There Is No Antimemetics Division | Sam Hughes

A meme is an idea or a thought pattern that is structured such that it propagates well—analogous to how a biological gene behaves when observed through the lens of evolution. These include old-school image macros, 6-7, and anything else the internet explicitly calls a meme, but also ideas like Christianity, Capitalist Realism, or the idea that milk is good for your bones. An antimeme, then, is a maladapted, anti-viral idea that resists being spread. A password, complex scientific theories, or the names of double agents. These are ideas that are difficult to share, or even to remember, or ideas that are being actively protected by (groups of) people. This book dares to take this concept further still by imagining antimemes that self-protect and actively erase themselves from people's brains and media, such as the written word and digital storage. It further imagines phenomena that feed off people's ideas, making them forget information, spreading through society and censoring vast areas of ideatic space.

The book starts out with a handful of chapters whose plot at first seems only very loosely connected and which read more like standalone stories. But soon a bigger plot starts to emerge, one that immediately turns the book into a gripping page turner and will find its culmination on an epic scale. This betrays the novel's origin as a short story, which then expanded as a web serial. But as the skeleton of a novel this structure provides a low-barrier of entry into the world and its characters and presents a comfortable introduction to the meta-ideas: ideas about the nature of ideas.

While chapters switch between a cast of main characters, they all share some level of involvement with the titular Antimemetics Division of the Unknown Organisation. This means that, despite frequent memory loss, they are all competent and quick to think on their feet, constantly (re-)inventing plans and solutions to—sometimes literally—unthinkable problems. This can be filed under the keyword "competency porn" and is incredibly satisfying to read.

The sci-fi equipment the Organization possesses, like memory-retaining drugs or mind-altering machines, is scaled perfectly to a middle ground of cool yet believable, powerful yet limited. And while the full inventory is kept opaque, the more pivotal gadgets are mentioned offhandedly early enough to never feel like cheap plot devices. In short, this novel manages to be a perfect secret agent thriller.

This alone would have already earned a solid recommendation, but I would not have spilled this much ink on the theme of antimemetics if it didn't also figure heavily into my appreciation. Almost every chapter explores ideas and memory from new angles, presenting new lenses through which to view them, like the personal or the cultural one, and examining our abilities to relate to them; remembering, forgetting, sharing, concealing, relearning, adjusting, misremembering, disbelieving, et cetera. In this way the novel has, in a very real sense, expanded my reality.

But we've had this talk before, haven't we? This isn't the first time I'm recommending this to you.

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