Thinking about how the area of identity signaling mechanisms has shrunk while the information you try to communicate has expanded.
Coat of arms: 2 feet x 2 feet, maybe 10-20 bytes?
Military ribbons/medals: 6”x 6”, maybe 100-200 bytes?
Profile pic: 0.5”x0.5”, and your whole self?
Conversation
Coat of arms
4
12
Couldn’t find a good chart of how to read military formal ribbon displays (is there a term for the full rack of stuff a military person wears for formal occasions, like “coat of arms”?)
The stuff on a very decorated general’s uniform is like 6 rows of patches
2
4
Even a very complex NFT pfp can’t indicate much. Bored ape semiotics seem to be about 1-2 bytes worth.
Regular pfps seem to at most indicate a vibe gestalt, like anime or statue head. Really just 1 bit that sorta parity-checks the whole persona.
2
10
“Type of guy” vibe boards (??) try to convey maybe 8-12 bytes?
It’s hard to gauge information content, since social media heraldic displays assume a sort of subcultural literacy context. So it’s relative information.
4
9
All the people agonizing about who is/isn’t a postrat should just invent a coat of arms scheme because there’s too many bits to convey. Some suggested elements
E(x): LW
🐍: Basilisk
🦀: UST/Sarah Perry
🍆: David Chapman
🐮: Moloch/SSC
😶🌫️: illegibility
🎗: ribbonfarm
🫖: tpot
3
1
20
You could probably fit 4-6 in a handle before it starts getting noisy and annoying.
I especially like the irony of a legible indicator of illegibility stanning
Replying to
I’d especially like a heraldry scheme for econ twitter, since I follow it in peripheral vision, but not closely enough to quickly parse where someone is coming from. What would be good symbols for Keynesian, monetarist, Austrian, MMT, Georgist, UBIer, behavioral economist?
2
9
Somehow almost all the conditions for a heraldic culture are here… internet of beefs, knights/mooks, obscure distinctions, nerdy interest in signifiers, suitable tech (NFT pfps)… yet it hasn’t yet quite come together. Wonder why. Too campy/unironic/on-the-nose?
3
7
The signal grammar is just set membership I think. Each symbol indicates membership in one interest or social subgraph or set. The whole is a pointing vector. You need additional info to characterize the sets themselves. Weird Sun is probably the best codified example to date.
2
1
3
There is also a tendency to make self-referential ironic jokes about signaling behavior itself, as in ‘ingroup’, but there’s more unironic heraldic signaling going around than we cop to: Ukraine flags, rose twitter, ((…)) etc
1
3
🤔
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
twitter.com/areatechnology is one attempt you may find interesting
1
1
8

