Playing tai chi with memetic warfare

I was motivated to write Antimemetics in part because I felt dissatisfied with how we’ve unthinkingly glommed onto memetic warfare as a terminal explanation for why people do what they do. Memes and mimicry might explain some of our behavior today, but they aren’t an excuse to roll over and accept things exactly as they are. This seems like a profoundly defeatist way for us to justify our worst behavior. Aren't we humans creative creatures, blessed with the ability to design our way out of even the most hopeless situations?

I recently participated in a panel in San Francisco about how new technologies gain public legitimacy. My co-panelists were three founders who are doing this quite well: Laura Deming (Longevity Fund, age1, Until) Celine Halioua (Loyal), and Noor Siddiqui (Orchid), and whose respective fields – cryopreservation, longevity, and embryo selection – touch up against some of the most sensitive frontiers in biotech.

These are not easy topics to make legible, let alone popular, and they’ve historically been met with distrust from the public and media. If one were to follow the conventional internet playbook today, the best way to address such concerns is to own it. Take a stance. Don't be afraid to step on people's toes. Use polarizing, coded language to strengthen your support base. You get the idea. I am sure that each of these founders were given this advice at some point.

When I reflected upon what I admired about them, however, it’s that they've all succeeded by explicitly not playing into the memetic wars. Instead, they’ve taken care to present their ideas in a way that feels credible and trustworthy. They focus on the science. They highlight real stories and use cases that broaden their appeal. And they even, subtly, helped rewrite the language used to describe these topics.

Longevity, for example, was commonly called "anti-aging" until the mid-2010s. It was associated with pseudoscientific products, like supplements or experimental therapies, that promised to make people younger. As a scientific pursuit, it was regarded as a vain billionaires’ quest for immortality that was largely out of touch with the needs of average people today. Thanks to the efforts of Laura and others, longevity founders and researchers now talk about "extending healthy lifespan" and targeting age-related diseases, which is much more relatable and actionable. Loyal, too, started with an approachable use case – helping dogs live longer and healthier lives – that could pave the path towards human longevity. They are currently running the first-ever clinical study to be accepted by the FDA that studies lifespan extension explicitly (dogs or otherwise).

Embryo selection has been around since the 1990s, but even just a few years ago, expressing interest in the topic was a career risk. Stephen Hsu, a vice president at Michigan State University, was forced to resign in 2020 due to his interest in genomic predictors of complex human traits (i.e. polygenic screening – a composite score of multiple genes thought to influence a trait – as opposed to monogenic screening, which only looks for a specific mutation). Hsu cofounded the service Genomic Prediction, one of the first to offer polygenic embryo screening. The first baby to be born with their service was featured in a Bloomberg article as recently as 2021. Embryo selection still draws inevitable comparisons to Gattaca, but the conversation has become much easier to have thanks to Orchid, whose tagline is simply "Have healthy babies." Orchid sidesteps the “designer babies” conversation, instead focusing on screening for genetic traits that could significantly impact a child's health, such as heart defects, vision loss, or certain types of cancer.

Cryopreservation is still comparatively new in terms of its trajectory to social acceptability, but Laura was drawn to the field precisely because she noticed she had a reflexive aversion to it, and decided this meant it warranted further investigation. I have some idea of what she was grappling with: in 2015, intrigued by cryopreservation, I asked some friends about the process. A few emails later, I found myself in a video call with a jolly man who reminded me of Saul Goodman, dressed in a brightly-colored buttondown and clashing 90s-style power tie, trying to sell me life insurance. The experience was memorable, but not exactly something that would appeal to a wide customer base. Instead of catering to weird transhumanists who want to freeze themselves in hopes of being revived in the future,¹ however, Until (formerly Cradle) created a new conversation that’s centered around specific uses for cryopreservation, such as preserving organ tissue for transplants, or neural tissue for research.

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Life science technologies are an interesting counterexample to memetic playbooks, because they’re a place where we must face the dizzying, and often frightening, consequences of humans toiling on the frontier of progress. Our first reaction is often to flinch and look away: this is classically antimemetic behavior, where an idea feels too consequential to acknowledge. Many people don't want to think about the implications of a world where we can live forever, choose our babies' genetics, or be resurrected after death – and understandably so. Better to suppress the thought and push it away.

When trying to spread an idea that touches people's lives, families, and personal values in an intimate way, leaning into memetic contagion can make them feel more alienated and afraid, as if the idea is running away faster than they can safely process it. A different approach is to focus on being relatable, concrete, and credible:

• Relatable: Regular people can see themselves in the future you propose. Orchid and Loyal both have websites that one could imagine sending to a friend or family member, featuring soft colors, approachable logos and taglines, and photos of real people – whether that’s couples who’ve had babies with Orchid, or dog owners with their beloved pets.

• Concrete: Rather than trying to evoke a high-minded, Elysian future, identify use cases that would solve specific problems today. While Until doesn’t shy away from their long-term vision of human whole-body reversible cryopreservation, they are starting with organ transplants, and they point out that cryopreservation is already used in IVF and stem cell therapies.

• Credible: Science – and more importantly, the processes driving scientific discovery and consensus – is treated seriously. In its clinical study announcement, Loyal’s team states that they “made the decision from the start that we would seek FDA approval for our aging drugs. It’s a rigorous, expensive, years-long process that sets a very high bar for both safety and efficacy – exactly as it should be.”

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Finally, I've been thinking about how one might apply these learnings to what's happening at the intersection of neuroscience and contemplative science – such as advanced meditation, transcranial focused ultrasound, and breathwork – an area that I'm currently preoccupied with, and which suffers from similar public perception challenges. Many people are skeptical or dismissive, and rightly so, of anyone purporting to offer blissed-out happiness for the one-time price of $999. But that doesn't mean there isn't real science and insight buried amidst the noise, and figuring out how to tease that out properly, and communicate it to others, is a big reason why I'm so fascinated by this space.

In writing about these topics so far, I've noticed that people seem to appreciate a narrative that is relatable, concrete, and credible. A number of people, for example, told me that a magazine piece I wrote about the jhanas was something they could send to a friend or family member and not feel embarrassed by. The report we published last fall about how such practices impact people's lives was written as a research piece, rather than trying to sensationalize the upside. By explicitly taking on the role of the skeptic, one can build a rapport with readers who might have otherwise tuned out the message. (Michael Pollan did this well, I think, with his 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, which helped psychedelics cross the chasm from taboo to socially acceptable dinner topic.)

There are two failure modes that I've noticed in this world. The first is when the vision is too vague, promising non-specific outcomes like "happiness" or "wellbeing." I think they think they are being relatable (who doesn't want to be happy?), but these outcomes aren't concrete, and that makes people suspicious for the same reason that "immortality" doesn't resonate as well as "extending healthy lifespan."

The other, and perhaps less obvious, failure mode I've seen is overcorrecting for credibility and concreteness at the expense of relatability. These narratives are overly scientific: fMRI scans are prized over personal experience, with scientists offering detailed descriptions of neural processes that aren't contextualized and don't have clear practical implications. Use cases are narrow – treating a disorder or neurological disease – but feel disconnected from a bigger vision, and don't inspire the public with what's possible.

I love how Loyal decided to develop products aimed at "longevity for dogs," a premise that might initially throw people off guard, but ultimately attracts their curiosity. Inspired by this prompt, I’ve wondered: what would a "killer app" be for contemplative science?

I was at a dinner recently where the topic turned to sleep issues. It turned out that everyone at the table struggled with sleep, and each person had their own way of dealing with it. There were, of course, the typical melatonin and sleeping pill-type solutions, but also more unusual adaptive strategies. One person admitted that they hadn't slept through the night in decades, so they'd parlayed it into a finance trading habit. Another said they watched YouTube videos of coin pusher machines to fall back asleep (I looked these up, and they are indeed soporific).

I was amazed by how everyone at the table had some private, tortured relationship to sleep. Sleep quality is very much connected to one’s psyche, but telling people to “work on themselves” in order to sleep better is too vague to be useful. Instead, we peddle a bunch of Band-Aid solutions and placebos, as well as the ever-infuriating lifestyle suggestions (“don’t look at screens,” “read a book,” “only use your bed for sleep”). While some sleep problems certainly have physiological causes, such as hormonal imbalances or airway issues, if you're sleeping well, your mind and body are also likely at ease.

Figuring out how to fix sleep in a novel and deterministic way, then, could be an proxy for loftier goals like “happiness” and “wellbeing,” rather than chasing those states in the abstract. Just as GLP-1s are marketed as a weight loss drug, but also show promise in treating other reward system disorders (such as substance abuse and addiction), perhaps sleep could be an entry point that would concretize the potential of contemplative science more broadly.

Beyond life sciences or contemplative science, I’ve noticed that when the public expresses fear of technologies like social media or AI, tech often reacts by doubling down on their ingroup, instead of trying to genuinely engage with these concerns. I think it’s useful to consider why people might fear these things, and try to speak to them on an emotional level, instead of using it as an opportunity to engage in memetic warfare. Doing this well seems to have had a counterfactual impact in longevity, embryo selection, and cryopreservation so far. And if the goal is to make exciting new technologies socially legible, rather than scoring cheap points for one’s team, it’s worth trying a playbook that communicates from a place of trust and reassurance to win public approval.

1. This is a self-own: my uncle was the first person to be vitrified by Alcor, the leading cryonics service, in the early 2000s. I guess it runs in the family.