My take is that religion’s role is to provide the necessary metaphors in order for individuals to navigate complex situations where being “good” isn’t clear.
We now have science to help us navigate these complex situations, but what is considered “good” is still up for debate.
Each deity worshipped functions as a vehicle through which these metaphors are told.
Religions started out with tales featuring many deities. This has trended downwards, from polytheism to monotheism to religions without deity figures, to pop culture references, to memes.
I’m not sure why it’s trended downwards, but my take is that deities as characters in these metaphorical tales makes for an unstable configuration as to the internal consistency of each metaphor.
But personifying values helps them spread easily via oral traditions.
Nowadays, we live in a world saturated with stories and characters. It would be unthinkable to imagine several characters or stories promoted to the level of deity personifying “good” values.
Religion has historically often been co-opted by different believers in what’s “good”.
i.e. What’s good for them
“If everyone coordinates themselves socially to do x, then y will happen, which makes or keeps me powerful/rich”
The situation we’re in right now with legacy religion & pop culture is one where both no longer helps individuals really navigate the complex situations we’re in.
We have the scientific method, but that’s not naturalistic enough. Most decisions in life are made naturalistically.
Pop culture signifies the logical conclusion of co-opting stories for personal gain. In capitalistic societies, there is no pretense of morality.
You can sell your stories directly in the marketplace to advance your own interests, plain as day.
Memes spread like wildfire on the Internet as a kind of hybrid between mythologies of antiquity & commercial pop culture, sharing traits of easy oral tradition and transparency of self interest.
This seems to suggest to us that such stories are limited by the carrying capacity of their underlying medium.
Oral traditions → Myths of antiquity
Printing press → Organized religion
TV/radio/film → Pop culture
Internet → Memes
Each epoch of “social programming” was also similarly fit to the sociotechnoeconomic reality of their time (that’s why they emerged):
Myths ↔ Hunter Gatherer
Org. Religion ↔ Agricultural Age
Pop Culture ↔ Industrial Age (Modern)
Memes ↔ Information Age (Postmodern)
It’s likely that the Information Age we’ve lived through since circa 1980 is drawing to a close.
Nothing substantial has emerged yet, but postmodern ideals have shown to be unfit for many of the complex existential risks facing us in a climate-challenged world.
Should we want to ensure a new form of mind-virus which carries with it the information needed to be a “good” human in our current complex environment, we likely need to invent a new medium which provides the necessary carrying capacity.
A mindvirus beyond GIFs & JPGs.
A lot of this thread was inspired by my current reading of “Snow Crash” @nealstephenson and “The Sovereign Individual”, so credit where it’s due!
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It’s going to be more and more difficult for nation states to continue imposing taxes on their citizens, as competition for tax havens heat up, and as leaks like this erode public trust.
Nation states that rely on taxation to finance operations will eventually be outcompeted.
Nations don’t reproduce, of course, unlike living things, but their influence is memetic and their ability to coerce citizens is a function of their ability to coerce the wealthiest of the world.
And increasingly, both are at historically low numbers.
The absolute kicker might come when it’s not just difficult to coerce the wealthiest to pay taxes, but difficult to coerce anybody, because crypto makes tax avoidance easy as pie.
Why is “taste” in something commonly framed as a linear scale?
i.e. “good taste”, “poor taste”
It’s a framing that I personally struggle with, for lack of a more fitting frame.
For example, you liked a show or a restaurant that has poor reviews. Do you have poor taste?
There is definitely a “better” ↔ “worse” dimension to taste, but perhaps a differrent dimension involves the person’s affinity to different tastes.
The people who didn’t like it are clearly more discerning than you about various aspects that you didn’t care about.
So back to the original example.
If you liked a show that had poor reviews, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have poor taste. It could mean that you don’t value aspects of it that others value, and you can accept those aspects even if they are of poor taste.
Perhaps the reason why interoperability is often more of a pipe dream (literally, as you pipe data manually from one API to another) than reality, is that it’s hard to truly capture value from a standard or a protocol. It’s easier to extract value from a platform or an app.
We see this in crypto. Ethereum, as a platform, will always be worth more than Polygon, Polkadot, or Chainlink.
We also see this with the web, where standards & protocols are subsidized by platform owners (Google, Apple, Microsoft).
We also see this in the smart home / IoT space. Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa are competing standards subsidized by the owners of their respective platforms. The money is made from the hub devices each company sells.
But the list of directions aren’t a map. They’re meant to be overlaid atop a map to make any sense.
Where is the actual map? Most companies don’t have them or even the tools to make one.
@johncutlefish@jimhead@intercom The insidious thing about calling that list of directions a 'map' is that everyone assumes the actual territory is implicitly known and well-understood, not to mention some the suspension of disbelief that for the “next quarter” the territory doesn’t shift as you navigate.
People like to demo multiplayer work tech to show small groups of people doing synchronous work together.
But the value of multiplayer spaces is allowing big groups of people to collaborate asynchronously on an ever-evolving artifact. oculus.com/experiences/qu…
With the ability to jump in and out. Bursts of activity.
Occasionally, collaborators overlap resulting in momentary synchronous collaboration.
An async model with smart synchronous conflict resolution means you get Git without merge conflicts.
The assumption that work happens only synchronously is dangerous.
Synchronous-only tools (like this Oculus app, video conferencing tools, or chat) encourage a high-presence, “interruptions and context switching is good”, low-time-preference culture.