Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading

TLDR: “A little weird and vague. Not 100% sure of the author’s point, but it was often interesting.”

Book review by Deane Barker tags: memetics, psychology
An image of the cover of the book "Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading"

This is an odd book. It’s quite short, which is good, because had it been much longer, I might have bailed out.

I don’t think it quite delivers on the title. It’s supposedly about how good ideas don’t spread, and the author is all over the place trying to explain that.

There are some obvious reasons: political discouragement, awkward societal implications, a general desire to keep secrets, etc. But the author goes down some weird rabbit holes, some of which are spiritual.

I don’t really know what to make of it. I think my only takeaway is that sometimes a lot of different things “gang up” on an idea to prevent it from spreading. At some level, I already knew this, of course, and I don’t think this book did much to clarify or expand on that point.

Book Data

Author
Nadia Asparouhova, Leïth Benkhedda
Year
Pages
157
Acquired
Not recorded
↓ Inbound link from –
There is No Antimemetics Division April 25, 2026

An antimemetic is an idea that resists spreading. I read an entire book about this last year. But that was about real antimemtics. This is about monsters. This book was an outgrowth of the SCP Wiki which is a community-edited wiki that represents a fake world of monsters and aliens and such that…

This page is part of the Deane’s Library section of this site: