesis — like Chris Dixon and Eddy Lazzarin wrote a post called the “Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle” like in mid-2020 (it’s something they’d been thinking for even longer than that) – And, all of us who’ve been in the space for a long time, all-it’s exactly like you said, they view the space as evolving in cycles: And it kind of alternates between these periods of high activity or quote-“memetic times”; and like crypto “winters”, where, it’s anti-memetic to the world, but there’s still activity happening in these smaller or bigger pockets that are not like legible to the rest of the world.

And- and it’s exactly as you said, Nadia: Some of it is a flurry of activity — like assets, prices, and the speculative activity — that then leads to new interests; and social media activity, it leads to more people getting involved, contributing to new ideas, open source code, leading to new projects, and startups getting creative — and then leading to product launches that actually inspire people.

And then of course, if it burns out, then there is this group of people (like you observed too), that then are sticking around and still building. And with each cycle — and we’ve seen like three or four now maybe, maybe five? — but it’s like really interesting because they show the data to like how each wave brings in new people, and then that group stays to build. So it’s like a very iterative thing.

And I’m so glad you brought that up because it’s very relevant to how ideas propagate (which I do want to talk more about) — before we do, I have some critiques too —

Nadia: That would actually be very fun to talk about.

Sonal: Yeah!

So one is, you describe the “balkanization of the internet” — But basically, if you think about these group chats (or community containers, whatever we want to call it): Is there kind of a homogeneity that happens?

Because on one hand, you argue that you’re actually seeing ecosystem diversity — your “memetic Galapagos” actually — but at the same time is it also creating this kind of high- homogeneity within group (in the in-group part), where people are just really not being truly infected with new ideas.

It’s almost like, are they all thinking the same — thinking they’re different? <chuckles> <Nadia chuckles, yah> Or like I don’t know how you would characterize this; I’m curious for your thoughts (because I for instance left a lot of them because I couldn’t take it).

Nadia: This is where we air our grievances about group chats. <laughs>

Sonal: Yes, exactly.

Nadia: Similarly, you know, I-I’ve noticed this dynamic as well. I’m sure there is a really great project here for someone to dig into, of just like all the different types of dynamics in people’s group chats. (I’m sure someone has already started to study this, but.) You know, there’s some group chats I really cherish because it’s just me and some of my longtime friends, and it feels like no one is trying to push an idea or anything like that. You’re just hanging out, right, you’re hanging out in this quiet space.

But then there’s also group chats that are formed around a specific purpose or idea that is bringing them together.

There’s also these sort of higher-volume group chats… Like I feel like the dynamics in a 5-person group chat are really different from the dynamics in like a 100-person group chats.

And then you end up in this weird uncanny space where — yeah, I think I felt uncomfortable in a lot of these more, let’s call them like “impersonal group chats” I guess — where the speed of message is just super super high volume; and, I think about sort of how does information spread in a very small group chat in these sort of like larger ones versus out in the public…

And then there is this strong sense of like groupthink being reinforced very intensely in some of these medium- to large-size group chats. <Sonal: yes!> Where it’s like, you’re kind of all there to agree with each other or to boost an idea… you’re, but critiques are not really welcome. (Or, it’s not my vibe, so I don’t really participate very much in them.) But that’s sort of my own experience with it, or how I feel about it.

I *do* want to be careful not to overly moralize <Sonal: of course> any one dynamic or another. Because I think these are also just features of how the internet works now. And, it’s good to know that it exists.

Sonal: Right. And I agree with you; I mean you pointed out yourself, networks are made of people. And these are just groups of people interacting. So we’re going to have the same dynamics.

That’s actually one of the things I also wanted to bring up: And that at least in medium, larger ones (maybe not personal ones; they’re also about work and professional engagement) — there’s also I think, this phenomenon that where people can be a bit performative? And we tend to believe… — this is, I think, the mistake a lot of people make when they think of smaller or self- organic communities, or bottom-up communities, or people who around shared interests — they almost act like hierarchy doesn’t matter. <chuckles> <Nadia chuckles> And it’s like actually it’s still there, and it may even be more- it might be worse in some ways, because you’re not even being explicit about it anymore. Like there can be a very clear hierarchy, like some dominant people; and then you have these other people —

Because here’s what I-: My experience, Nadia, has been that there’s a conversation that happens in the group chat. And now there’s like a shadow conversation that’s below the group chat, <Nadia chuckles> where people are side messaging and one on one, “I don’t actually really agree with that person”. And it’s like these group dynamics are actually being exaggerated in a funny way, by the very container of the chat.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, too. <Nadia: yes!> — it’s almost like they’re performative for like the-the big honcho in the group, and then they’re privately like grumbling about it to each other; it’s like so funny.

Nadia: Yeah, I’m sure there’s some axiom for this at this point – “For every group chat exists, there’s also like a side group chat.”

Sonal: “An anti- chat” <laughs; yah exactly!>

Nadia: “And if you don’t know that the group chat exists, then you’re the person that’s being excluded from that group chat.”

Sonal: That’s exactly right…! Yes. Maybe we’ll call it Nadia’s-Nadia’s Law or something. <laughs>

Nadia: Someone else has coined this.

Sonal: Yeah, we don’t want to put your name on it. <both laugh>

Nadia: But yeah, it’s sort of like like a small-town kind of fallacy as well — of well we tend to idolize the idea of like, oh wouldn’t it be so nice if I lived in a small town; and everything would be so peaceful here.

But anyone who’s lived in a small town can also attest to like gossip flies around like crazy; everyone is up in each other’s business, <yah> — because it’s much smaller and everyone knows everyone. So, it’s not really quite as nice and bucolic as it might seem. <yah>

In some ways, living in a city can enable you to be a lot more faceless and-and reinvent yourself constantly. <yes> So, yeah, I think similarly here, there’s trade-offs to both group chats and public social feeds.

Sonal: Of course! <Nadia: yah> Two more quick critiques —

One is (I don’t know if you’ve noticed this too), I would add: Kind of an untethered proportionality… So this is kind of like, what I would almost call like voodoo math, or “group chat math”, <chuckles> which is: There’s this funny thing — and I’ve seen this particularly in people who talk about media a lot; because I’ve obviously, you know, been building a direct media operation for many years now — and it’s funny, because the data and scale that people talk about is so untethered from reality.

So, I have like one or two people who will tell me like ohmygod, this person has a massive newsletter — and you worked at Substack, you know you worked at GitHub — and I’m kind of like, they have like 300 followers on that newsletter. <chuckles> And you act like it’s like thousands of people. Or ohmygod, this person has a massive media empire; and it’s like you know 20 subscribers to this Q&A (or whatever it is).

And I kind of chuckle about it, and I think it’s because there’s this almost… When you spend ALL your time in group chats — without the balance of the public square and other data to tether you a little bit to reality — I wonder if there’s kind of like this opposite thing of an anchoring heuristic that happens, where: It’s almost like instead of being anchored to a certain number, you’re actually disproportionately… you’re unmoored and unanchored to numbers. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, it might just be me.

Nadia: I definitely noticed this when I joined Substack. I actually had this huge moment of coming to reality or something — ‘cause this is during a time where there was you know a lot of contention and conflict between what people (other people) would call like tech versus the media. Right? <Sonal: Yes, yes. I remember that well> … It was a time! Yes. And I got to see a lot of that happening, you know I had a front seat because I was working at Substack at the time;

And I remember coming into it being like, you know, what is my idea of — exactly as you said <chuckles> right, I was one of those people — what was my idea of a big newsletter, someone with a big following? Because we were still trying to acquire new writers to the platform and stuff. And so trying to think through like what- who is considered big. And I came quickly to realize that my idea of what I considered “big” within the world of tech was…

Sonal: Is not big. Exactly.

Nadia: Is not that big! <Exactly!> I didn’t even realize how big <yes!> the New York media ecosystem was. <oh!> All these writers that were getting, that had… When I was trying to think of, like, who are the biggest tech accounts I know or something, to me these people were titans; they were drops in the bucket!

I came away from it very humbled, where I was just like, <yahh!> ohmygosh, I had no idea this whole world exists <totally!> I feel like this country bumpkin, sorry <chuckles>.

Sonal: Oh I feel happy you’re telling me this though, because sometimes I feel like a crazy person, maybe I’m — later we’ll talk about the truth tellers and champions; but sometimes I feel like not just a truth teller, but a Cassandra, <both chuckle> to use the Greek mythology, where I’m like this person who’s saying, this is happening and no one’s really hearing, do you even hear it? — So I’m kind of glad to hear you say this, Nadia.

Nadia: I think maybe you’ve noticed it as well, because you do have more exposure to sort of like art world and media world outside of just, yah (the world that we occupy).

Sonal: Well, the example that comes to mind for me is — like, I’m a big fan of Slate Star Codex/ slash Astral Codex, Scott Alexander’s writing… But it’s funny, ‘cause he wrote a post where he publicly revealed this (which is why I say this) — He’s like oh, I had this piece that went viral at like 500,000 views or something.

And I’m like, what?! I had pieces at Wired that, it had 12 million views in a day. Like, what are you even talking about virality? And that’s why when people attack Fox News (or whatever media outlet people are talking about) — it’s like crazy how massive these numbers are.

And so… Anyway, I’m glad to hear you say that about this kind of data-proportion effect, because it really do feel like there’s this weird distortion that happens.

But I do want to also say on the flip side: Maybe that isn’t the point. Because it can also just be like, maybe you just need to reach the right people, or maybe to interact with these ideas — these anti-memetic ideas, especially — you just need to be with the group in that quote-“cozy web” (that you and Venkat describe) to-to … you maybe only need to reach those people.

Nadia: That’s the thing; in a weird way, I think it almost doesn’t really… <Sonal: matter!> matter <Sonal: yah> if in your world… Again, like I think all these dynamics are reflected in non-internet examples as well.

So like, back to your hometown — gosh, there’s this tweet from years and years ago that still lives rent free in my brain, of someone asking, growing up, who was the richest person that you knew or something? <yah> — And if you If you then move to a city or something, and you have a different perspective, you think back, and you’re just like wow, that was like the biggest kahuna in town <yah!> that I could think of <Sonal chuckles> is like this…

And it’s like, it’s all relative, but it doesn’t really matter in the end, right, like I think relevance is super highly context dependent. And so if that person is the biggest person in your world, that’s okay, um.

Sonal: Exactly. Well, particularly if that’s who you listen to. And that’s all kind of that matters, if we’re talking about —

Nadia: Yeah, engagement is what matters, right?

Sonal: Exactly; or persuasion — like, why ideas spread and some don’t — like, if it has quote-“impact,” to use the word you use in the book, then that’s maybe how you measure that. And that’s all that matters.

Okay! So the last kind of critique/ open question is on the other theme that you don’t really explicitly say in the book, but it’s kind of underneath the surface, is: You talk about like, these things are happening in the dark forest —

Your book is published by the Dark Forest Collective by Yancey Strickler… And you actually talked about the dark forest (analogy) in the previous book, Working in Public (We also talked about it in our previous podcast; I’m a big fan of “The Three-Body Problem” trilogy, read all three books, and the fanfic book after that). And just for listeners who don’t know the dark forest analogy:

You know, it’s kind of this idea that, playing on the Fermi Paradox, that we live in space, in this completely dark forest invisible to other civilizations. And when you make yourself visible you can actually… be destroyed. Because then you’re no longer in that dark forest. It’s a very gross oversimplification, but —

Anyway. The question that comes up for me as another critique/ slash opportunity is: There’s a lot of knowledge buried in these group chats — in these communities, and towns, and islands in the Galapagos archipelago — that’s not made visible to one another. And that’s not even made visible to any other machines/ readable. And so there’s this huge like, what is tacit versus made explicit?

Nadia: It’s kind of… I think it feels like a shame for those of us, including myself, who grew up – remember in the early internet days, and where everything was indexed and searchable? It feels kind of sad to be like oh, but now a lot of that is not easy to find — I think that’s true (for what it’s worth) even beyond the group chat context; I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of even just highly public social content that is no longer indexed or easily searchable <Sonal: yahh> — especially with the move to video and things like that.

I try to take — and this this ties into the critiques I think that people have right now about whether our culture is stagnating; or you know are there any good ideas left, or are we just watching the same Marvel remakes on repeat over and over again — I actually, I think I have a, I tend towards a more optimistic view of it of:

Yeah, we’re losing probably a lot of tacit knowledge — partly because it’s not being you know indexed or searchable in easy ways — but also just because a lot of is happening in these dark spaces.

But on the flip side, it’s almost like, it’s partly because there are SO many ideas now floating around. And you’re almost… in this position of, being fattened by like all these — like I think the bar has actually been raised quite a bit in a weird way for culture. <Yes> And yes, if you look at the lowest common-denominator forms of what people are consuming, maybe that paints a bleaker picture — but if you grew up in a small town (I grew up in the suburbs), it’s like you’re deprived of culture, you’re in a culture desert, right, and you couldn’t access it in any other way. And think a lot of actually — I have some hunch that a lot of internet-y people came from these culture deserts, and they turned to their computers to like find what they were looking for.

But now there’s like, there’s so much more available… it doesn’t really matter where you geographically are, <Sonal: yes!> you can consume so much more interesting stuff.

So, yah, maybe it’s getting hard to make sense of it all — but even if someone were able to organize all that information, make it available, would we even have time to consume it all.

I feel actually fairly optimistic, that the quality of ideas that we have access to has probably never been better… It’s just — and this is where it comes down for me a little bit down to like, well, what do you want to choose to pay attention to: If you are spending all day scrolling on really stupid videos, and then you’re complaining about you know like where is the culture; well, that’s kind of on you, I feel like. <Sonal: Exactly> It’s like you can choose to spend your time focusing on the things that you’re actually interested in, or consuming and stuff you’re interested in…

I don’t think it’s quite as easy as saying, this is just a personal-responsibility problem. But, I think the information is at least available to us. And then the conversation should be about how do we get more people to pay attention to the things that are… high-fiber ideas versus yah the mental sugar.

Sonal: Yah, to use your di-diet analogy, in terms of complex and simple carbs <Nadia: Yah complex and simple- > Yeah, yah exactly. And you’re right, like the higher-fiber things digest better, they stay in your system better, that you chew on them more.

The simple things are kind of quick-hits, flash floods! ‘Cause like, let’s go to the question — you’ve been talking about it throughout this podcast, but if you were to summarize, why *don’t* ideas spread? — You know, you talk about this phenomenon where some things can be just a flash in the pan… but then they don’t really take off, or carry on? You even talk later in the book about phenomena *not* taking off that should — to be able to propagate an idea and really see it through its conclusion. (Because I want to shift into talking a little bit more about solutions and opportunities.)

Nadia: Well I think ideas don’t spread in the anti-memetic sense because they’re perceived to be super consequential. But it sounds like you’re yah maybe asking a little bit more about like, why – why don’t we make progress on ideas?

Sonal: Yeah, that’s actually the question — but is it only that it’s super consequential, Nadia, because that was one of the prongs I thought… But when I read your book, I read it more as: There’s also just some things we just don’t seem to see, period. Even if they’re not that consequential. I mean, tell me if I’m wrong, but that was also my interpretation.

Nadia: Yeah, I think that’s true. I mean, I talk about this in the context of bureaucracies:

So, Richard Dawkins, when he talks about memes — he has this also this idea of “memeplexes”, <yup> which are just sort of like a cluster of memes, right. So, you can think about like a political ideology or religion as sort of like a cluster of a lot of different memes that form this bigger thing —

And so there’s like a version of that for anti-memes, where you have like an “anti-memeplex” that <Sonal: it’s bureaucracy> that I think, yah, looks a little bit like a bureaucracy.

It’s like, yah, a bunch of smaller anti-memes that have conspired to make you *not* look at the thing. And so, yeah — like healthcare-healthcare reform might be an example of this; or journal publishing and scientific research or — you know there’s a lot of these systems where you’re just like ugh, it feels bad, but I can’t seem to look at it or make sense of it or anything like that.

And so yeah: Why can’t we seem to make progress on some of these ideas that really resist being looked at?

Sonal: Got it. It really is a question, not just of why these things don’t spread, but why don’t they take off — so how would you summarize *that* portion of the book and thesis.

Nadia: Yeah I think, a lot of this comes down to where do we allocate our attention…

It’s nice to talk about networks in this very sort of abstract way — but like really, when you drill down, what is the network made up of? It’s made up of individual people, individual nodes in the network. And so to really understand, like, why something doesn’t take off a network, you have to kind of go node to node <yes> and say, like why does it not spread from one person to another.

And when you’re really, really zooming in, then it’s: Where is someone choosing to allocate their attention? Are they avoiding looking at something because they’re afraid they perceive it to be really high consequence for themselves or for their network? So these are all these different levers I think that you can start to-to point to.

And then I think there’s, on — zooming back up to the network level — there’s also this question of like: How do we collectively remember things, right: So there’s like the individual question of like, as an individual, how do you choose to remember or forget something? But then on a collective level, how do we- there’s also this question of: We know that we want to remember something as a group, how do we remember them?

And this is where I think institution building ends up becoming very important. Where, you know we need to write things down; having formal rituals to (or processes) to sort of like resurface things into our memory… And, yeah, like how do you make it possible for someone to sort of pick up the work and-and can continue on with it. And this is where I talked about this role of champions, and you know, for most people, if they’re looking at some really… you know tangled up problem, most people are going to look away from it. And maybe that’s fine. But there’s going to be someone out there where they look at it and they go oh, that’s an interesting problem; like I want to spend some time on that, right. And so just really encouraging people to lean into that.

But, yah; as we think about sort of like collective remembrance, then it’s… as someone is working an idea, and as they step down or as they rotate out, how are they sort of preserving that knowledge for the next person.

Sonal: Exactly! <crosstalk> That’s exactly what actually prompted the question about tacit versus explicit.

Because, when you talk about like you know college campuses, like as a great example of a place where ideas can quickly spread, but then kids age out: like they only are in campus for four years. And so they’re booted out of the system, essentially. And then this next batch comes in. And-and that’s only one example.

And I don’t know if you have a concrete idea here, because of all the work you did in the open source world — Like is it documentation? Is that how people make the tacit explicit?

I come from — you know, <Nadia: yah> my earlier career (as you know), was at Xerox PARC — and they were pioneers in the first knowledge base systems, because they were trying to scale both knowledge across enterprises. This is back in the day when companies would be around for 100 years, but people would generationally age out — and then they would also try to scale expertise; so like someone senior (like a senior copy person) could help a more junior technician in the field without sending out expensive people every time.

So there’s like a lot of interest in knowledge-work documentation and making tacit knowledge systems explicit, etc. — like do you have any thoughts on how to do that, like concretely?

Nadia: Yeah it’s a, unsolved… as you’re pointing to, <yah> there’s an entire industry around trying to solve this problem <totally> so I don’t- I have no magic bullets here, for sure.

But we definitely saw these dynamics in open source projects. <yup> There’s this, you know, so many examples of a maintainer that has sort of just gone M.I.A. on a- on an open source project, and it’s still critically used; maybe there’s some security update that needs to be pushed through, and the maintainer is just sort of like nowhere to be found. That- that presents a problem. <Sonal: yah>

This question of successorship, right, like, how do you transfer a project to someone else?

There’s also examples in the opposite direction where someone comes on and says, hey like I want to help with this project — and the maintainer is maybe overburdened, or just not thinking about it that much, <yup> and they hand them the keys to the castle. And then that turns out to be a malicious actor who then does things you know that aren’t great to the project.

So you know it’s hard to think about sort of like what is the right way to do it.

I’m always a fan of documentation because I like writing, and I like writing things down. So, yes, documentation is great. But the reality also is, a lot of people don’t read documentation — and so, <Sonal: exactly> write it in a way that if you’re too detailed, and it’s too complex, and people just kind of tune it out. And so, how do you give people just-enough information <Sonal: mhm> that they act on it?

So, yah, I think documentation is great, but not the only answer… Like, it’s unsatisfying, but it’s like personal relationships: It’s like, someone that you really trust — or maybe someone who has just learned by observing you on, in this case, an open source project — where it feels like okay, I can hand this off to that person.

That might just feel better and be more successful than someone who’s kind of like, I read all the docs! — but doesn’t really know how something works in practice.

Sonal: Totally!… Well, the example that comes to mind for me (and I actually did this interview a number of years ago on this podcast), was with Tim Beiko at the Ethereum Foundation. <Nadia: Oh, yay!> Yeah, love him. <Nadia: Love Tim>

And he was talking about how they do the community calls…And he does such a lovely job of like, basically this decentralized coordination across many different entities (you know because they have this multi-client diversity in the ecosystem, that there’s a key value for them). And then how do you kind of coordinate?

And it goes exactly to what you said: It’s a lot of the human stuff, like, just talking about it. Like, people aren’t going to read the notes and talk about it. So, you know they have these community calls, every week, every month (I can’t remember); but like, they pull off massive feats of coordination — like The Merge — using those practices.

So I don’t think it’s (to your point), I think you’re right to be optimistic that these solutions will come about because people are already doing this at a scale — without a center. Like, it’s a centerless network, to use your analogy in the book.

Nadia: Yes, definitely.

Sonal: The other question I had for you on- along this theme of problem/ solutions, what to do, is in the chapter on the memetic Galapagos — I’ve actually been to the Galapagos multiple times… <Nadia: Oh wow!> it’s one of my favorite (favorite!) places in the world. It’s like a dream spot for me because I was obsessed (still kind of am), with Darwin’s theory of evolution, how it came about, just everything about it.

And, it’s interesting because one of the things you talk about in the book — you already talked about this on the podcast, like, you talked earlier about how isolated environments lead to “greater speciation and biodiversity” (which was obviously famously discovered by Charles Darwin’s study of finches across Galapagos Islands) —

You then talk about how group chats are like social islands; ideas evolve even more rapidly in a private online environments: “They’re tested, iterated upon, and refined” (I’m quoting you) “with little outside influence to temper the process as they adapt to the unique dynamics of their members, much like Darwin’s finches” —

You also then talk about like, that you know, many people are probably part of many different group chats/ slash communities. And therefore quote-“Perfectly capable of crosspollinating ideas that are being incubated in these highly concentrated environments.” And you gave a funny analogy: It’s like spending one’s days moving between several poorly ventilated rooms instead of walking around all day in the fresh air.

So, it’s the conditions for idea viruses to grow and mutate.

But then… I wonder how much they actually do spread *across* these islands / slash group chats / slash communities. Like, what-what have you seen or what do you think about them actually spreading, and truly connecting across these networks?

Nadia: I think some of the context in which I was thinking about ideas mutating and taking on these sort of strange qualities they might not have otherwise — One of the examples I mentioned in the book was this plot to kill a standing governor. Which kind of emerged from a lot of disgruntled people being trapped in these sort of, metaphorically, poorly ventilated rooms: Where they’re airing their grievances. <yah> And then those grievances start to feed into each other, and they start to bubble up, and then it turns into a real life plot to kidnap and kill a governor; which was thankfully foiled.

So in that case, it’s not really so much about how much is it hopping from one place to another — but more of how is it fermenting <yah> in this contained environment. <yah> You know to your point earlier about just this reality distortion that happens <mhm> when you don’t have something else grounding you, that starts to feel like the new reality and it feels like it makes sense.

So yeah; I think it’s maybe slightly separate from the idea of <yah> like hopping from one place to <got it> another; I don’t know that I can pin down the exact-exact details of how something is spreading or not spreading.

Sonal: But are they supposed to connect… and are people like crosspollinating these ideas?

Nadia: Yeah! I think — beyond the context of sort of ideas mutating, getting very weird very quickly — this goes back to sort of group chats as a sediment filter for bubbling up into, into our wider feeds.

And I talk a little bit about these dynamics as well of ideas that, or people, or books, whatever, that can feel really taboo and that you can’t talk about in a public setting. But people can talk about in like these smaller, smaller groups.

For a while, it’s not clear whether any other small groups are talking about it, or whether it’s just you and the people that you know. And, there’s sort of this — yah, testing of-of ideas that has to happen at some point, where it’s like the blobs start merging together, all the different groups start merging together. <Sonal: yes>

And so it’s like, you know, is this safe to talk about with a totally different group? Oh, it is; okay, that means like *that* is also marked safe, right. But sometimes it happens where you share an idea with a broader group <chuckles> — and I can think of many examples <chuckles> of this happening in social media, right, where someone says something out loud, and then it turns out, oh, you should not have said that; like please, put that back <yah> — And so then you’re failing the test, right?

But yeah, I think the smaller groups can feel like a safer place to sort of test something out before it, yah, it jumps to the next group. And then if it keeps jumping, then you start to see these social scenes form. And then eventually sort of a taboo can make its way into mainstream discourse.

Sonal: Yeah and maybe it doesn’t even have to connect because I think sometimes these things just kind of boil…– maybe just not accidentally; I mean, we haven’t studied the topologies and-and spread in these networks super scientifically — but like, just in the zeitgeist: You see like when a movement that boils up, and then it kind of recedes, and then there’s almost a backlash that can happen (backlash, <mhm> and counter backlash, and backlash to the backlash). And it’s just, I just kind of wonder if it’s also like a zeitgeist shift, like a general vibe-shift that happens:

Maybe a time has ripened —  I don’t know how to quantify this, ‘cause it’s such a loosey-goosey concept — It’s just kind of like: an idea has had its time; it’s flashed, it’s spread memetically; the anti-memetic thing is kind of sitting across all these different islands… and even if they don’t connect to one another, at a certain point in the future (even though we can’t concretely quantify it), it does feel like some things can happen in the zeitgeist without connecting and crosspollinating.

And it’s quite funny because I mentioned I went to the Galapagos multiple times: When you go from island to island, they make you wash your feet, so the sediment, like the sand doesn’t spread from island to island <Nadia: oh wow>… Yah! And that is kind of funny that you use a sediment analogy in the book, because the filtration — I mean, they’re trying to keep the biodiversity very pure and clean for you know ecological and tourism and other reasons — But when you go island to island, like you can’t crosspollinate. They will be so careful.

And granted, it’s an analogy in your book <chuckles> I’m not trying to make it literal <laughs> — but it’s funny, because that really struck me as one of the unique things about: When you have biodiversity, you kind of have to maybe not crosspollinate it to let it just be what it is… To protect this very thing you’re talking about, this anti-memetic quality — maybe they don’t really need to crosspollinate (at least in the ways that we conventionally think they do).

I don’t know — it’s a Dark Forest-related thing too, actually. <Nadia: Yeah, I think there’s something there…>

So okay. What I want to do now is just talk specifically about some technology solutions, opportunities… I also want to talk about specific roles you outline in the book — Let’s talk at an individual level, and then let’s talk at a kind of broader substrate level — like the Dark Forest/ macro level.

But at the individual level, you talk about three different entities in your book (not all in the same section):

• One is the role of the “truth teller”;
• The second is a role of a “champion”.
• And then throughout the book, you talk about “nodes” and “gatekeepers”, kind of interchangeably, and essentially us as individuals are nodes in these networks…

And so I’d love you to tell me a little bit more about what those roles are, why they matter.

Nadia: Sure! Let’s start with the nodes or the gatekeepers, since that’s sort of the most general- generalized role — I know we touched on this a little bit earlier in this conversation, but yeah,

I think ideas are often talked about sort of — like, even what we were just talking about now, sort of like — how do they come onto the scene? How do they spread through a network? <Sonal: yah!> We’re looking at this like very high network level…

And so I spend some time, and in particular, in the chapter about attention, just zooming all the way in to say okay, well, how are these ideas actually spreading from node to node or person to person? And a lot of that being, I think a function of where someone is allocating their attention; But also, these dynamics around… It’s not just that ideas go viral or they don’t go viral — I think that’s a very flattened way to think about the spread of an idea. Because as we all know, there are plenty of good ideas these days that people are intentionally not wanting to go viral or not sharing with their broader networks — So why is that.

And, and I use a couple different examples taken from epidemiology just to think about: Okay, it’s possible for someone to you know be infected by an idea, but choose to not spread it to their other connections for some reason; they just kind of hold on to it for a little bit. Someone can be presented with an idea and it just completely bounces off of them, just you know, not infected by it at all.

Also, the symptomatic periods of do <Sonal: yesss> does an idea pass right through you? Do you sit on it for a really really long time? All these things can sort of add a lot more nuance and complexity to whether an idea is simply going viral or not — which I think just assumes that oh I receive it, I pass it on, and you know just give me the next idea; it’s like an assembly line or something — like that’s not really how ideas spread.

So that’s some of the context around the idea of people being these nodes in a network.

And then I particularly hone in on two… two roles that I think are particularly influential in a network — and that’s the role of the truth teller, and of the champion:

The truth teller is someone who can sort of shake a network out of its collective suppression of an idea. And so the you know simplest metaphor for this is the child who says you know “the emperor has no clothes”, right. Everyone standing in the town square in the parade knows that the emperor has no clothes, <Sonal: right!> but no one can say it out loud. And the only person who says it is this small child who can kind of blurt it out. And then everyone goes oh, gosh, you’re right! You know how did I not see that? <yes>

So I try to drill a little bit into the dynamics of what makes someone a truth teller, and I think fundamentally, it’s someone who has (is perceived at least) to have no skin in the game or no agenda <Sonal: agenda, yah, exactly> Right, it has to be someone who stands out a little bit as an outsider. And everyone can kind of trust that person because they say oh, well, you know, this person just waltzed in and said it’s okay.

And I think this is fundamentally where a lot of religious leaders or figures can-can play a role because a lot of anti-memetic knowledge is treated as sacred — because it’s really difficult to unearth, whether from a group or from yourself in your own psychology. And so we can trust someone where we can go to a confessional booth and tell a priest our deepest darkest secret, and that person can kind of hold it for us right; you can have like a soothsayer or an oracle who’s like saying these things out loud, that’s no one else can be trusted to say, but it’s okay if they say it.

And then in a secular context — and this is also true for a lot of how consulting works, frankly, in large corporations — where the employees and the people that work there can’t say something that might be- that everyone knows is true, <Sonal: yes> but you can pay someone to come in from the outside and deliver the same truth in a nicely packaged report. And then everyone goes, oh! yes, of course. This is the… you know; and it makes it okay to talk about. <yes>

So we have these sort of like interesting rituals that we’ve developed in many different contexts to welcome this role of a truth teller or recognize it. But I think it’s really important that we have truth tellers — because without them, we end up in this state of like, high-highly suppressing a lot of truths that we really need to be acknowledging as a group. And you need you need that role of someone to shake you out of it.

And then the last one is the champion, which <Sonal: the champion! yup> yup, which we’ve talked about already a bit.

Sonal: Yah but go ahead and restate it because I think it’s useful in this taxonomy.

Nadia: So I think a truth teller is someone who’s sort of shaking us out of this collective mode of-of suppression – you know, we might temporarily look at the truth and then it all fades away, right. So if you think about the consultant delivering the report:

Everyone reads the report (maybe); and then they go, oh, this is very interesting insight. It’s possible that when the consultant goes away… nothing ever gets acted upon; it’s like oh that was a nice moment where we all acknowledged the truth, and then we all forgot about it and moved on with our lives. <Sonal: totally!>

So what you need is someone who is a champion. And the champion is someone who is taking it upon themselves to make sure that we don’t forget this truth that we all temporarily looked at, right — ‘cause that’s the problem with anti-memes, is we can look at it and then it kind of fades from our memory —

So, again, just using those consulting examples: You know, maybe there’s someone who works at the company who is finally like yes, this is the moment! I needed to have some outside source of truth to force this to become a priority for everyone else who works in the company. And so now they have their — you know McKinsey report or whatever — and they can go around saying like hey, we spent all this time doing this- doing this project to point towards these truths, and this consultant has told us that these things are true; what are we going to do about it? But it needs to be someone on the inside who is really making sure that those changes are being implemented.

And so — and this is I think, fundamentally how a lot of politics gets done, right, — because <Sonal: yes> the political machine is large and complex; there are an infinite number of issues that someone could be focusing on. And, all of that has to kind of be pushed through a system that is fairly limited in scope in terms of the amount of attention that can be allocated towards all these different issues that are competing for politicians’ time. This is why we have lobbyists; you can pay someone to go and make this their issue and make sure <yes> that it is put in front of, in front of a legislator to make sure it gets on-into a certain bill, or that a certain policy is passed.

How do politics actually get done? It- they get done because someone took the time to make this one very niche thing their problem, and <exactly> to make sure that everyone knew about it. I think sometimes people look at this and they go, oh that’s very trivializing; there are other issues that are more important than this. But I think it can also be really empowering because if you don’t like the issues that are being put on table, like you can be the person to be the champion for whatever you care about.

Sonal: That was a super helpful taxonomy ‘cause, I want this section to be more concrete. And that’s so relevant to each of us as individual; anyone can play all those roles.

So, a couple of quick probing questions:

Does the truth teller have to be external — or can they come internally from the network.

Nadia: Just sort of my first reaction is like, I think it does always have to be someone… not maybe not literally external, but perceived as having no agenda. <Sonal: exactly; yah yah>

So again, like a religious leader might be a very integrated part of a community — but there’s something that’s understood that like spiritual matters are a little bit separate from the other matters. Yeah, they can be trusted, they can be known — it’s not like it has to be a completely random person — but there has to be a sense that, like, we’ve all agreed that this person is somehow… stands apart a little bit.

Like court judges also can kind of be perceived as having this role <yup> of like oh you know you’re- you’re somehow more fair and objective in perceiving this than the rest of us.

Sonal: Totally.

And on the internal champ or the champion, not internal champions — I was thinking of internal champions in the context of sales and sales processes <Nadia chuckles> like; there’s always like, we talk about enterprise sales, any sales process, government, procurement, whatever it is, there’s always an internal champion —

But the flip side of that is sometimes the internal champion can also be kind of siloed. Like they’re a one-person department of X technology, so that the idea doesn’t get absorbed into the org or the target that you’re trying to persuade. So that person can also be set to the side.

So, the question around champions, is: The champion is just someone who carries the idea forward, or has some expertise in your framework. Is there like a particular hierarchy?…

Nadia: I don’t even think they necessarily need to have expert-… Or expertise can be learned in many cases on the fly; it’s like when I think of  like, when I think of what is the most important quality for a champion to have, it’s just perseverance. <Sonal: Ah, Interesting> Just make this your thing and spend all the time you need to…

Sonal: Keep pounding at it. Yah, yah, that’s how you get the idea to take off, <right> to spread. Yah.

Nadia: Yah. Because the problem is fundamentally that people keep forgetting and not looking.

If you’re just being annoying and tapping people on the shoulder all the time, like that in itself is a service, right.

Sonal: And then the last question on the taxonomy —

If we are each individual nodes… It was interesting to me that you said “gatekeeper”. Like, what do you mean by that word, that each node is like a gatekeeper: Is it that we’re a gatekeeper of our attention, of information, of ourselves, of our curation of our filters and feeds? <mm>

Like, what is the gatekeeper in this context?

Nadia: I think we’re a gatekeeper of whatever ideas we’re allowing to pass through us — <Sonal: yes…yes> and then flow on to someone else. Right?

You know, sometimes you encounter some sort of clickbait or rage bait, and I try to catch myself in those moments and go, okay, but am I doing exactly what the thing wants me to do — but maybe I just don’t because that’s…it’s… that would be the expected behavior, right.

Sonal: Yeahhh. And I think you even mentioned in the book that people are starting to do that on their own anyway, just because they’re becoming more familiar with this internet vocabulary of like how things work.

Nadia: Yeah! …I think we’re all developing a little bit of a better immunity, right, to the things that you might have shared unthinkingly 10 years ago, now you look and they’re like, uh I don’t need to share that right? <Sonal: Yeah, totally>

So that’s a good thing. We’re slowly developing maybe some immunity to these things. And I’m sure virus — ideas as viruses! — will continue to find ways to mutate and escape our whatever immunity that we’ve developed.

Sonal: I did wonder too if you need another role — which is kind of not like a town crier, but like the person who goes between places, and kind of calls out interesting things. <chuckles> Like in-in Hindu mythology, there’s like a-a character who does this — and it’s really interesting just from a storytelling perspective — and I feel like a lot of mythologies have this kind of person… Not like an oracle; but someone who just kind of walks around, and propagates info; almost like a storyteller-narrator?

And the reason I was thinking of this because in crypto, a lot of venture capitalists who got into crypto h- all told me (and this is like a decade ago), that they were all at some dinner talking to Wences Cezares — I never met this person, but he was a founder of Lemon and a few other companies — and, basically, he was the one who kind of infected their mind (in a good way) with the crypto-virus idea.

As a spark — because it was still kind of anti-memetic in that time. And, I kind of wonder if there’s that kind of a role missing here: like a town crier type of person, or a walker of the roadwalker/ traveler? I don’t know <chuckles>; I was just, I don’t know if you’ve thought about it at all…

Nadia: Yeah, yeah, definitely — it’s like the person that is almost like a clearinghouse for ideas or something, but just like constantly sort of rapid-fire <yes> sending things out to different people. And I definitely can think of specific people that are like this <exac> in my own networks, who are just constant generous source of ideas, or just really good at infecting: Either-either they’re sort of like spewing out tons of things, or they’re so trusted that when they do share something, people really listen.

If I were writing a book about mimetics I would probably include that role… so that’s definitely a role. But yah, if <Sonal: This book is a book about anti-memetics, so you’re not, yah!> — but that’s definitely a very useful role, though.

Sonal: Quick question, where do you see the role of protocols? Because in your book, you actually talk about protocols — you even contributed an essay to the “Summer of Protocol” series that the Ethereum Foundation had funded, and that Venkat collaborated on as well; and he’s also a mutual friend of ours.

I don’t know if you know this, Nadia, he was at Xerox when I was at PARC.

Nadia: Ohmygosh! I didn’t put that together… yah!

Sonal: Yah… So he and I first met in like 2006 or 5, something crazy. <Nadia: Wowww> Isn’t that crazy? I know. <Nadia: Yeah that’s totally–> I’m extremely fond of him and have huge respect for him;

But anyway, before you even answer the question, how would you define a protocol?

Nadia: As the term implies, I spent a summer thinking about protocols <Sonal chuckles> and writing this essay <chuckles> — so I spent a lot of time trying to get to a definition of protocols that I was happy with.

And so in that essay, I define protocols as: “procedural systems of social control that simplify communication between actors”. They can help produce a number of decisions that need to be made. And they resist- some being managed by any one central place. They kind of like run on their own in a strange way.

Sonal: That’s fantastic. And it’s actually not that dissimilar from the technical protocol — in terms of communication between systems; < you know Nadia: mm> without a human in the loop necessarily — it’s not that different.

It’s funny, because Hayden at Uniswap, and I were at our Founder Summit last year, along with Colm Delaine, who’s CFDA fashion-award winning KidSuper — and so the three of us were talking because Colm was like, “What the heck is a protocol? Why do you guys all call everything a protocol? Why can’t you just call it X?” And Hayden’s like, “Uh-uh, how do I even define a protocol?” And I’m like “It’s just a way for systems to communicate.” And it’s like, <Nadia: yah!> you can automate it.

So where do you see the role of protocols in this, discussion?

Nadia: Yeah, I think if we’re thinking about the role of attention in how attention shapes which ideas we pay attention to or not <yeh> — protocols serve this function that can be pretty useful, where they can abstract our attention away — free us up to think about other things, right.

So sort of like automation for the mind <Sonal: oh, there we go!> where it’s like, okay, we have a, yes, a very clear way of: okay, when this thing happens, like here are the list of steps that we follow — and so, therefore, we don’t have to spend time thinking about it.

The-the piece I wrote for Summer Protocols was actually about sort of like the dangerous side of it (it was called “Dangerous Protocols”) and says like, yes, that’s great when you can sort of automate process and be running in the background — but there’s that sort of like, you know, the fantasia/ the Mickey Mouse thing <yah>, where suddenly you have too many protocols running and what if they start to get a little bit out of control? What if you want actually, do want to revise a protocol?

We’re not paying attention to a protocol by nature of what a protocol is — Sometimes we can start to become overrun by these processes that we increasingly feel like we don’t have control over. <yah> And that’s sort of like the bureaucracy problem too. <Sonal: exactly> Somehow all of this was constructed from scratch somewhere, but now it has become so complex and unwieldy, and somehow it really resists us being- us-us looking at it. And so now it has become very difficult to revise or even evaluate.

And so I think that, that is an issue that can happen with-with protocols. But fundamentally, on the flip side, protocols are really important — just to have the ability to automate things that we don’t want to can- keep spending our attention on over and over again.

Sonal: That’s fabulous. I’m gonna do these last two as just lightning-rounds –

Do you have any quick takeaways or thoughts for people in marketing?

One of the things I think about here is — like a lot of listeners to this podcast, people in crypto, people beyond — are very curious about how to package ideas: They know how to do things (at least) how to do things memetically.

Do you have any thoughts on taking something from anti-memetic to memetic? One thing you already mentioned was packaging, which I loved.

Nadia: Yeah, I think it’s- it kind of centers around the packaging question. <mhm> I mean, the role of marketing is arguably taking things that are <chuckles> anti-memetic <Sonal: yup> and making them memetic. <Sonal: exactly!> So that is kind of the entire function of it.

I would also suggest thinking about the opposite direction of taking things that are memetic and making them more anti-memetic — <Sonal: Interesting!> Maybe that’s the role of a… a PR and comms, and sometimes.

Sonal: Yeah, to hide things, let people forget things. That’s interesting.

Nadia: Yeah, you have the power to make things more obvious — but also the power to make things fade away.

One of the dynamics I do touch on in the book is that sometimes when we think about hiding an idea, we think of it in these very like, obvious sort of tamped-down ways: We make something forbidden, we put it behind a paywall, or we you know ‘ve forbidden access.

And then sometimes that can actually hype up an idea even more, which can be a good thing if that’s what you’re going for — where it’s like oh this is a secret private exclusive event, and then everyone wants to know what the event is right? But making something truly anti-memetic can also mean making it, it can be more effective where you’re just kind of making something forgettable, and unremarkable — and just let it sort of like fade into the background. And, sometimes I think our egos can get in the way of that where it’s like well, if no one’s paying attention to the thing, I still want credit for like making the thing forgettable. But, a-a lot of anti-memetic work can be very thankless in that way.

Sonal: This ties to our earlier discussion about cycles in crypto — about how those anti-cyclical times were kind of quiet incubation periods, are very anti-memetic. And, you want that. You want that protected space to kind of do that.

And it’s funny, because the other example: People in crypto marketing always talk about like keeping things with the kind of a degen vibe <Nadia: mm> or like making it nerd-snipey and not like over-explaining things, because you kind of want there to be this vibe that… — Not that it’s exclusive, because obviously the industry wants to grow, expand — But there’s always this tension: I mean, you’ve definitely seen this in communities where there’s like an early phase of adopters, and then a new phase, and a later phase; and there’s always a little bit of keeping some things intentionally anti-memetic.

So I love what you said that you can go the other direction. I think that’s actually super interesting and relevant to our listeners.

Nadia: It’s true for- in open source for sure, as well. Where it’s sometimes maintainers are trying to — not actively discourage contributors, but just there should be a little bit of a bar where it’s… you know if you make it too easy for everyone to kind of waltz in, then it gets overrun — so you kind of want, yeah, just a little bit of a “if you know you know”, vibe.

Sonal: No, totally. Exactly.

So then the last lightning-round actually on that very note about open source is: You have any like kind of bottom-lines for community management?

Again: What you’re talking about is group chats — but they can be just any communities… — It’s a kind of a big question to ask, but like, if you had one takeaway for people who are community managers; or people trying to nurture these kinds of communities, what would you want to tell them?

Nadia: Yeah one-one thought that comes to mind is that group chats have come with their own sorts of pitfalls that need to be actively managed.

There’s a feeling that a- creating a small group, a small community can feel like higher quality — but sometimes they come with their own strange dynamics around… Small does not equal better. <Sonal: yah> Ideas can kind of mutate in these strange and rapid ways: Not just the dynamics between people in a group; but also just sort of like what is sort of the idea-products that are like coming out of those conversations. Those can also kind of spin out of control in sort of unwieldy ways.

And I think every community manager probably has experiences and knows this, but — yeah, just that still- active norms still need to be enforced and managed in those spaces to prevent them from getting out of control.

Sonal: Oh okay, great.

Okay. So last minutes, let’s now take it back up — so we just talked about the individual level, these specific roles, the truth teller, the champion; the individual as node in the network, and also gatekeeper… — now let’s go macro and talk about the dark forest.

And… do you have like a network topology… When you think of this, is the analogy/ the visualization — Is it just a bunch of islands, like the Galapagos, like an archipelago?

When we talk about these communities and small, high-context spaces, is it like planets; like in the dark forest analogy, where it’s just a bunch of planets in the universe invisible to each other, but very rich in their own spaces?

Is it houses? A city, a town? What-what metaphors <Nadia: hmm> apply in your mind.

Nadia: Yah.

I found I’ve had a few different images come to mind — they’re all related, but probably all slightly imperfect — and actually, when, so when Yancey, who founded this Dark Forest Collective label that published this book… <Sonal: And also the co-founder of Kickstarter, yeah> Yes! — So he was the one had sort of, like, connected this idea of like dark forest to what was happening on the web in his essay, which came out in 2019:

Where he’s talking about yeah the public social landscape has become too hostile; and now everyone’s kind of withdrawing to these smaller, smaller settings. There was a slew of related essays and riffs on that idea that came out around the same time: So, Venkatesh Rao was writing about the “cozy web” — yah the idea that yah, we’re again, just sort of like burrowing down with our smaller groups — And then Maggie Appleton, who’s a designer, actually published this really nice visual of how she had sort of envisioned the cozywe-:

She had a nice graphic around this, and it looks, looks like-like geological layers of the earth or something, where it’s <Sonal: Oh! Interesting> burrowing down, deeper and deeper down. So that’s maybe one one way of thinking from the surface level all the way down to the bottom.

I think as I’ve- yah as I’ve thought about it, it looks something like this highway — you know the information superhighway — of our very public social feeds. And then there’s like little exits you can get off at that are the-the smaller towns and things. Or… the early internet era was about building the highly public squares, and now we’ve finally managed to construct these, you know, smaller houses <Sonal: yes> where you can peel off and go have conversations.

Like it’s kind of crazy to think about… I mean, really, what I think has happened when we take this sort of doom-and-gloom out of it — is that we built this incredibly… public place for everyone. And now we need to build some little like private <yes!> – private houses so that we can also continue to be in this online universe.

But also, like it’s just like wild to me that it’s only very recently that we’ve been able to have a private conversation online in the way that we are now able to today. So yeah; they’re not- these are all maybe similar kinds of metaphors, but those are some of the visuals that come to mind for me.

Sonal: That was super helpful, Nadia. And I- it’s so interesting, because it seems like it’s playing out in physical spaces, too, you know; people talk about maybe it’s a flash in the pan that living in megacities is the way —

Like, we may live in a mega city, but our neighborhood is now really the container (however a person defines it): Whether it’s a community, a church, a physical geographical neighborhood, an online neighborhood… Like, we’re all kind of quote- “returning to smaller, high-context spaces” (to use your phrase) which is the whole theme of your book, whether it’s a group chat, whatever it’s called, interest group.

So then the other phrase you used in the book — and you said in the podcast a couple of times, too, <Nadia: chuckles> which really landed for me — was a “centerless network of networks”. And that I love… because when you think of the dark forest analogy, there isn’t a center of the universe —

You know, there’s like galaxies, there’s ecosystems, there’s planets. They can be in the same galaxy, they can be in different galaxies, there’s black holes that can suck you in (to use your supermemetic analogy). So I do think the dark forest is the right analogy…

But as a crypto person, I was very drawn to what you said about a “centerlessnetwork of networks”, because of course, I think of decentralization — which is obviously a big, big theme in crypto.

And, the other context for how it connects to our audience is that if you think of blockchains as a substrate — you know, or a technology that has those properties (decentralized, permissionless, etc.) — then crypto can be defined as a coordination machine that can connect all the dots, without having to connect all the dots. (If that makes sense; going back to this whole Galapagos, like, you can wash your feet between islands and whatnot.)

So; anyway, it’s just funny because Chris Dixon used to talk about how the web is broken — he wrote a book, “Read Write Own.” And one of the things he talked about early on (when we were talking about Medium back in the days), how the social web is broken, and that we need some layer to kind of connect it — and lately, the theme seems to be really about crypto as kind of like a coordination machine… Especially because a big theme of his book is about how networks are destiny.

And you basically say the same thing in your book: I feel like you’re basically saying that the network you are is who you are. That was at least a takeaway for me — is like the network you spend your time in is kind of destiny; it’s who you are, because what you’re thinking about is what you’re acting on, and being.

Nadia: I really… I wanted people to come away feeling like they can do something, or they know how to act in the world rather than…<sighs> Gosh, so much of what is being written about the world today is very defeatist, right; it’s very like, you know, “everything is crazy and just try to hold on and survive” or something. And I just find that to be such a depressing way to see- at least, let’s try to come up with something more positive.

Sonal: Yeah and I like that you’re not normative about it, which is also great.

Nadia: Yeah, yeah. Without being too like pounding-the-pulpit about it, the reason why I focus so much on attention — and that there’s one chapter that’s really about attention, and — yes, you know there’s a type of person where you can kind of roll your eyes and say, yes yes I know, attention is important, attention economies; blah, blah, blah —

But if you look at kind of what’s happening, lyou still can’t say it enough. Because I think people are still allocating their attention in poor ways, and then <Sonal: yes> sort of saying, well, why does the world feel so bad? And I really- I think sometimes attention can feel like this tug-of-war struggle where it’s like someone else is always trying to grab your attention and trying to snatch it back and whatever. And I think a lot of conversation is just around that of like: you know, malicious actors are trying to steal your attention, and you need to just grab it and hold- But then like we don’t have enough conversation around, well what do I do when I have all this attention.

Sonal: Yeah, exactly. I don’t want to be treated… I hate the nanny-stating of like I’m a person without agency. <Nadia: yah!> Like I have choice…yah

Nadia: Yeah. And I think that changes the conversation where it’s not just about preserving your attention for attention’s sake — But if people have goals that they’re really excited about, you will make the time, <that’s abso> you will find the attention when you’re absorbed in something that you’re really excited to do.

And so I really want to challenge people to think about: What is it that you actually want to do with all this attention that you have?

But then for them to also believe that, like, it’s possible to, if you don’t like the reality that you’re seeing, you know, there are things you can do to make your reality better.

Sonal: Well, and on the builder note, you have a choice now. <Nadia: Yah> you know there’s other social networks, there’s no longer only the one public town square that we had in the first phase of the web… And it’s a wonderful note, I think, for us to end on: Because it’s such a positive, optimistic, pro-person <chuckles> view of networks as destiny — like we’re not just victims of this; we get to choose, like how we curate and be in our networks and our spaces. I love that, Nadia. Thank you so much for joining this episode — that’s Anti-memetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading.

Nadia: Thanks for having me!