Groundhog Games We’ve Played Before
Ain't Nothing New Under the Sun
Note: shifting gears here on the blog and probably a long term change now that the WWG and Green New Fields series are mostly completed. A final infrastructure post is coming in GNF but future posts will be more focused, fewer abstract concepts, and in greater frequency as my Twitter presence goes to zero. Will remain focused on markets and politics with my fintwit content moving here to some degree. For now its all one feed but probably gets parceled out into sections eventually.
Begin With the End in Mind
Predicting the future is a tough business, and what I figure is the hardest part of it is more complicated that just right or left tail event—its Rummyisms of unknown unkowns that get ya. The process of elimination is usually pretty straightforward by itself; its the outcomes you didn’t have on your bingo card in the first place are the ones that invalidate your entire probabilistic data set.
In markets everybody wants to argue about and have opinions on the why of resulting outcomes, but the reality is the line can go up, the line can go down, or the line can go sideways. If you want to be more detailed about it, line can go up a lot or a little, down a lot or a little, or sideways for a long time or a short time; but the only thing that really matters to you is what the line does in relation to your position. Because that’s all the market really is, a collection of positions driven by the relationship of price relative to said positions.
At the basest level, markets can be stripped down to a 2 X 2 matrix. Ranges are either expanding or contracting, and price is either accelerating or decelerating. Its really not hard to craft a narrative tree from there.
Market narratives are typically shaped after the fact, but what if thought about narratives in advance and just ran a rolling decision tree anticipating how each outcome does to that relationship between price and positions?
What if we did that for all of life’s narratives? Your insurance and credit card companies already have one for yours.
Times of Enchantment
Depending on who you ask there are only six or seven basic story arcs to all the plot lines in all of human history. Rags to riches, tragedy, riches to rags, man in a hole, Icarus, Cinderella, and Oedipus—you can add comedy or not as at its own I suppose. Additionally, there are only 12 primary themes: power, identity, loneliness, friendship, free will vs. fate, hope, love, war, childhood, coming of age, environment, and of course the genre transcendent theme family.
Kurt Vonnegut basically wrote an early algo for it. It was rejected by the University of Chicago for his thesis, and we can safely add that to the laundry list of things about the world and humanity they are fundamentally wrong about.
“Computers can now play chess so I don’t know why they can’t digest this very difficult curve…the most popular story in our civilization”
As far probability and outcome matrices go, 7 x 12 is fairly tame by modern computing standards, and I’d certainly had paid more attention in school had they properly noted the classics were cheat codes for all the games humans play instead of funny costumes and old timey dialog. We can chalk that up to the unknown unknowns of youth, but the sales pitch was wildly undersold if there was one at all.
Understanding that there is nothing new under the sun, and that humans just play the same old games with new toys on a board with 84 moves give or take is the key to why degrading education is one of the primary opening gambits in games of conquest.
Clever Girl
Us humans fancy ourselves as quite intelligent and rational beings, and believing this to be true plays a large part in our own self esteem. But the fact of the matter is there is more to intelligence than just being clever apes, and human game play relies on strategies found not just in our primate cousins but all the way down to insects. Its called deimatic behavior.
If a bug can stunt on our go to move instinctively I’m going to have a hard time assigning much more intelligence to it past the act of breathing. Although I do suspect some folks would have trouble with that if our meat suits didn’t handle that shit for us.
Deimatic behavior is the root strategy behind divide and conquer in a democratic society, how the supreme court and the gop get people to silently adhere to unconstitutional and immoral policies that are only supported by the roughly 30% of the folks that absolutely nothing is too horrible for. The job is to just make it appear that cancer has an 80% approval rating.
Its also the root strategy behind visibility filtering on social media, managing perception via disinformation and propaganda, and is what fascists use to drive the feeling of existential dread and inevitability to assume power. Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes this point a lot, and we need to understand repetition isn’t just for the baddies just because we might be focused on keeping it fresh.
There is however a drawback to long term reliance on people believing things that ain’t so.
Gerrymandering Perception
There is an inherent instability within authoritarian and theocratic systems, and that inherent instability actually applies to any social construct that is organized around a fabricated narrative. Our current era frequently is referred to as “post truth” but this is a temporary affair that is actually a transitional phase in a cycle between accepted narratives. This applies to any organization big or small, and explicitly to national identity and foundational mythologies.
How the narrative curve goes when social movements form, they by rule as a subgroup form within an existing one. From there they either peak and peter out as a subgroup or they can grow in size large enough to challenge the dominant group. After that its just a question of whether their group takes over by popularity/voluntary or peaks and whether or not they’ll accept the results peacefully. Another 2 X 2 box matrix.
That’s the background reference for the next leg in the story curve, the next part is the difference in how each collapses. The truth based narratives can collapse by either being disproven and abandoned or being overthrown by untruth. Faith narratives can become dominant either by any type of story for the era’s technology that is as good as any other explanation and gains popularity, or in group/out group violence.
Both truth based and faith based narratives can collapse instantly, but faith based ones rely on the popularity of the social contract and the group itself or they’re faced with the choice of violence or forgotten. The main difference here is voluntary membership vs. group order imposed by force. Voluntary membership is resilient and imposed order is the “then all at once” kind of unwind. Reality is just much easier to defend.
Each successive wave in communications technology has enabled new ways to amplify deimatic projection for ideological purposes, from books to radio to television and the internet. Traditional mediums however came at significant financial expense along with physical constraints in the form of either from paper and ink to broadcast signal strength.
It wasn’t until most American homes were hard wired with a cable television feed that the barrier of entry on narrative projection was shattered. From that point forward it was simply a matter of content creation and the technology to create and send that content on the hard wire feed itself has evolved into today’s right click copy-pasta instant creation & delivery. The internet is running on some of those very same cables.
Like HFT algos, its the same game—just faster.
And the powerful projecting their personal preference as the popular choice has been that game since Gutenberg gave them the ability to artificially amplify their positions using financial means. Liberal media itself is one of those OG big lies because media assets always get bought, and twitter is no different. Yeah, the talent might be liberal but they gotta eat too.
Digital Deimatics
Facebook always had their thumb on the scale, with Twitter Musk is trying to take what has been a mostly passive weighted model on social media and give it a go with full Russian style manufactured reality and fantasy universe.
He paid 44 billion for a digital flash mob and the ability to choose the main character daily, and the ability for his own personal opinion to have editorial control over what is “center” vis-à-vis parameters for engagement. This is partially fallout from the wild west of crypto and AMC-apes, a new escalation in the information conflict—viral flash mobs directed for financial gain, making a mockery of the entire idea of markets themselves.
I’m really not trying to blow my own horn here, its just these guys are not all that hard to stay in front of either:
They’re not all that bright or creative, they’re copy pasta-ing games we’ve played before
There’s usually only a couple of different options in play at any given time
Whichever choice is blindingly obvious, or a 12-year-old boy would think is “epic” is the most probable
It’s almost always misdirection
I went over this in the previous post on Grooming Blood Libel, and here’s some more repetition to drive it home because the game is ongoing and the story arc is already set. How the normalization/corruption cycle plays:
Site becomes a “free speech zone” for GOP white supremacy and violent Christian Nationalist LGBTQ rhetoric
You stick around and create content for it
The 2024 election comes after 2 years of violence (already mass murder), the framing of the election is debating faith based pretenses to justify murder.
His wager is that you’ll stick around and legitimize his fictional reality with a side of “groomers”, that your follower count and emotional investment from your time on twitter will be important enough to tacitly support violence by continuing to create content. Explicitly if you give him $8 for the privilege.
Playing along is tacitly admitting you have a price, the rest is just price discovery.