the format reminds me of when the DVD key was leaked and kept getting reposted on Digg. Someone wrote a song! mmmm, there is no #antimemetics division or whatever :ACNH_Laughter:
#antimemetics
Oh, this is good. If you've read the (excellent) book, now watch the movie (or at least the opening scene) in a most excellent DUST short https://youtu.be/3v8AsTHfAG0?si=GSuxPNatZAU4Yo3N from @adriabomb (insta). #adriabomb #antimemetics #meme #harold
Erstes #Buch des Jahres fertig :blobcattoot:
There is no #antimemetics division von #qntm. Ursprünglich als Reihe von Einträgen im #SCP Wiki erschienen, gibt es jetzt eine überarbeitete, gedruckte Variante. Vieles ist anders, aber es ist immer noch beeindruckender, existenzieller Horror.
4,5/5 ⭐️
This week’s Short Stack:
• collaborative music
• creative shortcuts
• tension on screen
• dread on the page
Not a recap. Just what lingered long enough to write down.
👉 https://www.jnassi.com/the-weekly-short-stack-for-january-16-2026/
#Writing #WritingLife #WeeklyReflection #MartySupreme #JamVote #ThereIsNoAntimemeticsDivision #Antimemetics #antimeme #qntm #vibecoding
Royalty, Administration, and Antimemetics
I was all of 15 when defenestration was forever implanted in my mind. It means to throw someone out the window. It happened in Prague, 1618. Some important people were defenestrated, fell 70 feet, landed in dung. This led to the thirty years war and the coining of the word ‘defenestration’. Defenestrating happened to important, visible, people held responsible for mismanagement leading to widespread discontent. While the defenestrated may represent the idea, surely we can’t imagine that it was that specific person who was going around causing the suffering. No, they had minions. Here we explore a bit of their story.
Horned owl (Hoornuil) (1915) print in high resolution by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. Original from The Rijksmuseum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.Royalty is meant to be seen. They were either chosen by or were the local gods to lead the people. They were the head of everything and if something were to go wrong it was their responsibility. Royalty also means creating good memes. Whether the Alhambra, Taj Mahal, or Beijing projecting power through architectural memes was the standard.
Administration and bureaucratic structures is the silent clockwork that powers the projection. These guys, are antimemetic. The antimeme is a recent invention and denotes ideas that have high impact but are hard to spread. This is important because when the tax burden gets too high you want the peasants to go for the king not the local tax collector.
The Mughal emperors were the head of the administrative machinery with final say over all important matters. The administration itself was antimemetic in nature. The provincial officials such as the bakhshi, sadr as-sudr, and finance minister reported directly to the central government rather than the subahdar (provincial governor). Matrix organization, I hear you thinking. This complex, multi-layered reporting structure, while designed for central control, also diffused responsibility and made the precise locus of decision-making less transparent to external observers and even to other officials.
In the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor abolished the Central Secretariat to assume personal control. However, the volume of letters got so high that he soon appointed a few grand secretaries. They never held a high rank and always merely “recorded imperial decisions”. If merely were a boxer he would be a heavyweight. Can’t blame that guy with the pen if he’s just doing what the king asks him to.
From the al-Andalus through the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals the the ulama shaped legal systems and molded public morality. Of course the monarchs decrees but the ulama interpreted them and applied them as law into daily life. This interpretive authority, operating subtly within the legal and religious bureaucracy, allowed for continuous adaptation and influence without the visible, attributable acts of formal legislation, making it profoundly antimemetic.
Let me end with the quote from the wonderful, and joyfully mimetic, Yes, Minister:
“Hacker: Humphrey, did you know that 20% of all honours go to civil servants?
Sir Humphrey: A fitting tribute to their devotion to duty, Minister.
Hacker: No, their duty is what they get paid for. The rest of the population has to do something extra to get an honour. Something special. They work for 27 years with mentally handicapped children six nights a week to get an MBE. Your knighthoods simply come up with the rations.
Sir Humphrey: Minister, her Majesty’s civil servants spend their lives working for a modest wage and at the end, they retire into obscurity. Honours are a small reward for a lifetime of loyal, self-effacing discretion and devoted service to Her Majesty, and to the nation.
Hacker: “A modest wage”, did you say?
Sir Humphrey: Alas, yes.
Hacker: Humphrey, you get over £30,000 a year! That’s £7,000 more than I get.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but still relatively the modest wage.
Hacker: Relative to whom?
Sir Humphrey: Well, Elizabeth Taylor, for example.
Hacker: Humphrey, you are not relative to Elizabeth Taylor. There are important differences.
Sir Humphrey: Indeed, yes. She didn’t get a first at Oxford.
Hacker: And you do not retire into obscurity?! You take a massive index-linked pension and go off to become directors of oil companies and banks.
Sir Humphrey: Oh, yes, but very obscure directors, Minister.
Hacker: You’re in no danger of the sack. In industry if you screw things up, you get the boot. In the civil service, if you screw things up, I get the boot.
Sir Humphrey: Very droll, Minister, now if you’ve approved the list…”
[Series Two (1981) Episode Two: Doing the Honours]
Sources
Much of the reading and sourcing of material for this was done across books from the Contraptions Book Club and some deep research help.
- Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin
- Monkey King: Journey to the West, the abridged Lovell edition
- Islamic Gunpowder Empires by Dougles E. Streusend
- Kingdoms of Faith by Brian A. Catlos
- Zheng He: China And the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405-1433 by Edward L. Dreyer
- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister
#alAndalus #Antimemetics #Bureaucracy #Defenestration #Government #HistoricalTheory #history #HistoryMemes #Humor #MingDynasty #MughalEmpire #OttomanEmpire #PoliticalSatire #PoliticalTheory #Politics #PowerStructures #Sociology #YesMinister
@qurlyjoe awesome! TIL about the #antimemetics hashtag.
@bradbarrish
I stumbled on the #antimemetics hashtag a few days ago. 🤯 I’ve been enthralled by the meme of #Memes since I read Dawkins’ book years ago, but never thought of antimemes. Or fell victim to it, more likely, I guess.😆 More 🤯🤯. Tried to get Asparouhova’s book but got the qntm book instead. 😵💫 Serendipitous, at least. So, thank you, Fediverse, for opening a new realm to explore.
“As #memes dominate our lives, we’ve fully embraced our role as carriers, reorienting our behavior and identities towards emulating the most powerful—and often the most primal and base—models of desire.” www.newyorker.com/books/under-... #ideas #antimemes #Antimemetics
Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and...
"We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated #complexity alone." www.newyorker.com/books/under-... #ideas #antimemetics
Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and...
🎉🥳 Oh wow, a #groundbreaking revelation: #ideas spread because they're #catchy, not good! 📢 Who knew?! Meanwhile, The New Yorker unleashes the genius book 'Antimemetics' to explain why our ancestors didn't have TikTok. Truly, we're living in the #future. 🤦♂️🔮
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-good-ideas-die-quietly-and-bad-ideas-go-viral #revelation #antimemetics #TheNewYorker #trends #HackerNews #ngated
"We tend to think of cultural influence as being tied to popularity and visibility. What Asparouhova wants us to pay attention to is a whole other class of cultural stuff whose influence is linked instead to being hard to find or difficult to understand. These are what she calls 'anti-memes.'"
New Rules of Subculture
https://news.artnet.com/multimedia/the-new-rules-of-subculture-2642595 via Artnet
Photo: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu/Getty/Artnet
#Art #Culture #Antimemetics #NadiaAsparouhova
If you're one of the lucky 10,000, I'll provide a link, but I should warn you that this is (mild) psychological horror. (It's also great #writing)
Link: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-055
I reread SCP-055[^1] because I remembered an interaction between two researchers in the story and I thought it was a good example of the frustration of knowing something but being unable to describe it.
Turns out, I remembered it wrong, which is appropriate for scp-055
Speaking of anti-mimetic magic... ever heard of *There Is No Antimemetics Division* by qntm? 📖 It's about ideas so sneaky they can’t be remembered or shared (like antimemes)! The book follows a secret team fighting threats you literally can’t perceive. Mind-bending, witty, and rooted in the SCP Foundation universe. Perfect for fans of *Rivers of London* who love a good reality twist! 🌀 #SciFi #Antimemetics #Books 📚✨
qntm pubishing deal: "There is No Antimemetics Division" is one of the most interesting sci-fi novels I've read in the last 5 years. He's got a publishing deal now and is doing a rewrite.
https://qntm.org/publ
#antimemetics #publishing #books #qntm #scp #+
Version 2.
I really would love to include the department and site name *into* the design, and this looks like a good way to do it.
Making it manufacturable is also always a problem. Text gets unreadable when too small.
Cool Short – SCP: There Is No Antimemetics Division – Episode 1. Watch it here https://bit.ly/3TYnF64
https://lateboomersden.blog/2023/12/11/china-mievilles-the-city-and-the-city-borders-are-a-matter-of-belief/
Just read The City and the City by China Mieville, about fictitious cities that physically touch, yet are kept separate by culture. It got me thinking about how nebulous the idea of a border really is. We can build walls and fences, but the fences that count are mental.
#Culture, #Antimemetics, #books, #borders, #ChinaMieville, #ElPaso, #fiction, #Juarez, #memetics, #Mexico, #Psychology, #qntm, #SciFi, #Science Fiction, #society, #Texas
https://lateboomersden.blog/2023/11/04/there-is-no-antimemetics-division-or-is-there/
Really cool book that will melt your brain. I regret that I didn't stick with the SCP Foundation when I found it years ago. It's really turned into something special.
#Antimemetics, #books, #memetics, #memory, #qntm, #RichardDawkins, #scifi, #ScienceFiction, #SCPFoundation, #SamHughes
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