Portals vs flags is a good lens for breaking down fun-banter twitter vs beef-only missionary derp twitter. I’m 100% portal and most of my futile conflicts are due to mistakenly engaging a flag-twitter person with portal twitter rules of engagement.
Conversation
Portal: seduce someone into a fun new way of looking at the world, tends to be a process of yes, and improv-banter
Flag: Preach a sermon repeatedly in a hundred different ways and gather a crowd around you that wants repeated reinforcement of a threatened existing perspective
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Under high-VUCA,* portal discourses try to give you an experimental toolkit to process what’s going on
Flag discourses try to drown out the VUCA via positive-feedback amplification of a single familiar, reassuring signal.
* Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity
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Earlier, I pointed out that virtue ethics is most adaptive under VUCA, consequentialist next most, and deontological, the least adaptive. These map to flag twitter, hybrid, and portal twitter.
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I forget who made this argument, but it was in a large-group OODA loop discussion in New York: the higher the VUCA in a large-scale conflict environment, the more virtue ethics is strategically adaptive because it can accumulate a following via imitability.
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Ironically, the effectiveness at dissolving the VUCA and moving beyond is in the reverse order. It is adaptive in the sense a cancer can be more adaptive than normal functions in a body. It will win, but kill the host in the process.
Replying to
The Great Weirding is a particular kind of VUCA. The fragile new thing feeding on the sclerotic old thing being dismantled. It is the VUCA of being a cell inside a pupal stage caught between caterpillar and butterfly ways of being. It is pupal VUCA.
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Twitter is a microcosm of a pupal world, Software eating the world. Digital era eating industrial era in order to be born.
The process is happening everywhere from Hong Kong to Syria to the White House, but twitter is in a sense ground zero. The indicator battleground.
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It is not where the most consequential things happen, but it is where the most revealing things happen. The things that reveal how we might break out of pupal VUCA.
Because there’s an interesting near-balance between portal and flag forces here (advantage flags).
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Tiktok is too portal, meatspace is too flag, Twitter is Goldilocks zone. If portal twitter can hold out and eventually out evolve flag Twitter, there is some hope for the world at large.
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Flag twitter is about holding on to dying ways of being in a spirit of grim courage under mortal existential threat. Apres nous le deluge.
Portal twitter is about experimentally flexing clumsy new modes of being in a spirit of play. Le deluge be damned.
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To flag twitter, portal twitter seems like a nihilistic threat, fiddling while Rome burns, throwing open the doors to the barbarians.
To portal twitter, the self-important sermonizing of flag twitter seems like a deadly cancer, preventing the new world from being born.
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Portal twitter us about approaching the edge of the void, working up the courage to plunge in, making nervous jokes and memes on the edge. Portal twitter knows what’s at stake and that the only way out is through.
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Flag Twitter believes if you retreat energetically enough, by ignoring the pupal weirdness loudly enough with amplified sermonizing, the void will close, and an old kind of normalcy will return.
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Reduced to practice, portal twitter is basically “generate VUCA to eat VUCA”. A discourse that itself delights in volatility (inconsistency), uncertainty (improvisation), complexity (wordplay, nuance), ambiguity (irony etc).
Ashby’s law of requisite variety, memes edition.
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Good, evil, or neutral, portal twitter is always chaotic.
Good, evil, or neutral, flag twitter is always lawful.
(neutral evil, neutral good, and true neutral are brands and orgs playing twitter badly)
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MtG experts could probably work out the interaction dynamics better than me. I don’t have time for game theory 🙂
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But the BIG takeaway. Portal twitter and flag twitter don’t mix. Even if they’re nominally on the same side by the same definition of “good”.
Their beliefs about how to break out are just too divergent. It’s easier to spar with “evil” along your own axis (chaotic or lawful).
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Tldr:
Look at someone’s reply threads. If it looks like a town hall Q&A where they hold court with “my gavel, my norms” posture, it is flag twitter.
If it’s at least 50% shitposting and banter in reply threads, it is portal twitter. Engage with caution.
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Poll: If you read this far, what kind of twitter are you part of
- Mostly flag6%
- More flag than portal16%
- More portal than flag38%
- Mostly portal40%
100 votesFinal results
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