Tag: Games

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Culture

Day 1136 and Shopping in Heels

I had some practical acquisitions that needed to be purchased. They were most easily purchased via an in person retail environment for reasons I won’t get into. I much prefer ecommerce but not everywhere has Amazon if you can believe it.

I wanted to get this done quickly. While it’s true I like to putter around many types of stores. I’m quite fond of browsing in grocery stores for instances. But I prefer to be ruthlessly pragmatic when it comes to necessities. Browsing can be your enemy when you know exactly what you want.

Much of shopping can be a hostile and adversarial environment. Merchandising, pricing, sales associates all work on your focus and attention.

I have a few tricks I use on my own psychology if I would prefer my limited cognitive energy be used on more important decisions than what I’m about to purchase. Deciding between a bunch options for a non important decision weighs on your capacity. I don’t know if science has replicated decision fatigue but it sure feels like it’s real to me.

I wore a pair of high heels to go shopping in this case. It’s just enough discomfort to provide a bit of focus. I wouldn’t want to stay on my feet overly long in heels so I’ll encourage myself to make decisions quickly and not linger over it.

I was able to easily and without agonizing make quick decisions on a number of purchases. Once something fell within 80% of the parameters I’d set out for the item I know I wished to buy I said yes and moved on. It really can be that easy. I’d rather use my focus on important things.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1116 and Ask Me How I Know

I’ve developed a little social tic. If I am saying something a bit provocative I throw in a little joke.

“Ask me how I know”

I’ve come to use when I’ve learned a lesson the hard way. It will usually be revealing about my own shit and the lessons I’ve learned by making mistakes.

Taking action reduces uncertainty. To resolve uncertainty we must constantly be taking actions. But we make mistakes all the time in doing so. Owning up to our faults, foibles, and blind spots is the hallmark of responsibility.

So if I quip on some bit of social commentary and jokingly say “ask me how I know” it’s a bit of a peekaboo.

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Community

Day 1103 and Choosing Optimism

We finally got some significant snowfall in Montana last night. We’ve had a dry and relatively warm winter, so having half a foot of light powder was good news. It seemed to put everyone I met today in spirits.

I had cause to go into town and it was all smiles everywhere we went. A quick doctor visit was all enthusiastic exchanges about how beautiful it was outside.

The universe must have picked up on my general optimism as while we were in town some friends texted let us know they were coming through on their way to the airport. The timing worked perfectly as we went over to the other side of the valley to meet up before their next bit of travel and intersected for some socializing. Football games, bingo nights and bar food certainly sounds like a nice night in America.

As much pessimism infects our daily narratives, sometimes all it takes is a snow day and being together to remind you that we’ve got of reasons for optimism.

After reading about Joel Mokyr’s Culture of Growth thesis on the importance of a positive mindset for technological progress I’m reminded again that we have to bring that mindset to daily life.

The popularity of the e/acc mindset is a reminder that we can choose optimistic narratives to reset the negative algorithmic tilt. I am grateful for every social interaction I have with others who want to discuss progress. I see commitments in lives every day to building. There is optimism everywhere from biohacking to open source software to bingo nights.

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Community Finance Startups

Day 1070 and Allocating Personal Capital

As part the part of Twitter called TPOT comes into its own power the topic of resource allocation and how to route projects to sources of capital game up with Brooke Bowman of VibeCamp. It is a key question for Network State like entities that will need to navigate social ties.

I want to share how I do it as I’ve rooted some amount of capital across very different communities. I do it with some sets of intuitions I’ve gained from existing in a very powerful network of interests that are “The Silicon Diaspora” which is a syncretic coalition.

Much of it comes down to very specific context of what others are looking for in terms of outcomes. Investors with a specific thesis are much easier to work with for this reason. I try to express mine clearly at chaotic.capital and express myself actively through revealed preferences. I assume nothing is personal & everyone is working with some amount of emotional reactivity as it’s a human business.

A lot of it comes down to knowing who is a node in your network that can redirect it to someone who believes their resources can see a good return on their goals that are varying levels of abstract and personal. Skills and passions vary and this is good. It’s a mix of social capital, actual capital, and attention and it’s a giant game of inference

Some folks very good nodes and quite open to a range of different types of projects. Sometimes it’s just as simple as asking if they know someone who knows someone. I see a lot that isn’t in my own thesis but it’s in my own interest to pass it to others for whom it might be. The ecosystem approach has maximum strength when it’s played as a multi-agent pro-social game.

Also you almost never know someone’s full history so taking any reaction super personally is something I find to be too much for my own emotions. And I know a lot of history so if I can’t do it I try to make the presumption others can’t either. Be kind but clear.

That helps avoid a lot of accidental feuds that otherwise can ignite if you try to be delicate. I find transparent assessments of my own incentives goes a long way if I express it as part of my own reason for aligning. This is how I’ve worked with communities as diverse as back to the land doomers and crypto futurists to effective acceleration.

This is a fancy way of saying I don’t think “gossip” aka information sharing is actually bad but part of the empathy process of understanding what people want to work on and pay attention to in how they marshal their capital. You intake the values of your coalition and find shared ground. You keep their confidences by expressing collective goals. I try not to overweight my goals in that process. You have to do what’s right knowing outcomes are uncertain.

Showing you understand their context, their fears and their reputations concerns helps you. An act we denigrate in popular culture actually helps you to deepen the relationships as each signifier breaks down space between two people and builds trust. So don’t knock gossip. It has evolutionary, societal and individual benefit. Just remember the ultimate outcome is about bringing people closer.

Day 146 Gossip

I believe we are in an era where individuals can exercise significantly more agency because of the high leverage nature of the tools available to us. We owe much of this to information access and that is a wide coalition of people who are exercising basic freedoms to self determine because of this march of technology.

It’s my belief that freedom to compute is freedom of speech and these digital communities represent what I hope is more effective self governance through decentralization. We must build up the social trust amongst each other by showing we value each other’s interests. I believe this to be the right thing to do for each other. It’s the human thing too.

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Aesthetics Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 1066 and Behind The Scenes of Thousand Scenes Flourishing

We are living in an era of competing totalizing narratives. We assign Jungian archetypes and monomyths to complicated people and complex situations with many variables.

We ship relationships and stan fandoms even as the meme message is that we should be shipping code and forming bonds with other people with agency.

Remember that hyperstition is about bringing a reality into being. We have agency to impact the world we live in. We have more control than ever and anyone can get leverage.

I’m so inspired to see how many communities are facing an uncertain future head on. Sure we’ve had schisms and it’s easy to judge someone else’s sincere revivalism with crass cynicism.

I prefer an optimism about what we can all accomplish when we compete to serve a need better than anyone else. I like specialization as the more knowledgeable that is dispersed widely beyond a priest cast the better we seem to do as a species. A whole world of people is calling to you to own more of the future personally.

You may wonder what you can contribute. And sure some actors are massively more agentic. I never thought I’d be in that rare class and yet I can contribute meaningful to dozens of aligned projects. It’s important to avoid dickriding. Don’t make up stories about your betters. Or at least try not to believe them.

You can be personally better yourself. You can accelerate. Now is the time to arm yourself with leverage as the world shifts. Be wary of messiahs and mercenaries but also know action is expensive.

Strong organizations have healthy value memetics. “Just Do It” frames a broader truth that humans take in a context of millions of other agents. Action is disproportionally powerful when people just play their role.

I fight nihilism. I’m not eager for the end of humanity or our civilizations. I want our flourishing. But neither am I attached to a static vision of my humanity or yours. In the image of God gives quite a bit of latitude for our species’ evolution.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1046 and Aestheticization of Techno-Capital

Aestheticization of politics is to 1930s :: Aestheticization of techno-capital is to 2020s

Julie Fredrickson

Does anyone have a Walter Benjamin AI agent I can borrow? I’m working on the above analogy as I believe we may be seeing a similar form of reactionary populism with techno-capital finding itself at the center of a similar aestheticization process inside the accelerationist movements.

Its (mankind) self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin

The various branching of accelerationist thought has gone from university critical theorists towards the event horizon of techno-capital. It’s all playing out across fragmented social media platforms.

I don’t have a full analysis of what’s happening but e/acc’s first genuinely funny attack vector is a femcel coded brigade of glowie girlboss NFT grifts calling themselves “based retard gang” and Lil Clear Pill. They made a whole cute/acc manifesto riffing Landian NEET asexuality aesthetics just to sell some shit. Which is obviously the most techno-capitalism shit I can imagine. For watchers of the space it’s the Milady/ Remelia folks drifting into the slipstreams of e/acc for a buck.

If none of that scans for you don’t worry, I’m confident you are happier for it. It’s just interesting to see the branching and threading and hijacking of these schismatic groups all in search of clout and capital.

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Culture

Day 1045 and History Repeating

I’ve been feeling grateful to be older. I’m also feeling grateful to have been educated in a family that valued learning history. The more I see how much we repeat the same stories, the more I realize we just don’t change very much. Maybe the characters and the contexts change, but we sure like to hum a familiar tune.

I’m glad as I acquire more context that I am even able to see another turn of the wheel. It makes me feel like I’ve got a chance to avoid being caught in the churn. If you are a fan of science fiction you might recognize the churn from the Expanse. I’ll let one of the heroes explain it.


Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new.

The Expanse

The rules change. But the game remains the same. Human nature doesn’t really change at all just our circumstances.

And as circumstances change so do the rules of how we navigate the world. But the real game has only one outcome. You win and the prize is surviving. The rest is just context.

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1028 and Mimicry In The Age of High Variance

Do you recall a time when you “looked up to someone?” I mean this in the genuine possibly naive sense of admiration, not the specific act of being shorter than someone and looking up to meet their gaze.

As 5’3” female I’m basically always looking up. Alas I’ve found that genuine admiration is in much shorter supply in my adulthood than I was led to believe it would be as a child.

I’m sure some of this is the cynicism of my old age, but it’s hard not to notice the impacts of institutional distrust and 24/7 social media on admiration.

We know too much and it’s become harder to forget that homo sapians are irrational hypocritical reactive mammals whose our biology & culture engages us in nearly constant status seeking social games.

Sure you can blame Instagram for making us shallow mimics of prestige and power, but I’d bet your average anthropologist would be happy to walk you through the evolution of simian social dynamics. We’ve always been this way.

The additional complication is that we’ve come to expect more social mobility even as the gap between plebian and aristocrat has seemingly widened. Not that those terms have any static meaning. We no longer have strict birthright nobility as power has become more intertwined with economic power.

Nevertheless it would seem we expect, through such cultural innovations as the American Dream and capitalism, to have a chance at becoming high status ourselves.

It’s no wonder we struggle to find admiration when we see even the least impressive among us are rewarded with baffling sums of wealth, power and prestige. The term influencer is loaded for a reason.

And so our youth are despondent and depressed and our elites venal and sinful. The variance in personal outcomes has never seemed less socially satisfying. What do you mimic if the outcomes on display on your algorithms are at once impossible to achieve and derived from seemingly meaningless actions? I honestly don’t fucking know. You will have to figure that out for yourself now.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 989 and Autopoietic Ergodicity

In one of my group chats, I hang out with a bunch of rationalist machine learning engineers who are happily climbing the rungs of accelerating life.

I really love the energy of the community as it’s centered tangibly around making things. It’s a little less talk and a lot more action. It’s got a bit of a feeling of Stack Overflow’s early helpfulness but without the Hacker News nerd sniping culture. It’s like the best of a small Reddit thread but for dudes who want to make shit with artificial intelligence.

Now, of course, every community finds itself with disruptive members and turf fights over social mores. Virtual spaces are notorious for clout chasing and personal dramas. Veterans of green text wars are familiar with Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution.

And so it seems fitting that last night, in a much bigger very public egregore that is e/acc’s online community, we got to witness an immune reaction to someone trying to apply non-consensus standards.

I spent an hour watching it play out last night and then went back to reading before bedtime. I’ve got some personal investment in the space and it’s people, so of course that’s what I’m doing on a Friday Night.

But as I got up the next day and saw everyone going back to work, a insightful lowbie named bmorphism (slang for smaller anon accounts on Twitter within subcultures) introduced me to a term I’d never heard before. Autopoietic Ergodicity. Or how do multi-actor dynamic systems self regulate?

He introduced me Autopoietic Ergodicity via a link on PerplexityAI which seemed appropriate. And it got me thinking about how we as individuals interact on a much wider system and how it interacts with us.

The term combines two ideas by positing that complex adaptive systems (like living organisms or ecosystems) exhibit self-regulating behavior that enables them to maintain persistent patterns while also experiencing change from external influences. These systems are capable of minimizing changes caused by random factors, ensuring their essential dynamics remain stable without needing to undergo a complete reset or cycle back to the initial state. It’s like having a dampening mechanism that continually adjusts for fluctuations, allowing system resilience and long-term persistence in an ever-changing environment.

It’s my suspicion that something special is happening across portions of the fracturing social web as most of our platforms go back under more centralized control. The system is fighting back.

A meme using a Dune visual that originally has the elder Etreides saying to Paul “we need to cultivate desert power” with a substitution “autist power”

The grey tribes that have populated Silicon Valley have an opinion about the future. And it’s a positive one. We’ve got to find ways to be resilient in the face of memetic interference on our systems. There will be high energy distractions. We’ve got to be reminded that it’s a competition for efficient use of energy and we shouldn’t let it be drained. We’ve got to focus on making things that speak for themselves.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 957 and Will It Blend?

We are deep in the dog days of summer. I ran a fever and found myself dead asleep till nearly 1pm as my body valiantly struggled to process deluge of stress hormones I’d let pile up. I missed recording a podcast but the fever broke. I’ll catch up.

Meanwhile, on the website formerly known as Twitter, an epic battle of meaning was waged. The group mind egregore known as “this particular corner of Twitter” asked you to take a pill and/or hit a button.

A classic “my child said” poast with a twist on Newcomb’s Problem and Nash Equilibrium

And thousands of jacked in minds, from neu-fascism-IQers-must-speciate-eugenicists & red-rose transhumanist-luxury-space-communists to normie-Dad-banger-poasters, all raced to decide the meaning of the ultimate symbol.

Who lives and who dies when we can no longer coordinate exclusively within our ingroup?

Absolute fucking chaos. The collective of our shared internet went into a frenzy of consensus making.

Would you walk away from Omelas? Or would you save yourself? Would the gods of rationalism betray your soul with the knowledge that the good of the one can and does outweigh the good of the many?

In which selective phrasing has me deciding I shouldn’t jump into a blender but because I am me I also must immediately counter signal

Are you willing to step into a blender to save the normies? No? Yes? Fuck! Roko (of Basilik fame) redefined the problem space.

And then because we all must troll, we all stepped into a blender for the good of our species. Well, I wanted to annoy Roko. So I said I would when I voted that I wouldn’t. Because all serious social question can and should be trolled.

The choice is yours and yours alone

In the space of a day, we all leapt into the proverbial blender to save the naive, the kind, and the fucking stupid. It’s what Spock have done for us. Pro-social is the logical choice. Or is it? Is it better to be red than dead? None of us know.

I personally hope we all continue to create an eternal refinement culture of love and hope across all cycles of time to come.

I found it to be a privilege to be a member of the hive mind. We are all the alignment. Our consensus efforts inside the plutocrats toy is more likely to bring about the singularity than almost any other activity I can imagine.

It is a privilege to be in the egregore. My smol sensemaker syncretic smooth brain being hooked up into the wider hive for “Red vs Blue Walk Away From Omelas Boogaloo” is quite literally divine. To retweet each others bangers is to see the face of God. Just try and remember the truth. There is no blender.