There’s numerous interesting points in John De Goes1 Twitter’s Fucked blog, wherein I wrote:
First on the importance of decentralized curation. I want to be careful how I convey this point because I’m not trying to assert superiority. I’m claiming an observational point about reality. The Internet enables beta males to pretend they’re alpha. Males evolved to compete and interact socially in person wherein John is entirely correct to characterize the online activity as violent, because in person it would result in a beating from an alpha in the post-paleozoic tribal environment to which we’re instinctively adapted. This risk of repercussions is what maintained a sane order and productivity in the society/tribe. Religious discipline, community values of for example respect for elders, and social hierarchies played this repercussions role in agrarian and early industrial age societies. Instead now we’ve got going a devolution of our productive society (the economic result of elevating betas to fake alphas en masse) as follows on the Internet where there’s no objective accountability and repercussions:
https://steemit.com/psychology/@anonymint/social-courtesies-the-witless-and-pointless-example
The problem isn’t peculiar to Twitter, as I see the trolling as a contact sport without the contact also on Reddit et al, but perhaps it is correct that some facets of Twitter make it worse. I love participating in contact sports, but the mutual respect is only generated by the violent contact.
However, top-down curation is inherently corrupt as we see going on in Reddit and I also experienced first-hand on Bitcointalk:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1887077.0
(fact: Litecoin went from $6 to $350, yet I was banned for correctly predicting it because some betas were threatened by my rising popularity, although my intent wasn’t to gloat nor stroke my ego)
Thus I think decentralized curation/moderation is the way to force an objective meritocracy and repercussions on trolling and anti-social behavior. I’m working on trying to make this a reality with decentralized ledgers. I detest censorship and relish widespread participation, yet I also understand the problem with an absence of curation. So thus my intended solution.
I also agree with John that (by implication) the political and economic decadence of this (ZIRP debt-based, circle-jerk) capability to pretend that egalitarianism actually exists:
https://steemit.com/politics/@anonymint/is-egalitarianism-unconstitutional
Will bring us to the extreme oscillation between nihilism and ideology as predicted by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 1800s, which Jordan Peterson articulately covers:
(Entire series: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1373864.msg30641980#msg30641980)
I’m hoping decentralized ledgers can lead us out back towards meritocracy and sanity.
I also think Twitter 2.0 will happen and it will be on a decentralized ledger. Oh yes fully agreed that any comment about disintermediation of centralized Internet behemoths isn’t an indictment of their employees. May a 1000 more flowers bloom as a result of increased degrees-of-freedom.
1 Although I’ve known of him since 2009 due to some brief interaction regarding programming languages and interacted briefly again recently on the future of blockchains, he apparently gained more fame in the Curtis Yarvin incident:
A mob of SJWs, spearheaded by a no-shit self-described Communist named Jon Sterling, descended on LambdaConf demanding that they cancel Yarvin’s talk, pretending that he (rather than, say, the Communist) posed a safety threat to other conference-goers. The conference’s principal organizers, headed up one John de Goes, quite properly refused to cancel the talk, observing that Yarvin was there to talk about his code and not his politics.
Curtis Yarvin is creator of Urbit and the infamous Dark Enlightenment pseudonym personality Mencius Moldbug.
Regarding Jordan Peterson’s insight, Eric S. Raymond had analogous realizations yet didn’t seem to connect the post-mystic order of religion as necessary to group organization in the way Peterson and James A. Donald does:
[…] that there is a kind of live internal logic to mysticism and religion, something entwined with psychology that sends runners and shoots all through culture and art […] I constructed a world-view in which the forces I experienced fit within the natural order of science, as what Jung called "archetypes of the collective unconscious". I rejected supernatural explanations, but learned to believe in magic -- the magic of the human mind and hand and heart […] All the Gods are alive. They are not supernatural; rather, they are our inmost natures. They power our dreams and our art and our personalities. Theurgy and ritual can make them stronger, more accessible to the shaman. They can be evoked in a human being to teach, heal, inspire, or harm. Occasionally they manifest in spontaneous theophanies; the result may be religious conversion, creative inspiration, charisma, or madness.
Magic is loose in the world. It is not the magic of fantasy -- no would-be violators of the laws of physics need apply. Real magic acts in and through human agents […] The mode of the religious is faith. The mode of the mystic is experience. We do not enact rituals and promulgate dogmas to express our `faith' that the sun rises in the east, because it is a fact of experience […] The elevation of faith' is, in fact, a sign that a religious tradition is losing its ability to induce theophany, or has already lost it […] More generally, allegiance to fixed religious forms reliably murders true religious experience […] Zen represents a return to my earliest, non-theurgic mystical experiences as a child. Zen is very ... clean. It doesn't have the practical utility or drama or sexiness of the neopagan path. But there is one thing it does better; it strips away illusions. To experience things as they are, just as they are, without the drunken monkey of the mind perpetually layering them over with expectations and interpetations and preconceptions and yammering till you can't hear yourself be -- that is the Great Way of Zen […] If my language is too "religious" for you, feel free to transpose it all into the key of psychology. Speak of archetypes and semi-independent complexes. Feel free to hypothesize that I've merely learned how to enter some non-ordinary mental states that change my body language, disable a few mental censors, and have me putting out signals that other people interpret in terms of certain material in their own unconscious minds […] And as long as you stick with the sterile denotative language of psychology, and the logical mode of the waking mind, you won't be able to --- because you can't reach and program the unconscious mind that way. It takes music, symbolism, sex, hypnosis, wine and strange drugs, firelight and chanting, ritual and magic. Super-stimuli that reach past the conscious mind and neocortex, in and back to the primate and mammal and reptile brains curled up inside.
Rituals are programs written in the symbolic language of the unconscious mind. Religions are program libraries that share critical subroutines. And the Gods represent subystems in the wetware being programmed. All humans have potential access to pretty much the same major gods because our wetware design is 99% shared.
Only...that cold and mechanistic a way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one.
Religions are, mostly, the rotting corpses of dead mystical schools.
Most late-stage religions distrust mystics and lock them up in monasteries or hermitages; they rightly fear the renewing but disruptive effect of theophany. Eventually, for most of the religion's followers, even the theoretical possibility of unmediated experience of the God(s) is lost, or thought of as the preserve of specialists and madmen.
And this is why I am implacably hostile to Christianity in particular and the other Zoroastrian-offshoot religions in general. Never mind the fact that they have a long history of torturing pagans and mystics like me to death, and I fear they will begin doing it again the second they have the power.
No...their crime in present time is that they are such tragic, monstrous cheats. They create huge chasms of disconnection between us and our Gods, and then tell us that is inevitable because we are `sinful'. They associate the spiritual domain with so much dogma, cant and irrational garbage that anyone with a functioning brain has to either live in hypocrisy or reject the whole package -- and then wonder why life is so empty. They warp the language of spiritual discourse; they exert a sinister gravity on living mysticisms, tending to remake them in their own diseased images. In the name of God, they strangle mystical experience; in the name of love, they murder; in the name of truth, they tell lies.
It doesn't have to be that way. I have seen. I have been. I have known. The mysterium tremendum is within reach of everyone, "closer to you" (as the Koran puts it) "than the vein in your neck".
To find it, it is only necessary that you abandon both the dogmatic materialist prejudice that it's not there, and the dogmatic religious preconception that you know what it is.
The omission not expressed in Eric’s logic is precisely what Friedrich Nietzsche warned, which is that unbridled and exposed to raw mysticism, the human subconscious hindbrain would remain manipulable by propaganda and swing wildly between between extremist ideology and nihilism attempting to satiate the primordial subconscious need for Gods and magic. And as Eric noted, females, children, and adolescents are much more susceptible. I went through some of the magical phases that Eric describes mostly as a consumer of theopany but perhaps occasionally as a shaman such as one essay I wrote and read in class in high school about seeing a witch’s eye in the clouds. I think this also happened in sports a few times such as when on magical days where I was “in the zone” (where everything slows down and you’re in a trance) and I would score for example a touchdown every time I touched the football and nobody could stop me. In both cases, I remember people around me describing me as if they were mesmerized. My theophany experiences went so far that I was sure I had been visited by aliens and I could vividly remember every detail. Yet I had been praying and daring them to visit me for a long-time, so I had conditioned my subconscious for it.