Conversation

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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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Everything happens now, all at once, and it’s bigger than even the smartest one of us can wrap our heads around. This could be exactly the felt-sense of a neuron in a brain. Or it could be the eschaton. There’s certainly no end of bad actors seeking to exploit it in narrow ways.
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To bring it all together with the astronomy metaphors: historically, once telescopes were invented, people realized there are waaay more stars than the eye could see. But as they kept better track, they also saw many more faint things moving against the background of stars.
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FWIW, I spent the weekend out in West Texas under dark skies, with my telescope and my night vision gear. Maybe the night vision great would be interesting to work into the metaphor. It amplifies light by 60,000X. (Yes, 6e5.)
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B/c of this ridiculous luminance gain, I can put extremely narrowband filters on it, to see nebula in the sky in realtime. (Even in urban light pollution) This is better than telescopes b/c (1) it doesn’t amplify bkgrnd light pollution; (2) it doesn’t narrow my field of view
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