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Normally tribes have a self limiting mechanism in that the more influential they become the more territory they cover. The tribal identity gets more diffuse and lowest common denominator.

The bigger the elephant, the slower it moves. The amount of damage it can do is limited.

Technology is anything that increases this leverage. The ability to manage more with less. Anything that increases the ratio of this leverage is technology.

The more leverage a small group of people has over the majority the more monotonous the world feels. The many end up as NPCs in the game worlds of the few.

At the extreme end you have the world as a dream in the mind of god. Everyone is just a complex NPC that god makes up. Using powerful AI to model complete personalities based on a few scraps of interaction information.

What's weird is that "world as god's dream" is literally just first person pov because there's no way for "I" to have a point of view that's not from the perspective of "I'. Even out mental models of our closest people are just models with more information. Like GPT-99.

From the POV of self, everyone else is an NPC . Everything that feels human or solid or "real" dissolves when you poke at it. Even literal matter dissolves when you zoom into it.

It's very tiring to be holding the whole world in your mind all the time. It weighs nothing and yet it is one of the greatest burdens on the soul.