Antimemetics

Meghna Rao reviews the book that is sold out everywhere. 

The opposite of a meme is not a piece of information that doesn’t go viral. Even an academic paper that’s argot-filled and hard-to-skim contains weak strains of the memetic. They can be ignited if done right. For example, what happened with Dr. Ally Louks, when the first page of her otherwise obscure PhD on olfactory ethics was screenshotted, circulated, and quickly inserted into various positions in a multi-dimensional culture war. The memetic lies dormant in everything, a secret is a match waiting to be lit. A password deep-fried or brainrotted might find its way into the zeitgeist if it’s re-worked correctly.

The real anti-meme is something that has nothing at all to activate. No information, no strain of the memetic. This, as anonymous author qntm describes in his viral work There is No Antimemetics Division, leads to a maw, one that is gaping, macabre, impossible to look upon, terrifying and anti-human, ingesting memories whole, leaving behind nothing but the faint outline of the tear it’s made in reality. 

Futilely, persistently, these anti-memes are hunted down and managed by the SCP Foundation, a website that is—depending on whom you ask—an organization that has tasked itself with protecting the world, or a 16-year-old collaborative speculative-fiction writing project with thousands of contributors. The fiction takes the form of SCPs (Secure, Contain, Protect or Special Containment Procedures), documents that describe the strange anomalies that walk our planet and defy every rational, physical, scientific law we have come up with. Wormholes that link to highly intelligent alien societies; metal, folding chairs that are so surprisingly comfortable that their participants can never get up again; rituals to summon beings that can grant various petitions.

And, of course, qntm’s anti-memes, also known as self-keeping secrets. Of the few that the foundation has managed to log, one anti-meme is kept in a cement room. Those who have encountered this anti-meme can only describe it as everything that it is not. It’s not a sphere, for example. And it is not round.

Further reading: A very present feeling

Qntm’s text is the most professionally popular SCP by far. First published in 2018, the concept of an anti-meme has found its way into places as diverse as rationalist blog LessWrong, to YouTube, where short films based on the story gather hundreds of thousands of views, to publishing house Ballantine, which plans to release a new version of the book in 2025. It once again went viral on tech Twitter in late 2024, this time re-contextualized by the fact that Ballantine seemed to have removed existing copies from the internet. Screenshots of the blank, black prism that loomed on the book’s cover were set next to the OUT OF STOCK button on Amazon.

But the book’s memetic effect doesn’t merely stem from scarcity. I read it across several web pages, navigating through a thicket of hyperlinks, feeling the story mesh onto the persistent, ambient feeling I’ve had when I am spending too much time scrolling online; that I am logging voluntary memories and gathering many involuntary ones, shutting my laptop and finding that I have new, foreign ideas interrupting my sleep, that I can’t remember half of anything else I’ve read. That, somehow, my memory is being tampered with. And then the ensuing desire to map these foggy feelings onto a larger conspiracy, to blame it on a single, malevolent entity.

The book follows a set of characters tasked with getting rid of anti-memes. It is narrated omnisciently but centers Marion Wheeler, the experienced and competent head of the antimemetics division, as she traverses various blood-curdling situations that she almost always loses memory of afterwards. 

The antimemes sometimes masquerade as her coworkers; sometimes as objects; sometimes they are the sky itself. Every narrator is unreliable. We are never aware when a character is under the grip of an anti-meme, whether a few paragraphs of relief will be interrupted by large spidery tentacles ripping down from a cloud that undo any resolution we had been ambling towards.

The book is driven by a breakneck plot that I found matched the pace of any social media app. It granted me the rare ability to read and immerse myself in browser text. The characters are desperate. They counteract the effects of forgetting by taking pills. Mnestics help them remember what anti-memes would have otherwise forced, and amnestics erase any bits of memory that might upset an anti-meme if it spots them. These pills together can cause toxic shocks to the body, but it does not matter. Any other solutions to beat the anti-memes have near-zero chances of working.

It isn’t always clear if the book is able to think outside of the neat, still-early arcs of internet discourse. For example, the anti-memes were—potentially—invented by the Foundation, in an effort to stymie and erase the fascist ideas that had escaped from Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, anti-memes got loose. They developed agency and began to erase various aspects of the world themselves. I found that the reference dragged, an obvious finger pointed at the ills of top-down censorship and good but ill-fated intentions. I wanted something more up-to-date that suggested current evil was not the result of history’s naive good guys, that anti-memes could be the result of something that was sprawling, complex, ongoing, with multiple contributors and no pat answers.

The book regains its complexity in how it describes persistence. Oftentimes, it seems like the characters don’t have will. They don’t know what they’ve forgotten or whether their memories can be relied on. So they leave hints for themselves. Marion learns to navigate her faded memory by reading into her own written tone. She can tell when her jottings are assured and confident, or when she was once shaky, tired, about to give up, and managed to survive. These signs are supports that can hold steady during an anti-meme’s sweeping, all-consuming attacks. 

One might see the book as a nightmare situation that could emerge on an internet where we—humans—often feel like we run the show, because we don’t have nature to contend with.

Or, as one Reddit commenter wrote, the book’s arc can be a metaphor for a dogged attempt to counteract a parent’s slow onset of dementia. Another thought the mnestics, the drugs that brought back memory, were psychedelics that revealed reality before the anti-memes returned to wipe it away again. 

When I was young, I would experience brief, intense periods of sadness that would make my memory weak. I’d leave the house without my keys, or spend hours hunting for a pair of earrings my mother had gifted me that I’d later find was right where I’d left them last. I’d forget my friends for days or weeks at a time, until my sadness would break and I’d remember that they existed. Sadness was an anti-meme, and it was coming from inside of me. It had a way of mutating and re-emerging every time that I thought I’d won. For a while, I let it overwhelm me. Fighting this anti-meme seemed impossible. What kept me going were traces of myself that I’d find around. My rounded writing scribbled in the margin of a book, a trio of photo booth pictures with friends that I’d tacked onto my refrigerator.

It would be reductive to say There is No Antimemetics Division is relatable. The book’s world is woven around the anxieties and small triumphs of memory in the 21st century, but it never makes it obvious that the story is anything larger than the documentation of an SCP, one among thousands of others. A small, breakneck, speculative plot masking a deeper story. This seems to be what marks its uncanny ability to tap into the memetic, to itself become a thriving, evolving meme.

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