Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

## Chapter 3: Memetic Galapagos

LET’S RETURN TO QNTM’S FICTIONAL UNIVERSE, where antimemes are imagined as monsters that swallow our minds. TINAD’s heroine, Marion Wheeler, is sitting in an airlocked, bulletproof isolation chamber, watching a video recording of her former self.[29]

"You've guessed already that SCP-3125 is not in this room," she says. "In fact, this is the only room in the world where SCP-3125 is not present. It's called 'inverted containment'. SCP-3125 pervades all of reality except for volumes which have been specifically shielded from its influence. This is it. This is our only safe harbor.”

In the memetic city, group chats – along with other types of secluded online interactions – are our version of inverted containment chambers, which we built to shield ourselves from social media’s memetic contagions. Out there was where the crazy stuff went down: people screaming at each other over the slightest perceived transgressions, shilling the Current Thing, scrolling dumbly for hours through the comments of a single, inconsequential viral video. In here , we were safe: surrounded by trusted friends and colleagues who shared our views of the world, where we could finally discuss controversial topics with nuance.

This, it turns out, was the equivalent of saying: “I don’t want to get COVID, so I’m only going to socialize with ten of my most trusted friends.” Theoretically, and even in practice, this could work – if your ten trusted friends also avoid getting infected with COVID. But if even one person breaks the pact by interacting with the outside world, and brings the virus back to the group, your “pod” sanctuary is going to look a lot more like a superspreader.

Political activist Eli Pariser warned about the harms of what he called “filter bubbles” in his 2011 book of the same name, in which curated news feeds and social circles lead us to believe our reality is the only one that exists. Back then, filter bubbles were still painted in the wash of Obama-era techno-optimism, where exposure to ideas was considered the lifeblood of democracy. Pariser and his peers worried that if people weren’t exposed to conflicting or divergent opinions, they’d become stubbornly attached to their views.

Pariser’s version of filter bubbles looked something like COVID pods, or what we imagine group chats to be, where each group is perfectly segmented from the other, with no new ideas ever introduced. Depending on one’s goals, this level of isolation can be desirable (in the case of COVID pods) or not (in the case of filter bubbles).

Dense, isolated networks appear to be more stable and harmless, but they have weak immune systems. High trust between nodes means that they are more receptive to ideas – any ideas – that are introduced to the group, which can infect its members at an alarming rate.

COVID pods don’t work in practice because realistically, you can’t expect all ten of your friends to never interact with anyone else. Similarly, joining a group chat doesn’t mean you are completely cut off from outside contagions. If anything, you are probably part of many different group chats, and therefore perfectly capable of cross-pollinating ideas that are being incubated in highly concentrated environments. It is like spending one’s days moving between several poorly-ventilated rooms, instead of walking around all day in fresh air. By

confining ourselves to close quarters, we accidentally created the ideal conditions for ideaviruses to grow – and mutate.

Isolated environments lead to greater speciation and biodiversity, a concept famously discovered by Charles Darwin during his studies of the Galapagos Islands. Darwin noticed that if two island species descended from a common ancestor, they would evolve different traits based on their microenvironment. Finches, for example, had different beak shapes, depending on the type of food available on their particular island. Since there’s limited exposure to genes from outside populations, new species continue to evolve in strange ways,

Group chats are like social islands. As fast as the internet’s public highways might be, ideas evolve even more rapidly in private online environments. Ideas are tested, iterated upon, and refined, with little outside influence to temper the process, as they adapt to the unique dynamics of their members – much like Darwin’s finches.

Just as the Galapagos Islands gave Darwin a laboratory to observe natural selection in action, group chats offer a way for us to observe how ideas evolve in the context of dense networks. In his “Going Critical” essay, Kevin Simler attempts to model some of these dynamics in a simulation. One of his simulations depicts a few small, tightly clustered nodes (the “urban” environment), embedded in a larger, looser network (the “rural” environment).

Simulation of an idea-virus that starts in a looser network (left), spreads, and stabilizes, leaving only the denser networks infected (right). [30]

If the transmission rate is sufficiently high, an idea will take over both urban and rural areas. If it’s too low, it doesn’t take over either. But if it’s somewhere in between, it takes over the urban networks, but not the rural ones. As Simler points out, whether these dense and loose networks represent urban versus rural settings, high school students versus their parents, elite versus non-elite networks, or – in our case – the private versus public web, the point is that dense networks are more susceptible to infection than loose ones: [31]

We tend to think that if something's a good idea, it will eventually reach everyone, and if something's a bad idea, it will fizzle out. And while that's certainly true at the

extremes, in between are a bunch of ideas and practices that can only go viral in certain networks.

Most people’s group chats are benign – like Sophie Haigney’s group chat, “The Girls.” Its members are either immune to memetic contagion – we might call this being “very offline” – or transmission rates are low. (Picture, if you will, that one friend with crazy uncle energy who’s always dropping memes and links in the chat. Their friends might find them entertaining, but don’t take their ideas seriously.) But for group chats where nodes are more susceptible to infection (to be “extremely online” is exactly as it sounds – one who is regularly exposed, and receptive, to lots of idea-viruses), and transmission rates are high, bringing everyone closer together has only made contagion worse – like Erik Prince’s group chat, “Off-Leash.” Group chats offer a false sense of protection from the chaos of the public web. They are an even denser, and therefore more transmissible, version of the internet.

As we’ve seen with all the antimemetic phenomena we’ve explored thus far, there is historical precedent for these behaviors. Dense, offline networks – such as small towns – exhibit similarly “safe,” yet vulnerable, qualities. Before mass media communications like radio, television, and the internet, small towns were intellectually cut off from the world, which meant they didn’t capture all the upside of progress, but also avoided its downsides.

Sometimes, however, a small town would get spontaneously infected by an idea, which exposed their weak immunity as the idea spread rapidly through the network. The Salem witch trials, for example, were sparked by whispers that spiraled into hysteria. Its residents’ lack of experience with confronting unusual ideas enabled paranoia to grow unchecked, which led to wild and unforeseen outcomes.

One theory as to why cults flourished in the 1960s and 1970s might be due not just to the politically charged environment of the time – more of a symptom than a cause – but the new ways in which ideas were able to spread. The United States interstate highway system was built in the late 1950s, under President Eisenhower, just as the color television first arrived in households across America. Small towns were suddenly hit by a deluge of ideas from new forms of transportation and mass media, but they lacked the ability to process these ideas effectively. Just as the ideas from public social platforms spread and mutate among group chats today, small American towns became fertile ground for extreme ideologies to take root.

♦

IN OCTOBER OF 2020, the FBI revealed they had arrested thirteen men as suspects in a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The idea began in a paramilitary group called the Wolverine Watchmen: a dense network of likeminded extremists who met and coordinated via Facebook Groups and in encrypted group chats. Several members were active on YouTube, where they posted videos expressing their frustrations with Whitmer’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Private online spaces enabled these members to meet, and amplify their influence, in ways that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Without these spaces, they might have remained isolated, passively consuming content on platforms like YouTube or Facebook from others

who shared their extreme views, but never forming actual relationships. Offline, they likely would have kept their views private to avoid social or legal consequences.

With group chats and private online communities, however, members’ grievances were not just validated, but allowed to evolve into more extreme beliefs. The plot to kidnap Whitmer began at an in-person meeting organized by members in Ohio. A discussion about creating a new, independent society quickly turned to frustrations over the pandemic and perceived government overreach in mandating lockdowns. What might have otherwise remained as private anger escalated into a call to violent action, as the Wolverine Watchmen developed an elaborate kidnapping plot that included a “kill house,” field training exercises, and surveillance of Whitmer’s vacation home.

The upside of cults, utopian societies, and other social islands in the pre-internet “memetic Galapagos” is that, because they were physically and socially isolated, their ideologies rarely spread far. After infecting the entire network, ideas had nowhere else to go, and would ultimately fizzle and die – sometimes literally – with their members. While many cults committed violent crimes during their active days, in the long run, the extreme ideas that drove them to do such things were of little enduring social consequence, save as unusual footnotes in the history books.

In the context of private online spaces, however, members are still exposed to other networks, whether they are scrolling on their favorite social media platforms or participating in other group chats. Not only are they more likely to bring new contagions into the group, but they are also more likely to spread their group’s idea-viruses to other networks. A highly infectious idea that might have once died within the confines of a lone, fringe network can now jump between groups, enabling it to live on indefinitely.

If we plot the transmissibility of an idea against its impact, or how consequential is, we can discern a more fine-grained taxonomy of the types of ideas that move through networks:

Now, rather than just memes and antimemes, we can classify cultural objects – ideas, people, items – as being memetic, antimemetic, supermemetic, or dormant (non-memetic) .

Type	Description	Example

|Supermeme|The “black hole” of
memes. Supermemes spread
easily_and_infect people for a
long time. Their impact
generates a strong
gravitational pull that sucks
in everything around it.|Wars, cultural movements,
revolutions; some social
causes, like population
decline or the climate crisis| |Antimeme|Highly consequential ideas
that face strong resistance
from the nodes in a network.
Like fiber, they move slowly
through the system and take
time to digest.|Taboos; life lessons and
lived wisdom; uncomfortable
truths| |Meme|Highly transmissible, but
their impact is low. Like
sugar, these ideas are
consumed voraciously, but
pass through our system|Viral videos and images;
slang; norms, rituals and
traditions|

	quickly.Wedon’tengage deeplywiththeirunderlying premise.
Dormant(non-memetic)	Ageneralcatch-allfor “noise.”Theseobjectsdon’t spreadeasilyandareoflittle consequence,sopeopleflter themouttofocusonother, moreimportantthings.	Randomdataset;complex legaldocuments

Your average garden-variety meme is highly transmissible, but largely inconsequential. Memes die out quickly, or else pass through us unconsciously. Cultural norms like handshakes or saying “bless you” when someone sneezes are memetic, but we don’t think much about them. Even more consequential memetic behaviors, like marriage or working a salaried office job, don’t require much energy to process, because most of us were socialized into these norms and don’t question their underlying premises. The meme itself doesn’t consume much of our attention.

Supermemes, on the other hand, are like black holes. Like memes, they spread quickly, but unlike memes, they are perceived as highly consequential. Their sheer gravitational force pulls us in, crowding out our ability to think about anything else. Whereas antimemes are characterized by a “strange forgetting” by the perceiver, supermemes are characterized by a “strange inability to forget.” If antimemes provoke avoidant behavior, supermemes are closer to being trapped in a rumination loop.

Why do supermemes grip our minds, while antimemes are ignored or forgotten? Supermemes combine multiple attractors – ideas that exert a natural pull on our attention – into a single, digestible idea, which creates a magnetic pull. Attractors often resonate with our deepest fundamental values, fears, or aspirations, which make them impossible to resist. Supermemes typically contain the following characteristics: An appeal to strongly-held values: Fears about overpopulation or population decline, for example, are charged because they appeal to our beliefs about family, morality, and social responsibility.

Perceived widespread impact: Existential risks, such as from biological threats or artificial intelligence, theoretically affect everyone on Earth, which makes them feel urgent to address.
Lack of specificity : There is a surprising lack of consensus, for example, as to what the “climate crisis” actually means, nor how to measure its progress.

In short, supermemes frequently take the form of a civilizational threat that demands us to prioritize it over everything else. In the vein of “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” doomsday scenarios are easy to justify working on, because “No one can blame me for wanting to save the world from destruction.” And, just as how armies spring up to rally around a common cause during wartime, supermemes give rise to talent ecosystems that help them spread and survive for longer periods of time.

Until recently, supermemes were relatively rare. War is human civilization’s oldest supermeme: as Girard might put it, a violent outgrowth of mimetic competition for limited

resources. It forces everyone in the network to direct their attention towards a single narrative. Compulsory drafts ensure that everyone and their families, regardless of social class, give up everything – including their lives – to war. War has a sweeping impact on economies, careers, and cultures. Historically in the United States, its effects were visible in everything from the GI Bill, which funded World War II veterans’ college tuition and democratized higher education, to the Harlem Renaissance, as African-Americans migrated north from the rural South to fill urban labor shortages during World War I.

Today, war is no longer a defining cultural narrative for most of the Western world. Although war certainly hasn’t disappeared on a global level, and Western militaries are still active abroad, it is not something that civilians living in Western societies have a personal stake in anymore. Instead, they conscript themselves into the service of other supermemes, some of which exist in parallel. In recent decades, these have included: Climate change and its associated crises, such as peak oil Existential risk associated with artificial intelligence War on religion and Christian values Overpopulation (in the 21st century) and population decline Fear of foreign threats , such as the Soviet Union (during the Cold War), China, or Islamism Just as isolated environments in the Galapagos allowed species to adapt and specialize, the private web – with its many dense networks – fostered the emergence of diverse supermemes. What was once a single, unifying supermeme has now “speciated” into many rare and exotic forms, each uniquely tailored to the needs and values of its network.

How did we evolve from just one supermeme to a veritable open market? Keen observers will notice that the supermemes listed above all appeared after World War II. They are often grouped under the umbrella of “culture wars”: a fairly new concept in American history, despite the extent to which it embroils all of us who dare to peek at the news today.

The Cold War – with its blend of McCarthyism and proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba – represents a sort of hybrid transition period between the epochs of world wars and culture wars. During the Cold War, Americans were gripped by the ideological and military struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. The presence of an external, foreign threat created a unifying purpose: destroying communism and asserting Western dominance on a global stage.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, the United States found itself without a clear external adversary. In the absence of a unifying conflict, Americans broke new battleground with the “culture wars” – a term popularized around the same time – where they could fight over issues related to identity, morality, and values.

From an outside perspective, war is about fighting for limited global resources like power, physical territory, and cultural hegemony. But domestically, it also offers a salve for mimetic desire and competition, as it gives citizens a common place to direct their attention – towards an external threat. Patriotism (and its more extreme counterparts, nationalism and jingoism) is a unifying force; a fear of outsiders brings people together quickly.

Without a foreign threat to distract us from within-group differences, however, civilians become restless and start picking fights with each other. Their attention turns to angling for new territory: control over their social institutions.

Social institutions – whether media, academia, or the political machine – are the bottlenecks through which all ideological demands must eventually pass. To truly change culture, one must master control of these institutions. But the Digital Age created a flood of new ideas that are all competing for roughly the same, limited set of physical resources. Government budgets can only be allocated to so many places; Congress can only vote on so many new bills per year; Harvard can only accept so many students per year; The New York Times can only publish so many new articles at a time. Culture wars intensify when too many competing ideas are jostling for limited paths to change, which is why improving the speed and efficiency of institutional response becomes critically important during “(culture) wartime.”

While we can identify a few, distinct waves of culture wars – say, the religious fights between neoconservatives and New Atheists in the early 2000s, versus the wokes and antiwokes of the late 2010s and early 2020s – it would not be far-fetched to say that we’ve been embroiled in a prolonged and escalating mimetic conflict since the end of the Cold War. Girard believes that mimetic conflict is resolved by scapegoats, but as we’ve seen, they don’t help unify a fragmented landscape of disparate communities, because one man’s scapegoat is another’s martyr.

A temporary reprieve from the culture wars came after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as Americans were briefly united by a renewed focus on foreign threats. The national motto became “United We Stand,” and public attention shifted to wars abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this unity was short-lived as the motives behind these wars were contested, and the idea of unity itself was repurposed as fuel for the next wave of culture wars. Debates over topics like patriotism, national security, and government overreach became battlegrounds that divided Americans along ideological lines, reigniting internal conflicts that – it turns out – had only been temporarily suppressed.

If global wars are a grab for physical land and resources, culture wars are a grab for mindshare. Our slow migration from broadcast media channels, to social media platforms, to group chats can be seen as an ongoing effort to expand the frontiers of human attention and thereby relieve us from the zero-sum competition for mindshare. But every progressively smaller fiefdom still needs a raison d’etre . There has never been a perfectly peaceful community in the history of mankind: people always need conflict – no matter how trivial – to give them purpose and strengthen ties. (Ask anyone who lives on a college campus or retirement community how the most trivial gossip can take on mammoth proportions. Who brought whom back to their room last night? Who forgot to bring brownies to book club?) Supermemes bid ruthlessly for our attention. In doing so, they often take on a dark and apocalyptic tone. This sets them apart from other social issues, such as global poverty or animal rights, which don’t have these qualities, although some supermemes also started out more innocuously. Environmentalism is one case study that demonstrates how ideas can transform from mere “social cause” in the early 20th century to a supermeme today.

Prior to the Cold War, environmentalism was seen more as a distinct movement that one might opt into, rather than an all-encompassing force. In the early 20th century, “caring about the environment” was narrowly defined as the stewardship of natural resources, which grew into two related, yet distinct schools of thought – conservationists (such as Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot), who wanted humans to use nature responsibly; and preservationists

(such as John Muir), who wanted to leave nature untouched – that reigned for at least half a century. The establishment of the National Park Service in 1916, along with organizations like the Sierra Club, National Geographic Society, and National Audubon Society, reflected the formalization of these early movements.

By the 1960s, however – that strange transition period between global wars and culture wars – environmentalism took on a more alarmist tone, with conservationists questioning the effects of a post-WWII society that was newly enamored with mass production. In 1962, the biologist Rachel Carson published her manifesto Silent Spring , which stoked public fears about the harmful effects of pesticides and kicked off a new, advocacy-oriented “Greenpeace generation” of environmentalism that was primarily concerned with the harmful effects of human consumption and economic growth. As public concerns grew, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson fought to establish the first Earth Day in 1970 in order to direct more attention onto environmental issues. His, and others’, efforts were a success: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created under President Richard Nixon later that same year.

The activist era of environmentalism continued for several more decades, becoming more anti-corporate- than regulation-focused over time, including more extreme branches of socalled “radical” environmentalism, such as ecoterrorist organization Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which frequently used arson in its tactics. Finally, the late 1990s marked a third era of environmentalism that converged on a shared apocalyptic scenario, called “global warming” – bringing us to today.

Even in this new, post-Cold War version of environmentalism, however, climate didn’t become a supermeme until much more recently. From roughly the 1960s through the early 2000s, “being an environmentalist” was a distinct identity that most people did not affiliate with. It was certainly not considered to be part of one’s day job, outside of activists and nonprofit workers.

Climate became a supermeme in the late 2010s. There was a clear change in public opinion towards climate change around this time. Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communications (YPCCC), which has tracked public attitudes towards climate change for more than a decade, shows that their most concerned category (“Alarmed”) grew sharply starting in 2018, nearly doubling from 18% in 2017 to 33% of American adults surveyed in 2021 . [32] It was no longer enough to merely protect the environment anymore; we had to save civilization from extinguishing into a fireball.

There are specific events that probably contributed to this cultural shift, including a 2018 IPCC special report that described the impacts of 1.5°C global warming to the public, and the publication of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming , a book by David Wallace-Wells in 2019 that might be described as a modern Silent Spring. But the acceleration of the climate crisis may have also been driven by changes in how we communicate. The late 2010s overlaps with the rise of social media, which may have caused certain supermemes – like the climate crisis – to make the leap from niche social cause to urgent, doomsday scenario. The term “doomer” became popular starting in 2018, thanks to a popular 4chan meme.

The climate crisis also splintered into memetic tribes during this time, each with its own beliefs and agenda. The Breakthrough Institute, for example, with its focus on eco-modernism and technology-driven solutions, has little in common with Extinction Rebellion, which

advocates for radical, disruptive action through civil disobedience to halt environmental destruction. As these tribes retreated to the private web, there was no single version of a “climate advocate” anymore. Instead, climate tribes had evolved into a variety of exotic “species,” each adapted to the conditions of its community.

In the global war era, Westerners only dealt with one supermeme at a time. In the Dark Forest era, many supermemes can flourish concurrently, supported by an archipelago of dense networks. Private online spaces created the ideal conditions for these supermemes to grow. Find enough people who share your views, no matter how extreme or far-fetched, and they will form your new reality.

♦

I AM OF TWO MINDS about how we should interact with supermemes. The first is a warning. Supermemes are like a dangerous, antibiotic-resistant mutant strain of meme that we haven't yet developed widespread immunity to. They demand our attention – all of our attention – like a shadow that appears in the corner of your eye. Its mere presence demands that we look at it, keeps us from feeling fully absorbed in other pursuits. There’s a prickly sensation at the back of our necks that leaves us wondering: what the heck is that thing doing over there, and shouldn’t I figure out what it is?

When supermemes lack a clear focus on specific outcomes, they can trap people in a state of permacrisis that never fully escalates or resolves. A supermeme without practical application will loop upon itself indefinitely, as we dissect its virtues with likeminded people in group chats, conferences, and on our public feeds – citing statistics and imagined futures – without ever putting these ideas into practice. The only way to break the cycle is to shift the conversation from ideas to action.

Supermemes, perhaps perceiving that the physical world can “call their bluff,” strive to preserve themselves for as long as possible by marshaling as large of a talent network as they can. It is the supermeme equivalent of the “industrial complex” phenomenon that plagues bureaucracies, where an idea ceases to have attainable goals and instead tries to perpetuate itself for the sake of living on.

Supermemes are like an invasive species. When too many supermemes crowd a network, they can threaten its comparatively more diverse and generative creative ecosystem. Simler uses the example of academic research to demonstrate how this works in “Going Critical.” He distinguishes between Real Science, or “whatever habits and practices reliably produce knowledge,” and careerists, who are “motivated by personal ambition.” Careerists “gum up the works” of Real Science communities, promoting themselves instead of contributing to the growth of shared knowledge. As Simler puts it, careerism “may look and act like science, but it doesn't produce reliable knowledge.”

And so it is with supermemes. They may look and act like interesting ideas, but they are primarily selfish, doing whatever it takes to prolong their existence. Supermemes are like catnip for hordes of creative and knowledge workers – technologists, academics, artists, activists. But they are intellectual sinkholes, vacuuming up every resource they can acquire, and when they take over a network, there is little attention left to focus on anything else.

Fixating on the next big crisis is a recipe for perpetual distraction. To protect our attention, then, we must learn to resist the temptation of supermemes. For those who haven’t developed strong immunity, the best cure is prevention: staying far away from ideas that look like supermemes.

…On the other hand. We are here to examine the shape of ideas as they are, not as we wish they could be. In a crowded universe of narratives, the reality might be that ideas need to shout more loudly to be heard. Perhaps supermemes are a useful format to cut through the noise and spur people to action. From a zoomed out perspective, this means that instead of directing everyone’s attention to a single world war, or going to the moon, or defeating the Russians, society can now support many different “critical missions” simultaneously. Maybe civilization isn’t distracted, after all; it’s just scaling up, and we now have an increased capacity to tackle more problems at once.

Crises can be an effective way to spur ideas to action. Operation Warp Speed was a remarkable example of rapid coordination between the private and public sector to develop and manufacture a COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic. Researchers, government officials, and private companies came together in May 2020 to develop vaccines that might’ve otherwise taken years to create. By that December, just months after the initiative began, the first vaccines were approved for emergency use. Perhaps most notably, Pfizer and BioNTech developed a vaccine using relatively new and unproven mRNA technology, backed by billions in government support. Its success opened the door for a new wave of research into other mRNA applications beyond the pandemic’s needs, including vaccines to treat other infectious diseases like HIV and influenza, cancer treatments, and personalized medicine.

Operation Warp Speed showed how all-consuming ideas can drive meaningful action when resources, talent, and willpower are aligned. It helped that the people involved in Operation Warp Speed were working towards a specific outcome, which – combined with the urgency of the pandemic – forced them to move out of the ideas world more quickly. It also meant there was a clear end to the operation after it had served its purpose. Not every supermeme has this quality, but the presence of a productive goal might help us discern which supermemes are worth letting ourselves get sucked into. (Simply having a goal isn’t necessarily enough: I’m thinking of the flurry of DAOs and NFT communities in the 2022 crypto boom that had specific goals, but perhaps not productive ones, which led many people to act in risky and irresponsible ways that they otherwise wouldn’t have.) Instead of avoiding supermemes, then, perhaps it’s that we just need to be careful about which ones deserve our attention. Supermemes have no intrinsic value except as an organizing tactic: as heartwrenching or alarming as they might be, we cannot let ourselves be swayed so easily. If we pledge our attention to every supermeme that comes our way, we will lose ourselves in the process.

Nodes, again, have a critical role to play here as gatekeepers: they can help prevent a supermemetic outbreak from taking over the entire network. Cancel culture illustrates how networks can develop such immunity. At first, every public “cancellation” was treated equally, because people hadn’t developed an intuition for which transgressions were worth paying attention to. As the cancellations mounted, however, it became clear that one could not spend every day reviewing all the terrible things that every human has ever done – there are not enough hours in the day – so eventually, people stopped spreading every story and became more discerning.

Every person has their own decision tree for evaluating which transgressions to take seriously; it is not my intent to evaluate what that framework should be. The point is that there has been a clear evolution from the mid-2010s – where people were more receptive to every new “cancellation” news story – to the mid-2020s, where some nodes are now immune or resistant to spread, while others have varying rates of transmission. It takes time, but with sustained, repeated exposure, networks adapt to manage memetic overload.

Just as war can be a senseless outbreak of violence and destruction, some supermemes are equally senseless. But the tornados they whip up can be quite powerful. Supermemes can help us accomplish more big civilizational goals in parallel – so long as we’re careful about which ideas we feed into the wind machine, and which we allow to sweep us off our feet.

♦

THUS FAR, WE’VE PRIMARILY EXPLORED how ideas spread through networks at a bird’s eye level. Networks, at this altitude, look like a depersonalized constellation of nodes. But nodes are just people – they’re us ! While ideas do have intrinsic qualities that influence their spread, it’s also clear that we, as individuals, play an essential role in determining whether ideas flow through, or die with, us. It’s a big responsibility, especially when evaluating taboos or supermemes, where stakes are high for the network.

In the next chapter, we’ll zoom in to the atomic level and examine how we, as nodes, decide to pass new ideas onto our connections. Attention is the key mechanism that governs this process: it shapes not just our personal realities, but our collective behavior. Focus your attention on something, and it sharpens and becomes omnipresent. Let your attention wander, and the object blurs and fades away.

## Chapter 4: We Are Our Attention

IN THE LAST FEW DECADES, there’s been a new wave of what’s called “advanced meditation” that offers access to deep, intense mental states – from the euphoric, to psychedelic, to voluntary loss of consciousness – all of which are achieved solely through sustained concentration.

One type of advanced meditation unlocks a series of altered states referred to as the jhanas . Practitioners experience strong versions of highly positive emotions, ranging from buzzy thrills to a pervasive sense of peaceful “okayness” – much like a “panic attack for joy. ” [33] This isn’t your average mindfulness meditation app.

For many people in the West, meditation is synonymous with mindfulness practices that emphasize open awareness. In this approach, meditators are encouraged to stay present with whatever arises – sounds, thoughts, sensations – without focusing too much on any one thing. The goal is to cultivate a sense of calm and nonreactivity, where a person can perceive all things as part of a larger experience without feeling moved to respond.

But this is only one version of what is possible with meditation. Less commonly practiced is a style where, instead of keeping awareness wide and open, a person trains their attention on a specific object – such as the breath, a phrase, or a positive feeling. As the mind zeroes in, remarkable things can happen. Distractions fall away, a sense of self fades, and perception of time dissolves as a person enters a heightened state of effortless concentration.

If you’ve ever been in flow state – lost in a great conversation, toiling on a creative project, deeply absorbed in your workout – you know exactly how this feels. This style of meditation just makes it possible to invoke flow states without the use of external stimuli. Instead of having to strap on your skis and carve the hills to get that

sweet feeling of perfect synchronicity with the universe, with enough practice, you can conjure it in your body at any moment.

A highly focused mind, in a state of flow, amplifies whatever it’s given. If you train it on writing code, you’ll code effortlessly for hours. If you train it on an anxious thought, you’ll spiral into a panic attack. And – it turns out – if you train it on joy, you’ll burst into a radiant euphoric state known as the first jhana.

Most casual meditators never encounter these states, simply because this style of practice isn’t as widely known or discussed. Most popular meditation schools in the West, such as Vipassana, don’t teach the jhanas. Some teachers view them as distractions from insight, cautioning against attachment to the pleasurable bodily sensations associated with the jhanas. Many also believe that meditators need years of practice to achieve these deep mental states.

In recent years, a handful of teachers in the West revived the jhanas. New teaching methods made them easier to access in shorter amounts of time: sometimes days or weeks, instead of years. As more people – including Bay Area technologists – discovered the jhanas, they took to Twitter to tell others what they’d experienced.

Intrigued by the chatter on my feed, I pitched a magazine about writing a piece on the topic. As part of my research, I signed up for a retreat myself. I had virtually no meditation experience, save for a Zen retreat I’d attended with a friend over a decade before.

With the guidance of my retreat instructors, I found myself in first jhana – intensely euphoric, comparable to taking MDMA – in less than an hour. Over the next four days, I progressed through nearly all the jhanic states, each with its own distinct and surreal qualities. In fifth jhana, my mind floated out of my body to gaze at an infinite space. In sixth jhana, it exploded with indescribable, psychedelic beauty that – in seventh jhana – dissolved into nothingness.

The jhanas offer a rare glimpse into the extent to which our minds construct the world around us. As someone who had hardly ever

meditated before, what surprised me most was not just the actual sensations, but realizing that such extraordinary states had been locked away in my mind this whole time. Their existence demonstrates that attention, when summoned to its full strength, can pull off some incredible and counterintuitive feats.

Attention is how we carve our personal realities: it is the breathing valve of our consciousness. Selective attention , or the act of focusing on one object at the expense of others, determines what we perceive. Like a flashlight, selective attention illuminates whatever it is aimed at, while other, equally “real” objects fade into the shadows. As I type in a café right now, I am able to write because I’m unconsciously filtering out the café’s music, the murmur of other patrons, and the clatter of baristas preparing coffee.

This skill – which some meditators hone to an extreme – are a marvelous bit of wizardry that comes pre-installed in our brains. Using only our minds, we can make the world as beautiful or ugly as we wish.

♦

SELECTIVE ATTENTION IS AN ESSENTIAL SURVIVAL SKILL, but it also creates blind spots – hidden cognitive biases that dictate what we do or don’t see. The same mechanism that allows us to summon flow states can also filter out ideas that are inconvenient or mentally demanding. These blind spots are a type of antimeme that all of us experience regularly.

Economist Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler – who authored the “Going Critical” essay discussed previously – explain how attention shapes conscious experience in their book, The Elephant in the Brain . Our brains gently steer us towards narratives that make us feel good, and away from those that don’t. When someone donates a large sum of money to a charity, for example, they tend to frame it as selfless altruism, rather than acknowledging motives like gaining power or assuaging guilt. These hidden, selfish motives are antimemetic: they

remain invisible to the perceiver, because noticing them would present a challenge to how they see themselves.

Hanson and Simler emphasize that this behavior is universal, and having such base desires doesn’t make you a bad person. They even reflect honestly on their reasons for writing their own book, acknowledging motives like a desire for status and prestige. Yet even they – the authors of a book dedicated to uncomfortable truths – admit they were “relieved for the chance to look away” after finishing their book. As they observe, “It’s just really hard to look long and intently at

We avoid thoughts that are cognitively expensive to process. But ignoring these ideas doesn’t make them go away. Our antimemetic motives loom large in our minds: the eponymous “elephant in the brain,” silently guiding our choices.

Hanson and Simler use the term self-discretion to describe how our brains suppress highly consequential information. When we encounter an idea that disrupts our current version of reality, our brain “conspires – whispers – to keep such information from becoming too prominent.” As we saw in Chapter 2 with the spread of taboos, we do this not just to protect ourselves, but to avoid passing potentially damaging information onto others, including those we love or want to impress. “Feel the pang of shame? That’s your brain telling you not to dwell on that particular information. Flinch away, hide from it, pretend it’s not there. Punish those neural pathways, so the information stays as discreet as possible.”[34]

The Elephant in the Brain is about one type of antimeme: selfish motives that threaten our self-image and social standing. But this same energy-preserving mechanism filters out any antimemetic idea or task that demands significant mental effort to process. For example, I am reminded of a particularly pesky to-do list item that I put off, week after week, after my son was born: sitting down with my husband to write our will.

This task was an antimemetic albatross – seen and forgotten once a week – that I shuffled dutifully across my calendar. I knew it was important to write a contingency plan in case the worst happened. Though the scenario was unlikely, the consequences of neglecting it could be serious for the people I love. Nonetheless, estate planning is annoying work for two people with busy lives. Every week, I’d see it on my to-do list and bump it to the next week.

No one wants to think about their own death, much less the death of themselves and their partner simultaneously, and the horrible implications it would carry for those left behind. (This seems like a good time to quote Hanson and Simler, who lamented that discussing their book was “a real buzzkill at dinner parties.”[35]) Death, retirement planning, getting married and having kids…for many people, these ideas are difficult to prioritize because they force us to confront uncomfortable truths. Hanson and Simler note how ideas that emphasize altruism or cooperation spread easily: “By working together, we can achieve great things!” These ideas are memetic because they’re inspiring and easy to share. By contrast, ideas that emphasize competition or harsh realities often “suck the energy out of [36] . the room” and struggle to spread

From this perspective, antimemes are an immune response to cognitive overload. Whereas memes only require a small fraction of our attention and are cognitively cheap to engage with, antimemes are highly consequential and are cognitively expensive to grapple with. To protect our attention and avoid disrupting our daily lives, our “unseeing” defense mechanism kicks in, and the object slips by undetected.

Any major change in our circumstances, especially those that tie to psychological and spiritual needs, frequently presents as antimemetic. It is difficult to occupy two opposing realities simultaneously, which can also make it difficult to empathize with prior versions of ourselves – and, by extension, anyone who reminds us of who we once were.

When you’re happy, you forget what it was like to be unhappy. When you’re in a fulfilling relationship, you forget what it was like to be single. When you’re financially comfortable, you forget what it was like not to have money. When you have close friendships, you forget what it was like to be lonely. When you’re healthy, you forget what it was like to be physically impaired.

This type of antimeme poses a challenge for medical professionals who prescribe treatments for ailments that must be followed long after symptoms have subsided – such as antibiotics or physical therapy – or mental illnesses, such as antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, and antipsychotics. When these treatments work well, patients feel good and have difficulty recalling how they felt before – so they stop. One study by The Pew Health Group found that even though most participants knew that the “correct” answer to taking antibiotics was to complete their prescribed course of treatment, nearly everyone in the focus group “admitted they failed to do so, often stopping in midcourse when they began to feel better. ” [37]

Handwashing, too, suffers from antimemetic headwinds. Despite a strong public social norm towards handwashing, and clear scientific evidence demonstrating its value, compliance is absurdly low, even in medical settings. According to one meta-analysis, the mean handwashing compliance rate in the intensive care units (ICUs) of high-income countries – in other words, the type of place we’d expect compliance to be highest – is only 64.5%.[38] It’s not that people don’t understand the importance of taking antibiotics or washing their hands; they just can’t seem to stay engaged with these practices. Our health and wellbeing is an all-consuming goal when we don’t have it – but, once obtained, strangely fades from our conscious thoughts.

Attention is a precious, limited resource. We can’t expect to fully engage with every idea that enters our headspace. Yet at the same time, it’s clear that relying too heavily on unconscious filters can leave us blinded to opportunities that would otherwise be useful to “see.”

some Given that tradeoffs are inevitable, I find myself wishing for sort of moral framework with which to evaluate whether I’m investing my attention wisely. Is it equally “good” to focus on human rights activism, versus spending time with my family, versus scrolling on Twitter all day? What is our imperative regarding where to allocate our attention – if there is one at all?

♦

IN HER SHORT STORY, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula Le Guin describes a town called Omelas that stands shining by the sea. The gardens are covered with moss and the roads are lined with trees. Children play in the streets; there is no suffering or conflict. But this idyllic setting conceals a disturbing, antimemetic secret: the residents’ happiness depends upon the imprisonment of one child, who is kept in misery and confinement. Everyone in Omelas knows about the child, and the horrific conditions it must endure, but they do not do anything about it, because doing so would require sacrificing their own happiness.

One way to interpret Le Guin’s story is as a parable about moral complicity. The child in the story represents the oppressed and exploited members of society upon whom our comfort and happiness depends. We are asked to expand our attention to take in all the unseen realities we’ve filtered out of sight, and to consider whether we would continue to live in Omelas with the knowledge of the bargain required, or be one of the few who walk away.

In attempting to apply this lesson to the real world, however, I am overwhelmed by the number of tradeoffs I face in my daily life. How one easy it would be if there were only child from Omelas held captive in the basement of our consciousness, instead of hundreds or thousands! Global poverty, human trafficking, worker conditions in warehouses and factories, factory farming of animals…an entire shadow city of suffering lies behind every basic task in our modern world today. And in the age of supermemes, where we are navigating not just one Really Big Narrative but an entire marketplace of them,

we are exposed to even more of these moral dilemmas today, with each one screaming that they are the most urgent and consequential one.

Refusing to engage with difficult ideas – even those that point towards the deep suffering of our fellow humans – does not necessarily make us cruel and callous, or even selfish. No one can expect to fully address, and reconcile, every dilemma they face. When our attention is being pulled in infinite directions, deciding where to direct it isn’t a simple moral question of “good” versus “bad,” but a practical question of how to spend our limited resources. We need to decide which uncomfortable truths to prioritize and which to let go.

We could try to resolve the dilemma of infinite choice by treating it as a problem of utility maximization. This is the view promoted by utilitarianism, which emphasizes acting in ways that maximize happiness and minimize suffering for the greatest number of people. Implied is that there is some discoverable way to rank the relative importance of issues and allocate our attention accordingly, using metrics like "lives saved" or "quality-adjusted life years."

Effective altruism is a philanthropic movement inspired by utilitarianism, and it uses evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to help others. Effective altruists prioritize actions that maximize positive impact, and in some cases, have developed elaborate algorithms to define what “positive impact” actually means.

But such calculations always reflect the values of those who create them. What one person deems most important – whether it’s alleviating global poverty or combating climate change – is shaped by personal, cultural, and historical contexts. Even metrics that seem purely quantitative mask subjective choices about what we value most. Focusing on causes that prioritize improving lives abroad versus those in our local communities, for example – or vice versa – is a matter of personal values.

Le Guin’s story is a testament to the importance of intuition and taste, which prevents us from accepting utilitarianism as a wholesale solution to the problem of prioritization. Omelas is a dark version of

the utilitarian world in which happiness is technically maximized for the most number of people (the rest of the town), but comes at great cost (the child). Her story resonates because – for most people, anyway – it just doesn’t feel right to outsource our judgment to a game of numbers.

In his book Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy , philanthropy scholar Peter Frumkin identifies a key consideration for developing philanthropic strategies, which he calls instrumental versus expressive giving. Instrumental giving focuses on measurable outcomes and is driven by a desire to solve specific, often large-scale social problems with efficiency and precision – like the effective altruists’ approach. Expressive giving , by contrast, emphasizes the personal values, beliefs, and identity of the donor. Impact is measured according to individual or community values, even if the outcomes are less deterministic.

Frumkin’s telling of history suggests that we’ve already seen the utilitarian worldview play out. With the passage of time and rise of professional norms in philanthropy – accelerated especially by restrictions imposed by the 1969 Tax Reform Act, such as stricter reporting requirements and mandatory payouts – Frumkin argues that philanthropy went too far in the direction of instrumental giving. An overfocus on efficiency turned into a race to the bottom, where all philanthropic strategies became indistinguishable from one another.

Philanthropy is meant to be pluralistic, reflecting a diverse expression of values from private citizens who exercise the freedom to put their money wherever their ideas are. Instrumentalized philanthropy, on the other hand, starts to mirror the role of government, where there is a single, authoritative way of doing things. Philanthropy and government should ideally work in tandem, where experiments funded with private funds can derisk and inform what’s eventually adopted at the institutional level with public funds. But if philanthropy is too prescriptive, it stifles the experimentation it is supposed to enable.

We can use these two philanthropic dimensions – instrumental versus expressive – to inform how to allocate our attention in a way that benefits our networks. The utilitarian approach feels like monoculture farming. If everyone uses the same calculation to determine where to allocate their attention, we will create a brittle system where too many people do the same type of work, which reduces overall fitness and leaves us vulnerable to blind spots.

Instead of trying to engineer a perfect hierarchy of attention, we should aim to cultivate a “biodiverse” information ecosystem that thrives on a multitude of interests pursued by each of its members. In biology, ecosystems with greater biodiversity are more resilient to shocks and better equipped to adapt to changing conditions. Similarly, a healthy network benefits from having many different nodes pursuing what each finds most meaningful or compelling. Not every gatekeeper will uncover a transformative idea, but the sheer diversity of approaches increases the likelihood that someone will. A decentralized network of curious minds makes the information ecosystem stronger, more adaptive, and more likely to produce ideas that take off.

Each of us, then, is left to decide how we want to prioritize our attention, according to our own values and interests. But how should we balance our personal interests with those of our networks? Is what’s good for us, as individuals, always good for the group?

♦

“OUR ATTENTION IS BORN FREE, but is, increasingly, everywhere in chains,” declared a trio of activists in a New York Times [39] . op-ed Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt are members of the Friends of Attention collective, a network of “collaborators, colleagues, and actual friends ” that formed in 2018 due to shared concerns that our attention is being hijacked for others’ private gain.[40]

Friends of Attention organizes lectures, educational workshops, and performative art to remind the public that there is a war being waged on our attention, and that we need to fight back and reclaim control.

They compare the fragmentation of our attention to fracking, or the practice of cracking the Earth’s bedrock to extract oil and natural gas. Profiteers, they claim, are “pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.”

I first encountered attention activism when I read Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing , less than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Odell, an artist and activist based in Oakland, California, frames “doing nothing” as an act of political resistance to what’s often called the attention economy , or the buying and selling of attention in a market, like that between advertisers and media properties. ” [41] Advertisers compete for sellers’ attention like casinos bidding for the most degenerate gamblers, tracking consumers’ eyeballs and sentiments and using this information to place just the right ads in just the right places so that they can charge clients as much as possible. Widespread social media use ensures a steady stream of monetizable attention. The producers of attention – that is, all of us – are treated as cattle in these transactions, shuffling around like zombies and staring with glazed eyes at whomever is the highest bidder.

Odell implores us to extricate ourselves from this system, pointing out – as I discovered via on my meditation retreat – that where we direct our focus determines what becomes real. Mastering control of our attention is how we “not only remake the world but are ourselves remade. ” [42] Odell is fond of bird-watching, and she recounts how spending her time on the study of birds and local ecology, rather than on her phone, transformed her perception of the world:[43]

More and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them….these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality…. A towhee will never simply be “a bird” to me again, even if I wanted it to be.

I share the activists’ views that taking a hard look at our attention, and how it is being spent, is an important step in helping people reclaim a sense of agency over the world. Researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCollough once showed that when students were asked to keep a daily journal about what they were grateful for, as opposed to recording their grievances, they reported significantly more positive moods – as well as prosocial behavior, such as helping others with personal problems or offering emotional support.[44] People who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives – irrespective of their circumstances – would almost certainly benefit from directing their attention to what brings them joy, which also makes them more likely to make positive contributions to their communities.

Where we direct our attention also shapes more than just our personal realities: it influences which ideas do or don’t spread through our networks. The same critique of utilitarianism – that it leads to idea monocultures – applies to unregulated attention economies. Networks ultimately rely on their nodes to evaluate new ideas. If we let others hijack our ability to engage with difficult or complex ideas, we risk shirking our duties as gatekeepers. Giving away our attention to the loudest, flashiest voices in the room ultimately creates a world where we’re all parroting the same set of banal ideas.

Nevertheless, I find myself somewhat dissatisfied with the solutions offered by the attention activists, who tell us to “remain in place” as a means of reclaiming our attention, but in a way that seems disconnected from our responsibilities to the network. Odell, clearly exasperated by memetic overload, dreams of a world in which we free ourselves from “shouting into the void” on social platforms. Instead, she asks us to “replant [our attention] in the public, physical realm.”[45] “Whether it’s a real room or a group chat on Signal,” she writes, “I want to see a restoration of context, a kind of context collection in the face of context collapse.”[46] Her words reflect a widely felt, contemporary desire to escape the memetic city’s constant churn, seeking safety in smaller communities where we at least know who is

vying for our attention, instead of letting it passively trickle out of our brains into the rushing rivers of our news feeds.

In a sense, Odell got what she wanted. Less than a year after How to Do Nothing was published, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and the world ground to a halt. Stay-at-home lockdowns forced us to reengage with our local, offline worlds, even as it supercharged our online ones. We baked sourdough bread as we scrolled our feeds, but – because we couldn’t see our friends in-person as often, or as easily – we started spending time in smaller online contexts, too. We spun up group chats. We signed up for newsletters. We hosted book clubs and dance parties on Zoom. For a brief period, it seemed that the web had indeed benefited from a “restoration of context.” As a popular meme of the time proclaimed: “Nature is healing.”

But the future that followed didn’t quite look the way Odell envisioned, in which we “reinfus[ed] our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.”[47] The reemergence of the private online web was not a mere reversion to Web 1.0, where people socialized on blogs, email chains, and internet forums, blissfully disconnected from a shared narrative. Instead, the web is now composed of both public and private spaces, and these two worlds are closely intertwined.

Odell imagines that in a space that is “small and concentrated enough…the plurality of its actors is un-collapsed.”[48] But, like a genie wish gone awry, the rise of Signal group chats didn’t necessarily lead to a nuanced landscape of ideas so much as a balkanization: a memetic Galapagos where dense networks lead to even greater and weirder idea speciation, which then make their way back into public contexts, both online and offline. While some group chats are innocuous – the kind that Odell had hoped for – a global restoration of context also made our world darker and stranger and more unrecognizable than before.

When confronted with the noise and unpredictability of the public web, it can feel good to retreat to quieter spaces, whether that’s the private web or our local communities. If our attention is truly ours to

spend as we wish, there should be nothing wrong with this behavior. But retreating from the chaos only protects ourselves. It is akin to fleeing to gated communities or the suburbs to avoid the dangers of cities, burying ourselves in the comforts of “local community,” while avoiding the hard work of getting things done at civilizational scale. Taken to its logical conclusion, the divestment of all members from public spaces destroys the integrity of those spaces.

Odell, for her part, recognizes this concern and explicitly cautions against escapism. In a chapter titled “The Impossibility of Retreat,” she warns us from following in the steps of communes in the 1960s or seasteading experiments in the late 2000s, reminding us that “there is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in this world,” even as [49] . she acknowledges its temptations

It is hard to see, however, how one can fully embrace the invitation to “refuse” the world without becoming disengaged from solution building. Odell believes that periodically stepping away is a temporary, not permanent break from reality: a sort of mental reset that reminds us what our lives are really for. But this reminds me of the social media addicts who cycle through deleting and re-installing apps on their phone, instead of learning to cultivate a fluid sense of control in the world they’ve been given.

“Standing apart,” in Odell’s eyes, is “a commitment to live in permanent refusal,” even when actively participating in public spaces. [50] But I find it exhausting to imagine standing in a permanently defiant position, hands on hips, feet apart. How can I learn to act decisively, from a place of ease and confidence, rather than bracing against a constant perceived tension?

Viewed through the eyes of the attention activists, I feel less like an empowered individual and more like a forever-branded piece of cattle that has been rescued from its captors: unchained, yes, but lacking purpose and direction. I don’t just want to stand still; I don’t want to be the naysayer in a sea of people who are doing and building things. There will always be a place for critics and whistleblowers, but if

everyone did the same, the world would not be better in the long run. We can’t hunker down indefinitely in cozyweb. Our public narratives and civilizational histories still need to be nurtured. We will always crave the wide, expansive feeling of awe – a supermeme to devote our lives to.

There is no wishing away the existence of the public online web. If we don’t like what we see, we simply have to learn how to engage with it more deeply and meaningfully. We must pick up a paintbrush, find a blank canvas, and paint the world as we wish it to be. Instead of hiding in our safe and quiet communities, we need to summon the courage to step forward and attempt to do great things.

♦

IF ANTIMEMES ARE A DEFENSE MECHANISM in response to cognitive overload, we now know how to make things more or less antimemetic: by mastering control of our attention and wielding it to shine a light on whatever we want to make more real in the world. Whether we’re filtering out distractions, grappling with moral dilemmas, or striving to create a better future, our attention is the tool that makes it all possible.

Attention is not something we merely own ; it is what we are . Learning to wield it isn’t just about returning to the “present moment,” but rather about creating infinite, dazzling realities – because what we choose to see in the present moment is unique to each of us.

But reclaiming control of our attention isn’t just about hiding out in cozyweb. Our attention is not meant to be commandeered by others, but it is also not ours to hoard. Even when it’s hard, our responsibility to the network requires that we actively engage with, and contribute to, the world around us. There is no single answer as to which causes we ought to take up, and this is by design. When we pursue what each of us finds most interesting, we create a diverse ecosystem that benefits the network.

In the next two chapters, we’ll apply everything we’ve examined so far – on the individual and network level – towards collectively advancing the causes we care about. I want to talk about us as magical wizards of attention, capable of waving a wand and transforming our worlds in astonishing ways. That seems a lot more fun to me than playing slots at the casino.