A good test of what kind of followership you’ve cultivated is what happens when you say something stupid: are they smart enough to spot it and flag it, and kind enough to do so gently? Or do they simply double down and compound your stupidity, turning it into a trainwreck?
Conversation
If you do this, one of two things will happen:
a) your own stupidity will grow by feedback until they drag you down to their zombie level
b) you will overcompensate by never saying anything that risks being stupid, becoming uninteresting
1
2
14
People mistakenly think this strategy is antifragile because zombie armies grow bigger/stronger with every battle. But it actually represents fragility. By systematically filtering out a class of signals using hostile defenses, you allow thinking inside to grow weaker.
1
8
As the cognitive potential energy inside your zombie firewall shrinks and ages and fails to attract fresh blood to stay alive, you end up in an equilibrium of derp. No new imaginative thought can penetrate so what’s in there feeds on itself. Positive feedback squeal of 1 idea.
2
2
10
Straussians are particularly vulnerable to this shit because they believe some version of “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten”. That a few esoteric sources that can cover all they need. That the rest of the world only needs exoteric broadcasts, not listening.
1
5
Add to that their tendency to believe in the rightness of telling noble lies and the moral/ethical legitimacy of using idiots as tools at scale, and hey you’ve got digital Genghis Khans creating a Zombie Warring States era online. World War Z.0.
1
9
And you know the most ironic thing here? Every one of you reading and agreeing with this thread knows exactly the top few people I’m talking about here but am deliberately not tagging or naming. Because they’d turn THIs thread into a war zone too.
3
1
8
They tell themselves that we are cowardly, unimportant digital-middle-class chatterati doing bullshit jobs and intellectualizing without fighting in their big important crusades, and that they’re missing nothing. That we are to be either ignored or burned with righteous wrath.
1
6
In a way it’s the age old conflict pattern: kings+restive peasants against middle classes.
But somehow I suspect we’ll last longer. The world is too complex for idiots to run, and too big for a few straussian crypto-monarchs (in all senses of ‘crypto’) to run by themselves.
2
14
Note: zombies are mostly CREATED through such exploitative, radicalizing thought leadership. You don’t draw from a large pool of waiting natural-born zombies. You zombify potentially mentally healthy people, by betraying trust earned through original work twitter.com/neilscudder/st
This Tweet is unavailable.
3
1
10
One more. I try but fail to see the world from the zombie stormtrooper perspective. All I can imagine is they’re lonely people who turn a slight emotional resonance with a distant celebrity, plus a small sign of royal favor like a like, into an entire desperately protected psyche
Replying to
Great threat. You've explained one of the major dynamics of crowdsourcing. Are there others? As always, I wait for your posts to make sense of things..
1
2
Replying to
🙂
Quote Tweet
How to raise a zombie troll army in 12 steps.
Step 1: Create something of real value, or if you can’t, leverage an inheritance into crap value with a large surface area. We’re NOT making stone soup here.
Show this thread
Replying to
A desire to be right, to be certain, to put the world in order and right the wrongs you see.
Anything that violates what you know to be true must be wrong
Believe what other believe
Sacrifice the scapegoat
Without making personal sacrifice
1
1
2
Perfectly understandable
It’s easy to mimic
It’s easy to shirk burden
It’s easy to cast a stone
It’s not easy to be the dissenting voice
Retweet = mimic
Quote retweet = shirk burden
Reply = stone casting
Tweet = dissenting voice
1
1
1
Show replies
Replying to
was talking about how when you're fighting on Twitter, you feel important, you're fighting the good fight, diving into bunkers and shooting perfectly aimed barbs at evil bad guys. But in reality you're sitting on your couch, tapping a glass screen
2
8



