SpaceXponential

The upshot is this: Communities and cults are both valid and reasonable ways to organize social structures. Flat communities worked well in the early internet of high barriers to participation and limited people and content. Hierarchical cults work better today, when the internet has a plethora of content and people, and all those barriers have fal... See more

Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said: " The ... See more

In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse.  In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutio... See more

The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least... See more

Immutability, as it turns out, is not always well defined. In the case of blockchain, it does not mean that the records can never be changed or rolled back. Blockchain trust is immutable not in a binary sense, but in a probabilistic sense. Distinguishing untrustworthy chains from the consensus is not an all-or-nothing decision. The more subsequent ... See more

... I realized I associate art with gifts. You don’t mark a true gift with a monetary value. You don’t predict the rise and fall of that value. If an art is important to you, you want to hold onto it, instead of trading it with others. And if an art is to initiate a spiritual experience for an audience, it should not involve itself with transa... See more

Every good cult leader needs a stage - Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the Clubhouse chat-room model is that it provides a stage where leaders can talk while followers listen as part of an audience—and sometimes wait to be called on.

This image appears in two channels,  Sublime  and  Feeling Futuristic . You can probably start to guess what these two channels are getting at, but it takes visiting both of them to understand the nuances of their content. While  Feeling Futuristic often feels like some combination of wonderment, apocolyptic visions, and specul

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