Nadia Asparouhova

@nayafia

publishing @asteriskmgzn // books: Working in Public (open source) + Antimemetics (ideas that don’t spread)

San Francisco

nadia.xyz

Joined June 2011

389 Following

29.7K Followers

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Nadia Asparouhova
@nayafia
Mar 26, 2025
I wrote a new book! It's called ANTIMEMETICS: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, and it's about ideas that don't want to be shared or remembered, despite their importance. Now available for pre-order: darkforest.metalabel.com/antimemetics
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Nadia Asparouhova
@nayafia
6h
I think we underestimate how technology affects not just how we live and work, but how we think. Our sense of self is so ingrained that most people assume the narrative self is the only version we have. A couple years ago, I accidentally discovered that there are several
Asterisk
@asteriskmgzn
7h
Games tell us what to do. For many people, this is a pleasant escape from having to write our life’s story for ourselves. Hannah Kim (@thisishannahkim) argues that this is more than a trend: that humans are increasingly moving away from narrative-based to game-like thinking.
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Nadia Asparouhova
@nayafia
Nov 10
Toby identifies one of tech’s great shortcomings today: that our moral systems are inherently organized around an individualistic, rather than shared world of institutions and social norms. It’s what makes Bay Area culture so distinct: a strange love of humanity, expressed
Asterisk
@asteriskmgzn
Nov 10
Transhumanism was designed to answer a distinctly 20th-century question: how do we improve the human? But today, we’re facing a different question: what are humans even for? @tobyshorin on what Silicon Valley’s transhumanists and meditators inherited from the German Romantics,
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Nadia Asparouhova
@nayafia
Oct 21
A funny thing about this is that by definition, this sort of authenticity can't be faked or exploited - people eventually figure out who's who. It's in some ways the easiest hack, but requires you to actually be a good person
will o’brien
@Willob
Oct 20
Another takeaway after three years of building a company is that the returns to just "being a good person", and not acting transactionally, are higher than I expected. There are so many transactional, boring, and at times immoral people in the tech industry that if you act with
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Nadia Asparouhova
@nayafia
Oct 19
I've come to believe that it's a lack of self-reflection, not being conniving or manipulative, that makes someone a bad person. Everyone engages in occasional behavior that is harmful. A "good person" takes that feedback to heart, takes responsibility for their actions, and
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