(2018-10-05) Rao Against Waldenponding

Venkatesh Rao: Against Waldenponding. How to Actually Manage Attention Without Smashing Your Phone and Retreating to a Log Cabin

For several years now, I've been developing a growing discomfort with a philosophy of relating to technology I call Waldenponding

The crude caricature is "smash your smart phone and go live in a log cabin to reclaim your attention and your life from being hacked by evil social media platforms." It is less of a caricature than you might think. At an event I was just at, the opening keynote featured a guy who's literally done just that

I'm also on board with trying and adopting experimental rituals like a no-devices sabbath day if they work for you. But as an attitudinal foundation for relating to society and technology, Waldenponding is, I am convinced, a terrible philosophy at both a personal and collective level. It's a world-and-life negation.

If FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, is the basic fear exploited by third parties that want to drown you in information, the basic fear exploited by people telling you to unplug and retreat is FOBO: Fear Of Being Ordinary (Remarkable Life)

Lemme do a 1-slide presentation

FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books

What the "unplug for self-care" crowd doesn't get is that you are part of a Giant Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC) computing the future. The level and latency at which you consume information and act on it determines your "job" in the social computer

If you don't manage your information economy career, you will default to the lowest-level job in the social computer: processing very low-latency information with small-minded cognition (bottom left) for small bets. It's the equivalent of low-level bug reporting/testing.

This isn't a bad thing.

Still, you can and should aspire to more.

be sensitive to your current mind size (small to great) and consciously target the zone you want to be in, moving fluidly between small/great mind.

There are THREE ways to fail at this

The first failure mode manifests as trying to consume only information at your target level. Like only reading The Economist and journal papers, and trying to produce only in institutional modes. This will fail. You need some information diet input from ALL levels to work at ANY level

The second failure mode manifests as trying to have Great Thoughts on a diet of pure low-latency live information (upper-left red box).

The final failure mode is trying to keep up with all the information at all latencies at a small-minded level (lower-right red box) Reading every trending tweet and every bestselling big history book and everything in between, but ALL at the same small-minded level

It's not addictive FOMOing that kills you, but not being able to translate the information consumption/production choices you're making into winning bets

The stable consumption/production positions are along what I've labeled the turnpike (a term borrowed from economics). You can move focus up and down along the turnpike. Higher latency requires higher abstraction levels/bigger minds to extract value. Get off the turnpike and your bad returns will start to kill you.

he fact of the matter is that information distribution has become free/cheap, so the firehose is going to have flows at all timescales, time constants, and abstraction levels no matter what designers and advertisers want or don't want. It's the information firehose itself that's creating this environment not evil designers

The idea of a profane/secular "temporal" plane and a sacred/religious timeless/eternal plane is a medieval idea invented to justify the power of powerful intercessionary religious orgs. Don't reproduce that bad pattern.

This game is based on the opposite fear to FOMO which I call FOBO. If FOMO is Fear of Missing Out, FOBO is Fear Of Being Ordinary. What do I mean by that and why is retreating from digital information streams a mark of FOBO?

When you are plugged into the GSCITC, you are part of a great computational fluidization of human cognition. You're just one instance in a liquid cloud of human intelligence

The GSCITC is not a homogenizer of effort or imagination, but it IS a homogenizer of egos and identities. What you do counts. Who you are doesn't. You are an ordinary part of an extraordinary process.

This is the heart of FOBO. Fear of Being Ordinary. Fear of being just another entangled particle in the GSCITC. Fear of your ego dissolving into the collective ego. Fear of having "nothing to show" for playing a part

Personally, I can attribute more than half my income in the last few years to being strongly plugged in all the time, so rewards certainly didn't suffer. Half my good ideas for writing came from being plugged in, so neither did productive potential. And I don't think I'm any dumber for having been plugged in.

If you are a genius who rises to Level 25 Omega Super Adept in a monastery in the mountains, who knows everything there is to know about candle flames, that's kinda... very convenient for the Pope and the King. Smart person out of the way in a log cabin learning Candleology out of FOBO.

A real adept oughta be able to meditate on the angriest, most toxic twitter stream, consume the bile, and turn it into nectar: actionable insight you can bet on in the real world

We are all now part of a powerful global social computer in the cloud that is possibly the only mechanism we have available to tackle the big problems of the world that industrial age mechanisms are failing to cope with. We might as well get good at it. Do your part. Stay as plugged in as you can.