Conversation

The “bespoke escaped subjective realities magical thinking” megatrend is much further along than we realize. Not because it is actually stealthy, but because by definition it is trying to retreat from headlines instead of appear in them. Appropriately it also lacks a single name.
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Several terms get at different aspects of it. Thing is so multifaceted it is hard to name —— Personal realities Alt facts “Fake news” Escaped realities* Extended universe Multitemporality* Gamification (old, but overloadable) Domestic cozy* * my coinages
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Replying to and
Though there’s a long history to this, I trace the modern origin of the whole line of speculative constructionism to whoever credited Steve Jobs with “reality distortion field” powers. We’re a very long way from that now.
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20 years ago, state of the art was a) easily satisfied nerds choosing to live in somewhat degenerate fandoms b) corporate kool-aid cults c) a few actual cults in compounds Common factor was maintaining a local scope boundary for your alt-reality. Tune out rest of world.
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What’s fascinating now is I see people investing in stable *global* scope alt reality constructionism. But this isn’t global historical or ideological revisionism contending for cultural power. It’s a private overlay on public. Nobody knows you inhabit the world differently.
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To coin another term (we need a whole lexicon here) this is grey wold-building Grey world-building = grey man tactics + normcore presentation + boundaryless global scope “Nobody can see I’m wearing AR glasses that replace all faces with bunny faces and I’m living in bunnyverse”
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The world as a global computer is acquiring a hypervisor capable of running a lot of *global scale* reality VMs that can be nearly unaware of each other. How many can it hold? When does the rivalrous hardware (land, things made of atoms) run out? These are good questions.
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The answer is probably: far more than you think. Software eating world = rivalrous becomes non-rivalrous. Ephemeralization = more with less. “Give me a place to stand and I’ll create a world”
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There’s just so many people thinking good thoughts about this stuff, I’ve been doing more compiling and collecting than original thinking. Ratio’d in a good way. Hopefully refactor camp this year will be a good place to pull together a big pile of ideas.
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The chapter on non-Euclidean geometry in Edna Kramer’s history of math is titled “geometry for universe builders”. Feels like we’re on the cusp of non-Euclidean geometry for subjective universe builders.
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