A broader zeitgeist that happened in the last few years is that “scene-making shameless person lacking a certain emotional chunk of emotional range” got recoded as “genius contrarian” the way “wears black turtleneck” got recoded as “Steve Jobs level visionary.”
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Some dressed it up further with being on autism spectrum becoming an aspirational contrarian-genius claim.
Basic logical error. Many geniuses being on the spectrum does not mean all on the spectrum are geniuses. Sadly, most just have compromised judgment with no upside.
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Anyhow, back to shame, insincerity, and hypocrisy becoming part of the OS again, and shamelessness, scene-making and cheater-detection going back to being occasionally useful and tolerable tactics, rather than treated as a lofty contrarian-genius-asshole philosophy of governance.
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In case you’re wondering why I’m focusing on cheater-detection as a pathology...
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Overactive cheater detection is at the root of a lot of societal problems. It’s not that people are dumb when acting under biases but that they’re only smart about problems framed as cheater-detection.
You can work on eliminating 100 biases, or just on lowering cheater-response. twitter.com/vgr/status/134…
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Forgot perhaps the biggest piece of the shame/regret/forgiveness layer of the OS, which Biden is reinstalling: a proper place in public life for death and mourning, which occasion perhaps the most sincere displays of shame/regret/guilt/etc. Biden’s brought that back in a big way.
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Some people suspected the constant presence of the late Beau Biden in the narrative was more than a little staged. But there has been a core of sincere emotion there. The sense of this inauguration also being the first public mourning for 400k dead from Covid also feels real.
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I need to write something more careful about this “forgiveness” layer of the institutional OS. I wrote a version around block chains as a forgiveness technology a while back, but need to write something more general.
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Stuff like this Arlington ceremony... they just didn’t seem meaningful when Trump did them. He seemed puzzled like a blind person at a silent movie. At some level he didn’t seem to get why people were doing somber ceremonies. I suspect he thought funerals are just extreme PC.
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There’s a sense of narrative claustrophobia being lifted. There’s a lot more room in the grand narrative for a spectrum of narratives that don’t need to all cohere. This pluralism is ironically what the trumpist narrative monoculture demonized as a monolith. Pure projection.
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It’s not that their story wasn’t being heard. They seemed to think it was the only one that had a right to be heard. When you’re used to a narrative monopoly, pluralism feels like censorship.
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Replying to
Which is ironic, since Biden represents continuation of an imperial mode of US government but looks like Amtrak Joe, while Trump ran the show like a petty small town council but acted like an emperor
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Kamala Harris family is very Modern Family. They just need to add a gay couple in there to look like a nightmare to Hallmark channel.
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General thought: trad administrations are highly scaled systems with a necessary and meaningful distinction between backend and frontend. There is a minimum necessary theatricality to the front-end. It’s a UX metaphor. This reads as “fakeness” to libertarian-scale imaginations.
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Trump may have slapped his name on skyscrapers but fundamentally didn’t get scale and backends. He managed like a small wealth-management family office. His base wanted small-scale wysiwyg dynamics. National budgets managed like small family budgets etc. All UX, no backend.
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