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The Malignant Meme: Why Ideas Behave Like Cancer
Paperback
General Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral Sociology
Publisher Price: $24.99
Publisher: Jtd Portfolio Management
Published: Sep 1 2026
Pages: 210
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
We have built an information environment that systematically selects for certain kinds of ideas - not because they are true, or useful, or good for us, but because they are well adapted to the environment itself.
Some of these ideas behave, in every meaningful sense, like malignant growths: spreading rapidly, resisting correction, adapting under pressure, and causing harm that scales with their reach.
Drawing on Richard Dawkins's foundational concept of the meme, industrial engineer and systems designer Jody Dyer builds a precise diagnostic framework for understanding how ideas go malignant - and what it would actually take to stop them.
Across twelve chapters and thirteen analytical exhibits, The Malignant Meme examines:
- Why the information environment selects for harmful ideas the same way biology selects for adaptive organisms
- How to identify a malignant meme using five diagnostic criteria
- The lifecycle of a malignant idea from initiation through entrenchment - and where intervention is still possible
- How cognitive biases make us systematically vulnerable - and what partial defences look like
- What artificial intelligence is doing to the speed, scale, and personalization of memetic spread
- What individuals, platforms, regulators, and educators can realistically do
Rigorous but accessible, analytical but urgent, The Malignant Meme is for anyone who has watched a false idea spread faster than the truth and wondered why - and whether anything can be done about it.
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