Nadia Asparouhova on ANTIMEMETICS

Samuel Arbesman:

Welcome to the Orthogonal Bet, where we explore the weird and wonderful ideas that shape our world. It's a cabinet of curiosities for the ears and the mind. I'm your host, Samuel Arbesman. Complexity scientist, author, and scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital. In this episode, I had the pleasure to speak with Nadia Asparouhova. Nadia is a writer and thinker who explores the ideas that suffuse the tech world. Nadia is the author of Working in Public, about the culture of open-source software, as well as the forthcoming book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. Antimemetics is a fascinating book that explores how some ideas are far less likely to spread than others and how we can use this to think about our society more generally. Nadia and I had a chance to discuss her book, exploring what antimemetics consists of, a taxonomy of anti-memes, as well as how this is related to public versus private communities. We discussed super memes, a sort of opposite of anti-memes, as well as immunity to super memes and even long-term thinking. More broadly, we talked about the tech world's uniqueness, tech is a social class and even philanthropy in the tech world. This was an incredibly thought-provoking and provocative conversation and I had a great time speaking with Nadia. Let's jump in.

Nadia, great to be chatting with you and welcome to the Orthogonal Bet.

Nadia Asparouhova:

Thanks for having me.

Samuel Arbesman:

I think a good place to start might be with actually your new forthcoming book. It's about antimemetics. So maybe we can just start with what's an anti-meme and what's antimemetics and how do you think about this idea?

Nadia Asparouhova:

Well, I can't take credit for the concept of antimemetics. I first came across the term in this book called There is No Antimemetics Division, which is a horror science fiction book by an author named Quantum. But I think it really captures a little bit of the moment that we're in right now with the internet and social web. So if you think about memes, you think about virality, that's sort of dominated the first half of, let's say Web 2.0 or the initial explosion of social media platforms where ideas just spread super, super rapidly across people. In the last, let's say five-ish years, and I think a lot of other people have started to notice that some of the most interesting spiciest takes are no longer being thrown out into public for everyone's benefit. A lot of people are still doing that. A lot of people are sharing those one-on-one in messages, they're sharing them in group chats. And so there's a strange paradox happening where the ideas that are perhaps the most interesting or the most generative are being workshopped in private spaces. Fundamentally, an anti-meme is an idea that resists spreading despite its importance or despite the fact that it is very compelling. That's the general concept.

Samuel Arbesman:

When you're talking about memes, this is much more than just the silly meme of the image with the large chunky text. This is like the Richard Dawkins meme of an idea that is-

Nadia Asparouhova:

Self-propagating.

Samuel Arbesman:

Yeah. Self-propagating in the sort of prime way, designed to be spread.

Nadia Asparouhova:

Yes, yes.

Samuel Arbesman:

And you mentioned these anti-memes, while they are very compelling, they kind of resist spreading. I'm just wondering though, and you mentioned that there are the environments that lend themselves to anti-memes of private chats and other more quieter environments as opposed to everyone interacting with everyone sort of social media or certain aspects of the open internet. Is there a distinction here between the environments where people are sharing memes versus the idea's structure itself?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I think the way an idea structured can take on a lot of different forms. So they themselves will sort of mutate in order to either propagate or resist propagation. So you can think about, this happens a lot in politics where let's say there's a policy proposal that is fundamental list of facts of what is going to happen, but you can spin it in so many different ways and so the same idea can take on different forms that make it easier or harder to spread. But I think which structures for an idea resonates still depends a lot on its environment. So you're tailoring a message to its specific audience and so that says something about the network in which it's spreading. But I think the factors that I would highlight would be not just the network and the environment, but also what is going on in what I call the individual node level. So for any one person who is hearing or receiving that idea, what are they resistant to? What do they reflexively turn away from? And I think that's different for each person.

Samuel Arbesman:

And you also mentioned this current moment of the digital world, kind of cozy web or private group chats or whatever it is. My sense of reading what you were writing, you view this as a good thing. That there is the ability to share a different sort of idea than might otherwise be shareable and this retreat to more human scale networks. Do you view this as a good thing? Is this something that we just need to contend with? How do you think about that kind of world?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I think it's an inevitable thing. I think the idea that we were going to be able to freely spread around information in these highly public environments that would be a stable way of communicating with each other is just ... Most people can see how that didn't really work out.

Samuel Arbesman:

So it's almost like the social media moment and belief and oh, we're going to share information with everyone and kind of have this global marketplace of ideas or public gathering place or whatever. It was almost this brief momentary madness of society of like, oh yeah, information. We want information to spread and so therefore the logical endpoint is everyone should be sharing everything with everyone. And then at a certain point, we kind of woke up from this fever dream and realized maybe this is not the best idea. Is that kind of how you think about it?

Nadia Asparouhova:

Yeah. It's funny. I mean, not to date myself, but I'll talk to people who are significantly younger than me who don't even believe that that was ever true. That we ever thought that this globalist view of share everything on the internet and more information is better, that anyone ever believed that because it seems so obviously not true now. But I think it's important to remind people of history, that that is the era that I grew up in, at least in early internet days. And so yeah, I think we're just in a different chapter right now, but for some reason we don't really talk about it, I think in that way. And I think people tend to focus on, yes, right now the highly public social platforms are super overrun by let's say the sort of mimetic dynamics. Probably from a pure numbers standpoint, virality is more in its peak than it ever was before, right?

Ideas do spread around super, super rapidly, but I feel like there hasn't been enough conversation about what is happening in parallel. There's a parallel digital history that's happening, and because people don't have that much insight into what are other people's private and semi-private behaviors, I know what my group chats look like. I don't really know what other people's group chats look like unless they tell me about it. And a lot of these things are self-censoring, which is one of the key properties I think of anti-memes where you can be aware of everything that's happening, but just for some reason you're not going to tell other people about it. You're not going to spread it. I think about when Reddit became a thing or Twitter became a thing, journalists would just sort of mine this stuff for content and create all these articles saying so-and-so thinks this and that, just endless news fodder because journalists and everyone else, we don't have insight into other people's group chats or what they're privately browsing or what they're messaging with each other.

The only times you see it come up are in court cases. Sometimes you'll see messages being leaked and then people kind of pour over those. But we just don't have a lot of insight into it and that's why I think people haven't really named it or noticed it. But yeah, I think it's an inevitable next step and next evolution of the web where we can't just share everything in public. We share a lot of things in private, but I think it would be a mistake to say that we are transitioning to a fully private web. It's not that I think these highly public feeds and platforms are going to disappear, and as I argue in the book, I don't even think it's really a morally good thing to say I'm just going to hang out in my own private spaces and ignore what's happening in the public fronts. I think these two worlds are intertwined. We've created a complementary world. We're not reverting to life before highly public social media. We're creating this second life form that is now working in tandem.

Samuel Arbesman:

I guess in some ways it's kind of a return to the clear sense of there are real life and everyday life where you're writing letters to people, you're just having conversations with people, and then occasionally you're sharing things publicly and writing something for public consumption. And that's kind of what you're saying. We need to return to this healthier balance of real life versus, I don't know, publicly shared life, whatever that is. But I guess in some ways almost, the early internet, even though I think many people viewed it as, okay, we're going to be sharing everything, it's kind of this dynamic, it might've worked well for a while because it was still a relatively small community. And it was only until the true end point of this idea of really everyone to everyone, then we realized, oh wait, this actually doesn't really work. And so it works when early days of Twitter, it was actually a much smaller community or you were just kind of sharing on some public forum, but it was a pretty small forum or whatever it is. Do you get a sense that's what was happening even then?

Nadia Asparouhova:

Yeah. And I think the first time I really started to notice this ... I guess this also happened just in my personal use of social media noticing that something had changed, but also the first book that I published was about open source software and how it's built, and similarly, there's this sort of classical notion of how does open source function, and it's the idea that you have this big community of developers all around the world and everyone is collaborating on this project. There are a bunch of strangers. It's this really happy collaborative environment. And when I went and actually talked to a lot of these projects and dug into what was happening, in reality, a lot of these are structured as one or a few developers who are doing all the work and then they're just being flooded with user support requests from people that are just passively consuming their software and they think that a contribution is opening an issue and telling them to fix a bug or something, but actually can turn it into this sort of endless stream of demand.

The argument that I made in my first book was that what is happening in open source software is happening to everyone where yes, this concept works at a very small scale when you didn't have that many people that were using open source software, but at a very large scale, it just breaks down. And again, it feels like something that is much more intuitive and easier to state now, but five years ago it still was kind of a not acceptable thing to say.

Samuel Arbesman:

And related to what you're saying of going back to the anti meme kind of stuff in terms of how there are all these private conversations that people don't really see. I mean, you see your own, but you don't really know what other people are talking about until it's shared. It's reminded me, and I think you use this analogy in your book around this idea of almost dark matter where in dark matter in astronomy ... And I'm going to butcher the analogy probably really badly because I don't really understand it fully, but it's like we assume it is that we posit dark matter exists because of gravitational influences, but we don't really know what it's made of or what it does because it doesn't really interact. In terms of the anti memes and what we can speculate about all the anti memes that we are not ourselves privy to, is it simply the idea that there are anti memes out there because we each experience our own private version, and so therefore the assumption is that therefore they exist for other people and then occasionally they leak out into the larger world or have some other kind of impacts like similar gravity and dark matter. How do you think about that?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I think maybe similar to dark matter, I think most people are not even fully aware that anti memes exist or how much they govern their own lives, both on a personal level and on a network level. So one of the examples of anti memes I talk about are cognitive biases where there are just things that make each of us intuitively uncomfortable to think about. You don't like thinking about getting sick and dying. You don't thinking about dealing with estate planning. You don't thinking about your own selfish motives for why you do things. And so you just block that stuff out and don't think about it until someone shines light on it or you come into conflict in a certain moment, you may not even really realize how much these things are governing your lives.

And so yeah, I think it's similar to dark matter in that way of even though I understand the concept of dark matter, it is sort of overwhelming to think about the amount to which it exists and influences my life. It's just overwhelming and I can't really process it. If you sit down and say to someone, "Everything you're doing in your group chats, that's also true for celebrities and politicians and anyone you can think of in the world," everyone has their own version of these group chats at this point in our internet lives. You might say, "Oh yeah, I guess that is true," but somehow it's just not something you really think about day to day.

Samuel Arbesman:

So in terms of what the good examples of anti-memes are, is it mainly these ones of things that are just inherently uncomfortable to think about or things that are just hard to remember? How would you categorize the nature of ... I don't know. If there's a taxonomy of antimemetics.

Nadia Asparouhova:

Yeah. I think what brings all these different types of anti-memes together is that they're all things that are very highly consequential and therefore they don't spread very quickly because they are so consequential. But I think that can be expressed in many different ways on many different levels and so yeah, I've mentioned some examples of things that are personal anti-memes for each one of us individually. There are societal taboos, so ideas that you can't say out loud in public, but you can whisper about with your friends, you can talk about behind closed doors. Some of those taboos eventually become ideas that are brought to more public light. You can think about obscure writers or ideas that were too controversial to stay in public that eventually slowly, slowly make their way into light. Some taboos just remain hidden forever because they are just too consequential and we try to hold those off.

And then yeah, there're also more societal political topics. I give a couple examples in the book. I think a fun sort of trivial example is daylight saving time, which the majority of Americans want to get rid of. In Congress, they have tried multiple times to get rid of it and it has unanimous support, and yet for some reason we still have daylight saving time. This happened, what was it, like a year ago or so where everyone was confused as to whether we had finally abolished it or not, and it's like, nope, it's still languishing. And why can't we get rid of this really simple thing that everyone or the majority of people don't want to have? And in part it's because you can see these spikes in news cycles. Every time it happens, people get really up in arms about it, about changing their clocks, whatever, and then we just forget about it two days later. How many other processes like that are just buried in our system where it's like, oh, I'm so annoyed about this thing when I see it and then I just forget about it?

Samuel Arbesman:

Right. And if you're the one person who keeps on talking about daylight saving time well outside of the time when it actually changes, you're like, "Oh, you're that strange person thinking about that."

Nadia Asparouhova:

But maybe we need a strange person. We need someone who's just obsessed with abolishing daylight saving time and makes it their cause year round because the rest of us can't seem to remember it.

Samuel Arbesman:

So someone who's essentially ... To use all these metaphors, someone who's more immune to anti-memes and is able to continue to hold onto these things. And then you also talk about this idea, the photo negative of anti-memes, of super memes. I'd love if you can talk about what these are and how they've gained a foothold on how we think about the world and what that means in relationship to antimemetics.

Nadia Asparouhova:

I think of super memes as a weird mutant type of meme that is highly consequential and spreads rapidly. So most memes, we think about them, they're fairly inconsequential and we forget about them quickly. They kind of pass through our system. You think about how many times you've shared a funny tweet or a post or a video with someone. You share it, you kind of forget about it, and then you move on even though you feel highly incentivized to spread it. A super meme, you similarly feel highly incentivized to spread it, but it's something that feels very, very consequential. And so you think about some of these big weighty ideas that you hear people talking about in these apocalyptic, very dire terms, these big civilizational crises. So some examples right now might be climate crisis, population decline. Although in the past it was overpopulation that people were worried about. Existential threats from artificial intelligence. And they all share these really similar characteristics where they speak to our values somehow, a deeply held social value.

So it's sort of something you feel deeply in your bones. It's something that has an undefined date in the future in which this supposed terrible thing is going to happen, but it's just like looms in your head. It's a perceived threat somewhere in the future. Because it's this non-specific thing that also speaks deeply to our health social values, it's perceived to impact the entire world. It has huge, huge impact if true. It's this thing that you just can't stop thinking about because you keep thinking, "Well, I don't want to be wrong about this, and if I don't take it seriously, do I risk our entire civilization comes crumbling down?" So it's a very specific type of thing that becomes a super meme. And I just noticed more and more of these cropping up. I think they are closely intertwined with culture wars which have come to replace global military conflicts that we use to bind ourselves together as a society or bind yourself to your group because you're all similarly focused on whatever this issue is.

And it's not to say that super memes don't always have a little bit of truth to them. Some of them certainly might. There are certainly things we should care about regarding climate issues, even if we don't believe that the world is going to explode or overheat in the next 20 years or whatever. But it's the extent to which people become really, really obsessed with it. The idea is really good at marshaling a lot of talent around it. And so when you think about it, it's not dissimilar to the ways in which world wars in the past might have ... Everyone takes up their arms and rallies to this cause. It's that same sort of behavior, but we're now applying it to lots and lots of different types of ideas.

Samuel Arbesman:

It sounds like taking an idea and turning it from some sort of compelling argument that is worth thinking about and changing our behavior into a super meme. Once it becomes a super meme, it becomes this all encompassing thing that it sounds like it's not healthy to have. Are there ways of deescalating a super meme or is it the kind of thing where you just have to wait for a super meme to be replaced by another one that maybe seems less negative and is this the kind of thing like, oh, this is just what humans do. We are obsessed by certain ideas and we just have to live within those borders?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I feel really conflicted about what to do about super memes because mean when I look at the structure and the shape of all these ideas, they seem to have this similar set of characteristics. And so there's a part of me that goes, okay, well that's a pattern of behavior that I'm just going to choose to be immune to. Similarly to you see enough cute cat videos, TikTok videos, whatever that people are sending you, at some point you just develop a little bit of immunity to it where yeah, you're like, "I've seen this before." And yes, on balance, I feel like these are probably not great ways for us to spend our time if you want to be focusing on things that are truly generative. And that's an if, right? Because I think then the flip side of it is look, people need causes to believe in, they need stuff to live for, they want futures to fight for.

That's maybe just an innate part of being human. And if we don't have big global wars to focus on, then maybe this is the replacement for that and maybe it's not the most unproductive use of our time. One of the examples I talk about in the book is something more like Operation Warp Speed where yes, there was a crisis, but there was also a very specific thing that people were trying to get to, which is developing this vaccine. To me, that's sort of an example of taking a crisis and then using it to marshal a lot of resources towards a productive end. And so I think maybe one thing for people who are confronted by super memes is to think about, okay, what is a specific thing I can focus on that has a clear resolution that I want to pull together a lot of talent or resources towards? Maybe that is a more productive way to think about super memes versus I see a lot of people fall into this trap of just endless ruminating about what the future might look like and then nothing really gets done or nothing really changes.

Samuel Arbesman:

If it's this kind of indeterminate future, then there's always more to think about and to be worried about versus saying, okay, here's a clear goal that we can aim towards and then it might not solve everything, but it allows us to then maybe live more productively in the moment. I'm not really sure what the angle is, but there's something clear that you can focus on as opposed to just constantly being worried about this amorphous negative outcome.

Nadia Asparouhova:

But again, I feel medium confidence on all of it where maybe people just need a thing to care about and live for. But I think the one danger I would highlight about super memes is that they feel really productive to the people involved in them. They think that they're spending their time on something that is super generative important, and I would just sort of challenge that to say what are the actual outcomes of the thing that you're working on versus what is really being accomplished here?

Samuel Arbesman:

Do anti-memes have almost ... And you mentioned there's a certain amount of immunity you can build up to super memes, but do anti-memes almost have this canceling out effect in terms of super memes? Is there something that can be done to make ... Now I think I'm misusing both of them. But is there something there that anti-memes can be used or is it more just like this is the opposite and can help us clarify what anti-memes are by the opposite extreme?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I think they are the opposite, but then the prescription for anti memes is the reverse of maybe what works for super memes, where with super memes, it's almost the prescription is maybe try not noticing, try living your life and not ... Yeah. Try to forget a little. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. And with anti-memes, it's the opposite of maybe try noticing. And again, they're similar to this being of two minds around what to do with super memes. Some anti-memes are probably good that we shove into the back of our minds and we don't remember, but I think it's also useful to be aware of, hey, this is a phenomenon that affects us individually, affects us collectively, and so what is not getting done because people keep noticing and forgetting a thing over and over again and what happens if you try to just notice a little bit longer?

If it's a topic that keeps flaring up and then everyone forgets about it, can you try to develop more institutional knowledge around this topic? Can you try to find a champion who is going to really take on the cause and persistently for a longer period of time and not just let it languish instead of just saying, "Oh, that's a thing that we always remember and forget." Yeah. So I think with anti-memes, the prescription is more around how do you force yourself to remember and try to develop some institutional knowledge around a thing that you decided that you don't want to keep forgetting.

Samuel Arbesman:

In terms of institutional knowledge and just trying to notice or have some sort of memory for these kinds of things, is that related in some way to certain things in current society where people talk about, okay, we're extremely short-term oriented, but we need to have more long-term thinking? It could be as simple as just beyond the current quarter, but it could be year, decade, century, millennium. I think about the Long Now Foundation, which I'm involved with and some of these other kinds of institutions, those kinds of very long-term approaches of having intergenerational memory around certain ideas. The key. Is there something else you had in mind?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I think long-term for the sake of long-term is not always the right answer either because speaking for future generations is also going to be dangerous because you don't know how the world's going to change. Examples where this can work, think about our political system, which yes, it is messy and it's swampy and people have a lot of things to say about the way we do politics in this country, but in the end, politics is also about not just the politicians who are the public face for the work that gets done, but all the staffers who are behind the scenes who have very long careers in politics working in DC and those are some of the people who are actually carrying on this living memory from administration to administration even as things change. I think that could be one way that you're tasking someone with holding onto these memories and preserving them even when the pieces on the chessboard are changing.

I think there is a version of creating this institutional knowledge or memory that can also be not so productive. In the book, I talk about bureaucracies as sort of these anti-memeplexes. Richard Dawkins talks about memeplexes as a collection of memes. These self-propagating ideas that work together to form a bigger idea or a bigger concept that spreads. An anti-memeplex is like a series of anti-memes that are working together to keep something hidden out of sight. And so when we think about the worst versions of bureaucracy, it's a bunch of these different protocols that are all working in tandem and no one really has any insight into how the system works and even if you want to change it, it's very, very hard to untangle. And so the extreme version of trying to not forget and creating systems to not forget can also be bad when it's self-running and no one even understands how it works anymore. But yeah, I think there's still some smaller measures there around how do you create reminders for yourself? How do you task individuals who can remember for the rest of us and get work done even as we continue to forget? I think those sorts of things could be really helpful.

Samuel Arbesman:

Yeah. I think there's a sense of you need to create institutional memory, but also a deliberateness as opposed to just some sort of inertia or momentum where these things continue being done without actually examining them from year to year or whenever it is. Which reminds me, in the book you talk a little bit about your own career arc and the roles you've had within organizations, and maybe you can talk a little bit about that because it also relates, I think, to a certain degree, to some of these not quite institutional memory, but being someone whose job is to maybe raise certain ideas or discuss ideas that other people are not necessarily going to be discussing. I'd love if you can talk a little bit about that too.

Nadia Asparouhova:

Yeah. I was talking in this chapter about who plays the role of bringing an anti-meme to light. So you think about the proverbial child who's saying the emperor has no clothes, and this parable is something that we tell our children, and we understand that there's situations where everyone knows a thing and no one is saying it out loud, and you require this truth-telling role. Someone to just shout it out loud and then everyone [inaudible 00:25:33] goes, "Oh yeah, you're right." But someone needs to enable that to happen. And so I talk a little bit about this truth-teller role and how antimemetic knowledge that can often be so hard to unearth on a collective level that it takes on this sort of sacred quality where you have to appoint someone to be the person to say the uncomfortable thing out loud.

And this happens in religious contexts, of course, and in societal contexts, but it also happens in corporate and work contexts. I realized that I've served in a lot of different places, which Catherine Boyle calls the interesting person role. And she didn't mean it necessarily, I think derisively or favorably, but maybe just sort of pointing out that the phenomenon exists. I don't know whether it's a good or a bad thing necessarily, but the role that I've often found myself serving is yes, I come in to perform a specific role at a company, but effectively I kind of become this person who is pointing out some of the things that maybe aren't okay for any one person who's maybe more embroiled in corporate life to say out loud. So a manager can't necessarily say it, an individual contributor can't necessarily say it, but there's this person who is perceived a little bit to be an outsider who everyone can pin their own desires or motivations onto that person so that if you say something that it's a little bit uncomfortable, then everyone else can go, "Oh yeah, yeah, right. That's the thing we should be doing."

In a more formalized context, a lot of consultants serve this role where you hire someone from the outside to say something that everyone already knows on the inside, but they just needed to pay someone to say it because no one who's really embedded in the organization can say it out loud. It's a strange phenomenon that we have this type of career, this type of role. And yeah, I don't actually know ... As I wrote in the book, I don't know that that's ... It's certainly not something I would've set out to do or am necessarily even proud of, but I think it's just a fact that it's a thing that exists and that people need for whatever reason.

Samuel Arbesman:

Are there certain types of organizations or companies that seem more amenable to having an interesting person role versus ones that just need to hire consultants to get the things said?

Nadia Asparouhova:

As I've gone through my career, I now meet more and more people who have had these types of roles at their companies, but I would've never guessed that that is a role that exists. I would never tell someone go try to be this somewhere. I think it's a really specific thing of you might have a certain perspective in the world and then there's an organization that needs that kind of perspective or cares about it, and then it's sort of this nice match. But I think community roles are often pretty similar to this, and a lot of the roles I have worked in are community related. I think it's pretty hard to hire someone that is just a career community manager who doesn't necessarily have a deep connection to the specific community that the company is working with. That works maybe as the company really grows and is just part of the organization is much more formalized.

But early on, I think you really need someone who has trust with that community or who really deeply understands it, and that role often doesn't transfer to a different company with a totally different community or a different type of person. I'm sure there are a lot of other roles that are like this in company organizations where some roles are very transferable between companies and some roles are not super transferable. And so yeah, this might be one of those things where it's kind of like a weird arrangement that you have to stumble into.

Samuel Arbesman:

Do you think there's also almost a lower bound on the company size? Below a certain size, they're just trying to build a company, but above that they then have the luxury for this kind of thing or ... Although I feel like at least with one of your companies, you ended up having this role fairly early and you were one of the very first employees, so maybe the lower bound thing is not correct.

Nadia Asparouhova:

Yeah. I'm not sure, and I'm not really sure even what the right answer ... Because I could only really speak from what I've actually done in my career, but I don't know that I made all the right decisions. A McKinsey type consultant will be hired even by really, really, really big companies and I think that is a version of an interesting person type role, but then I've mostly worked at much smaller companies and I've found a place for that. So I think people find it. Maybe their needs also just change over time where I don't always feel like my role has been to say the uncomfortable thing, which maybe it's something that a paid consultant would do more of. Sometimes it's just more of here's a perspective on the thing that we're doing that someone else might not have felt comfortable pointing out.

Samuel Arbesman:

Really, it's the interesting perspective and you've also written more broadly just about tech culture and subcultures within tech and world of Silicon Valley and the various ideas that they latch onto. I want to talk more about that, but one of the things I was thinking about is also ... And the world of Silicon Valley seems very primed for taking on a lot of these super memes that we've been talking about. Is there something about the tech world that lends itself to latching onto super memes? Is it just something that really lots of other communities are doing as well? You're just kind of maybe talking about the ones in that area, or maybe I'm just more familiar with that as well. How do you think about the tech world and super memes?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I stumbled into tech pretty early in my career and I think for a while ... I'd worked briefly in nonprofits before then, and that was the only other comparison I really had. And for a while I always thought, okay, well if things don't work out in tech, I can always go work in a different industry. But the more I've gotten peeks and glimpses into other industries, I've realized tech really is unique in this way. Tanner Gurt has this really great essay he wrote somewhat recently about how tech is this marriage of ideas and action, and I think that's something fairly particular to tech. And you see DC politics or LA entertainment, they have versions of this where they're obsessed with a certain class of ideas and then they turn those things into action. But tech I think is unique in that it is obsessed with ideas of every shape and form and prides itself on how do we make these things real.

So it's not just sort of sitting there and philosophizing. It's also not just being super heads down, but it's both these things together have to happen. From that, we get a lot of these tech values around that are more maybe meritocratic or just really, really open to learning and hearing from lots of different perspectives because any obscure book you stumble upon might be the source of your next big idea that you can then turn into some interesting action, and they're just always looking for problems to solve. As we have seen tech transforming from just a pure business industry that creates and sells and exits startups to something more than that, it feels more now like a social class that has its own particular set of values and it's bringing those values into the world. I think we're seeing that more and more of just tech's political and social influence growing.

I think it is uniquely suited to be able to tackle a wide range of problems because it is so open to ... Great ideas can come from anywhere. Working on weird niche ideas is not seen as a bad thing. There's no hierarchy around that. In fact, the more niche and weird, the better sometimes. The flip side of that being that tech is sort of the ultimate generalist industry. It can be overly confident about what it knows about different industries or specific problems, and I do think to its credit that we're seeing it trying to partner and align itself more and more with deep subject matter experts in different industries. You see people that are scientists or policymakers who are also identifying with this sort of tech social block or tech social class. So I think it's much better at it than it was in the past, but there's still always that tendency for any generalist, tech included, to say, "Well, I read one book on this thing and now I understand how to solve the problem."

But at least I think it serves this important role of being an industry that actually cares about solving these types of problems. Because I think for a lot of other industries that are just so narrowly ... They have the really, really deep subject matter expertise, but there's also a little bit maybe defeatism around we know exactly the way that things are done, therefore we will always do things this way and tech can kind of come in and say, "Well, what if we did things a little bit differently this way?" So I think it's a balance between those two. That generalist and that specialist view.

Samuel Arbesman:

You mentioned also tech is a social class, which I find is a really interesting phrase. What are, in your mind, the markers of this class? Presumably if you're thinking about it as a class, there must be all these different markers outside of just the earnestness and pragmatism versus idealism. How do you think about it as a class?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I think there are a set of social values that feel uniquely tech that probably feel intuitive to us of being very results oriented, asking whether things can be done differently, thinking about things from first principles. This constant search for talent that can come from anywhere and that wanting to amplify and bring that talent to the forefront. It is this unique combination of prizing individual talent, but for the collective good. So I don't think tech is libertarian. I think tech cares about finding talented individuals so that they can contribute to these collective social problems. So I think there are a number of social values that mark tech as a certain type of social class. But then, yeah, I mean if we really wanted to get into a sociological study of tech as a new elite social class, I think there's plenty of other markers that we might start to see emerge.

Tech has definitely gotten more into displays of wealth in recent years than I think in the past. People definitely dress better than they used to. It's kind of all past the hoodie stereotype. But on the other hand, I think sort elite social institutions and stuff, let's say education for example. A lot of my friends in tech who have all the resources in the world don't want to send their kids to the same prep schools that maybe a different elite social class really prizes. It's cool to get accepted into a college with then drop out of it. A lot of people are interested in creating micro schools or homeschooling or just doing education differently. I think that's a unique social marker of tech. There are examples like that where instead of being perfectly assimilated into the existing social institutions that are markers of high status or high class, we'll be seeing tech continuing to create its own versions of that over time.

Samuel Arbesman:

You've also written a little bit about philanthropy in the tech world. How do you think about how the tech world gives money away versus other sectors that are very, very wealthy? And then maybe to provide some perspective and how do you think they should versus just how they are?

Nadia Asparouhova:

I thought I understood this a lot better, and the deeper I go into it, the less I feel like I understand. Yeah, I think historically, as short as tech's history is, tech was much more focused on let's say instrumental or utilitarian ways of thinking about philanthropy. So they cared about how do I measure these outcomes and results? Versus the more sort of expressive styles of I'm going to start some crazy initiative that just is an expression of what I am interested in the world and I'm putting that out there for everyone else to benefit and use from. I think over time we're seeing more of this shift from the instrumental way of thinking to more expressive versions of philanthropy in tech, but there's still some part of tech that still I think is very results oriented and isn't really going to be able to totally shake off that instrumental desire.

I think a lot of tech's philanthropic legacy is going to be around speeding up our existing institutions rather than creating entirely new ones. Helping remove some of that cruft and just make public institutions just move faster. I think that could be a real legacy of tech. I do think there is a broader phenomenon happening that we could say is only by virtue of tech has created the biggest wealth movement, I think in all of modern history, just in terms of the amount of wealth created and the number of people who have financially benefited from tech. And so this trend is generally true of what I think is happening to wealth right now, but specific to tech, because tech is the one that created all this wealth. I think there is a strange social phenomenon happening where because so many people have financially benefited from tech, it creates a little bit of this chilling effect where you think, "Well, I only have let's say 50 or $100 million, and that's nothing compared to this person who has a billion dollars, so why should I really bother doing anything with my money?"

I think a lot of people also just the financial outcomes were sort of insane and unexpected and maybe they don't necessarily want to do anything else with it besides just sort of enjoy and live their lives. And so there are so many people that have become wealthy in the last 10-ish years that I think there's just no longer the social expectation that just because you have a lot of money, you do something interesting with your wealth. So weirdly, we have more people who are capable of doing something interesting than probably ever before in history, and at the same time we may not necessarily see that many more people doing interesting things so-

Samuel Arbesman:

Do you think in some ways then the idea of having to do something interesting with your money or give back is almost like one of these anti-memes where it's like it's something that could actually be really important to think about, but most people who are in the position to be thinking about this don't want to because it's a bit uncomfortable? Is it one of these anti-memes and we have to kind of create some way of having champions or things? How do you think about that?

Nadia Asparouhova:

Yeah, I definitely think it has some antimemetic qualities to it. It's really hard. It is really cognitively expensive to think about. I think developing a strategy and being aware of the optics around what you do or you don't do. I hear this consistently from a lot of people. It's surprisingly very difficult to find great opportunities to direct large amounts of capital. And so yeah, I don't envy anyone in that position. There's probably some sort of antimemetic quality here where it's just easier to not think about it. And this is where I think in Carnegie's day, he and Rockefeller, they made a lot of public statements around their philanthropy, right? Carnegie is advising his peers to do something interesting with their wealth and he was trying to model that behavior himself. And that can really only come from a peer, I think, not from an outside person.

And so maybe we need more examples of that in the current generation of people not being afraid to be bold and do interesting things. I think we're getting to that. Tech also needs time to figure its self out. When I think about where tech was five or 10 years ago versus now, it's clear that tech is getting much bolder and being more willing to talk about its values, talk about the things that it wants to do, not be afraid to say that they want to try to improve all of our existing institutions. So yeah, I think we're getting there.

Samuel Arbesman:

Okay. That's super interesting. That actually might be a perfect place to end. That was super thought-provoking. Nadia, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. This was amazing.

Nadia Asparouhova:

Thanks. This was great.

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