22 Nadia Asparouhova - Ideas That Infect

Nadia Asparouhova
And that’s a really good thing. And then we all kind of know, you know, what happened after that. So we started building infrastructure around this, right? So you have this sort of Web 2.0 era where, you know, we’re taking that seed of an idea and then really canonizing it into these social platforms. And everyone is sharing their ideas on, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. And then it starts to get just, you know, for a time, let’s say in the mid-2010s, it feels really good. And again, we’re still really excited about this, you know, unchecked spread of ideas. And then things start to get like a little bit weird in the second half of the 2010s. And we don’t even have a name for that era yet. I feel like that’s how new it is. You know, we talk about it as the culture wars or cancel culture. Or something strange started to happen where people started getting really angry at each other because they’re just too exposed to too many ideas. And there’s… The overall feeling of collapse. Yes.
Jackson Dahl
I think it’s like the defining… I don’t know if that’s what you would call it, but that’s definitely what happened.

Jackson Dahl
Totally. I think it’s also just a really good reminder. One thing that kept coming up as I was reading is just like we’re, we’re in a very young version of whatever this digital life is. And like, it’s not that young anymore, but in the grand scheme of like human society and sociology is really young. And I think like, it’s easy to think about these things as sort of like, oh, we’ve, we’ve reached how it’s going to be. And it’s, it’s clear that that’s not the case. There’s one thread on the, on the sort of like cancel culture idea that I thought was really interesting. The book, you’re talking about Gerard and the historical way, kind of like humanity would deal with sacrifice as a way to move out of memetics. You say, it would not be far-fetched to say that we’ve been embroiled in a prolonged and escalating memetic conflict since the end of the Cold War. But the proliferation of memetic tribes strained the core assumptions underpinning Girard’s framework. As a context collapse made it impossible for any one scapegoat, no matter how big, to fully resolve the conflicts between tribes. And I thought this line was amazing. One tribe’s scapegoat was another’s hero, and the act of scapegoating or being scapegoated even became itself a memetic model to aspire to.

Nadia Asparouhova
And’re just so completely um fattened by it or something that like we don’t even appreciate it anymore so it’s like you know having this big table of pastries or something i think it’s Sort of like marie antoinette or something is all the cakes and the pastries and the foods and whatever we’re just like oh god it’s like another pastry like i don’t want this yeah we’ve Lost our taste yeah i think like it’s it’s maybe it’s because if you think about i mean so a common critique is that movies are terrible now. And they are kind of terrible. And, you know, you can look at all the data if you just look at movies and say like, yes, tons of them are remakes and sequels now. But if you kind of zoom in and say, okay, where are good stories being told and sort of like a visual format? A lot of it just moved to TV shows, right? There’s like the quality of TV shows now today is like so much better than it was when I was growing up. It was just, you know, sitcoms and not much else. So, you know, amazing stories are still being told. They just got repackaged into a different format. But then somehow I think people just can’t appreciate it because you watch an amazing new TV show like every week.

Nadia Asparouhova
So brief definition of anti-memes. Anti-memes are ideas that are self-censoring. So that’s in opposition to memes, which are ideas that are self-propagating in the Richard Dawkins sense. So a meme wants to spread, wants to jump from person to person. An anti-meme for some reason, even though you do find it interesting and compelling in the moment, for some reason you’re suppressing and holding on to it. And the just sort of TLDR reason for that might be that this anti-immune is perceived as being highly consequential either for you personally, if you spread it, um, for a network, uh, If, you know, you might harm your own network if you go around talking about ideas that are a little bit too controversial or taboo or whatever. Um, and so you’re kind of like holding onto it.
Jackson Dahl
Is there a, like a Marshall McLuhan medium is the message-esque thing here where it’s actually impossible to separate how an idea spreads from the idea?

Nadia Asparouhova
I think it’s totally possible. It’s a little scary. I mean, I guess maybe on the flip side, the argument I make about super memes is that there’s always just like memes, anti-memes, whatever, there’s always been a super meme that, you Know, governs people’s minds. So it’s almost as if, like, we just need something really, really big to dedicate our lives to, right? And so historically it was war of some sort where everyone is just expected to drop everything you’re doing and just give yourself to this group cause. And then they became more like culture wars after the Cold War where we kind of – there’s, yeah, the battle of ideas. And there have been many waves and iterations of culture wars well before the ones that, you know, we’ve had more recently. And then, yeah, maybe – so super memes are still – there’s always something where it’s like, you know, I just – I crave something bigger than myself. Um, I crave something that I want to lay down my, my own identity and my own life for, and my own resources for. So they’re probably just a feature that needs to exist.

Jackson Dahl
It feels like the key idea here is that, is that like selflessness or not even necessarily explicit selflessness so much as like not being like not having an agenda for yourself. You say the truth teller is the opposite of the shameless shill. Can you talk about that? Like tension? I guess I’m pointing out like, are they inherently selfless? Is it just about not having an agenda? Like, what enables these people to speak so effectively to represent the group?
Nadia Asparouhova
I think it’s about standing apart from the network a little bit and not having skin in the game, maybe. So it’s not necessarily that they’re selfless. And a lot of truth tellers can be seen as sort of selfish in a sense where they’re sort

Nadia Asparouhova
I think it’s about standing apart from the network a little bit and not having skin in the game, maybe. So it’s not necessarily that they’re selfless. And a lot of truth tellers can be seen as sort of selfish in a sense where they’re sort of like, I’m just going to say a thing out loud and whatever, see what happens. But yeah, in contrast to maybe like the shameless shill who is sort of trying to get attention all the time by saying the most extreme thing possible, they have a relationship to this Network, to their audience, right? They, they are trying to get points. They’re trying to gain status, reputation, whatever. And so that, that’s why they keep just escalating what they’re saying. The truth teller sort of says, I don’t even know what this network is. You know, I’m just sort of wandering in here. Yeah. Just pure chaos, injecting a little bit of chaos into network and everyone. And, but I think because they are, have no prior attachments or relationships, they can be perceived as more trustworthy because it says, well, you know, why would someone say that If they weren’t, if they, yeah, if they have no other relationship to the network, so.
Jackson Dahl
You say they will happily shout an uncomfortable truth into a crowded room, then twirl off while everyone else hashes it out. It’s like, I imagine like lobbing a grenade. Yes. Do you think it’s important for them to have any accountability?

Nadia Asparouhova
Yeah. And there’s something there. And again, with this idea of, you know, ideas are infecting us or we’re not even necessarily in control of what we’re sharing or not sharing. They’re uncovering something that an idea that is already familiar to that group of people that is just being suppressed, right? Yeah. And so like the go-to example I used here was just the kid saying that, you know, the emperor has no clothes, right? It’s like everyone already knew the emperor had no clothes. They just needed someone who had no other relationship to say it, but you can’t say something else completely random.
Jackson Dahl
It’s such a great point. You talk about this more in the context of companies or at least smaller groups where like they’ll bring in this interesting person, as you call them, whether it’s an academic or kind Of a person who’s a writer or a sub stacker or something. There’s another paragraph that felt very like Bill Campbell-esque. You say, because they have the unusual visibility across the organization, they could observe and express the hidden collective desires that others cannot. Very much the emperor’s no close. The executive, because they would be a tyrant. The middle manager, because they would risk losing their team. The entry-level contributor, because they would endanger their job. While interesting persons may run projects on their own, their true impact is not always measurable through the company goals and performance reviews. The real purpose of an interesting person is to shepherd anti-memetic knowledge into light. I and many people I know have served this role inside of organizations. One friend ruefully

Nadia Asparouhova
Um, I think earlier in my career, it started to feel like, am I just really disagreeable? Um, you know, I got a lot of advice and maybe trying to figure out how to fit in more. Um, and so, and I think, you know, I wouldn’t say I’m the most agreeable person, so it’s like maybe there’s room for improvement there, but, but I think over time I’ve come to see that, Oh, this is actually a, this is itself a defined role. You kind of just need to be okay with being that person that is, yeah, standing apart. And then I think it brings me a lot of, yeah, clarity and fulfillment.
Jackson Dahl
Do you have a sense of how this shape can, like, if we have this sort of, what is a truth teller inside of a company? And then, like, the extreme example of just, like, the guy on the sidewalk sidewalk or like the guy on twitter just saying crazy like out there but interesting stuff like is there a frame For how we should think about how these people could show up in more parts of society and networks in like different orders of magnitude of groups where do you feel that we need more of It this maybe is going to where we’re going to go, but like one frame here would be inside of a effective altruism, inside of what you call an ideal machine or inside of an institution or Inside of a, I don’t know, like a local, more local version of an online community, inside of the dark forest collective. Like my sense is I’m almost, maybe I’m, I have this wrong, but like, I’m almost imagining like the very, very defined group and the truth tolerant side of that. And then just like the public speaker, but it actually feels like at least in how you describe it. So much of the importance here is like,

Nadia Asparouhova
Yeah. It’s just kind of like, oh, because you see ideas come from just like the craziest places. Like, I mean, when you look at stories of, you know, how is some new creative idea or invention or innovation? Like it’s often from really random things. It’s often from someone being able to synthesize two different ideas or two different fields and say like, oh, what if we cross over this thing with the other thing? But it doesn’t, yeah, like they can just come from anywhere and then suddenly someone’s just kind of like off to the races with it. And I’ve experienced this myself with my own work where sometimes I’m like, I don’t know why I like the things I think I’ve poured the most effort into I really couldn’t tell you I could Have never predicted that I would have cared so much about this or that idea but it just like it just gets lodged into your brain and then off you go but ideas also need a vessel yes yeah yeah
Jackson Dahl
I think about like you hear it like so often in music there’s like the um that Get Back documentary, Paul McCartney’s just like randomly strumming on his bass and then like the song comes Out of nowhere. You see it happen. There’s a, this guy, Benjamin Lavitude, who wrote When We Cease to Understand the World. It’s a kind of crazy novel about, or novel historian thing. Anyway, he has this line where he’s talking about writing and he’s like, even in the case of fiction, he’s like, it’s like, it’s less like creating something. It’s more like picking up flowers off the ground.
Nadia Asparouhova
I love that.

Nadia Asparouhova
And I’ve experienced this myself with my own work where sometimes I’m like, I don’t know why I like the things I think I’ve poured the most effort into I really couldn’t tell you I could Have never predicted that I would have cared so much about this or that idea but it just like it just gets lodged into your brain and then off you go but ideas also need a vessel yes yeah yeah
Jackson Dahl
I think about like you hear it like so often in music there’s like the um that Get Back documentary, Paul McCartney’s just like randomly strumming on his bass and then like the song comes Out of nowhere. You see it happen. There’s a, this guy, Benjamin Lavitude, who wrote When We Cease to Understand the World. It’s a kind of crazy novel about, or novel historian thing. Anyway, he has this line where he’s talking about writing and he’s like, even in the case of fiction, he’s like, it’s like, it’s less like creating something. It’s more like picking up flowers off the ground.
Nadia Asparouhova
I love that.
Jackson Dahl
But you see that pattern everywhere across ideation. I think your frame on it is really, really right. That brings us to the last thing I mentioned, which is how do these go bigger than the individual? And I think there’s, it seems to me that there are kind of like two ways to think about this. There’s the like historical view, and then there’s the like, what is the modern internet native version of it look like? And you’ve written plenty about institutions. I want to read a couple of things on that quickly. Social institutions, whether media, academia, or the political machine, are the bottlenecks through which all ideological demands must eventually pass. To truly change culture, one must master control of these institutions. We’ve certainly seen technology internalize a lot of that recently. On that note, it’s also the right time for tech to transition to a cultural institution building phase after several years spent recoiling from public backlash, which signaled its Maturity and inevitable expansion beyond its humble roots as a niche industry. For those who ask, why would anyone do this if there’s no financial ROI? Tech’s place in the world has shifted dramatically.

Nadia Asparouhova
Everything goes back to religion, right? Everything is a religion. Um, um, yeah, actually when I was doing my research around open source developers, I did a, I made a podcast with a friend because we, we, that was a mini series that was specifically focused On the relationship between open source communities and religions because we, I mean, you meet a lot of open source developers that are very, very Christian. And, and I think part, part of why that is, is because they’re sort of informed by the same, same sort of feelings and values and norms around how to conduct themselves in a religious context Are the same as, you know, I’m building a community online or I’m managing community and sharing software with people in the world. So, yeah, I think you find religion in the funniest places. But, yeah, I think this is probably not so much different. It’s just people

Jackson Dahl
I want to talk about an idea that runs through the middle of the book and I think clearly runs through so much of your work broadly and maybe like your moral worldview, which is attention. I mentioned Jenny O’Dell earlier in that book, How to Do Nothing. I think it’s a quote from her. She says, more and more actors appeared in my reality. After birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. These had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in my previous renderings of my reality. A Towie will never simply be a bird to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And then a few quotes from you that kind of stacked up to me in an interesting way. I want to talk about us as magical wizards of attention, capable of waving a wand and transforming our worlds in astonishing ways. That seems a lot more fun to me than playing slots at the casino. Our attention is not meant to be commandeered by others, but it is also not ours to hoard. Near the very end of the book, you say, Robert Moses wasn’t a superhuman. He just paid attention to things that others did not. And then finally, attention is how we carve out our personal realities. It is the breathing valve of our consciousness. Using only our minds, we can make the world as beautiful or as ugly as we wish.

Jackson Dahl
I want to talk about an idea that runs through the middle of the book and I think clearly runs through so much of your work broadly and maybe like your moral worldview, which is attention. I mentioned Jenny O’Dell earlier in that book, How to Do Nothing. I think it’s a quote from her. She says, more and more actors appeared in my reality. After birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. These had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in my previous renderings of my reality. A Towie will never simply be a bird to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And then a few quotes from you that kind of stacked up to me in an interesting way. I want to talk about us as magical wizards of attention, capable of waving a wand and transforming our worlds in astonishing ways. That seems a lot more fun to me than playing slots at the casino. Our attention is not meant to be commandeered by others, but it is also not ours to hoard. Near the very end of the book, you say, Robert Moses wasn’t a superhuman. He just paid attention to things that others did not. And then finally, attention is how we carve out our personal realities. It is the breathing valve of our consciousness. Using only our minds, we can make the world as beautiful or as ugly as we wish. How have you attuned yourself to the kinds of ideas that you want to see in the world?

Nadia Asparouhova
And it’s so it starts to sound a little bit like a, you know, aphorism or warmed over career advice. Seriously enough um or they think they know what it means and so then they kind of dismiss it but they don’t really really know what it means to just be very open and receptive to whatever Comes your way um and part of that is about eliminating unnecessary distractions right like and i don’t it doesn’t have to be in this sort of aesthetic way or you know self-depriving Sort of way i think it’s just sort of when I look at, there’s a lot of, you know, content you could consume or, you know, just choosing which notifications you let through or which emails You pay attention to or whatever. And you kind of look and you’re just like, is this really, really worth me spending time on or whatever? I just keep my brain clear and it’s just like it’s not that hard to just turn them off or push them away or whatever if you just like there’s no real reason to I think we still get stuck in this Again it’s it’s you know everyone talks about attention and yet I just think I still don’t think we’re taking it seriously enough so sometimes I say things or it sounds they sound overly Obvious but like I really just don’t like, if people were doing it, then we wouldn’t have to keep talking about it. But yeah, I think like this, as much as I can kind of keep my mind like in a relatively like blank slate or just keep, maintain my own resources around attention, then I, then it can be allocated To, like, surprising and interesting things instead of spending that budget on things that are just a waste of time. And I think a lot of why people make not great choices with their attention is just fatigue and you get stuck in this loop of fatigue. And this is true for a lot of healthy choices, right? It’s true for eating well. It’s true for exercising when you’re just tired and you’re stressed out and you, you know, yeah, stress eating is a thing, right? You’re not doing it because you actually think that potato chips are better, but it’s just like you’re, you’re in a state of fatigue and you’re mentally weak. Yes. You’re mentally weak or whatever.
Jackson Dahl
Yeah.
Nadia Asparouhova
And, um, and so, you know, how do I just set myself up for success to not have that? And if you can get yourself back to a baseline where you’re not fatigued, then it actually becomes much easier to just make the right choices.

Nadia Asparouhova
You know, it’s like you should really be paying attention. You should really be putting down your phone and like it’s not it’s the same as being told you should really eat vegetables and so you know it’s just it’s very um uh it’s not a great way to It’s yeah like who wants to do the the boring responsible paternalistic yeah it requires a lot of willpower and so i think part of it is that we don’t talk enough about the amazing things That can come as a product of great attention. So, you know, looking at people who are super fit can be a really great motivator to want to work out or something, right? Or people who feel really, really good when they eat healthy, like then you want to feel good. I think we haven’t really looked very much at sort of what is the end goal of all this attention where it’s like oh cool I’m paying I’m in the present moment like what does that even mean And it’s kind of what I was I wanted to push a little bit more in the book of it’s not just about there is some baseline reality that everyone else is tuned into and you’re kind of checked Out of and you can come back up to this place it’s this is like an entirely uncharted territory that you just create whatever you want and that’s that’s exciting and if you are excited By that then the prerequisite to do that is getting your attention into the into sort of like the right place it’s above the baseline yeah that’s a that’s a really important i i also have
Jackson Dahl
To admit like the notion that we have less

Nadia Asparouhova
I think it’s maybe just an openness again and to willingness to sort of reframe any situation you’re in where they’re now, you know, I sort of try this out when I’m in, it’s, it’s, you know, Going to the DMV or you’re stuck in like traffic or something. And it’s like, how can I make this the most joyous moment possible? Um, and I actually find that it’s often quite possible to make it like this, like really happy experience. And that’s kind of silly when you think about like, why, how can driving in traffic be, be fun and enjoyable, but like, it’s possible. But I think it’s, you have to have this sort of like openness and receptiveness idea that’s, you know, your brain and like wants to go down these, these grooves again. Right. And so it says, oh, you’re in traffic. This is, this sucks.
Jackson Dahl
Like, you know, I know how to behave here. My brain knows to be mad or sad. Yes.
Nadia Asparouhova
Execute the, the, I am mad critical. And then you just kind of barrel down that. And it’s, you know, I think one of the other things I realized since kind of starting to explore this stuff is just how much we socially reinforce this in each other too.
Jackson Dahl
And in ourselves.
Nadia Asparouhova
Yeah, yeah.
Jackson Dahl
I’m going to feel this way. It even relates to like, I’m always late. Yeah. Oh, now I’m going to keep always being late. Like we take on this. It’s really cool how much the through line between attention here in this context maps so well to the anti-meme stuff, which is basically, if I’m not overreaching here, it is training Ourselves and our attention to not just let things flow to the default path over and over and over again. This idea, it’s getting stuck somewhere. It’s like getting lodged. Similarly, our emotions, our feelings, it’s just like the ball’s going to trickle how it will, or I can intervene with attention. Yeah, definitely.
Nadia Asparouhova
Yeah. And I think it’s, this is where I really wanted to drive

Jackson Dahl
You have this, I think it’s at the very beginning of the book, you have this like kind of like what this experience experience came out of. You say like so many messy drafts before they become finished products, the ideas move faster than I could keep up. I was slipping and sliding all over the place, writing down more and more examples that I came across and cramming them into a big brain dump doc called antimemetics-notes which perched Itself mockingly in the top left corner of my desktop for years. Whenever I had some downtime between projects, I would try to refine the doc. Each time I would get frustrated by its unwieldiness and set it aside again. You go on to talk about the journey and the motivation to do something that really felt true to you. But like, what is the actual process or feeling of going from, I’m someone who’s written a fair amount and like the idea of writing a book seems completely impossible. And in the slipping and sliding feels really right of just like, I’m lost in this. There’s so many interesting ideas. Like, what does it feel like to eventually like summit that hill and start to compress it into something that you feel like you can hold?
Nadia Asparouhova
A huge relief. I mean, yeah, I’ve written a lot of things now. And with every big thing I write, there’s always a point where I’m just like, I’m certain it’s not going to happen. It’s just like, this is the worst thing I’ve ever written. Yeah. And then you just got to push through it. Yeah. I think fewer expectations is helpful for me. Writing second book has been, was way less painful than the first book. Maybe also because it was, you know, not, the first book was kind of more directly a product of a lot of research I’ve been doing. And this one was kind of more of a, maybe more adjacent or spans across a lot of things that I’m interested in. But I think also part of it was just like not having, not trying to like carry the weight of like, it’s just writing. Like, you know, zoom out. It’s okay. Like, you know, so I think, yeah.
Jackson Dahl
You also mentioned you told almost no one about this.
Nadia Asparouhova
Yeah.

Jackson Dahl
That makes it easier.
Nadia Asparouhova
Yeah. I think there’s a little bit of just like, I like having a, a wall, frankly, like, I mean, if you spend all day thinking about something, I think this is true for most people with like their Jobs or their work, right? Like I am constantly thinking about it like you know even when i sleep and i wake up and it’s it’s like there’s like this running loop but i need to have a place where i don’t think about it And so if you’re you know if you’re someone where your job is just like meetings all day like you don’t really want to be doing more meeting like things when you’re not working and for me It’s like if i spend all day just thinking about ideas like i like having a space where i can kind of be turned off and not have to just be sort of off duty a little bit. I also like I think a lot of inspiration that I get and ideas are come from just observing other people. And so I don’t like so much having if someone is if I’m talking about my own stuff, that means I don’t get to hear about what other people are talking about. And I like collecting bits of things from people. So I much, much, much prefer to be listening to other people talk about themselves and the other way around.
Jackson Dahl
I’m sorry to put you through this.
Nadia Asparouhova
This is okay.
Jackson Dahl
You have a great old blog

Nadia Asparouhova
If anyone’s gonna care about this or whatever but i just feel like i need to do it and i’m just gonna stand behind that and and do that so um i always feel good when i force myself to do something Like that with writing and i find that the the writing that i do because i think someone else is gonna like it is often much less satisfying than the ones where because you know even if no One pays attention to something that you wrote for yourself at least you know that you did it for yourself um but i actually also weirdly find that like the same with the idea machines Piece where it was like also it felt very abstracted like is anyone really going to care about this um and it was really well received and i think like yeah it’s sometimes you just really Got to trust your intuition on and not listen but but like that that reflex in itself i think is one of the hardest things for creative people to do in general and um it’s why you often like You don’t see people with really long careers and creative work because you know they start getting ideas around what they should be doing or other people are kind of whispering in their Ear about it. And it’s very, very hard to keep doing interesting original things for a long period of time. I struggle with it constantly. So for me, it’s a good exercise, good practice to just keep trying to do that even when it’s hard.
Jackson Dahl
Yeah. And there are levels to it, too, which is like maybe you’re like, oh, I’m doing this for me kind of, but I need it to be commercial enough. It’s like there’s always like a way to go deeper. Also, I think the really, really great stuff tends to be not really for anyone else.
Nadia Asparouhova
Yeah, I think it’s really true.
Jackson Dahl
When we first met, you talked about like the many eras of Nadia. You’ve done a lot of different things um

Nadia Asparouhova
I think we are now in a place where people can be openly disaffected by feeling that democracy doesn’t work. And I think this is, again, tying to this defeatist sort of attitude about mimetic behavior, which is sort of like, well, you know none of it worked. We’re screwed. And I think it still works. We just have to, you know, it doesn’t mean being totally hands off either. It means kind of getting in the arena yourself and participating in it. And, yeah, it feels like a very old school thing to say. Like, let’s talk about our civic duties and stuff. But yeah, I don’t know. I still think there’s just so much left to discover and uncover about it that we haven’t even tried or tested. So.
Jackson Dahl
You have written about the value of space. Sometimes it feels like I can’t think in here