Are there any real-life examples of antimemes? How would antimemes even propagate given that they'd "die out" immediately?
In general a meme is specific to an entity-pair, with self-censoring information as a subset of antimeme that makes the information itself remove itself from the mind that learns it. In general though, information that is an antimeme is not the same thing as a category of information that describes an antimeme.
So, "your parents weird sextape" is generally antimemetic, you are unlikely to share that information yourself and I would not expect to see many examples where someone posted this. Your password is also antimemetic in most cases.
That said, information may contain both antimemetic and memetic components, such as "the game" (I just lost). The rules inherently are antimemetic and self-censoring, however the memetic component ensures this is still transmitted effectively to as many people as possible. A more entity-pair specific meme-antimeme relation is "where the good drug dealers hang out", which is information that is highly memetic or antimemetic under different conditions.
I think the key isn't to think of these things as strict categories, but labels we ascribe to a more continuous measure of memeablity.
Of note, information is actually pretty low entropy in general, there are only a few confined states that information is valid in. Erasure just makes it statistically hard to recover the information in a usable timeline. So going from a sequence of 1's to a sequence of any number is increasing entropy.
If you go through the solution to Maxwell's demon it will help here too
Also, chromosomes are nucleotide-encoded memes, and linear ones use teleomeres to impose limits on the number of replications they support, so that's another imperfect antimeme.
I know of no antimemes whose antiemetic nature comes from their ability to interfere with the human mind, but then again, I wouldn't know about them if they existed, which is more or less the book's point.
Another candidate is the common usage of memory-holing, where important information is removed from public perception maliciously. The Dubai Chocolate thing technically falls into here, as does the whole "war in Iran to distract from the Epstein files" thing. Frankly the whole Epstein stuff is riddled with malicious memes and antimemes to deliberately muddy the waters. Similar to deliberate attempts to inject insane conspiracy beliefs "the moon controls our brains" into conspiracy theories that are too close to something real "mk-ultra".
Consciousness for an antimeme is more of a classification error in my mind, as consciousness as a concept is permanently warped. But you could describe a secret society/dark family secret as a form of living antimeme, hiding some information and preventing it from being shared using a variety of means.
One possible antimemetic truth is "Most people are not good at what they care about".
• this person who suspects a research-related origin of covid is not a published, experienced virologist. Conclusion to draw: only virologists funded by research grants have credibility to sound-off publicly on covid origins. 'research-related covid origin' becomes an anti-meme.
• this person who asserted 'X' is an antisemite. (conclusion to draw: 'only people who accept 'not-X' are not antisemites' X becomes an anti-meme.
• this person who saw [unexplained craft in a sky / in a hangar] has Y derogatory items in their reputation. conclusion to draw: ;only people with derogatory reputations see UFOs' [unexplained craft] becomes an anti-meme.
To go further, Eric Weinstein vecame knwon for coining the term ‘pre-bunked’ narratives. This was a version of memetic inoculating where the debunking had to get out ahead of the inconvenient narrative requiring debunking. A good and (by now) pretty uncontested example of this was Peter Daszak’s actions throughout the first half of 2020, with The Lancet Letter (aka Calisher et al, The Lancet, 2020) he organized (with Nobel signatories no less) providing a massive pre-bunk at a time when few in the public were seriously countenancing any pandemic origin, much less a research-related one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19)
(I should offer disclaimer here that I remain an advisor to BiosafetyNow, an advocacy organization).How many people have been arrested for their involvement, again?