The Cost of Communication covers a very similar argument in a lot more detail, particularly with stronger grounding in memetic theory:
The basic argument of this post has 4 main components:
Memetic Immune Systems: Just like there is a biological immune system for viruses, there may be a memetic immune system that decides which ideas, a.k.a. memes, are adopted by the individual. This memetic immune system would not select for “good” or true ideas. It would select for ideas that are beneficial to the carrier’s germline.
Increased Memetic Competition Selects for Attention-Grabbing Memes: Memes spread via attention; it is a resource they require and compete for (Chielens, 2002). Increasing our ability to communicate with each other means that memes can spread more easily, by definition. Increasing the ability of memes to propagate means they have to compete with a wider range of memes for the same attention budget. This selects for more and more competitive and attention-capturing memes. The selection for competitive memes can produce very dangerous ideas that are successful in spreading despite being negatively correlated with humanity’s well-being. Also discussed in this sub-section is the effect increased communication bandwidth seems to have had on social media addiction and local news organisations: not good.
Memetic Kin Selection and the Emergence of Groups: Memes are unlike biological genes in that they can rapidly signal their presence in a carrier. Therefore, they can take moment-to-moment advantage of relative levels of perceived memes in the local population to adopt their spreading strategy. This leads to some interesting behaviours, e.g. in-group/out-group dynamics, preference falsification, mobs of non-genetically-related individuals, etc.
The Problem of Critical Density and the Evil Triad: Some memes are detrimental to the well-being of the general population. In other words, they are “bad” ideas, negatively correlated with humanity’s well-being. For a subset of those memes, it takes time to figure out why they are bad and for competing memes to emerge. However, because of the ability of memes to coordinate with copies of themselves (Point 3), memes can reach a critical density in a population. At that point, arguing against them becomes very difficult, e.g. you are arguing against a mob, against dogma, etc. As such, in the case of dangerous memes reaching critical density, the speed at which memes can spread may pose a public health risk. Additionally, if these memes spread via polarization, then arguing against them can be ineffective. To combat these kinds of “Evil Triad” memes, it may be that memetic social distancing, i.e. reduced communication between individuals, would be a successful strategy.
The Cost of Communication covers a very similar argument in a lot more detail, particularly with stronger grounding in memetic theory: