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Fireside Chat with Nadia Asparouhova

Talk Nadia Asparouhova
researcher practitioner
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In this fireside chat, Nadia Asparouhova discusses the concept of anti-memes—ideas that resist spreading or being remembered—drawing on SCP fiction and her book Anti-Mimetic. She extends an epidemiological analogy to online communities, critiquing Venkatesh Rao's 'cozy web' concept by comparing group chats to poorly-ventilated COVID pods that compress and mutate ideas rather than truly insulating people from them, and connects her SOP23 essay's 'Whitehead protocol' (good, attention-freeing automation) versus 'Kafka protocol' (bad, confusion-inducing bureaucracy) to how attention and memory shape which ideas survive.

Related resources

Fiction

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archival-time-vs-carnival-time archival-vs-carnivalist-interfaces eventfulness-sewell

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This issue examines California's wildfire management through the lens of prescribed and wild fires at the wildland-urban interface, tracing how 20th-century fire suppression policies fundamentally contradicted ecological understanding of fire's necessary role in ecosystems. The case study explores combustion as a memory practice and investigates how new tools reshape our epistemological relationship with fire management.

archive article memory

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Topics

anti-memes attention-and-memory-as-compass cozy-web-critique memeplexanti-memeplex memory protocol-watching protocols town-hall whitehead-protocol-vs-kafka-protocol