(2019-10-17) Hunt The Long Now Pt3 Is This Normal Asking For A Friend

Ben Hunt: The Long Now, Pt. 3 - Is This Normal? Asking for a Friend. Today’s note is about the micro. Today’s note is about getting back to the Real.

That’s the defining characteristic of life in the Long Now … you swim in an ocean of stimulus and fear so long that you forget whether or not there was ever a shore. You forget yourself. You forget your identity as an autonomous human-in-full, connected with other humans that you work and play with in a non-instrumental sense. You forget your Pack. (tribe, 2019-09-11-HuntTheLongNowPt2MakeProtectTeach)

You become a cartoon. (NPC)

over a period of about 18 months over his junior and senior years, Neb corrupted that monthly low-stakes game of Community into a weekly high-stakes game of Alienation and Cartoon … into a system of belief and forgetfulness.

Neb didn’t really PLAN to objectify his fraternity buds. It just came naturally to him.

that’s what a fear and stimulus system IS … a rigged game.

For every too-clever-by-half coyote like Neb Tnuh who confuses talent for being on the right side of a fear and stimulus system, there is a scaled version of that same system that exists to objectify and stimulus/response Neb like he objectified and stimulus/responsed his frat brothers, and there is a scaled version of THAT system on top of that, and a scaled version of THAT system on top of that. There are at least four nested systems of believing and forgetting in our modern social lives. Sooner or later, we all become objectified cartoons. We all get bitmapped. We all start to believe that our negative expected value game is a positive expected value game, and we all forget that an alternative game is even possible. Some part of us, anyway. The Neb part of us.

Few people today remember The Peter Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

So here’s the Epsilon Theory variation, call it The Neb Principle: In mass society, every citizen tends to rise to his level of cartoonification.

At every level of this nested and fractal system of believing and forgetting, the micro-structure time-line is the same.

the process of the Long Now is now being ensconced at a global scale … at the scale of an oligarchic economic system of believing and forgetting and a statist political system of believing and forgetting.

How? Through mastery of the fifth stage of the Long Now micro-structure. By stealing our tells.

You know the word for what they do with our stolen tells, don’t you? It’s Nudge. And you know the true superpower of a Nudge, right? We believe we’re making a real choice. (nudging)

We have to confound the stolen tells. At scale. At global scale.

So I’ve got two new ideas … two forms of public resistance to share with you … two forms of hiding your tell that I think can scale … two forms of bypassing the fear and stimulus systems that make cartoons of us at every turn. One for politics and one for economics.

In politics, I want to start a movement to encourage write-in candidates. I want to give everyone the tools and the information they need to bypass the political party system

In economics, I want Epsilon Theory pack members to know who the other Epsilon Theory pack members are, so that they can do business with and share information with like-minded people directly. I want to give Epsilon Theory pack members the tools and the information they need to bypass the information system of the tech giants and Wall Street.