I love all these. I'd add Blightsight by Peter Watts to the list. It has the creepy, psychological bent of Annihilation combined with the hard science elements common to qntm's, Neal Stephenson's and Greg Egan's books.
Would love to find more books like Blindsight, something about the way it described agency without consciousness was both creepy and extremely memorable.
Blindsight was great. I had such high hopes for their follow up novel Echopraxia, but sadly it felt rushed and under-edited, but the ideas were spectacular.
I wanted to like this, as the premise was fascinating and the word-smithing was pretty good. But something about it left me feeling a little disappointed at the end. More so the end of the entire trilogy, than Annihilation by itself though, IIRC.
I'll second your feeling on Annihilation trilogy. To me, the whole message boiled down to "my life kinda sucked, and now it sucks even more". The phenomenon ostensibly at the center of everything seems to take back seat to protagonists being bummed about it existing / their lives in general.
His book is great, but to be clear I feel like he writes exactly one book. I've read it in many forms and it's an amazing book. But don't be surprised when you realize that every book is just him trying to find a new way to look at the same object over and over again.
Very enjoyable but his short stories are great because they force him to focus on one idea instead of how his whole world view fits together.
I'd push back on the redaction point. One of the primary conceits of the book is that the information is generally affected, which includes the contents of the book itself. While doing multiple pages is kinda taking the piss, the general idea is much better than just verbally stating it is hard to remember.
Yeah, it's trying to cohere the structure of the book with the topic matter which I really appreciate. It doesn't always quite land, but I think it was really worthwhile. Although I can understand how someone who is looking for a "normal" novel might be dissatisfied. But to me it's a bit like house of leaves, you need to accept the meta-conceit of the book being subject to the effect of its contents.
As someone who has a low opinion of House of Leaves,
and was e.g. entirely immune to the charms of Twin Peaks,
I believe you're right.
But even then... once this devolved into what felt like a teeth-clenching march to the Final Battle, on the basis AFAI can tell that this is what the author understood Novels Must Do,
it wasn't even providing the pleasures you get from just floating along.
Researcher here, if you like antimemes as a concept then this is a nice treatment that introduces people to what it means and how one needs to think around them in order to function.
A malicious antimeme would be a dark pattern in web design for handling privacy/data/etc. Something designed to satisfy whatever law/regulation requires them to have the option while making the ability to find/remember/interact with it as hard as possible.
Another candidate is the common usage of memory-holing, where important information is removed from public perception maliciously. The Dubai Chocolate thing technically falls into here, as does the whole "war in Iran to distract from the Epstein files" thing. Frankly the whole Epstein stuff is riddled with malicious memes and antimemes to deliberately muddy the waters. Similar to deliberate attempts to inject insane conspiracy beliefs "the moon controls our brains" into conspiracy theories that are too close to something real "mk-ultra".
Consciousness for an antimeme is more of a classification error in my mind, as consciousness as a concept is permanently warped. But you could describe a secret society/dark family secret as a form of living antimeme, hiding some information and preventing it from being shared using a variety of means.
I spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and the character of antimemes. Even ended up writing a whole taxonomy and mathematical framework for it.
In general a meme is specific to an entity-pair, with self-censoring information as a subset of antimeme that makes the information itself remove itself from the mind that learns it. In general though, information that is an antimeme is not the same thing as a category of information that describes an antimeme.
So, "your parents weird sextape" is generally antimemetic, you are unlikely to share that information yourself and I would not expect to see many examples where someone posted this. Your password is also antimemetic in most cases.
That said, information may contain both antimemetic and memetic components, such as "the game" (I just lost). The rules inherently are antimemetic and self-censoring, however the memetic component ensures this is still transmitted effectively to as many people as possible. A more entity-pair specific meme-antimeme relation is "where the good drug dealers hang out", which is information that is highly memetic or antimemetic under different conditions.
I think the key isn't to think of these things as strict categories, but labels we ascribe to a more continuous measure of memeablity.
Isn't there also a physics angle to antimemes (as portrayed in TINAD)? Self-erasing information sounds like a reduction of entropy and should therefore be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, no?
It's only a violation in the same way life is in violation. If the system is open it's fine to mess about as long as energy flows.
Of note, information is actually pretty low entropy in general, there are only a few confined states that information is valid in. Erasure just makes it statistically hard to recover the information in a usable timeline. So going from a sequence of 1's to a sequence of any number is increasing entropy.
If you go through the solution to Maxwell's demon it will help here too
Oh this is neat, it seems to be a good way to switch off of doom scrolling cause after using it for a few minutes it was pretty easy to just go do something else without the urge to go back to it.
Plus some of them are pretty cool, I found one that looked like a rug.
I worked on this once after an argument with my boyfriend.
The original argument was "the ones digit has permanent pattern in 2^n {2,4,8,6,2...}.
We made a system to generate digits for powers of two, although eventually we just made one that can take arbitrary bases, and found that you can decompose digit frequency and find a variety of NMR like resonances that vary based on where you terminate data collection.
It was really fun and this makes me want to get back into this so I could check the properties of those resonances across bases and stopping points for data collection.
> The original argument was "the ones digit has permanent pattern in 2^n {2,4,8,6,2...}.
Isn’t that obviously the case (for n >= 1 anyway)? If each successive power of two is just the previous number times two, then it would always have to follow that pattern.
Any integer >= 10 can be expressed as the sum of a multiple of 10 plus a single digit number, for example 32 = 30 + 2. So 32 * 2 can be written as 2 * (30 + 2). And since any integer ending in zero multiplied by any integer must also end in zero, you only need to look at the single digit part of the number to see that a pattern must immediately emerge for powers of two, or of any number for that matter.
Diaspora by Greg Egan
Anathem by Neal Stephenson (this one is a bit like doing homework but worth it imo)
If you vibe with short stories Exhalation by Ted Chiang Crystal Nights by Greg Egan isn't bad either
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