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Here's @vgr reflecting on the (computational) asymmetry between recognising a valid narrative structure, and generating an interesting story that is so validated. There's a couple recent threads in which I've talked about this in logical/computational terms, so I'll link below.
1. A thread responding to @cstross in which I discuss the how computational asymmetries articulate the aesthetic distinction between taste and inspiration:
2. A very brief description of @chrisamaphone's work and how it articulates this difference between generation/validation in precise terms:
So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.
I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.
Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.
I think we tend to overplay the weirdness of the way internet meme culture intersects with post-neoliberal politics, because we see history from the inside, which produces extreme dissonance between our familiarity with a meme in one context and its appropriation by another.
This produced a bunch of hysterical overreactions to the appropriation of Pepe by the alt-right, and the memetic war machine of the Boogaloo Bois, when historically they’re pretty normal. Grass roots movements use any symbolic resources to hand when building social networks.
This is one way in which a counter-culture bootstraps itself, by creating systems for authenticating in group speech for passing information amd organising. This is what makes it cohere as a platform for action. Divergence from the mainstream culture is a feature not a bug.
