Words can’t be defined arbitrarily, so I am going to examine your definition first.
First, I am not sure what exactly counts as “mainstream”, and why is it even important. What you describe seems like a relationship between a meme and a culture, whether large or small. So you could have “anti-memes of antimemes” as Isnasene describes. Or you could have a polarized society with two approximately equally large cultures, each of them having their own “anti-memes”. Or a small minority, such as cult, that strongly ignores the surrounding culture.
What did you mean by “mainstream knowledge”? It is something most people sincerely believe, or just something they profess? They may react differently. Sincerely believing people may listen to arguments when they have proper form; but you can’t convince a person whose “belief” is simply an expression of belonging to a team.
A symbiotic war half-meme encourages you attack its parity inverse as “wrong”. The meme in a meme-antimeme pair nudges you to dismiss its antimeme as “unimportant” or invisibly ignore it altogether.
I am thinking now about “culture wars” where attacking other people’s opinion as wrong has gradually changed into “no-platforming”. I wonder whether there is a spectrum where sufficiently “no-platformed” opinions change into “unimportant” when the side defending them is completely defeated.
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Also, I am afraid that the actual usage of the word “anti-meme” would be to defend ideas from valid criticism. (“You only disagree with me because this is an anti-meme that threatens your ego!”)
The example of Lisp is a good one here: we have a decades long holy war where one side shouts “Lisp is superior (and so am I by recognizing this fact)!”, the other side goes “where are the libraries? where are the tools? where are solutions to problems X, Y, and Z?”, but the former side goes “la la la, I can’t hear you over the sound of how Lisp is superior!”. Then suddenly someone with a good object-oriented background fixes the usual problems with Lisp, creating Clojure, and—lo and behold! -- suddenly the mainstream is happy with the result.
That is, focusing too much on how your idea is an “anti-meme” makes you blind to its actual flaws.
These are all good points. By “mainstream” I’m referring to to the information you acquire by being part of a culture; the stuff you learn just because “that’s how it’s done”. This definition of “mainstream” is necessarily subjective because it can be defined only from the perspective of a specific culture or subculture. To someone growing up Amish, “mainstream” (in this context) is Amish. “Mainstream” is important because holes in this kind of knowledge are uniquely difficult to identify.
I don’t think there’s a spectrum between “no-platforming” and “unimportant”. I think they’re opposites in a way that doesn’t come full-circle, but haven’t thought about this hard enough to be sure. It’s certainly worth exploring.
Using the word “anti-meme” absolutely could be used to defend ideas from valid criticism, as illustrated by Isnasene’s comment to a similar post. Lisp is indeed an excellent example here. I think the library problem was its biggest issue and this got overlooked by early proselytizers.
Words can’t be defined arbitrarily, so I am going to examine your definition first.
First, I am not sure what exactly counts as “mainstream”, and why is it even important. What you describe seems like a relationship between a meme and a culture, whether large or small. So you could have “anti-memes of antimemes” as Isnasene describes. Or you could have a polarized society with two approximately equally large cultures, each of them having their own “anti-memes”. Or a small minority, such as cult, that strongly ignores the surrounding culture.
What did you mean by “mainstream knowledge”? It is something most people sincerely believe, or just something they profess? They may react differently. Sincerely believing people may listen to arguments when they have proper form; but you can’t convince a person whose “belief” is simply an expression of belonging to a team.
I am thinking now about “culture wars” where attacking other people’s opinion as wrong has gradually changed into “no-platforming”. I wonder whether there is a spectrum where sufficiently “no-platformed” opinions change into “unimportant” when the side defending them is completely defeated.
.
Also, I am afraid that the actual usage of the word “anti-meme” would be to defend ideas from valid criticism. (“You only disagree with me because this is an anti-meme that threatens your ego!”)
The example of Lisp is a good one here: we have a decades long holy war where one side shouts “Lisp is superior (and so am I by recognizing this fact)!”, the other side goes “where are the libraries? where are the tools? where are solutions to problems X, Y, and Z?”, but the former side goes “la la la, I can’t hear you over the sound of how Lisp is superior!”. Then suddenly someone with a good object-oriented background fixes the usual problems with Lisp, creating Clojure, and—lo and behold! -- suddenly the mainstream is happy with the result.
That is, focusing too much on how your idea is an “anti-meme” makes you blind to its actual flaws.
These are all good points. By “mainstream” I’m referring to to the information you acquire by being part of a culture; the stuff you learn just because “that’s how it’s done”. This definition of “mainstream” is necessarily subjective because it can be defined only from the perspective of a specific culture or subculture. To someone growing up Amish, “mainstream” (in this context) is Amish. “Mainstream” is important because holes in this kind of knowledge are uniquely difficult to identify.
I don’t think there’s a spectrum between “no-platforming” and “unimportant”. I think they’re opposites in a way that doesn’t come full-circle, but haven’t thought about this hard enough to be sure. It’s certainly worth exploring.
Using the word “anti-meme” absolutely could be used to defend ideas from valid criticism, as illustrated by Isnasene’s comment to a similar post. Lisp is indeed an excellent example here. I think the library problem was its biggest issue and this got overlooked by early proselytizers.