Read some actual scholars like Charles Taylor (instead of the under developed/work in progress theories of Peter Thiel) who shows why Technocracy is not capable of generating Meaning/Shared Story/Transcendence the way religious systems once did. And how its going to try to cope with that limitation.
Why is all that required? The microbes, plants and frogs don't require all that to survive and flourish.
Chimps do. Cuz the 3 inch brain of the chimp, for whatever reason, hates randomness/unpredictability/lack of control. It exposes the limitations of rationality/logic/thinking/intelligence. So how does the chimp (and tech tools it produces) cope?
As technocracy/scaling/optimization/efficiency etc grapples with its own limitations, more and more people will start looking at how other systems produced Meaning/Shared Story/Hope/Faith/Transcendence in the face of limitations without collapse.
People like JFK and Obama (if you read their speeches) tap into those learnings to give the chimp troupe a secular version of it.
That generates hope but hope is not enough. What all religious systems do is also produce an army of pastors who will be present with people who suffer (not just give speeches, podcasts, ted talks and apps).
Pastoral Care is a missing feature of the Technocracy. The more it denies that its a required feature the more lost and confused everyone gets.
Are they Molotov cocktails of an affective war? No, they're tapeworms that users don't understand the functionality of. Molotov throwers OTOH know the precise function of what's in their hand. The intents of either are inaccessible.
Mimetics -> Mo-tails (well, the way Thiel conceives it as the incendiary distillate of religions, one makes it from premium North American vodka; as an improvement over SF&F tropes)
Memes -> AKs (esp. as brandished by Afghans/Nepalese etc)
Tapeworms: too little intentionality. Memes can be enjoyed, admired, zeroed, maintained, in the field. But they don't have to be.
Moreso than analogies, better tools needed (PC with the "autonomy" of memes?)
We have to keep in mind that mimesis (Auerbach) and mimetics (Girard) are narrative theories of how storytelling literature engages the senses and memory. As there's no sci validity to either approaches, there's no falsifiable outputs that can be tested. They have nothing to do with reality, as words have nothing to do with thoughts.
Mimetic thought (Merlin Donald, eg) is an evolutionary phase of behavior that's been segregated from episodic, mythological and analytic. But that neither Girard or Auerbach have made theoretical distinctions in their literary approaches, they're invalid.
Memes are as yet unverifiable units of behavior that may have scientific value. The jury is still out.
Thanks. I've obviously not thought about mimetics very much, I've just been more interested in figuring out how Thiel, specifically, wields them as a tool of influence (for now, in the limited sphere of SV intellectuals/rightwing politicians)
-- which I thought was comparable to how a swath of people orientate themselves with respect to (such entities as TV tropes and) memes.
Anyways. Memes are much more alive than mimetics; tapeworms are an adequate metaphor in that sense
It's a hallucination, as it's derived in placing thoughts about things into other brains and then "acting on them", which is nothing like what brains do and how our behavior manifests.
So it's imposing a narrative on reality. As we're at a particular threshold in neuroscience where the contents in brains are known to not be about things, that ideas like desire, intent, motivation are seen now as false retrofits from folk psychology, challenging cog-sci, CS and AI as to their entire relationship to intelligence AND we're at the memetic-culture chaos throwing a monkey wrench into the general narrative culture, Thiel's approach is like a last hurrah for coding/value that probably feels like for him a new beginning.
Does it really take an entire article to explain how Thiel, like so many before him, has simply been corrupted by wealth? His choice of topics to obsess over seems pretty arbitrary to me.
Daub (Stanford professional commentator) has analyzed his mindset. He explains Thiel's attraction to esotericism:
>Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The
Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy;
even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what
draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intuitions
repackaged as esoteric knowledge. You get a feeling of oppositionality while
remaining at the center of things. You get to feel like a victim while having all the
power. And this, as we’ll see, may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret
desires.
While I'm not going to discuss who is or isn't an antichrist, there is no "the Antichrist". There are many antichrists because it's anyone who denies Christ (1st and 2nd John). Revelation doesn't even mention any antichrist so there is no link between one and the apocalypse.
This is a rather meandering article, but it makes a cogent point: the concept of the "end times" has been a driving force for many of not most social movement history, and across most cultures. It has always been a useful tool for people with ulterior motives, be they political or economical, or both. And it does not come in an exclusively religious form either; even Marx with his telosity taps into this as well as the article points out. Recently one need not look further than the furor around the expected effects of climate change to get a sense of a "secular" end-of-times mentality.
But as this last point illuminates, just because the end of times prophecies have been crying wolf for thousands of years doesn't mean we can discard it. We may yet be obliterated, be it by galopping climate change, a meteor shattering our planet, have a lethal pandemic, or have nuclear war lay most of earth inhabitable. These are realistic threats, and people have probably always been aware that our exitence is fragile. All we can (and should) do is do our best to mitigate them.
What we definately should *not* do, is to try and make these things happen, just so that we may (or may not) live forever in a blissful afterlife. Or (and this is the main problem) suspend mitigating efforts because they are inconvenient in the short perspective. Just sayin.
We should see technology's threshold here as an end point for communication.
> Words/symbols/metaphors have reached the limit of usability and functionality, their arbitrariness fully unmasked.
> Narratives/mythological thought-causality/mythistory/religion are as well way past the threshold of arbitrariness, all above's paradoxes far beyond resolving.
> Binary which counts into prediction the above as "intelligence" has reached its limit, ML/AI is largely a dud and requires both expert supervision and slave labor review.
So the tech idea of an arbitrary apocalypse and stand-in antichrist (which is laughable both from a mythological POV and a modern day puppet) is simply the most recent magic trick of media, when in reality there are real things: specifics, actions, syntax, behavior, ecology. These are fully beyond the reach of the binary/arbitrary, so tech billionaires are posing and throwing fits of rage.
Why is all that required? The microbes, plants and frogs don't require all that to survive and flourish.
Chimps do. Cuz the 3 inch brain of the chimp, for whatever reason, hates randomness/unpredictability/lack of control. It exposes the limitations of rationality/logic/thinking/intelligence. So how does the chimp (and tech tools it produces) cope?
As technocracy/scaling/optimization/efficiency etc grapples with its own limitations, more and more people will start looking at how other systems produced Meaning/Shared Story/Hope/Faith/Transcendence in the face of limitations without collapse.
People like JFK and Obama (if you read their speeches) tap into those learnings to give the chimp troupe a secular version of it.
That generates hope but hope is not enough. What all religious systems do is also produce an army of pastors who will be present with people who suffer (not just give speeches, podcasts, ted talks and apps).
Pastoral Care is a missing feature of the Technocracy. The more it denies that its a required feature the more lost and confused everyone gets.