We live in a time with a growing phenomenological, object-level (or as I prefer to call it, log-level) bias. Patience for abstractions of any sort is at its lowest in my living memory. If you argue at an “ism” level, you are presumed stupid until proven worth listening to.
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Bolder statement cf morning thread: Despite the ism in it, capitalism is not an ideology but a meme about ideologies. Including ideologies that presume to theorize it. It turns abstractions from sources ranging from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand into... schwag. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1269657013010575361?s=21 …https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1269657013010575361 …
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Memes are to narrative markets what dollar prices are to financial markets. They impose a relative transactional value on ideas. A publisher puts both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx into book and tee-shirt form-factors pricing them at $15 or whatever. Memes do the same.
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Think about it: everything cast into the distracted boyfriend meme template has a certain narrative price tag and implicit valuation on it (marking its worth relative to other ideas, and its current position on its inevitable journey to farce status).
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Take the same au courant abstraction like say “defund the police” and apply the following meme templates to it: Distracted boyfriend American chopper Butterfly man Expanding brain Doge Harambe Money printer go brrr The one that sticks the best is the “price” of the idea
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Hell you could arrange memes on a nihilism spectrum from doge to harambe perhaps and apply them to lots of ideas and literally price them by likes/ratios and create an actual prediction market based on memes, a formal version of what we do on Twitter anarchically
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End of conversation
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"unironic trafficking in abstractions is the new humanities" ggpic.twitter.com/re5gaipi9z
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Data Oriented Design vs. Object Oriented Design
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