Network States

gloom

In politics right now, almost nobody is actually choosing a side; 90% of us are choosing a delaying tactic, waiting for a sane-seeming viable position to emerge, and in the meantime uncomfortably signaling *against* the most insane seeming position among the one available. You’ll notice that most people are far more comfortable attacking either right or left than defending or justifying either. Ie it’s “attack wokeism and stay studiously noncommittal on fascism” or “attack fascism and stay studiously quiet on wokeism.”

The 9% who defend an explicitly adopted side mostly sound either clueless enough or grifty enough to ignore. The 1% people who need to be taken seriously and also adopt primarily positive and public defenses of right or left, with attacking the opposition being a secondary priority, are serious only to the extent they are powerful. Not because their positive vision of their “side” is coherent.

Dunno if this is a gloomy thought or a positive one though.

Good take. 2 things:

1. Has to be partly a product of being super ironic. Irony poisoning reduces our ability to be sincere and increases our ability to criticize. 

2. Since the internet has brought barrier to entry on access to information in general down to ~0, it’s easy to feel reasonably confident poking holes in anything. 

New structures of power need a consensus mechanism. In the past they’ve always had to either deceive or have undeniable power. 

On-chain truth could be the new consensus mechanism that gets people to believe in something without being susceptible to ironic criticism.

Hypothetical metric of “how many different sources of truth do people defer to” across a population at any given time that’s probably very useful in anthropological descriptions of those people. 

The great civilizations probably all reduced this number to effectively one. I’d be curious about counter examples to this. 

In the US we probably shifted from a religious Christian source to a secular one somewhere in the mid 20th century, but that source has now been pretty thoroughly discredited because of the internet.

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

I took it purely descriptively. I didn’t see a strong value judgment either way

This is the exact opposite of my take. I think it’s healthy that people are doing this and that irony is the great defense against clueless sincerity