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gmuslera 10 hours ago

Time matters in some of the categories there. What if a meme (I don't know, money, the tragedy of the commons, some future cult of the dead or whatever) works as a great filter and wipes mankind and any civilization that develops it at some stage? it is an antimeme even if, for some thousand years, it became locally popular? Something that erases itself or whatever spreads it over a not short period of time qualifies as antimeme or not?

joshpicky 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Agree that’s kind of the hard part of trying to categorize them.

Spatial and temporal locality can be a thing. And depending on how you take them into account they can be more or less clear categories

throw310822 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are genes that spread rapidly in a population because they are highly inheritable and yet, once they spread, cause a population extinction. These are genes- they replicate easily- not anti-genes. An anti-gene is something that doesn't replicate at all: it kills off its organism in infancy, or makes it sterile. Each of them needs to develop entirely independently, because it can't be transmitted.

Note that in There is no Antimemetics Division, the anti-memes are persistent, independent entities, not information: they have an existence that is material, it's the information about them that cannot be communicated (it's an antimeme). So maybe a good starting point would be to ask ourselves what facts and patterns exists in the world that resist being noticed and communicated.

joshpicky 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I think that was the starting point of author. Similar to “meme” the term is too broad on purpose, so you come up with different possible ideas depending where you started from