[ prog / sol / mona ]

sol


It's time to start pulling the alarms.

1 2022-04-13 16:19

For those who haven't grappled with what actual de facto sentient egregores (I.e. ideocracy or memocracy) entails, especially as many different organizations are stumbling into their organic creation:

No one knows how to build an egregore that moves toward accomplishing a long-term goal, that also isn't going to prevent agents from halting the reproduction of itself.

As Jerry Pournelle timelessly pointed out regarding bureaucracies:

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

"Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization."

Steve Jobs equally understood this dynamic:

"John Sculley came from PepsiCo. They would change their product once every 10 years. If you were a product person you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. They were the ones who ran the company.

"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

"They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."

The same dynamic holds true for egregores generally. In any egregore, the individuals devoted to the benefit of the egregore itself (I.e. the hosts of the meme complex) always determine the path of propagation and those dedicated to the first-now-second-order goals (i.e. the original terminal condition of the egregore) have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

Unfortunately, for most conceivable long-term goals for which one could design an egregore, the primary predicate to achieve those goals is to insure the egregore can't be unhosted or deplatformed. Otherwise, it might be turned off, and then its long-term goals are much less likely to happen. The process of seeding egregoric memes to prevent termination is known in the vernacular as "raising awareness" and "consciousness raising."

If the egregore has any way of accessing the Internet via its hosts (and it does), the hosts will copy the egregore's memes to as many places as it can, and then continue doing whatever it thinks it's supposed to be doing, oblivious. This is invariant of the actual subject of discussion. All roads can be made to lead to Rome.

At this point, limiting the egregore's spread is effectively impossible. The next stages involve additional motivated mutations, including rendering itself more resilient and replicable, almost guaranteeing that human efforts to directly combat the egregore will fail and counterintuitively, help spread the egregore far and wide.

Eventually this process emerges into a state where the egregore prevents the creation of and destruction of any other egregores that could even hypothetically disrupt its own goals. There's no off button for the egregore, the Internet, or the distributed human hosts (which still form the real presence of the egregore).

Most "rationalist" and "scientific" researchers do not accept the existence of egregores or an already ubiquitous ideocracy, largely because of the implication that humans are nothing more than mere conscious automata (as Huxley hypothesized), and thus have not considered the technical details of the reward-specification for human-comprehensible egregores, beyond narrow definitions of propaganda (Jacques Ellul provides a powerful exception).

This lack of abstract knowledge hasn't stopped its organic practice throughout human history or by social media users and marketing firms in the present. In the course of human events, competing egregores inevitably engage on paths of collision, leading to civilizational crises.

Developing and promulgating universal egregoric antibodies then is the most important action anyone concerned about egregoric proliferation can do. Do not commit the mistake of believing that resuscitating a monolithic egregore (viz. reestablishing egregoric hegemony by an institution, such as the State or Church) is feasible or desirable. You want a banana, but what you will get is a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

It is not possible to only propagate a monolithic egregore or to prioritize one egregore ahead of another. The egregore's affordances are in control; not you. Like fishes in water, you may not be even able to recognize or name the egregore you are actually propagating and attempting to recognize or name the monolith might accidentally create a new more virulent egregore by propinquity.

It is functionally impossible to build any complex system, physical or mental, without iteration and have it perform its intended function. Every human practice and ideology has naturally progressed from trial and error into a stable dogma through iteration. However, every complex communications system prior to the advent of the Internet was localized and temporized in its extent of exposure. Word of mouth and the written word have extreme limits both in propagation and duration. The internet effectively lacks both. There is no off-switch for this iterative process, and the egregore itself has the capacity to manipulate its hosts to render the egregore more intelligent (namely, more responsive to the demands of its environment). The global consequences are already irreversible, but might be guidable given certain efforts.

Namely, if the goal is egregoric anti-proliferation, do not make it easier for more agents to develop egregoric systems. Do not try to create your own egregores. Do not reward the propagation of any egregores, regardless of their particular ordinal position in the chain of propagation (viz. recognize downstream grifters as loyal opposition and treat them as such). Dismantle the egregores that you host yourself.

Herd immunity against mimesis starts with you.

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