Prosperity is antimemetic

Memes spread. They hop from mind to mind as if intentionally propelled by their own effort.

Antimemes do not spread. They are ideas that you want to remember, but cannot. When you look at them, they are perfectly visible. But if you turn, they disappear from your memory.

Nadia Asparouhova has a short and compelling book on antimemes and internet culture: Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading.

This is not the first book on antimemes. The short sci-fi novel There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm captures the idea brilliantly and evocatively. You should probably read that one first. Both books are short.

But what Asparouhova has done has locate antimemetics in our political moment, where the one global conversation of the big social media platforms is being partly complemented and partly replaced by private group chats. Group chats are a safe space for experimentation. In group chats, ideas are nursed and refined into memes before they can be released into the open world.

Anyway, it’s not the group chats that interest me right now. Asparouhova, and qntm before her, have pinpointed a problem in the social dynamic of ideas. Ideas which are antimemetic have a structural handicap in public debate.

Prosperity – and the many economic and social dynamics that support prosperity – is antimemetic.

Few among us will deny that we are living in an era of historically unparalleled wealth; that this wealth is widely shared; that it has brought increases in living standards which allow us to participate in global society and culture in ways unimaginable to our ancestors; to have health and healthcare unimaginable to our ancestors; and to enjoy creature comforts that the monarchs and barons of the past could not dream of.

You might read this and think – but what about house prices? Environmental degradation? Social disorder? Which is of course the point. It is so hard to hold the empirical fact of prosperity in our heads that we rebel against it even as we observe it.

I struggle with this too. It is extremely tempting to caveat these observations about our good fortune even as I write them. To signal that I get it, that I am not cringingly Panglossian. I want to assure you, reader, as I have tried to many times before, that I intellectually and emotionally understand your deep concerns about the current state of the world and share them, even if I have quirky or counterintuitive solutions.

We can observe prosperity but we cannot hold it in our mind. We keep being pulled towards the critiques of prosperity which are more memetically efficient. Asparouhova calls some of these supermemes: climate change, identity, fear of foreign threats (from immigration or war). They demand our attention. They are newsworthy.

That prosperity is antimemetic leads us to underappreciate the more memetic institutions that support it. The planks of liberalism - markets, private enterprise, rule of law, property rights, individual liberties, and the freedom to innovate - are typically seen as burdens or frustrations rather than assets.

I’ve written a lot about those institutions and their opponents. But institutions support prosperity, they do not cause it. Prosperity is just the compounded result of countless intentional improvements to everyday life. It is the micro-innovations that have gone into Ikea’s Billy bookshelf or takeaway pizza. It is just as much the fancy innovations (food deliveries via drone) as the boring ones (a quarry in a new location).

To build you first must dig

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February 21, 2025

I had a few lines on the ABC this week talking about the announcement that the Victorian government is going to reduce the public sector workforce:

This failure to recognise our prosperity leads us to see only the costs of micro-innovations rather than the benefits that are only tangible when we aggregate them together.

You might see where I’m going here. It seems socially costless to place an additional regulatory burden on an industry to prevent a visible harm. But it only appears that way because we cannot grasp the cumulative prosperity that red tape erodes.

Asparouhova does not offer a general theory of what makes any given idea antimemetic, but she has some explanations. Some ideas are too cognitively complex or emotionally burdensome for efficient sharing. Some are resisted by the environment in which they are shared. Some are deliberately cloaked in obscurantism for fear of social backlash.

The antimemetic character of prosperity has other origins too.

We rapidly adapt to improvements in living standards. The material results of growth become our "new normal" and disappear from conscious awareness. Consider how ubiquitous internet access in the form of the smartphone has changed the world. How long did this always-on accessibility take to fade into the background? A few years at most? This is the point of Louis CK’s bit about airplane WiFi and more generally Charles C. Mann’s fantastic essay “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It”.

Another challenge is that growth is gradual while its disruptions are episodic and dramatic. Employees get hired one at a time but get laid off in groups. Firms begin small and collapse big.

And prosperity doesn’t generate political capital. Redistribution does. The Mancur Olson dynamic (the benefits of rent-seeking are concentrated and the costs are dispersed) means that large segments of the economy have a stake in optimising their memes for distribution. Prosperity has no equivalent structural incentive.

For some years my friend Victor Perton has been running a campaign for optimism (here’s his Substack). It’s God’s work and I fully share his goals. I am deeply, passionately optimistic about what innovation and technology and growth will bring human civilisation.

But Lenin was optimistic about the future too. Prosperity is the state that we are in now. What we need is to recognise that state. Maybe what we need is gratitude, although perhaps we’re too cynical and secular for gratitude.

To defend liberalism is often just to remind people of what they already possess.

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