(2022-01-18) Hunt Narrative And Metaverse Pt1 The Living Word

Ben Hunt: Narrative and Metaverse, Pt. 1: The Living Word. I’ve spent a thirty-five year professional career spanning academia, technology companies, and Wall Street studying “linguistic patterns in unstructured data” … or what are more commonly known as narratives.

I’ve come to an inescapable conclusion: Narratives are as real and as alive as you and me.*

I don’t mean this as a metaphor. I truly believe that narratives are an alien lifeform in exactly the same way that viruses are an alien lifeform.

Both narratives and viruses have a lifecycle of purpose and intention – they are born, they grow, they respond to their environment, they reproduce and they die – all in service to preserving the existence of their kind. Both can be organized and understood through the same principles of species taxonomy as any organism in the macroverse.

The world of viruses is the microverse, an invisible and completely alien world of infinitesimal scale.

A note on the use of the word ‘alien’ here, which is the most ruined word in the English language

The only science fiction writer today who gets close to preserving the true meaning of the word – and I am convinced it’s because he doesn’t write in English – is Liu Cixin.

When I use the word ‘alien’, I mean it in its true sense. I mean it as something that is profoundly non-comprehensible on its own terms

No one believed in the microverse 200 years ago. Germ theory wasn’t even a thing

But today we all believe in germ theory.

I’m asking you to give the same consideration to narratives

the possibility that there is another alien world besides the microverse

The alien world of narratives is the metaverse – a mental world of symbols and images

You’re thinking that because the metaverse only exists inside our heads as a mental construct, it isn’t real like you and I are real, and things inside the metaverse aren’t alive like you and I are alive.

The metaverse is not some mental ghost in the machine of the human brain. No, it is a physical expression of the way that the human brain wires itself at the cellular level in response to linguistic stimulus, creating a persistent alien world

The metaverse isn’t just as real and as alive as you and me, the metaverse is literally what makes you and me … you and me.

This is transcendentalism, the recognition that there is another world beyond the mundane macroverse, and it is the foundation of every great religion and faith in human history.

What’s new, for me at least, and I suspect most of you, is that I used to think that these teachings were delivered as metaphor. Today I think they were delivered as fact.

Is the Mark Zuckerberg metaverse of virtual reality and avatars and Oculus glasses part of the metaverse I’m talking about? Sure. It’s the merest, most inconsequential part, but sure. It’s the cringe neighborhood of the metaverse. It’s the Metaverse! TM.

I think Zuckerberg’s android vaudeville routine is an intentional effort at misdirection, a calculated effort to convince the world that the metaverse is this little thing over here, a juiced-up version of Second Life or a cosplay version of Ready Player One, even as Facebook goes after the metaverse’s true golden egg: controlling the grammar of narrative and changing the way we think.

Mark Zuckerberg knows that the biggest changes in human history are not from scientific discoveries. He knows that the biggest changes in human history are from changes in how we think.

Slavery used to be a thing. Settling your differences through dueling used to be a thing. The divine right of kings used to be a thing.

*How do you rule the world? By killing the ideas that do not serve your ruling interests, and by giving birth to the ones that do.

And yes, Mark Zuckerberg totally gets this.*

Facebook is one of the most prominent manipulators of the metaverse, one of the most powerful members of what I call the Nudging State and the Nudging Oligarchy

not one person in a million sees the metaverse as real. It’s just the water in which we swim.

everyone talks about the evil that comes from “gain-of-function research” on viruses in the microverse. And for good reason. But no one uses the language of “gain-of-function research” in any conversation about Facebook and Twitter and Google and Republican PACs and Democratic PACs, even though that’s exactly what they’re doing — gain-of-function research on narrative lifeforms in the metaverse!

I think it’s because we have not yet built the grammar and the vocabulary to describe the metaverse and its narrative lifeforms.

that’s why Epsilon Theory exists.

develop the words that allow us to speak of it.

Today we live in a Fiat World, where virtually everything of social importance in the material world exists by proclamation.

Today we live in a world where it is impossible to turn the metaverse off.

It’s not just the development of social media like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all the rest. It’s also the development of 24-hour “news” channels (Cable News)

Most of all it’s the development of handheld (mobile) delivery devices for all of these “content platforms”

The result of these gain-of-function efforts on narrative viruses is simply this: we are broken.

I say that clinically. Dispassionately. I say that as a game-theoretic observation, in the sense of a sub-optimal equilibrium in a game of Stag Hunt, where every rational decision is to defect from mutually advantageous actions and norm-following. (game theory)

I say that as a political science observation, in the sense that with bimodal policy preference distributions across every issue area, political institutions built for centrist, single-peaked preference distributions – like first-past-the-post voting structures, separation of Executive and Legislature, even the US Constitution itself – inevitably wither and die.

But I tell you there is a way out. A way through. A way up. A way to think differently about our lives so that we can make our way to the optimal equilibrium of the Stag Hunt, so that institutions of coordination and facilitated cooperation can actually work again.

Everything changes when you see that the order is imagined, that the Great and Terrible Oz is just a man behind a curtain.

Everything changes when you see how others are creating thoughts for you to think and crowding out thoughts for you not to think.

goal is not to distance ourselves from the metaverse

it also contains the best of us. The metaverse is inextricable from a live well lived.

Our goal should be to embrace the metaverse from a position of agency and harmony with our physical lives. Our goal should be to identify the positive narratives of thousands of years of accumulated human wisdom and reject the negative narratives of a few decades

Because Socrates and Jesus are the OG metaverse meme-lords.

Know thyself

Love thy neighbor as thyself

I think these are the two most powerful and positive narratives in all of human civilization: self-knowledge and empathy.

The song of self-knowledge is the song of the self.

The song of empathy is the song of the soul.

What makes the songs of Socrates and Jesus so powerful? It’s their grammar.

These are not songs organized around principles of the political or the group. These songs are addressed to YOU as an autonomous human being who is inherently capable of introspection and love.

The songs of Socrates and Jesus are songs of profound autonomy and independence.

That’s what makes these songs so dangerous. That’s why the State put both Socrates and Jesus to death.

Today, the Nudging State doesn’t put you to death for singing a dangerous song

Today they make you ridiculous.

Today they drown you out with songs of their own.

First we will write the words to see the metaverse. Then we will write the songs to change it.