Attention and Reality

Nadia Asparouhova (Website, X, Substack) is a writer and researcher who has spent much of her career in service of the question: 'what's happening here?' across various parts of the internet.

Nadia recently published her newest book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. She explores why consequential ideas, unlike memes and supermemes, fail to spread. She also recounts the last several years of online public and private life and how we're all less naive than we were in previous eras of the internet. Critically, she suggests a path toward poking our heads out of group chats and silos to engage in publicly discussing or promoting the ideas that matter most.

Her first book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, was published by Stripe Press. Nadia also worked at Substack, Protocol Labs, and Github, and has written extensively on Silicon Valley Culture; the importance of ideas and institutions; consciousness, attention, and meditation; and more.

Nadia's self-described sweet spot is when people respond to her writing by saying,"I read this piece and it gave me words for a thing that I didn't know how to express before." I can attest that is true, both for Antimemetics and for much of her other thinking. And as much as she writes about ideas, I admire how focused she is on how they might produce action.

Nadia believes that important ideas infect us, and the reasonable response to that is to be tremendously thoughtful about our attention. I hope this conversation inspires you to put great care into where your attention goes.

Transcript and all links: https://dialectic.fm/nadia-asparouhova

Timestamps:

• 1:31: Why Ideas Matter
• 9:33: The Last 10 Years of the Internet and Attention Collapse
• 17:07: How The Internet Caused Attention Collapse
• 19:59: Private Coordination in Public Spaces
• 24:01: Legibility and Illegibility as a Tactic
• 28:28: Ideas Are Not Created Nor Discovered; They Infect Us
• 35:17: Defining Antimemes
• 42:00: Ideological Black Holes: Supermemes
• 49:13: Engaging in the Public Square vs. Opting Out
• 54:16: Truth Tellers who Can Bring Anti-Memetic Ideas to Light
• 1:05:06: Champions, or the Great Apostle Theory
• 1:10:57: Institutions, Ideologies, and Movements
• 1:24:51: Attention
• 1:31:30: Jhanas
• 1:38:42: Writing a Book
• 1:46:19: Connecting the Dots in Reverse
• 1:50:29: Lightning Round: Fighting (or Working With) Human Nature, Software as Passion Project, Democracy, Space Away from the Center of Things

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