(2017-02-24) Rao The Birth Of Magic

Venkatesh Rao on The Birth of Magic

What happens after the End of History? The answer, I argue, is the Birth of Magic

In this supersonic regime, far from history ending in the sense of no more surprises, there are now so many surprises, coming at us so thick and fast, that we are being forced to invent something like a supersonic narrative technology, where mere "history" is a kind of subsonic narrative technology. The events of 2016 were, in a sense, the sonic boom marking the end of history and the birth of what is beginning to replace it: the creation and consumption of magic.

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained (Training). To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

Training in history prepares you against surprise by turning each emotional texture of caring into a predictable response. This is the essence of Derping: reiterating your priors in the face of novelty.

To be educated is to develop a deep awareness of history as merely a list of surprises, rather than as a specific "true" story or account of those surprises

Ideologies depend on the existence of such collective predictability in reactions against surprise. They represent organized preparedness against surprise.

there is a way to return cognitive vigor and interest in your sense of history. Which is to care about history with a very special pre-emotion that cannot be produced through imitation: Curiosity.

Curiosity, unlike stimulation-seeking, does not operate by the immediate calculus of pleasure and pain but by the anticipation of growth, and openness to the unpredictable emotions that accompany its pursuit

The incurious merely retell old stories with cosmetic changes that don't actually accommodate the surprising, setting in motion the self-fulfilling prophecies of their own decline.

To be prepared against surprise is to be prepared to preserve your narrative of history against the disruptive potential of surprises. To block the generativity they represent.

This is what fuels technological change and creates the future. Those who are prepared for surprise find unexpected new agency by co-evolving with its unfolding impact: sex with the future, so to speak.

democratic franchise -- the vote -- as a sort of UBI of political Agency. A Universal Basic Political Agency, UBPA.

That's a minimum on the political agency

all technology is political. It is the curious who own the transient surplus political agency embodied by technology between the surprise of invention and end-state of commoditization.

The commoditization of a technology is its democratization. It means any residual political agency is distributed as UBPA, and its exercise mediated by the merely trained

There is some correlation between liberal education in the institutional sense, and education in the sense of James Carse's "prepared for surprise" state, but it easy to both overstate and understate it.

Let's wrap up with Arthur C. Clarke's famous third law: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That idea helps characterize the post-historical state.

To actually educate yourself, do the things that are advertised as being educational. There is truth to the claims. But let the test of your education be your preparedness for curiosity, not your grades or credentials.

One day, some surprise -- your surprise -- will lead you down a path of mastery of a Generative future; a path that others fearfully shy away from. On that day, you will be born as a magician (Magick).