Unless you're in one, no one likes an echo chamber. In fact, in my experience most people in echo chambers dislike echo chambers but don't recognise themselves as being in one. There's a pushback going on against social media algorithms turning our online lives into one expansive echo chamber, showing us things we're apt to agree with, hiding anything too thought-provoking, convincing us that our views are normal and others are aberrant.

People tend to believe instead that we benefit from diversity of ideas, from being challenged and having to challenge others. Even platforming pretty horrific ideas is championed by free speech advocates, the idea being that it is better to know about and argue down such ideas than let them gestate in echo chambers.

At its worst, memetic inbreeding can lead to terrorist attacks, race hate, suicide cults and other forms of violence. At its best, annoying forms of censorship and interesting religions. At its most bizarre, conspiracy theories and the likes of Scientology. Groups of susceptible people exploited and isolated, brainwashed, turned away from doubt, handed a platter of enemies and a simple means of identifying them (generally anyone who disagrees with any echoes).

There's an analogy here between culture and biology. Spread the genes apart. Diversity is prosperity. Don't fuck your siblings. The key to optimising the information one has for a job or a role or an environment is to explore that information space, be it genetic or memetic, look for better, more advantageous positions in that space and to allow that position the flexibility to respond to changes. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, queer rights, trans rights, animal rights, conservation, climate action... These all speak to how successfully we can change our positions when we explore different ideas, despite the outrage of echo chambers. Indeed, thesis, antithesis, synthesis: the dialectic of philosophy mirrors nature's schematic for improving our genes by adding the best of others' to our genome.

But... if we're going to take the analogy seriously, memetic inbreeding ought to have benefits sometimes. It is thought that we evolved the social characteristics we have by first the isolation of and then the reintroduction of a small related group that had slightly speciated. Kin selection kick-started reciprocal altruism which matured in a small pocket of our ancestors' population. When that pocket was reintroduced, the social characteristics they had gave them a competitive advantage: the population as a whole came to reflect this more competitive subgroup.

I feel like this probably happens with memetic inbreeding too: good ideas might develop faster in an echo chamber than they would out in the open. In some ways, specialisation does this. The trick is to end the isolation of the echo chamber and to let the idea stand on its own two feet and compete in the broader information space. If it's worth as much of a damn as its acolytes believe, it ought to prosper.

The isolated genius seems to be an extreme example of memetic inbreeding, where only one person's ideas get an airing, and this seems to follow the pattern of prospering in the wider world. Groups of like-minded individuals, small cultural or political movements that end up making big waves, were probably no more tolerant of outside opinion than the space-Jew-fearing anti-vaxx Qunatics of today. The difference is that the former lived or died in the big wide world, while the latter are cowards who retreat to their echoing caves at the first sign of contradiction or, worse, use guns when words fail.

Perhaps echo chambers aren't the problem. The problem is our self-infantilisation that never allows them to mature into something prosperous or die trying.