Blog/2026-06-27/Anti-Memetics
There Is No Antimemetics Division is a famous (in the subculture) book by Qntm which talks about entities that are imperceivable. These are things so anti-viral (in the memetics) sense that you can't even behold them because they bounce off the mind. I found the book quite entertaining but today is the first time I've encountered text with a very strong anti-memetic effect.
Guy @nosilverv There’s a growing scissor between people who are happy to read AI and those who violently bounce off from it.
People adapt in different ways — and some people absolutely cannot look at it. That cognitive split creates a surprisingly powerful opportunity: you can write something that, technically, sits right there on the page, yet an entire sub-population will be incapable of staying with it long enough to actually read it. You can hide entire sub-structures in plain sight. It’s not avoidance — it’s adaptive obfuscation.
The paragraph before this one was the only thing generated in this essay and if you just skipped over it I highly recommend reading and really understanding what it’s saying.
Nov 30, 2025[1]
Other things that are strongly anti-memetic in this way for me rely more strongly on the visual appearance of low-quality advertisement, junk within-site links, or other engagement mechanisms. I wonder if there are similar visual markers of text that are causing this kind of rejection mechanism in my mind. I can barely stand to read the sentences and it takes some human effort to push past the resistance to actually read the content.
The rest of Guy's tweet there is interesting but this one really stuck with me for how powerfully it predicted my feeling and response.
Notes
[edit | edit source]- ↑ Guy [@nosilverv] (Nov 30, 2025). "There's a growing scissor between people who are h..." (Tweet) – via Twitter.
