The news hasn’t really been about the news for quite some time.
Most of us learned this wh
Metametastasis
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This commentary is being provided to you as general information only and should not be taken as investment advice. The opinions expressed in these materials represent the personal views of the author(s). It is not investment research or a research recommendation, as it does not constitute substantive research or analysis. Any action that you take as a result of information contained in this document is ultimately your responsibility. Epsilon Theory will not accept liability for any loss or damage, including without limitation to any loss of profit, which may arise directly or indirectly from use of or reliance on such information. Consult your investment advisor before making any investment decisions. It must be noted, that no one can accurately predict the future of the market with certainty or guarantee future investment performance. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Statements in this communication are forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements and other views expressed herein are as of the date of this publication. Actual future results or occurrences may differ significantly from those anticipated in any forward-looking statements, and there is no guarantee that any predictions will come to pass. The views expressed herein are subject to change at any time, due to numerous market and other factors. Epsilon Theory disclaims any obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or views expressed herein. This information is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of any offer to buy any securities. This commentary has been prepared without regard to the individual financial circumstances and objectives of persons who receive it. Epsilon Theory recommends that investors independently evaluate particular investments and strategies, and encourages investors to seek the advice of a financial advisor. The appropriateness of a particular investment or strategy will depend on an investor’s individual circumstances and objectives.
The cognitive overload from frequent releases from Rusty is exactly the kind of zetetic dopamine hit I am looking for!
I am amidst a comment on "Losing Our Minds’ also. I will take this opportunity to ask about terminology for that piece…if epimemetic and epimorphic properties are distinguishable, as you helpfully suggest there, they would be reflexive with each other. So…is ‘epimorphomemetics’ a word?
Or do you have another new term up your sleeve to discuss the overarching framework?
Paradoxically this dopamine hit is why I’m not sure I can agree to ‘delenda est’ and having my social media taken away! In the absence of other technoconnective tissue, where would we find content of sufficient depth to move the discussion forward? It has to be through a medium less mediated and less costly than what came before social media, and if it can’t be social media, then it has to be something new…?
I have had some observations in mind since Biden’s debate performance since it was easily recognizable as an archetypical Emperor New Clothes moment. When is there a crowd? Speaking of ‘metameta’! Rusty’s note seemed a good place to get these thoughts on paper because this issue of obsession with crowd size makes it so clear that the very existence of a crowd has become another layer of the common knowledge game. We need common knowledge on the existence of a crowd in order to create common knowledge. Ben of course has been pointing out the need for missionaries to establish existence of a crowd for years, but I think the progressing social fragmentation makes it ever more important. It is not just Trump’s ego!
Biden’s debate performance became a common knowledge moment in part because of the meta level common knowledge that a Presidential DebateTM is significant enough of an event in narrative space that a crowd implicitly exists. And a crowd did exist. Supposedly 51 million people watched. But this is down from 73 million who watched Trump vs Biden in 2020. And this is exactly the point, it is becoming more difficult to safely assume that a crowd of sufficient size to trigger common knowledge is actually watching any one event, regardless of its real or perceived importance. So it is natural that the missionaries have become obsessed with creating common knowledge on the existence of the crowd itself. And there are so many continuing dynamics like genAI that will continue to fragment audiences into smaller groups in terms of consumed content.
We believe that social media is a panopticon. And this is all that is necessary for it to be one. But I think social media is not at all the panopticon we believe. For those who have significant others for which their personal algorithms have evolved to feed them a different history of events this is easy to verify! My wife and I compare the sense of what we are seeing in these feeds regularly and are regularly amazed at the different conception of events that emerges. I think it actually takes a pretty significant memetic energy to go viral across all narrative channels.
I think this reasoning plays a role in why both Trump and Biden have been, or were in Biden’s case, able to persistently maintain a narrative of fitness despite it being obvious for those with eyes to see and ears to hear that only vestiges of fitness remain, at best.
Now a challenge to one of Rusty’s thoughts.
It is easy to say that the cost is trivial when we are talking about one event. But I’m sure it is not news to anyone that this quickly becomes untrue if we don’t constrain ourselves thus. And it is just another arrow pointing to Ben’s latest thoughts on ‘opting out’, or in my own words, building the discipline to more properly balance our Attention. It is pretty obvious that to impute the energy and time to decipher the reality around longer or more frequent sequences of events will, at some threshold, become pathological for anyone.
And perversely the system now knows well that infecting people with this pathology helps to control them.
Finally, without having searched for more context on ‘Cartesian Crisis’ as caveat, I have to metaphysically protest how I think Weinstein means the term.
The true crisis is that the Cartesian idea that our reality is fundamentally grounded in a separable background was a myth! It is just as much of a myth as our reality being fundamentally grounded in the emanations of an omnipresent being. In both cases we built our dominant cultural institutions of the time on these metaphysics, and they work well in the thesis phase (cultural ascendency). But the same ideas will not work in the antithesis phase (cultural descent).
Social media and generative AI and the corresponding ‘epimorphomemetics’ is putting the final nail in the coffin of dispelling the enlightenment myth. I think this phase of antithesis/descent started over a century ago. This is an attempt to articulate why I think metaphysics matters. I’ll give it another try at some point.
We are in the process of developing beyond the Cartesian Myth, and yes this will be produce a crisis, but it is an unavoidable and ultimately healthy crisis which is necessary to restore a state where our institutions and cultural paradigms are no longer discordant with our metaphysical understanding.
Yes, I think they are reflexive, but I’m not sure that the reflexive effects themselves are distinguishable enough to warrant the effort of trying to distinguish the taxonomy. (I’m also not sure that they aren’t)
Yes, I think that’s right. I think that the realization that the crowd itself can now be the missionary at a certain critical mass is part of the evolution in our/my thinking on this. I also think it is something which has evolved in the socially networked age - it is what I mean when I say that the networks have matured.
I think you had it on metameta. I don’t think the crowd size matters as much as the perception of having experienced it. Think instead about the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. I think that was a common knowledge event by proxy. Few people actually watched it, but just about everyone developed common knowledge of it. I think this it part of what I’m trying to convey in metametastasis. The context itself becomes the viral thing. There’s still value in seeing the thing, but as long as people see the conversation about the thing or perceive that such conversation is happening, common knowledge can form.
Yes.
Yes, this is why I gave Weinstein grace. I was making a specific point and don’t really disagree with the general one. This will not always be the case, so I don’t feel challenged. I agree.
In some dimensions I think this is important and true. I think we can control our Attention (to some degree), but to your earlier observations, I don’t think we can pull ourselves away from the epimorphic/epimemetic qualities of our age. We live in a socially networked age, even if we have zero accounts.
I think metamodernism and postmetamodernism is a fun and useful thing to discuss! But I also think the Cartesian notion Weinstein has in mind encompasses a much more practical definition of knowing. We perceive that we know things and act on them. Our world is making it more difficult to perceive that we know things. That is a crisis, I think, but not one that suggests an optimistic way forward. That’s because I think that the crisis is caused by our paralysis in the face of increasingly complex symbols and the fact that they are now the vernacular of socially networked storytelling. The clearest “way out” of the Cartesian Crisis (whether how you’ve described it or Weinstein, I think) is the Hive, as Ben described it. We’re being shepherded toward being shepherded.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. It may just be the structure of my predispositions, but you left me me no choice in that you segued naturally to epistemic communities. I’m not sure when I first saw you refer to this concept but I found this quote from Dec 2020, it could be the one.
My thinking over the past several years has continued to converge on the idea of epistemic communities as a realistic resistance mechanism. Curious how this strikes you these days? Frankly, my feeling stems from the fact that ET began to serve protofunctionally for me in this capacity years ago. The epistemic community idea is coming up in other threads lately as well so I want to avoid repeating myself too much. The challenge is what you hit on in 2020, that the incentives that will need to underpin successful epistemic communities are quite incompatible with the incentives of evolved institutional structures like monopoly capitalism. Tangibility and personal relationships are friction in such structures. In a knowledge structure built on community it takes more time and more energy to arrive at beliefs, but the beliefs will be intrinsically more meaningful because they derive from personal relationships and dialogue.
The ‘meta’ here is that there is also very little incentive to build the tools that would enable these kind of community structures to grow and evolve. It literally takes people who want to put in action without expectation of large benefit. Zizek calls himself a ‘moderately conservative communist’ lmao, we might need more of those? People willing to build tools without an expectation of scale. Or even with mechanisms in place to mitigate against scale.
Can’t avoid noting that the discussion definitely becomes metamodern in the sense that the goal would be to rediscover meaning via a more fragmented epistemic structure (i.e. it would look more pre-modern) but without sacrificing the ability to continue to make progress that comes from our modern sensibility and the idea of consensus across scale. As is often the case the answer seems to be a hand wavy nod at tokenization in some respect, which still makes sense to me, but obviously not saving the day anytime soon.
I feel the same way today! Where I convey a lack of optimism here is at the same level as before - the aggregate level of society, or even many sub-levels of belonging; that is, I don’t think there is a “social” solution. I think there is a local solution in the non-geographic (although geographic is fine, too) sense.
It’s a clever construction. I’m a very conservative communist among those with whom I feel a mutual sense of commitment, which is a very small community indeed. I STILL think this is it.
Is your claim that institutions are built upon the foundations of the metaphysics at the time? Or maybe from a different approach, that our institutions are collective manifestations of the metaphysics of the time? Or reflections? Or representations? And if so, I’m curious if you have any ideas on what the metaphysics of our time say about the next-generation of institutions.
Or perhaps the question is moot altogether, and that institutions only apply to the prior world?
There was this Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston romcom called The Breakup from maybe 20 years ago. Standard format, entertaining, did what it was supposed to do in terms of audience expectations.
There was a scene that has always stuck with me where they’re arguing about dishes. Vaughn reluctantly agrees to help and Aniston tells him no.
“You just said you want me to help do the dishes.”
“I don’t want you to do the dishes, I want you to WANT to do the dishes!”
“Why would I want to do dishes?”
This line was played for laughs in the trailer, but in the movie itself it’s clear that this scene was serious. It was a deep look into the sort of person Vaughn’s character was and what flaws lead to a breaking point in this relationship that he allegedly cared about but never bothered tending to.
Objective reality and the truth are buried under a sink full of dirty dishes. So long as some of us are willing to clean them they always get done, the truth always comes to light, and the lazy boyfriends get to live in a house with clean dishes. But it’s not enough to just coast. It’s also not enough to occasionally attempt to unearth the truth from beneath the Pyrex caked with two day old, dried lasagna. You have to want to get to the truth. You have to want to do the hard work in order to reap the reward. Far, far too many people are comfortable farming that out to someone else. For too long reality has been taken for granted, and the inevitable consequences are beginning to announce their presence.
I think we hit a Lagrange Point for truth about a decade and a half ago, and now we’re rapidly slipping out of equilibrium and being pulled towards something huge and distant and sinister.
And Quint is busy smashing the radio.
Amen! And this is exactly what I am on about when I talk about the transition from individual to collective (ie national) consciousness. The crowd (aka neuron cluster) sees/reacts to something and other crowds/teams/tribes (aka neuron clusters) respond and react. The abstraction of a conversation that ensues (including mott and bailey variety) are how new abstract ideas about the identiy of the uber crowd (the crowd of crowds) is formed.
I love you guys!
I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
-Slavoj Žižek
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Slavoj_Žižek
A spectre is haunting Western academia (…), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.
A thought occurs.
In the same way that a willow tree is antifragile, its structure improved by the winds that blow against it, we need the real-real friction of difficult people in order to be antifragile ourselves. That is one of the many tiny robberies of pseudosocial media - we can unfollow/unfriend/sleep/block accounts and choose networks in ways that are both not possible and ultimately not empowering in meatspace.
Family is supposed to be a place where we learn to negotiate this, but between actual divorce and the number of families absolutely decimated by Covid and political arguments I don’t think I know anyone who is not impacted, fatigued and fragged by the reality that it’s become too easy to just disengage because that’s what technetworks have reinforced.
Woven into this model is a thread of a conversation my wife and I had: two very resonant words in current conversation are boundaries and trauma. The former is the point at which friction produces too much heat, the latter just overblown. Is that model relevant or realistic?
Speaking of trauma, if I made a drinking game out of the number of ways meta is appended here I’d be in the ER.
