I just read a wild book about an organization that protects us all by dealing with with monsters that don’t want to be remembered.
There Is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm (“quantum”), aka Sam Hughes came from a regular on the SCP Foundation Wiki. The SCP Foundation (Secure Contain Protect) is an online collaborative writing project about a shadowy organization that battles and locks up “anomalies” that would drive people insane if they knew.
The Antimemetics Division is a barely-remembered part of the SCP Foundation tasked with protecting the world from anomalies that can steal or modify memories, and monstrous creatures that can’t, or shouldn’t be remembered.
It reminds me of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, but with a bit of sardonic humor. Memory loss is so existentially disturbing, and this is a horror book as well as imaginative science fiction, but qntm manages to find the humor in it.
An anti-meme is the opposite of a meme, a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to describe any idea that spreads through a culture.
An anti-meme resists spreading. Anti-memes are real, by the way. Dirty secrets, passwords, strings of random numbers. That includes the memory-thieving variety.
The smartphone should be an SCP if it isn’t already. Think how many phone numbers you forgot.
So much of this book has blown my mind. The degree to which memory determines what we think of as existence, the SCP from another universe changing everyone’s reality, the SCP that they have to “contain” OUTSIDE a hermetically sealed box.
There’s even a kind of afterlife that consists of self-aware memories. Craziness.
Most if not all of this book can be found on the SCP Foundation Wiki or in video format on YouTube, but I paid for the book, cuz I think this guy deserves it. Very imaginative stuff!
Maybe this will whet your appetite:
We Need to Talk About Fifty-five (SCP Orientation)
Late Boomer's Den 