Becoming a Memetic Heretic 🤺
Memes spread from mind to mind without real defense
Memetics is the study of how ideas spread.
Heretics reject religious ideas.
Memetic Heretics are people who are able to reject the current popular trends despite huge social cost & keep forging forward.
Today, ideas propogate through black rectangles in our pockets.
Before, they were delivered through parchment & blood.
Don’t say the word “Contrarian”
There are so many people who label themselves contrarians in Silicon Valley. It is a meme spread by Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois & the rest of Founders’ Fund Mafia—ignore them.
What ideas are truly yours?
Inspecting your mimetic programming forces you to a simple question:
What ideas have I actually come up with?
In what way have you remixed previous components? How have you changed them in your own way?
I followed this meme for over 1/3 of my life!
I found Hacker News at 19, headed to Silicon Valley at 24, got into YC at 28 (didn’t attend), chased the meme dream until 33—then I woke up in a strange place.
The YCombinator memetics were so damn powerful—they ruled me.
Every interesting side quest I went on broke their rules.
But they worked for me.
What new ideas deserve to be passed on forever?
There are so many dimensions this question can take. Humans produce information at an incredible clip!
As I try to figure out which quests I can best help out with, this is what I keep asking myself:
How can I find someone with an idea that is genuinely new?