if everything is a meme...

nadia asparouhova, mimetics, memes

To sit between two stools in the ashes, Bruegel the Elder’s Twelve Proverbs (1558)

---

TWICE IN THE PAST MONTH, I’ve had the same conversation, which is: How should we interact with what we see online? The first happened on the second-floor balcony of a cabin at a retreat on an island off Vancouver. I had been writing and taken a break when I ran into one of my housemates, a new friend, and after a few minutes of surface-level conversation, she began to twist her hands and hesitate; I asked her what was wrong, when she admitted to me that she had started to feel an impossible dissonance, that it didn’t feel fair for her to have this escape when so much was happening in the world.

I noodled around idiotically and said something regretful and stupid that ended the conversation like, “Look, you have this short and wondrous life that you need to live, take a look at that faint mountain back there behind the strip of calm blue lake and the various deer haunting their way across the property. It is a blessing that we have this.”

Some days passed before I encountered the second person who brought this up to me. I was running to catch a train out of Vancouver. The lace of one Timberland hooked into the eyelet of the other and I went flying onto the sidewalk with my palms out in front of me, ripping up my knees and bruising the bridge of my nose. I missed my train. In the hollow of the old, wooden Vancouver train station, I booked a last-minute flight and an Uber to the airport. I arrived at the airport bloody and mangled and a little defeated.

I had so many hours before my flight. To distract myself from the pain, I started to tend to my email inbox. I realized that my spam filter had grown too strong and was hiding emails that I wanted, and in that folder, I found the galley to Nadia Asparouhova’s new book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, a smart, clear-headed writer whose work I always pick up. Her first book about the open source community was honest and did long-term, on-the-ground reporting that I really admire.

This new book is a way to think about why certain ideas spread online, and others don’t. I describe it as a user guide to social media. It informed some of that conversation with my second friend, but let me first tell you what the book is about.

---

THE INTERNET IS NOT A VEHICLE FOR INFORMATION but a meme machine. A meme is a piece of information that is easily transmissible; jokes, slogans, viral ideas. Labubus. And, Asparouhova suggests, memes are difficult to look away from because they are mimetic.

Here, she applies a concept coined by conservative philosopher Rene Girard. According to Girard, we want things for no reason other than the fact that other people desire them. There is the subject: you; the object: the matte glasses with the rounded-square frames; and the model: the beautiful LA comedian on Instagram whose life you desire. Do this ad nauseam and you’ve created the mimetic, public internet, with every person online in lockstep with everyone else.

Shared desires create communities, but mimesis creates conflicts. Jealousy, competition, and hatred develop when others have objects that one wants. Rather than fight it out, communities participate in what Girard describes as scapegoating. A group of people will pick an arbitrary person—or animal—who will serve as the representation of these negative feelings. They will sacrifice this arbitrary person to purge those feelings. Often times, these acts of violence feel legitimate and earned.

While Girard stops in the real world, explaining that the judicial system replaced endless revenge in real life, the internet has no laws. This is where Nadia enters. Cancel culture, which she generalizes as a phenomenon across all sorts of political parties, is our version of scapegoating. When a person is canceled, a community can be purged of their internal negativities and brought closer. Nowadays, the sacrificed person goes on to feature in another subculture, which creates a culture war. People escape this war by retreating into private forums and group chats, and the public internet fractures.

---

THE OPPOSITE OF MEMES ARE ANTI-MEMES, secrets, taboos, and general ideas that don’t ever seem to take hold, like putting the toilet seat down after you use it or holding the door open for the person behind you. Others are dormant and even uninteresting, like random data sets or a social security number.

Girard’s theory would say that we are desirous animals, our entire online lives in eternal mimesis. Asparouhova finds this worldview limiting and bleak. She chooses to separate from it. She counter-balances the idea that we are nothing more than our desires with the idea of the anti-meme, one that is inspired by QNTM’s speculative fiction work (my review here, although I’m not sure it’s one of my best).

In small groups, people can talk about anti-memes without the fear of being scapegoated. They can evangelize and test out these ideas in smaller forums. This means that group chats can be highly susceptible to awful ideas, but they can also be places where harder-to-convince concepts can have their day. They might even become super-memes, which Asparouhova describes as calls-to-action, larger-than-life ideas that take hold of your brain and make you want to make a change. Her example is the climate crisis: ever-looming and abstract enough to keep worrying about eternally.

You must enter the public internet! This is Asparouhova’s clarion call. Stay in your walled gardens as long as you need to and protect your attention. If you find an anti-meme you genuinely believe in, test it out out in the chat, and then emerge with it back to the public internet.

You might find yourself becoming a truth-teller, someone who is sharing what they see without any agenda. Maybe even a champion, a person who works tirelessly at getting an anti-meme into practice, studying the environment it’s trying to enter. If you’re really good, you might even help establish a protocol, a method of formalizing behavior, like the recycling laws that happen across New York.

---

NADIA’S BOOK IS MORE OF A USER MANUAL THAN A TREATISE, sort of a how-to-do-social-media that she gathers from a wide, often-quoted, sometimes-obscured range of sources. Her intention, as she makes clear, is to illustrate the mechanisms by which ideas—good, bad, mundane—take hold of the public web. She is a systems thinker. She urges for a diversity of memes, to avoid a monoculture and to strengthen the public sphere. “Ideas follow the same path from obscurity to acceptance, regardless of their moral implications,” she writes, making clear that her real hope is to write a framework rather than an indictment or approval of any one group

I found her book refreshing in how neatly it mapped out our social media ecosystem. It was even empowering in some ways. I’ve felt, at various times, afraid of the public internet because of my experiences on it. When I was young, I reported on the Modi government, and found myself overwhelmed by the genuinely angry tweets I would read about myself. I withdrew, and to read Asparouhova say that it was alright to rest, reflect, and then to emerge again—it made me want to re-enter the fray with more purpose.

The ways in which the book falls short, however, are important for me to tell you about.

---

THE SECOND FRIEND TO BRING UP MEMES TO ME happened before my knees had even started to fully scab. He sat on my couch, telling me about nearly crying in front of his students after watching videos on loop of ICE snatching children away from their parents. After class, a student came up to him and gently suggested that he stay away from the news.

I tried to explain Asparouhova’s book to him, that so much of what we see on the internet is an echo of a meme. But then he brought up a genuine question: What do we do about those events that are actually happening in real life?

Although Asparouhova draws on real life concerns and points to pre-internet history, her book primarily documents the internet behaviors that have emerged in tandem with current, major social media companies. I worry that if everything is a meme or an anti-meme waiting to take hold, we start to doubt real honesty. Reducing all beliefs to how they are transmitted means that everything is a meme, no matter its source.

The example that came up for me was the video of George Floyd’s murder that went viral a few years ago. I was incensed. But not in a mimetic way. I was reminded of something I’d learned when I was young. I had a friend on my block whose brothers were always getting harassed by the police, even though they were just teenagers riding their bicycles with us. The rest of us would get left alone. This would happen time and time again. What I saw happening with George Floyd felt like it fit with what I had seen first-hand, and so the Black Lives Matter protests felt important to me.

If you were opposite of me in a mimetic world, you’d probably distrust me and believe that I was trying to fit into some model. This was a really common position during the protests, to say that people were being mimetic. Or maybe you’d try to combat what I believed with a counter-meme, which wouldn’t really convince me after what I had seen with my own two eyes. Unless you were in my small, private chat, you likely wouldn’t take the time to understand that the experience felt true for me.

And the inverse is probably true as well. How many memes have I dismissed as fake because they’re viral? Or turned away from something because I had learned to see it as purely mimetic. The natural pose in our current social media environment is to distrust everything we see in public. I’d like to see Nadia’s criticism of Girard go one step further. A mimetic society can explain a clutch of behaviors on social media, but I’m not quite sure we’re sending our best if the explanation stops there.

---