Thread by @visakanv

when I meditate deeply and become absolutely still, it becomes clear to me that society has still not even really begun to understand the power and potential of social media

@boop why are we like this

big reason for this is that people primarily operate via outdated intuitions based on past experience with past tools, and their imagination is constrained accordingly

the analogy I've used so far to talk about this is how people used to treat the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar for almost 30 years before jimi hendrix came along & demonstrated how you could push it to its limit

not a perfect analogy bc guitar is (mostly) single-player

(hendrix wasn't the first, like how pythagoras wasn't either, but yadda yadda. mainstream narrative is formed around what most people are most familiar with)

would be kind of arrogant of me to insist that I am here to be The Jimi Hendrix Of The Internet, but I think I'm comfortable saying that I am the Jimi Hendrix Of Twitter Threads, for starters

generally speaking most people live in the past

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1366136513164054529

maybe the most epic things people have done with social media you could say are things like "meme the guy into the whitehouse", "storm the capital" etc... IMO all of this is still extremely early stage, play-doh stuff. I believe the real stuff will reshape society Foundationally

here's an interesting thing to chew on – electricity was an innovation over steam, and even when it showed up, it took 50 years for systems to truly, fully adapt. we are still in the middle of the system adaptation for "everyone can publish"

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/983545624745267201

science and education should be completely revolutionized from the ground up. people get excited for a minute when they watch a ted talk, and then after about a year of trying some stuff they give up. but these things take decades even when the writing is on the wall

aside and in parallel: the challenge for a lot of people, based on a bunch of conversations I've had, seems to be: how to be excited about something relatively slow-moving over a lengthy period of time. this is actually a storytelling skillset I think

in concrete terms about my own publishing, which is sort of performance art: just as I grew from nothing to ~30k on twitter I will grow from nothing to 100k+ on youtube and use that to organize/coordinate human networks in cities worldwide

are you getting it? this isn't about ME, I am just a wave in the ocean, I may as well be anonymous. this is about NETWORK EFFECTS that for some reason 99.99% of people are still oblivious to. but whatever, because

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1360222712124219392

"give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I'll sell ads and merch to make money to buy consumer products for myself" – lots of people

hrm I am taking this in a slightly weird direction today lol

point is

we have not begun to scratch the surface

we are in the early days

the biggest things we've seen are but a fraction of what is to come

it's always been that way and people are always surprised nevertheless

here's another random-ish related thought

there are so many people in the world that it actually makes perfect sense, from a cost-benefit analysis POV, to completely ignore/ghost anybody who doesn't understand you

that can be rude, so I wouldn't go that far, but think abt it

because you will never even talk to 0.01% of people. that's 700,000 people

brains designed for tight knit group of ~150 people, maybe a small multiple of that

culture designed for 10,000-100,000ish

in a world of ~7,700,000,000

the opportunities aren't just infinite, they are UNIMAGINABLE because our imagination is constrained by our history/culture

we are like little babies playing with the froth at the farthest reach of the tide, trying to conceive of the true scale of the ocean

do you know how big the ocean is; if you even begin to try to map it onto your intuitions you'll still be wrong

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/996272715232198657

and we get all caught up in our petty local drama, lol

can't be too harsh/mean to ourselves about that, we do have primate monkey brains. we are doing pretty good given the constraints

people be like "help me o lord why do I keep thinking bout the titty" and not "damn, fucken chimpanzees managed to calculate the curvature of the earth and photograph it from outer space and send probes into deep space"

anyway yea this is why I don't meditate too much. that way I can rest easy, relax and think about

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1362900338005614592

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