Something about this being an important historical long-arc narrative cue. Thinking centuries not decades.
Something about this is setting off my longue durée instincts. More Black Death than Spanish flu.
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This is the real singularity, starting at log level
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I think my sense of the uncanny has to do with the extent of miscalibration of the strength of the wilderness/built environment barrier. At the microbial level it barely exists. We are in relation to microbes where we were with lions and tigers a thousand years ago.
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It’s not that the civilizational stack is fragile because of bad design or perverse evolution. Our stack tech is just laughably weak in relation to our microbial environment. A century of parent progress against infectious diseases has created a false sense of security.
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It’s like hurricanes or earthquakes or forest fires vs built environment, but drastically more asymmetric. The biggest, rarest quakes we expect, like Cascadian big one, still only threaten a region. Here we have a decadal threat that can casually threaten us much more broadly.
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It might be the great filter kicking in
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Old thread of the parts I think are not mysterious even if difficult
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When this is all over, the question will be how to beef up things that collapsed under the stress. There will be calls to:
Nationalize things that fail
Privatize things that fail
Distribute manufacturing more
Distribute inventory more
Distribute money more
Distribute time more
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Best fit to my blindspot is a version of a hypothesis I’ve entertained for a long time: the rewilding of humanity is beginning. What’s new is that we’re finding this is not even remotely fun. Especially the rewilding of cognition. We’re learning to think like wild animals again.
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Wild cognition, not cognition in the wild. The wild consciousness is not fun to inhabit, compared to the many pleasant escaped realities available to the civilized “enlightened” mind. It’s a mass of unpleasant mind states besieging a small is,and of ignorant bliss phase space.
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The apocalypse of the “civilized” mind is far more consequential than that of the built environment. The Great Weirding has been a first sniff of it so far. This is the first bite.
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Replying to
“Civilization rises and falls like a wave, forever to be broken against the rock of barbarism”
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Do you have any book recs you can point me too# that can help me dig deeper into your POV? I’d love to learn more.
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Ugh. This keeps encroaching on me and I agree that it is not fun. And yet, the aliveness that comes with it feels incredible in its own way.





