Embryo selection has been in the news lately. The phrase tends to conjure sci-fi images of wealthy parents designing immaculate children, but I find that media discourse often glosses over the practical limitations of these technologies, which make them much less dramatic than they appear. I wanted to unpack what we actually can and can’t do with embryo selection today, which I hope will provide a more grounded foundation for discussing its ethics.

Firstly, a few definitions. Embryo selection is, broadly, the practice of screening and implanting an embryo with favorable traits. There are a few ways to determine whether it has such traits:

• Monogenic screening (or PGT-M) checks your embryos for a single, clearly defined genetic mutation. This type of testing has been used since the 1990s to screen for serious, life-altering genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease.

• Polygenic screening (or PGT-P) is a newer technology that only became commercially available in 2019. It can be used to assess an embryo's risk for conditions influenced by multiple genes – such as diabetes or schizophrenia – rather than just one gene. But, because we don't always know which genes to look at, researchers use statistical models, based on population studies, to estimate which genetic variants are likely to influence a certain trait. These variants are then compiled into a polygenic risk score (or PRS).

For example, we know schizophrenia has a strong genetic component, but there isn't a single "schizophrenia gene" that's responsible for it. Unlike Huntington's disease, which is caused by a mutation of the HTT gene, researchers have to approximate which combination of genetic variants might influence someone's propensity to have schizophrenia, and assign weights to each one.

Polygenic screening – and the underlying risk scores, which researchers have developed since the late 2000s – has attracted controversy because it could be applied to a wider set of traits like IQ.1 But, on a technical level, monogenic and polygenic screening are just two different methods for predicting an embryo's traits. Both methods can be used to screen for genetic diseases that could severely impact a child's life. Most parents probably wouldn't want their child to have Huntington's disease (monogenic) or schizophrenia (polygenic).

Both methods also have practical constraints that aren’t often discussed, which is what I want to discuss here.

Problem #1: Parents can’t make enough embryos to screen beyond the essentials

The first issue is that parents can't currently make enough embryos for elective trait selection to matter very much. A single embryo retrieval – in which eggs are retrieved, fertilized, and matured to the blastocyst stage – plus genetic testing can cost around $30,000 and might yield 3-5 embryos. For each embryo transfer, the live birth (i.e. "success”) rate is perhaps in the 50-60% range, so multiple transfers are often needed. And these numbers are on the higher end of successful outcomes.

Fertility clinics also grade each embryo on its quality, which is correlated with the likelihood of a successful implantation. Most use the Gardner grading system, which looks at a blastocyst's size and cell quality. A 6BC, for example, is less likely to have a successful transfer versus a 4AA.

Parents may also want to consider the sex of the embryo, not just for elective reasons (wanting to have a boy or a girl), but for certain genetic diseases. A male with a BRCA1 mutation, which causes a high predisposition for breast cancer, still has an much lower lifetime risk (1-5%) than a female (60-80%).

These two filters alone shrink the pool considerably. Now, try adding just a single genetic trait to screen for, and the list of viable embryos gets even shorter. Imagine you are screening for Huntington's disease, which typically affects 50% of embryos:

• EMBRYO #1: M, 4AA, mutation yes

• EMBRYO #2: M, 5BB, mutation no

• EMBRYO #3: F, 3AA, mutation yes

• EMBRYO #4: F, 6BC, mutation yes

• EMBRYO #5: F, 4AA, mutation no

Half your embryos have the mutation, so you wouldn't want to implant them. But of the embryos who don't have the mutation, only one (#5) is considered high grade, which a fertility clinic will prioritize because it’s more likely to result in a live birth. In this example, we didn't even have the luxury of considering the embryo's sex.

A world in which parents are "shopping" among lots of different traits in their embryos simply doesn't exist today. You would need to create dozens or hundreds of embryos to make this possible, which current IVF methods don't produce. Researchers are exploring new possibilities in this realm, such as generating embryos from stem cells, but these are still highly experimental, and inevitably raise a different set of ethical questions. For now, embryo selection is tightly constrained by biology and numbers.

Problem #2: With polygenic screening, you're unlikely to find a genetic outlier

The “not enough embryos” problem also impacts the usefulness of polygenic screening. Polygenic risk scores are comprised of lots of genetic variants, which interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Statistically, on a bell curve of all possible genetic combinations between two parents, most of your embryos will end up somewhere near the middle (meaning, the middle of what you would have produced anyway through natural conception) for a given trait, with only small variations.

When you only have, say, 5 or 10 embryos to choose from, you only get a few “shots” along this bell curve, and it’s unlikely you’ll uncover anything interesting. Finding a genetic outlier is like sticking your hand in a jar of green jelly beans and rummaging blindly around, hoping to grab the one red jelly bean: it’s mostly wishful thinking.

Problem #3: Polygenic risk scores are not set in stone

We tend to think of our DNA as something that is hard-coded into our bodies. Therefore, any information we receive about our genes must be irrefutably true, right? Wrong. Some genetic information is clear, especially once we know what to look for. But for the most part, our understanding of how genetic variants map to traits is complex and incomplete, and these insights are always changing. Genomics researchers can’t just look at our DNA, like some soothsayer blowing the dust off an ancient text, and tell us what they see. Instead, they use statistics to make educated guesses about which genes seem likely to influence a certain trait, and to what degree.

You can think of this as similar to how people use the English alphabet. Sure, it only has 26 letters, and everyone knows what these letters are, but people still find new ways of rearranging them – words, sentences, essays, books – every day, and we’re not going to run out of new combinations anytime soon. Developing a polygenic score is kind of like that, too.

Warren Weaver, a director at the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s, once described the difference between problems of simplicity, disorganized complexity, and organized complexity:

• Problems of simplicity are a two-variable problem. Monogenic screening falls under this category: “Does this embryo have X mutation?” has a direct and straightforward answer.

• Problems of disorganized complexity deal with a large number of variables, but which act in predictable ways that are independent of their relationship to each other. Population studies used in genomics research are an example of this: “What percent of this population carries Y variant?” is a complex question, but can be answered with statistical analysis.

• Problems of organized complexity involve multiple variables, each of whose significance can change depending on its relationship to other variables. Polygenic screening is this type of problem. A genetic variant might be more or less important depending on which other variants are present (which could amplify or mitigate its impact), as well as other factors like a person’s sex, lifestyle, or environment. And we don’t always know what these dependencies even are.

A polygenic risk score is just a model that captures our best-guess thinking at the time. Like any model, it can have wide error bars. With time, we can probably reduce these errors quite a bit, to the point that we're comfortable making consequential decisions. But we’re nowhere close to that world for every polygenic trait in question.

Many polygenic scores are trained on European ancestry and don’t always generalize to other populations. Standards are still emerging in this field: researchers don’t all use the same data sets or methods to create these scores. And companies don’t have to disclose how their proprietary scores were developed, nor how accurate or predictive they are.

High uncertainty might be fine if we were dealing with a pure research problem. But when genetic testing companies offer their customers a neatly-wrapped polygenic risk score, it can seem more certain than it actually is. I've had several services give me conflicting insights about my risk for various polygenic traits, based on limited or differing interpretations of the data. If one service tells me I have a high risk for, say, Type 2 diabetes, and another tells me I have a low risk, which one should I believe? How should I change my behavior based on this information? If these services can't help customers understand what they should actually do differently, having access to these data insights might be more counterproductive than not having them at all.

For technologies like embryo selection, which utilize this research, I think we should hold ourselves to a high degree of confidence before making decisions about elective traits. We are, of course, always updating our collective scientific body of knowledge2, and sometimes we have to act even when we're not very confident about what we know. I can understand why someone might pursue a treatment with 55% odds of success, for example, if they’re facing a rare and aggressive type of cancer and have no alternatives. But it’s another story to make life-altering choices for ourselves, or our children, based on highly speculative data, when the default choice might have been just fine. At the very least, companies should be transparent about the uncertainty we have around these scores today, so consumers can make informed decisions.

Do these issues mean that none of this technology matters?

Not at all. Firstly, I do think it is useful for parents to do genetic testing of themselves before having kids, which can surface any major genetic issues. This is a simple saliva test that you can do at your doctor, costs a couple hundred dollars, and is often covered by insurance (especially if you have a family history of disease) or even subsidized by test providers.

Embryo selection, too, has clear value when families have known genetic risks that could significantly impact the quality of a child's life, such as hemophilia or hereditary cancer. In these cases, monogenic screening can mean the difference between having children versus not. Despite the panic about designer babies, most embryo screening today is being used for exactly this: avoiding passing severe, life-altering diseases on to one’s children.

Genomics researchers are now trying to extend this research to more common, but still consequential, conditions like diabetes and heart disease. This pursuit also seems valuable to me – such conditions are among the leading causes of death in the United States – even if I'm not yet convinced they’re ready for consumer primetime.

Finally, we shouldn't get too hung up on embryo selection itself, because it represents just one way of solving for a bigger ambition. Gene editing, for example, could someday enable us to correct harmful mutations directly, which would bypass the need to create and choose from a handful of embryos. However we get there, though, I think the underlying imperative is still worth pursuing: finding ways to prevent genetic disease and help more people live healthier lives.

I was motivated to write Antimemetics in part because I felt dissatisfied with how we’ve unthinkingly glommed onto memetic warfare as a terminal explanation for why people do what they do. Memes and mimicry might explain some of our behavior today, but they aren’t an excuse to roll over and accept things exactly as they are. This seems like a profoundly defeatist way for us to justify our worst behavior. Aren't we humans creative creatures, blessed with the ability to design our way out of even the most hopeless situations?

I recently participated in a panel in San Francisco about how new technologies gain public legitimacy. My co-panelists were three founders who are doing this quite well: Laura Deming (Longevity Fund, age1, Until) Celine Halioua (Loyal), and Noor Siddiqui (Orchid), and whose respective fields – cryopreservation, longevity, and embryo selection – touch up against some of the most sensitive frontiers in biotech.

These are not easy topics to make legible, let alone popular, and they’ve historically been met with distrust from the public and media. If one were to follow the conventional internet playbook today, the best way to address such concerns is to own it. Take a stance. Don't be afraid to step on people's toes. Use polarizing, coded language to strengthen your support base. You get the idea. I am sure that each of these founders were given this advice at some point.

When I reflected upon what I admired about them, however, it’s that they've all succeeded by explicitly not playing into the memetic wars. Instead, they’ve taken care to present their ideas in a way that feels credible and trustworthy. They focus on the science. They highlight real stories and use cases that broaden their appeal. And they even, subtly, helped rewrite the language used to describe these topics.

Longevity, for example, was commonly called "anti-aging" until the mid-2010s. It was associated with pseudoscientific products, like supplements or experimental therapies, that promised to make people younger. As a scientific pursuit, it was regarded as a vain billionaires’ quest for immortality that was largely out of touch with the needs of average people today. Thanks to the efforts of Laura and others, longevity founders and researchers now talk about "extending healthy lifespan" and targeting age-related diseases, which is much more relatable and actionable. Loyal, too, started with an approachable use case – helping dogs live longer and healthier lives – that could pave the path towards human longevity. They are currently running the first-ever clinical study to be accepted by the FDA that studies lifespan extension explicitly (dogs or otherwise).

Embryo selection has been around since the 1990s, but even just a few years ago, expressing interest in the topic was a career risk. Stephen Hsu, a vice president at Michigan State University, was forced to resign in 2020 due to his interest in genomic predictors of complex human traits (i.e. polygenic screening – a composite score of multiple genes thought to influence a trait – as opposed to monogenic screening, which only looks for a specific mutation). Hsu cofounded the service Genomic Prediction, one of the first to offer polygenic embryo screening. The first baby to be born with their service was featured in a Bloomberg article as recently as 2021. Embryo selection still draws inevitable comparisons to Gattaca, but the conversation has become much easier to have thanks to Orchid, whose tagline is simply "Have healthy babies." Orchid sidesteps the “designer babies” conversation, instead focusing on screening for genetic traits that could significantly impact a child's health, such as heart defects, vision loss, or certain types of cancer.

Cryopreservation is still comparatively new in terms of its trajectory to social acceptability, but Laura was drawn to the field precisely because she noticed she had a reflexive aversion to it, and decided this meant it warranted further investigation. I have some idea of what she was grappling with: in 2015, intrigued by cryopreservation, I asked some friends about the process. A few emails later, I found myself in a video call with a jolly man who reminded me of Saul Goodman, dressed in a brightly-colored buttondown and clashing 90s-style power tie, trying to sell me life insurance. The experience was memorable, but not exactly something that would appeal to a wide customer base. Instead of catering to weird transhumanists who want to freeze themselves in hopes of being revived in the future,1 however, Until (formerly Cradle) created a new conversation that’s centered around specific uses for cryopreservation, such as preserving organ tissue for transplants, or neural tissue for research.

Life science technologies are an interesting counterexample to memetic playbooks, because they’re a place where we must face the dizzying, and often frightening, consequences of humans toiling on the frontier of progress. Our first reaction is often to flinch and look away: this is classically antimemetic behavior, where an idea feels too consequential to acknowledge. Many people don't want to think about the implications of a world where we can live forever, choose our babies' genetics, or be resurrected after death – and understandably so. Better to suppress the thought and push it away.

When trying to spread an idea that touches people's lives, families, and personal values in an intimate way, leaning into memetic contagion can make them feel more alienated and afraid, as if the idea is running away faster than they can safely process it. A different approach is to focus on being relatable, concrete, and credible:

• Relatable: Regular people can see themselves in the future you propose. Orchid and Loyal both have websites that one could imagine sending to a friend or family member, featuring soft colors, approachable logos and taglines, and photos of real people – whether that’s couples who’ve had babies with Orchid, or dog owners with their beloved pets.

• Concrete: Rather than trying to evoke a high-minded, Elysian future, identify use cases that would solve specific problems today. While Until doesn’t shy away from their long-term vision of human whole-body reversible cryopreservation, they are starting with organ transplants, and they point out that cryopreservation is already used in IVF and stem cell therapies.

• Credible: Science – and more importantly, the processes driving scientific discovery and consensus – is treated seriously. In its clinical study announcement, Loyal’s team states that they “made the decision from the start that we would seek FDA approval for our aging drugs. It’s a rigorous, expensive, years-long process that sets a very high bar for both safety and efficacy – exactly as it should be.”

Finally, I've been thinking about how one might apply these learnings to what's happening at the intersection of neuroscience and contemplative science – such as advanced meditation, transcranial focused ultrasound, and breathwork – an area that I'm currently preoccupied with, and which suffers from similar public perception challenges. Many people are skeptical or dismissive, and rightly so, of anyone purporting to offer blissed-out happiness for the one-time price of $999. But that doesn't mean there isn't real science and insight buried amidst the noise, and figuring out how to tease that out properly, and communicate it to others, is a big reason why I'm so fascinated by this space.

In writing about these topics so far, I've noticed that people seem to appreciate a narrative that is relatable, concrete, and credible. A number of people, for example, told me that a magazine piece I wrote about the jhanas was something they could send to a friend or family member and not feel embarrassed by. The report we published last fall about how such practices impact people's lives was written as a research piece, rather than trying to sensationalize the upside. By explicitly taking on the role of the skeptic, one can build a rapport with readers who might have otherwise tuned out the message. (Michael Pollan did this well, I think, with his 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, which helped psychedelics cross the chasm from taboo to socially acceptable dinner topic.)

There are two failure modes that I've noticed in this world. The first is when the vision is too vague, promising non-specific outcomes like "happiness" or "wellbeing." I think they think they are being relatable (who doesn't want to be happy?), but these outcomes aren't concrete, and that makes people suspicious for the same reason that "immortality" doesn't resonate as well as "extending healthy lifespan."

The other, and perhaps less obvious, failure mode I've seen is overcorrecting for credibility and concreteness at the expense of relatability. These narratives are overly scientific: fMRI scans are prized over personal experience, with scientists offering detailed descriptions of neural processes that aren't contextualized and don't have clear practical implications. Use cases are narrow – treating a disorder or neurological disease – but feel disconnected from a bigger vision, and don't inspire the public with what's possible.

I love how Loyal decided to develop products aimed at "longevity for dogs," a premise that might initially throw people off guard, but ultimately attracts their curiosity. Inspired by this prompt, I’ve wondered: what would a "killer app" be for contemplative science?

I was at a dinner recently where the topic turned to sleep issues. It turned out that everyone at the table struggled with sleep, and each person had their own way of dealing with it. There were, of course, the typical melatonin and sleeping pill-type solutions, but also more unusual adaptive strategies. One person admitted that they hadn't slept through the night in decades, so they'd parlayed it into a finance trading habit. Another said they watched YouTube videos of coin pusher machines to fall back asleep (I looked these up, and they are indeed soporific).

I was amazed by how everyone at the table had some private, tortured relationship to sleep. Sleep quality is very much connected to one’s psyche, but telling people to “work on themselves” in order to sleep better is too vague to be useful. Instead, we peddle a bunch of Band-Aid solutions and placebos, as well as the ever-infuriating lifestyle suggestions (“don’t look at screens,” “read a book,” “only use your bed for sleep”). While some sleep problems certainly have physiological causes, such as hormonal imbalances or airway issues, if you're sleeping well, your mind and body are also likely at ease.

Figuring out how to fix sleep in a novel and deterministic way, then, could be an proxy for loftier goals like “happiness” and “wellbeing,” rather than chasing those states in the abstract. Just as GLP-1s are marketed as a weight loss drug, but also show promise in treating other reward system disorders (such as substance abuse and addiction), perhaps sleep could be an entry point that would concretize the potential of contemplative science more broadly.

Beyond life sciences or contemplative science, I’ve noticed that when the public expresses fear of technologies like social media or AI, tech often reacts by doubling down on their ingroup, instead of trying to genuinely engage with these concerns. I think it’s useful to consider why people might fear these things, and try to speak to them on an emotional level, instead of using it as an opportunity to engage in memetic warfare. Doing this well seems to have had a counterfactual impact in longevity, embryo selection, and cryopreservation so far. And if the goal is to make exciting new technologies socially legible, rather than scoring cheap points for one’s team, it’s worth trying a playbook that communicates from a place of trust and reassurance to win public approval.

When people ask me “what I’ve been thinking about lately,” I feel like I’m playing a game of Codenames:

It’s a popular party game where you lay out a grid of random words and have to come up with clues that tie many different concepts together, in hopes of nudging your team to choose the correct words and score points.

If my life were a Codenames grid right now, it would include the following:1

• Antimemetics

• Advanced meditation

• Silicon Valley ideology

Help, codemaster! Make that into a clue, and you’ve got this newsletter update.

I don’t usually like sending link roundups, but I’ve been publishing too many things recently, on too many seemingly-disparate fronts (except to my subconscious, who is somehow weaving these themes together into a single individual called “Nadia”), to make a story out of it.

So…here’s what I’ve been up to lately. You can treat it like a board of charcuterie, and only pick out the bits you like (cornichons for me – hold the mortadella, please). Or, for that matter, like mingling with a bunch of Nadia-shaped guests at a house party, and politely excuse yourself to get a drink whenever you get bored (I won’t be offended).

Antimemetics (the book)

The New Yorker published a lovely book review of Antimemetics this week, written by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. Beyond his coverage of the book, I think it’s a great explanatory piece of the internet’s recent vibe shift, and why neither the left (with its emphasis on gatekeeping) nor the right (with its emphasis on mimetic desire) has offered a satisfying narrative that gets us to where we’re going next.

My internet politics, in a nutshell:

Asparouhova’s basic intuition is that both of the prevailing theories of information on the internet (either that it had to be sanitized and controlled or that it was simply natural for it to remain perennially downstream of charisma) have been wrong….[but] she does not think that all communication can be reduced to a power struggle, she is not ready to give up on democratic values or civilization tout court, and she considers herself one of many “refugees fleeing memetic contagion.”

Ben Davis of Artnet News also wrote a shorter review of Antimemetics, which we discussed at length on his podcast. (As an aside, I’ve enjoyed getting to talk about this book with a wide range of audiences, from our dear technology brothers at TBPN, to the art critics at Artnet, to my fellow illegible internet blogger Applied Divinity Studies.)

BOOK RELEASE! We released the digital version of Antimemetics this week, so if you bought your copy already, it’s now available (you should have received an email about it). If you haven’t bought a copy yet, you can get the Kindle version now on Metalabel or on Amazon.

The physical copies are still heading to our distributors, but they should likely ship to everyone next week. Here are a few sneak preview photos from our designer (see the shiny silver print?), aka “proof of physical copy”:

Advanced meditation

Meanwhile, I’ve been plugging away in relative peace and solitude on my latest topic of fascination: advanced meditation and the remarkable, intense states we can engender using only our minds.

I started working with the Meditation Research Program at Harvard University/Mass General, led by Matthew Sacchet, a neuroscientist who’s doing, in my view, some of the most critical research in this space today. We are currently developing an education initiative that I’m excited to share more about in the coming months.

Matthew is an absolute beast at publishing papers2, but what primarily attracted me to his work is that he, too, cares about translating scientific and contemplative knowledge into meaningful and actionable insights for the average person. As you might imagine, it’s not easy to find people like this in meditation land, where many conversations quickly unravel into Buddhist poetry and start to feel more like a hazing ritual.

I also recently published a few bits of research from my work last year with Jhourney, a meditation retreat company. We spent some time trying to identify factors that are correlated with meditation success. Beyond the more obvious, demographic-type factors (like social media or prior psychedelic use), we uncovered a few interesting behaviors. One is about how people who overestimate their abilities are less likely to access deeper states, and the other is about how challenges with feeling pleasant emotions in the body (such as alexithymia) is especially correlated with difficulties.

I’ve had some good conversations about framing meditation as a trainable skill – if so, what would the underlying pedagogy look like? It may seem obvious, but many meditators push back on the idea that their skills can be measured or assessed in any rigorous way. And yet, meditation experience (as defined by e.g. number of hours meditated) doesn’t seem to correlate to abilities, so I think there’s room for more experimentation here – which is why I’m excited about my work with Matthew’s lab.

Silicon Valley’s political ideology

Last but not least, I published a piece about Silicon Valley’s political ideology in American Affairs. The impetus was a seminar I co-hosted with Tim Hwang last fall – days before the presidential election – where we brought some people together to discuss where the “Silicon Valley ideology” is going and where it’s been.

In the American Affairs piece, I revisit Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s iconic “Californian ideology” essay from 1995 to argue that Silicon Valley is not libertarian. Nor was it ever classically liberal. Nor is it currently undergoing a “rightward shift.” Tech is its own, strange, undefinable thing (apropos to this newsletter?) that chronically suffers from a lack of allies, as evinced by its getting dumped by the Democratic Party in the 2010s, and its current, growing dissatisfaction with the Republican Party in the 2020s.

It’s hard to write timeless essays about rapidly changing topics for a quarterly magazine, and there’s a lot I wish I could have expanded on in this piece, given how DOGE (and tech’s increasingly skeptical relationship to it) has unfolded, but I’m glad for the opportunity to situate our current moment in historical tech commentary. I hope it helps address some of the outdated notions that tech’s behavior can be attributed to merely being libertarian, obsessively capitalist, or autistically engineer-brained.

It's easier than ever to share ideas. But in recent years, some of the most interesting ideas are burrowing deeper underground, circulating quietly among group chats and texts instead of public social channels.

I've watched these changes unfold while thinking about a book I read a few years back, called There Is No Antimemetics Division (or TINAD), a horror science fiction book by the pseudonymous author qntm. In TINAD, the world is overrun by antimemes, or ideas that actively resist being remembered or shared – despite their importance.

Antimemes exist in real life. They are a broad category of self-censoring ideas that includes taboos (things that everyone knows, but can't be said out loud), cognitive biases (things that we can't see about ourselves), or memory lapses (things we know we ought to be doing, but keep forgetting to prioritize). Antimemes grab our attention in the moment, but we struggle to keep them top of mind. This sort of forgetting occurs both collectively (ex. taboos) and individually (ex. cognitive biases).

I read TINAD shortly after its release in 2021. Afterwards, I started collecting scraps of thoughts about antimemes in a text file that I kept on my desktop, which I named antimemetics-notes.md. At some point, this file grew large enough that I thought I might try to write a blog post about it. I tried and failed at this task many times, partly because it felt like the world I wanted to write about was still evolving, and partly because – true to their name – antimemes are hard to think about directly for too long.

Since TINAD was first published, more and more people I know seem to have found their way to its pages. The book (and its author, qntm) is one of those wildly successful self-publishing stories: while it wasn't published or promoted through conventional channels, enough people fell in love with its premise that qntm recently signed with Penguin Random House to re-release it for a wider commercial audience.

I think qntm is one of the best science fiction authors of our generation. Still, I longed for a proper nonfiction treatment of antimemes. It seemed that such a consequential idea needed an analysis that was grounded in the real world, not just a fictional one. While qntm first coined the term "antimeme" back in the late 2000s, the concept has found fresh relevance in recent years, I think because it helps us understand the next phase of the social web: one that’s driven by private and semi-private online spaces, not just highly public ones.

Memes may dominate how we communicate online, but in the last few years, their rapid spread has also necessitated the birth of a parallel, shadow ecosystem, where the best ideas are paradoxically harder to find. Not everyone wants their ideas to go viral anymore. One friend writes a newsletter that he asks people not to share around. Another publishes their writing in a Google Doc, which is sent only to a small group of trusted people. My new favorite social app is a private, Twitter-like app that a friend created just for his friends.

Chasing virality is no longer a sufficient motive to explain why we do (or don't) share what we do online. But we still don't have the vocabulary to describe what we’re doing instead. Group chats have become a major platform for social communication in the last five to ten years, but hardly anyone has written about them, in large part – I think – because they can't. Group chats are self-censoring: unlike the public social web, we can only know what we've experienced, or what others are occasionally willing to share with us. The juiciest gossip is reserved only for its members (and those who accidentally stumble into a highly classified war chat).

I also think a lot of people, especially those who grew up in the Web 2.0 era, are weighing conflicting emotions around both wanting to withdraw from the chaos of public social web, while also feeling vaguely guilty about checking out. It's much more comfortable to live in our group chats and DMs, but doesn't it feel a little strange to watch the world burn from the safety of our miniaturized abodes? Shouldn't we....do something? But what?

I've found myself wishing for a narrative that didn't just feel like complaining about social media today, nor pining for a simpler time where we didn't have to beg for likes and shares. The past is the past: we need to let it go. Instead, I wanted to take a hard, unflinching look at where we are today, and try to figure out how to make meaning from our lives with the constraints we currently have.

I wasn't the only person thinking about the future of the social web. In 2019, Kickstarter and Metalabel co-founder Yancey Strickler published an essay, titled "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet," about why he felt increasingly uncomfortable interacting in public spaces online. The essay attracted a lot of attention, and eventually Yancey formed The Dark Forest Collective with a few likeminded collaborators, including Venkatesh Rao and Maggie Appleton. They published an anthology of their writing early last year. The first print run sold out in the first 72 hours. A few months later, they announced that they were looking for more ideas to publish under the same label.

I hadn't properly met Yancey before, but it turned out we were admirers of each others' work – making slow, lazy circles around the same cluster of ideas. And that's how my half-abandoned Markdown file of notes began preening itself into the book I'm sharing with you today. It’s called Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading.

I didn't really mean for this to turn into a book. I wasn't sure what its final form would be when I sat down and started writing in May of last year, from the warm and sun-filled loft bedroom of a rented summer home in Manhattan Beach. Mostly, I wanted an excuse to think about antimemetics. But the draft grew and grew, and it sprouted legs, and it began to wobble and toddle around, and a few weeks into dissecting and organizing my notes, I began to develop a fondness for the alien creature that had taken up residence in my head and heart. I coaxed this manuscript – an improbable mess of ideas that had so many false starts over the last three years – to grow at the same time that I watched my infant son grow: rolling onto his stomach, rocking on his hands and knees, crawling and climbing up the stairs, pulling himself up and cruising from couch to coffee table.

In December, my son finally stood up and walked seven steps on his own, before he tripped and fell. But – realizing what he had done, and the possibilities he had just unlocked – he stood up and did it again, and again, and again, shrieking and rolling and laughing with joy and he stood, and walked, and fell, and stood, and walked, and fell, and stood, and walked again. A week later, I turned in the final draft of my manuscript for Antimemetics.

Publishing with the Dark Forest Collective felt like the right way to release this book. Antimemes are delicate and messy and hard to look at; they would be swiftly crushed in the hands of a publisher trying to juice it up and make it "go viral," like a flower ground under the heel of a shoe.

I had thought of this book as a "fun summer project," but as my writing wore on into the winter, I realized that antimemes were an overarching meta-theme of much of my life and interests: whether that's the unseen costs of infrastructure, the need for privacy in our online lives, how talent ecosystems are forming from the memetic spread of apocalyptic thinking, how bureaucracies keep ideas safely hidden, or how our attention is being hijacked by doomscrolling. All of these ideas make an appearance in Antimemetics.

And, of course, this book is in some sense a sequel to my first book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. (While writing Antimemetics, I joked to myself that I would call it Working in Private.) I wrote that book partly because I felt that what was happening to open source developers – who, in the face of overwhelming demand for their attention, were withdrawing from public online spaces – was going to happen to all of us. I even referenced the Dark Forest thesis in my initial book announcement.

I barely told anyone I was working on this book. This makes Antimemetics itself a sort of antimemetic experiment. I am putting my faith – as always – in my writing speaking for itself, and earning its right to spread from person to person. So, if I've written something here that resonates with you, please share it with your friends – and buy the book!

Antimemetics is now available for pre-order:

Pre-order now

The first edition will be sold exclusively on Metalabel; we’ll make it more widely available soon after. We plan to release Antimemetics in late May of this year.

Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting my work.

When I first pitched a magazine piece about a meditation subculture surrounding the jhanas1 at the beginning of this year, there hadn’t been any media coverage of the practice yet. The Twitter discourse mostly centered around two questions: 1) Are the jhanas even real? and 2) If you can self-induce extreme bliss, why would you do anything but “press the pleasure button” all day?

Fast forward to the end of the year, and the jhanas have now been covered in The Atlantic, Vox, Time, and Men’s and Women’s Health. Instead of debating whether they are real, the question I hear now is: “How can I try it?” Or, “I went on a retreat / tried the instructions in your blog post, and some crazy things happened!” I’ve been especially surprised to hear from people I would’ve never expected to hear from (read: not meditators or “spiritual” types) – it’s been a cool way to get to know some of my acquaintances on a deeper level.

Now that we’ve established that jhanas exist, my focus has turned to understanding their impact. Jhanas feel like self-induced psychedelic states, so – do they offer similar benefits?

Answering this question, however, turns out to be a challenging research question. Firstly, there aren’t that many researchers studying the jhanas yet, and frankly, academia doesn’t move as fast as my curiosity. Secondly, of the few published studies I’ve read about the jhanas, recruiting participants is a barrier to study, because jhanas are a skill that must be taught, and there just aren’t that many people who’ve tried them yet. And thirdly, because jhanas occupy a weird space between “meditation” and “psychedelics,” it’s not even clear which type of impact to look for, much less measure. (Mindfulness and MDMA might both change your outlook, but in very different ways.)

A big, open research question with little prior art to draw from? Sounds fun!

I decided to team up with the good people at Jhourney, a retreat company that teaches the jhanas to beginners – and therefore have unique access to practitioners – to tackle these questions. We asked their alumni how their lives have changed since going on a retreat. You can read our findings in a report that we just published today:

Read the report

I’ve also summarized our key insights and takeaways in this Twitter thread.

As far as I know, this is the most extensive report yet on the impact of the jhanas on meditators. There’s a lot here that needs to be validated by research, but my initial goal was helping us figure out the right questions to even ask. (To that end, this report has already helped inform another project we’re working on with an academic lab – more on that soon.)