The New Rules of Subculture

·37 min·3 clips

Nadia Asparova reveals how anti-memes, ideas that resist spreading, shape our most intense cultural investments.

1. The Art Angle host Ben Davis interviews Nadia Asparova about her book Anti-Memetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, published by the Dark Forest Collective. 2. Nadia Asparova is a writer and theorist who worked at Substack in its early days; her book was published by the Dark Forest Collective, named after writer Yancey Strickler's concept of the internet as a dangerous public space from which smart people retreat. 3. The episode's thesis is that alongside the well-known memetic culture of viral ideas, an equally powerful anti-memetic culture has always existed — and is now becoming more visible as reaction to the memetic peak of the late 2010s. 4. Asparova grounds her use of 'meme' in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where memes are self-replicating ideas that propagate the way genes do, including behaviors like handshakes and large systems like religion or politics as 'memeplexes.' 5. An anti-meme, by contrast, is a self-censoring idea — something compelling in the moment that struggles to propagate, like taboos or cognitive biases that seem to disappear when you look away. 6. The term 'anti-meme' originated in the SCP Foundation, a wiki-style fiction community, where a user named Quantum described a paranormal entity you could interact with but then couldn't retain any memory of; Quantum later expanded this into a horror sci-fi novel There Is No Anti-Memetics Division, which Penguin Random House is re-releasing this fall. 7. Asparova says the web 2.0 era — Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter — turned memetic behavior into a dominant cultural mode; by the late 2010s, 'everything was just too public' and ideas were 'escaping context too easily.' 8. The reaction to this memetic peak was a retreat to group chats, newsletters, Substack, Slack communities, and Discord servers — all coalescing around the same time as a direct response to the culture-war intensity of the late 2010s. 9. Asparova argues that group texts as a multi-user format only became technologically available in the mid-2010s; people had always wanted semi-private spaces, but the technology to create them online didn't exist until recently. 10. She distinguishes three epidemiological concepts applied to ideas: transmission rate (whether someone who has an idea will actually spread it), immunity (not all nodes in a network are equally susceptible to an idea), and symptomatic period (how long someone actively expresses an idea they've been 'infected' by). 11. Memes have short symptomatic periods — they spread fast and are forgotten quickly, like norovirus — while anti-memes have long symptomatic periods, living dormant like a parasite and subtly shaping behavior even when the host is unaware. 12. Davis and Asparova question the 'dark ages of creativity' thesis, with Asparova arguing it's a symptom of late-stage memetic society, while Davis notes that historically the significant art of any era was usually running against the grain of what was popular. 13. Asparova describes 'Straussian writing' — from philosopher Leo Strauss — as writing that has an obvious public meaning but a hidden deeper meaning for a target audience that understands certain subtleties, allowing controversial ideas to be published publicly while remaining anti-memetic in practice. 14. She draws a parallel to fashion: Scandinavian minimalist style looks like a plain white t-shirt and jeans to most people, but signals specific brand recognition to insiders — a 'if you know you know' mode of communication that gives fine-grained control over who receives the message. 15. Asparova says artists need semi-private spaces not just to incubate new work, but increasingly as a terminal destination — producing for small niche audiences as an end in itself, not as a stepping stone to mass audiences. 16. She distinguishes two versions of mimetic pressure on creators: negative (harsh comments, public criticism) and positive (fans demanding more of the same thing, pigeonholing artists who try to evolve). 17. The episode is structured as a collegial intellectual conversation between two people with overlapping interests in online culture, with Davis frequently adding art-historical or personal teaching anecdotes to test Asparova's framework. 18. The tone is exploratory and theory-forward, with both participants comfortable in the terminology of internet culture studies and willing to complicate or push back on each other's framings. 19. Listeners interested in internet culture, the sociology of creativity, subcultures, or the practical challenges of building an audience as a writer or artist will find this most relevant. 20. Listeners expecting concrete case studies of specific artworks or shows, or a how-to guide for building an audience, may find the conversation too abstract.

As heard by us

A sharp conversation about cultural ideas that gain power by staying hard to find.

The Art Angle finds a useful frame for a cultural shift that is easy to sense and harder to name: creators and audiences growing more comfortable with work that travels through smaller, more selective circles.

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You want a smarter lens on why some ideas hit harder when they stay hard to share.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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