22: Nadia Asparouhova - Ideas that Infect
Nadia Asparouhova (Website, X, Substack) is a writer and researcher who has spent much of her career in service of the question: 'what's happening here?' across various parts of the internet.Nadia recently published her newest book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. She explores why consequential ideas, unlike memes and supermemes, fail to spread. She also recounts the last several years of online public and private life and how we're all less naive than we were in previous eras of the internet. Critically, she suggests a path toward poking our heads out of group chats and silos to engage in publicly discussing or promoting the ideas that matter most.Her first book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, was published by Stripe Press. Nadia also worked at Substack, Protocol Labs, and Github, and has written extensively on Silicon Valley Culture; the importance of ideas and institutions; consciousness, attention, and meditation; and more.Nadia's self-described sweet spot is when people respond to her writing by saying,"I read this piece and it gave me words for a thing that I didn't know how to express before." I can attest that is true, both for Antimemetics and for much of her other thinking. And as much as she writes about ideas, I admire how focused she is on how they might produce action.Nadia believes that important ideas infect us, and the reasonable response to that is to be tremendously thoughtful about our attention.
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 22 with Nadia Asparova. Nadia is a writer, researcher, and something of an internet sociologist. Nadia recently published her latest book, Anti-Memetics, where she details the last near decade of the internet, how public and private spaces have evolved, and critically, why some ideas, unlike memes, resist spreading rather than spreading virally. Much of our conversation is focused on the ideas in this book, but we also talked about Nadia's other writing. Including her incredible blog and newsletter, as well as a bit about her first book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, which was published by Stripe Press under her prior name, Nadia Egbal.
Nadia also previously worked at Substack, Protocol Labs, and GitHub, and has worked as a researcher in multiple contexts supported by a number of organizations. My favorite thing about Nadia is that she seems simultaneously deeply interested in ideas and ultimately focus on how they can produce action in the world. We talk about that and much more, and we return, as Nadia does in her book, to the notion that attention is upstream of all of our ideas and all of our action. Thanks for listening to Dialectic, and if you enjoy it, please share it with a friend.
Here's Nadia. Nadia Asparova, welcome. Speaker B: Thank you. Speaker A: I'm really glad to be here with you. You— it's a kind of a recurring theme with this podcast, but you You have a lot of, you contain multitudes. There's lots of different ideas. We're not going to scratch all of them today, but hopefully we'll get into a lot of them. And I think that starts actually with ideas. There's a line in The New Yorker, uh, review of your recent book, Antimemetics, where he says, she is interested in ideas that cost something.
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