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There are fewer patterns and they’re harder to spot. This acts as a self-reinforcing thing because fewer people then navigate by those patterns. And the few patterns that ARE spotted tend to attract unreasonable overindexing attention.
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My 2-3 big calls in the last few years (premium mediocre, internet of beefs, domestic cozy) have attracted imo like 3x more attention than they would have in 2012, adjusting for me being better known. When there sky is hazy or light polluted, only the clearest constellations pop.
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This is literally true. Go into the countryside on a dark clear night. “Easy” constellations like the Big Dipper and Orion will be harder to spot than in a light polluted city because there’s so much more going on. You can even see Milky Way (many urban dwellers don’t know this)
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OK, now you’re speaking my language - astro & internet culture! The brighter stars are easier to spot inside urban light domes, b/c the background light pollution boosts their prominence within the dynamic response curve of the human visual cortex.
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Where your metaphor gets interesting (or ironic) is that the absence of patterns can be due to: (1) absence of stars [Voyager] (2) a decrease in background haze [urban -> countryside] (3) an increase in stars In all cases, human patterning works on SNR, not absolute brightness.
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The third case is what’s actually happening right now. We can call it Great Weirding, or Thousand Plateaus, or Decoherence, but it’s all the same underlying phenomena. The density of human memetic interaction has gone from vapor to liquid; supports way more waves and patterns.
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It’s entirely possible that this new phase has coherent patterns within it, but they are imperceptible to a human observer working at human scale. Network effects may create phenomena like rogue waves on the memetic ocean: Surely it obeys physics, but you don’t see it coming.
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Maybe the period of time 2000-2015 was special in having the right mix of specific types of individuals, the sites & apps having a specific modality of interaction, that certain types of memetics were easier to discern.
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Now they are still there, but the individuals you’d need to track are producing signal that’s lost in the background noise. We’re going through generational shifts right now. Everyone is here. The iPhone generation drives very different signaling than gen X or millennial.
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Trying to make sense of all this stuff in real-time is like a Roman citizen trying to write the Pompeii Daily News while younger generations are actively burying you in burning ash and fossilizing your reality. Are you a journalist? A historian? A victim? A ghost?
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