Thread by @eriktorenberg

Reality is up for grabs right now.

We're seeing more and more groups bootstrapping their own reality.

People call this "community building" but sometimes it's literally people defecting the shared sense of mainstream reality that has existed for centuries and creating new ones

Faith in institutions are crumbling at the same time the platforms for people to exit their own realities & enter new ones are growing

In the most uncertain time of some ppl's lives (COVID), ppl are scrambling for leaders who can give them a sense of what reality is or should be

Due to information & complexity overload, some ppl are
seeking sources of complexity-containment as if they were being chased by a saber-tooth tiger.

This explains conspiracy theory hysteria etc. In an age of increasing fragmentation, ppl are desperate to adopt a shared reality

"If you have a creative vision of what the world is, or should be, and you have the will to create cultural artifacts that embody that vision of reality, and you just have the discipline and skill really to push it through, then you are essentially the founder of a new reality."

"This prediction of the theory seems borne out by what is now called "the creator economy." What we call "content creators" are really seed-stage reality entrepreneurs, & what we call their "fans" are consumers of—&investors in—the entrepreneur's model of reality" - Justin Murphy

Another version of this my friend calls kaleidoscope theory

Culture fragments into thousands of shards.

Each culture plays out its own fantasies alongside all the other cultures.

The result is skyrocketing cultural innovation, at the cost of shared alignment on anything.

A good tradeoff, assuming it doesn't lead to complete disaster.

Or alternatively, a barbell model.

Thousands of shards, a few big religions, and nothing in the middle.

VR (or AR) isn't just a literal technology, it's also a metaphor. The metaphor might be bigger than the tech

What about shared reality? Didn't we have it?

No, we had shared myth, where everyone was under the same delusions.

In the info age, you can't keep up the delusions anymore.

But the more info/data there is, the more arguments over what's true.

Gurri:

https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1205372119762079745?s=20

When all information was centralized & you only ever knew a small group of ppl, you could spend enough time with people to collectively sense-make & get on the same page.

But when you can talk to orders of magnitude more ppl in much more superficial ways, aligning is impossible.

What else explains the need for reality entrepreneurs?

Reality itself is being blunted.

Liberal wealthy societies have a fundamental contradiction: They try to reduce conflict & protect people, yet their media is fundamentally obsessed with violence & perversion. Schizophrenic.

America solves this problem by allowing for the full range of human experience, but at the level of *virtual reality* only.

It's a contradiction between politics of safety and the aspiration towards extreme experiences.

In an effort to protect, we've stymied the vitality

In other words, Trump provides America with the simulation of living through an incipient fascist dictatorship without actually delivering it

Seattle & Portland etc provide America w/ the simulation of living through the Maoist cultural revolution without actually delivering it

You can tell that something is LARPing by the low body count.

Real communists & fascists kill millions of people.

Much of the war takes place on Twitter. Twitter makes you think it's the French Revolution. Even the worst of cancel culture is a cake walk in comparison.

Maybe virtualism is just the end-result of liberalism.

Makes sense that in a true marketplace of ideas, you'd end up with a long-tail of realities.

Liberalism & capitalism created an opening, & social media fanned the flame, effectively creating a stock market of realities.

Anytime you talk about communities bootstrapping their own realities, you risk devolving into cults.

So the Q is what's the community design that's most amenable to the equal & full emancipate emancipation or empowerment of all the members involved, without devolving into cult?

Bruno Macaes' unorthodox take is that post-truth era could be good.

The great thing about fantasy, the logic goes, is that everyone can have their own, whereas facts (or modernity) can be limiting & even authoritarian in comparison.

Just need to make fantasies that can work.

Much of this was inspired or quoted from @MacaesBruno's book, "History has Begun", @jmrphy Hard Fork series & recent podcast, and conversations with others.

amazon.com/dp/B086CD1Q6D/…

theotherlifenow.com/hard-forking-r…

jmrphy.libsyn.com/internet-vital…

Obviously it could also be immensely bad.