The surprising insight for me was that secular booms powered by religion-like faith is probably not attribute to the tangibles. Apollo was inspiring but too tangible and specific. Gold rushes are closer but still too sharp and narrow. You need something vague like Reaganism.
Conversation
Basically you surrender to a force of serendipity. Reagan’s genius was in getting there via negativa. Convincing people serendipity was the natural state unless the state tried to “help” (8 scariest words etc).
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Very few technological forces are this generic, so usually some human narrativization into a progress narrative is needed. But oil and silicon both come close to “naked” religions. No prophets or bibles needed. Raw serendipitous benevolence and bounty of nature. Just add physics.
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The relevance of this for today cf meaning crisis is — there’s no point giving people something to believe in (hopepunk, green new deal). You need to give people something to surrender to. Trumpism hit this button hard. It’s not what he offered. It’s the surrender he accepted.
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The left has not offered a surrender option since the 60s (hippie/dropout culture). This is why it struggles everywhere to be seen as anything other than authoritarian power grab by a bureaucratic minority.
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For those like me interested in a technological surrender option, a new Promethean force comparable to Moore’s Law, crypto, ML, and solar have been the 3 big candidates, all “children of silicon.” None as powerful as the parent.
Lithium is another, but weaker than oil
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Importantly, surrender options are not ideas unless they are literal religions. They need a material basis. Arguably Reaganism had a material basis first in globalized trade, then in silicon. Americanism as a 150y old region is rooted in oil.
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The US was the OG petrostate for ~20-30y. The only reason it didn’t succumb to the Dutch disease/curse of resources is, it was first so had to invent the oil industry and all the tech. The hard work stayed the curse which descended on later petrostates.
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Aside, curse of resources is a degenerate surrender religion. Saudi Arabia’s first religion, ahead of Islam.
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So inventing even the finest new secular -ism won’t help solve the meaning crisis. You need to claim either god or physics on your side. A bunch of philosophy or manifestos won’t do.
God is dead, so it’s either reactionary delusions or new physics.
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Surrender to technological serendipity is what we usually call a network effect. An unbounded nonlinear upside dynamic hay is unreasonably easy to trigger within a broader physics rising tide (oil, silicon).
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This is a satisfying theory and explains why charismatic cult leader types only ever attract a minority of idiot true believers under post-modern conditions. The axial age is long over. Simply claiming revelation and delivering messianic texts is just campy to most people.
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Relatedly modern cults are NOT precursors of trad religions of 3021. Conditions have changed. The pristine ground of unicameral minds was only available for colonization that one time. It was the first and last “human resource” fossil fuel. New religions can’t evolve that way.
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If I had to bet, I’d bet on machine learning as the new physics force that can drive a new surrender-based religiosity. Just surrender to the inscrutable algorithm. If Moore’s Law is OT Judaism, ML is NT Christianity. Already with eastern (Chinese) and Western branches.
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Wow, your jargon-fu is incredible. 🤩
I see what you mean, now. Interesting. Maybe Bitcoin maxis are surrendering since it’s apathetic to the rising tide (uranium/nuclear). And not forward thinking enough to see how fusion disrupts the comforting incentives.
TF is “dynamic hay
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Conceptual frameworks are like programming languages. Most ideas can be expressed in all of them (and often are). Still occasionally it seems like progress is much easier in some than in others. And often nobody will quite know how to explain why.


