Lands of Lorecraft

The dying world I spent so many years understanding on the other hand, despite the powerful normalcy field surrounding it, is in fact the less real world. The magical thinking that governs it is all the more powerful because those caught up in it are not even aware of it. 

But of the two worlds I’ve been witnessing, I am becoming convinced that the emerging weird world being claimed by lorecraft, with tarot cards and literal magical thinking in the mix, is actually more real, and has been all along.

If this hypothesis of lorecraft as an emerging managerial capability is correct, any organization — be it a traditional corporation, a DAO, or just a complex money-making coordination pattern passing through Twitter or TikTok like a wave — will thrive and do interesting things to the extent it has both interesting ideas and content — and skilled lo... See more

And the way you get good at it is by getting increasingly attuned to the softer, subtler side of organizations. To the extent these subtle and nebulous forces can be understood and manipulated with precision and deftness (soon with deep learning for leverage), you get vastly more sophisticated organizations. 

But there’s a really compelling alternate hypothesis — lorecraft is how you design and manage organizations where all the dull and boring stuff is increasingly being automated away, and what’s left of management and leadership functions is increasingly just the interesting and hard to automate stuff.

This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a cope. 

This suggests a skeptical null hypothesis — lorecraft is perhaps a kind of self-soothing behavior in individuals caught up in a highly automated, non-nurturing, and inhuman work environment. Being raised by TV is a walk in the park compared to being raised by apps.

Instead of work as something you do for a maternalistic entity with a human face (sometimes nurturing, sometimes abusive) between you and every algorithmic process, you get a cloth mommy API if you’re lucky and a wire mommy API if you’re not.

When you start earning a living in what seem like play money tokens that are mysteriously valuable enough to pay your bills with, you really start to take a hard look at what the so-called adults have been telling you, about how the world works.