There were two stories in the news this week that got me thinking about the future of generative AI. Not the next decade, where there will be a lot of excitement that echoes the early social media boom, but in the time after. What does the post-AI internet look like once the sheen wears off? How will humans relate to the content machines make and to the machines making it?

In the first article, genAI is celebrated for its ability to create a new episode of television from whole cloth. In the second, genAI is panned for empowering the spread of misinformation through greed-driven web scraping. These are both sad stories.

“The Simulation”

An AI generated episode of South Park, with plans for a digital WestWorld.

TL;DR - NFT Company wants to produce full simulated worlds of intelligent agents going about life (think Westworld meets Second Life), with storylines popped out to turn into content like tv shows or movies. They’ve debuted their “Showrunner AI” by creating a brand new episode of South Park about deepfakes threatening Actors.

Praise Glorbo

A subreddit trolls a botfarm news site into posting an article about an upcoming World of Warcraft expansion that doesn't exist.

TL;DR - The subreddit r/WoW has been frustrated over past months with the website zleague.gg scraping their popular posts to turn into blog content. Users decided to take action by creating a popular post filled with fake anticipation over “Glorbo,” a nonexistent upcoming game expansion. Zleague did what it does, and posted a blog about redditor’s reactions to the “upcoming” expansion. It’s since been removed- but you can still read here here.

It’s immediately apparent why, despite being humorous, the “Glorbo” affair is concerning in its “fake news”. “The Simulation,” however, has received mixed positive and negative attention. The positive voices are excited about new horizons for generative content. The negative voices decry showcases of technology meant to replace writers and actors with machines in the middle of a historic WGA/SAG joint strike, where automation is a key issue.

People are excited about “The Simulation” because it indicates that long-form generative content is just on the horizon; a generative promised land of unlimited content with near-zero production costs. You can practically hear the drool dripping from investor’s mouths. Regardless of your disposition towards the news, the fake South Park episode gives us glimpse into a warped future of online content.

Discontent

Most comments over the quality of the generated episode itself are that it lacks humor, and is at best “mildly watchable.” Watch it yourself and put your opinion in the comments (I doubt you’ll be wow’d). For me, the episode evoked the sensation of eating a meal consisting solely of saltines. Outside of creating sensational headlines this content isn’t worth producing, let alone consuming.

GenAI does not produce content, it produces discontent; hollow work that falls into an odd uncanny valley, aping the shape of human art without any of the substance or lived experience. The more we invest in genAI, the more discontent we’ll be pumping into the world, the more we’ll drown out genuine human creation.

GenAI will turn the internet from an already-crowded content vehicle into a clown car. Renown Sci-Fi publication Clarkesworld was forced to shut its doors to new submissions due to what is essentially a content DDOS. An overproliferation of “Glorbo”-like bot content has significantly impacted Google's search quality. Researchers are already warning us that generative content will create a feedback loop of AI models being trained on AI content, leading to “Model Collapse.”

Tech-savvy millennials have spent most of their lives being told that The Singularity is just around the corner. That we’re ramping up to something big. That a hyper intelligent machine mind will reach escape velocity and bring the rest of society with it into the future. This isn’t what is happening. Generative AI is not creating anything new- it’s remixing the old, and quickly running out of old things to remix.

The Unsingularity

The bleeding edge of genAI technology is not driven by social progress, or by a thirst for technological advancement— it’s driven by the bottom line. The training data feeding frenzy that powered transformer model innovations is over. Lawsuits abound over companies violating intellectual property and privacy laws when collecting training data. Data collected from the moment genAI tools became available onwards is tainted by the potential for model collapse. Like any frontier, the frontier of free human-made content will be locked down by the industry that’s arrived to exploit it.

What will happen to the culture of our global information network after it has been squeezed for every last drop of human content, and pumped full of generative discontent? We’ve seen what happens to forests, to swamps, to any environment when strip mined: it collapses.

Gen Z turned to TikTok when Google’s results became unverifiable as human, and that’s only the beginning. The internet’s social sphere will become unusable when every piece of content a user generates has discrete value as fuel for machine learning, and when human content is indistinguishable from machine discontent. As each marker of humanity falls to automation (text, speech, appearance) the utility of the internet’s social sphere will dim and then fully extinguish- leaving a webscape of robots pushing ads on one another.

Maybe in this way we’ll finally be free.

My hope is that if freedom comes, it will be in the Unsingularity. That the death of the technology prophesied to elevate us will spur a return to the real world. That future generations will shun the internet for anything but functional work, and return to “artisanal” human-made content in their leisure time. Call me a Luddite, but at least the Luddites understood automation as an existential threat to their lifestyles.

Either way, look on the bright side: even though right now is a low point for finding human-generated content on the internet, it’s the high point for the rest of our lives.

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Folks, it’s time for a change. As a society, we’re too anxious, too migratory, too divorced from the institutions that should bind us together. We’ve gotten away from traditional values. No one understands the value of hard work anymore. We need a return to the good old days, where everyone was secure in their future, their home, and their job. With the edifice of society crumbling around us like the Roman empire of yore, it’s time for us to do as the Romans did- and revert to feudalism. It’s time to go serfing.

Serf the wave

If you look at the shape of any society’s history; all its violent convergences and divergences, it resembles a wave. Economic cycles of rise an fall that all culminate in a peak of prosperity, followed by a crash into chaos.

Capitalism is collapsing. Congratulations, you made it! We reached peak profit, and it’s a big drop from this historic high. There are two options: ride the collapse, or be sucked under with the churn. As a shitty surfer, I have enough experience to tell you that the former is infinitely more enjoyable than the latter. Let’s look at this expert chart, which will tell you exactly where we are in this cycle

If you’ve somehow ended up reading this in the midst of doomscrolling, you’re likely too late to “catch” the wave and end up as nobility in the new world (bummer). You’ll need to settle for the next best thing: indenturing yourself and your descendants to a propertyholder and their descendants in perpetuity.

This isn’t a new idea- historically, serfs were all the rage in the middle ages (and up until the mid-20th century in some parts of the world). Though they’ve come in a lot of different flavors over the years, the most common arrangement is peasants bound to lands held by feudal lords. Lords might change, but the serfs stay with the land- a liege doesn’t “own” their serfs, just the land that the serfs are permanently bound to; unable to leave by pain of severe punishment or death. Like nobility, serfdom was hereditary and inherited from one’s parents.

“BuT pAuL,” you might say, “I tHoUgHt SeRfDoM wAs BaD?”

You’re right, idiot, it was bad. But this isn’t serfdom; it’s Serfing. Serfing is hip, cool, new, and modern. It’s everything serfdom wasn’t. Let me tell you why:

Better living through serfing

Modern life is hard, and getting harder. We’re constantly looming on the precipice of unemployment, eviction, political violence, and environmental catastrophe. Each day things seem to draw closer to boiling over, and the population experiences that tension as both mental and physical strain. We’ve all got anxiety.

Our society has an anxiety epidemic, and it’s only getting worse. What’s the root of that anxiety? Uncertainty. Our brain is an anticipation machine, and the skyrocketing precarity of our world makes it malfunction.

What if there was one weird trick that doctors didn’t want you to know about? One that could make your anxiety go away entirely? Good news, there is- it’s called serfing.

In one fell swoop, serfing can take away every ounce of uncertainty from your life. No more worrying about where you’ll work or losing your job- you’re there for life! It’s actually a two-for-one, since you live where you work- no more stress over landlords, apartment hunting, moving, and security deposits. No more general anxiety about your future or where you’ll be in ten years- you know you’ll be here, where you belong, toiling for your beloved liege.

Phew 😮‍💨, can’t you feel all that stress melting away?

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Neofeudal kit & caboodle

So what sort of sick gear do you need to go serfing and hang-ten hour workdays? Believe it or not, no gear at all is required for serfing. That’s the best part: you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.

Although you may not own anything, everyone stands to benefit greatly from the serf-patron relationship.

What do serfs get out of the deal?

The Three S’s of Serfing:

• Safety,

• Stability,

• Subsistence!

What do patrons get out of the deal?

The Three P’s of Patronage:

• Ownership of your person

• Ownership of any products of your labor.

• Ownership of any proceeds from the sale of those products!

Doesn’t that sound fantastic? I can’t think of a single thing that could go wrong with such a mutually beneficial relationship!

Now that you’re convinced of the benefits and ease of serfing, it’s time to scout out some hip locales to give it a permanently binding try.

I wanna go serfing

Due to improvements in modern technology, politics, and infrastructure, the new breed of modern serf is more likely to be bound to a company than land, which only means exciting new serfing opportunities!

If you want to have success serfing, you’re gonna need to get up early to be first in the line-up, and have a keen eye to spot a good wave to ride. Here’s a few early serf spots with strong potential to carry your line through the dark times with only mild abuse and total objectification:

Storyliving by Disney: these corporate private communities provide opportunities for residents “looking to write the next chapter of their lives with Disney.” To me, this sounds like the perfect opportunity to permanently put oneself and one’s family under the power and protection of a liege. Once things start going topsy turvy, who knows how long that’ll last! It’s an awesome serfing opportunity, but the fact that it requires an upfront payment for access makes it difficult for many to obtain.

Three stars. ★★★

Amazon Company Towns: Jacobin may report Amazon creating communities entirely dependent on their corporation for survival as a bad thing, but Business Insider and Bloomberg tells it how it really is: Amazon’s New ‘Factory Towns’ Will Lift the Working Class. This is an excellent opportunity, it really is. You could get in on the ground floor of the new Holy Roman Empire. 20 generations from now, your greatest-of-great grandchildren could be working the same spot on the assembly line that you start tomorrow. If that isn’t preservation and continuity of the working class, I don’t know what is. What’s more, this opportunity doesn’t have any of the pesky buy-in or prestige requirements of other serfing communities.

Five stars. ★★★★★

Monsanto Seed Dependence: If you’re still taken by the retro roots of serfing, this might be the option for you. Although you’ll need the land to get started, you can grow food using seeds you don’t own, and be subject to a massive set of bizzare conditions and privacy-violations, just the way we like it. Who knows where this will go in the future, but fingers crossed on it turning out to bring back serfing’s original glory days.

Two stars for uncertainty and difficulty of entry. ★★

Zucktown, USA: Good news, everyone. After initial buzz in 2018 from the NYT and other publications, Zucktown is back on! With homes, offices, retail, and a hotel this 59 sq. acre paradise will be available to Menlo Park employees of Meta. As someone who’s worked in tech, I can’t imagine anything better than making my living situation contingent on my employer. This has all the hallmarks of a perfect cushy serfing spot- long hours, autocratic top-down rule, and housing on premises so you can be born, live, work, and die without ever going more than a mile from your home. However, Meta is extremely picky when it comes to who they hire, so this may be a difficult serfing spot to get to for most getting into the game.

Considering the difficulty of entry, Zucktown gets Four stars from me. ★★★★

The Republic of Samsung: It’s been argued that the Chairman of Samsung is more powerful in South Korea than the nation’s President. With massive developments like Samsung Town, which boasts 20,000 resident employees, the mega-corpo-nation is the stuff of serfer’s dreams. Things are looking good for a future where Samsung and South Korea are synonymous, and now’s the time to hop on that train.

Five Stars. ★★★★★

These are just the tip of the iceberg. Feudal markets are a rapidly expanding economy; many exciting options exist for anyone looking to get in on the ground floor of an organization and never, ever leave!

Serfing USA

There’s a bright future ahead for society- a secure, solid, unchanging- traditional. I, for one, can’t wait- I’ll see you in the lineup…

I’m going serfing.

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To us, thoughts and information are unreal- we see their influence, but not their form. We keep information in patterns, in symbols, in the space between neurons. All of these are impression molds of something without physical form- instructions for how to reproduce information, but not the information itself.

The field of Memetics is often panned as pseudoscience due to the fruitless search for a physical embodiment of information; a “replicator” to serve as an analog to biological genes. Though we can very much observe the effect of information on the procession of biological life and evolution, we have not been successful in locating any physical outlet. This article is a thought experiment to imagine a reality where informational replicators are both real and tangible.

Let us imagine, for a moment, a projection that sits atop our reality. A plane of existence in which the information we store and share every day has physical form. The informational plane. The Infoplane.

Rules For Infolife

There is life in the Infoplane. Informational life. Infolife.

• Infolife’s form is dictated by an essential, underlying structure- similar to our own DNA. This structure’s analogs to the nucleotides in our genome are the basic elements of symbology and communication which make information persistent and reproducible. Spoken word, written language, the shape of a synapse- the negatives of our impression molds are tangible here.

• The infobiological equivalent of a unicellular organism is something like a fact or a phrase- atomic information that reproduces by being related or remembered.

• The infobiological equivalent of a multicellular organism is something like a discipline, a canon, or a religion- a set of facts and atomic knowledge that all work in concert to form a greater whole.

• Miscommunication and misinterpretation in the physical plane is analogous to gene mutation in the Infoplane, carrying with it the same potential for infolife’s adaptation and selection as our own genetic code.

• A game of telephone can grossly alter the content of a message, making it incomprehensible- something like a deleterious mutation. A disagreement in the interpretation of a scripture or constitution can lead to a schism- something like a speciation event.

The Infobiome

Much like our own world, Infolife has evolved to live in many different environments on the Infoplane, mirroring the different mediums of storage and communication in the physical world. The physical differences in rate and integrity of communication and storage between these mediums in our own world translate to significant differences in infolife’s evolution between biomes:

• Biological mediums of information are slow to reproduce, and less volatile due to physical DNA’s evolved error correction.

• Perceptual mediums are mostly subsets of biological mediums, infolife here is short-lived, and unlikely to procreate and adapt unless physically recorded into another medium, such as memory.

• Mental/conceptual mediums represent a saltatory leap in the speed of iteration on information, and thus see increased complexity in their infofauna.

• Spoken word has a slower rate of informational reproduction with a higher likelihood of transcription errors and very brief lifespan, resulting in dramatic changes between shorter generations.

• The written word is less error-prone than the spoken word, and longer lived. Creating more stable lineages of infolife with complex anatomy layered over many generations.

• Digital mediums of information and storage transfer are by far the least mutable, the fastest reproducing, and are relatively long-living. As a result, rapid iteration and proliferation of clonal ideas is the name of the game. This produces a higher density of infolife with low variation between generations.

Movement & Speciation

Nothing locks a species of infolife into one biome or the other, but translation into a new informational medium may represent adaptation or development of that information into another species. An example might be the sensory perception of a mystic being related and passed down verbally as a story, copied down as a religious text, and eventually codified as a parable in a religious canon.

Every step along the way, new infolife is produced conceptually in the minds of humans who consume this information. That conceptual infolife can in turn be passed on in the form of communication (verbal, writing, etc.), spawning new lineages and species from diverging understandings or interpretations. Martin Luther had different thoughts about the underlying information conveyed in Catholicism’s religious texts, which led to the creation of whole new informational organisms.

In much the same way here, I’m reiterating points already made by others before me in new language that I find more digestible. Though a product of the same ancestry, it’s a different species, or at least a different race, of memetics.

Why Does This Matter?

This distinction matters to me because one of the core tenets of this blog and my philosophy is that societies are organisms. Also, that organisms are not individual species, but rafts of cooperating ones. Here are some examples from prior posts:

• In “Symbiogenesis…” I review Lynn Margulis’ fringe theory that speciation events actually occur due to the formation of new symbiotic relationships in nature, such as endosymbiosis, where the symbiotic link between mitochondria and prokaryotic cells enabled the creation of eukaryotic, multicellular life:

  Engineering Our Social Vehicles

  Symbiogenesis: The fringe belief of cooperative evolution

  Sloppy Sunday Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles— I’m your host, Paul Logan. We’ve got a doozy of a show for you today- it’s Sloppy Sunday. If you’re new around these parts, that means on Sundays we like to get those longer pieces out there, even if it means they are a little rough around the edges. T…

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  4 years ago · 3 likes · Paul Logan

• In “You are parasitising your body…” I talk about “humans” as infolife that’s formed a symbiotic relationship with homo-sapiens:

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

You are parasitising your body: exploring the idea that self is an informational symbiont of Homo sapiens.

Symbiosis Saturday Hi there, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. If you’re new to the newsletter, today is Symbiosis Saturday. On Saturdays around these parts, we like to chat about wacky ways species are getting along with one another. Today we’re going to talk about…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · 7 comments · Paul Logan

• In “What are social vehicles anyways?” I review how infolife in partnership with physical infrastructure determines the shape of our society:

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

What are social vehicles, anyways?

Theory Thursday Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Theory Thursday! If you’re new to the newsletter, that means that on Thursdays around these parts we like to dive deep into theory. It’s a special day because it’s always exciting when someone says the name of the thing in the thing. Without furt…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · 4 comments · Paul Logan

• In “The Cultural Microbiome” I elaborate on how group selection works within complex infolife to maintain a status quo and prevent mass change from within:

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

The Cultural Microbiome

One of the most fascinating things about the gut microbiome is that though it is subject to competition between fauna, the major determinant of species success isn’t microbial fitness- it’s what the host eats. The initial colonization of the gut microbiome starts…

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4 years ago · 1 like · 3 comments · Paul Logan

• “Abstraction and Informational Mediums” is sort of the proto-version of the article you are reading now. It’s focused more on the physical world, as opposed to the infoplane:

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

Abstraction and Informational Mediums

Over time ant colonies have evolved the ability to tend aphids and fungus- agriculture and husbandry not dissimilar to our own. Ants evolved this trait over billions of years. Humans figured it out over the course of tens of thousands. How is that possible…

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4 years ago · 1 like · Paul Logan

• “EOSV; TLDR” was a clumsy first attempt at a general statement of this philosophy. It touches on how these ideas can begin to slot together, and points to a potential for affecting societal change via an informational hygiene (think germ theory and washing our hands before delivering babies, but with how we communicate and midwife our ideas):

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

EoSV, TL;DR

So, we got off on the wrong foot. I should have tried to deliver you a thesis, or general purpose before throwing you off the deep end into a bunch of memetics bullshit. This is a personal philosophy and framework for individual action. I believe that…

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4 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Paul Logan

We’re all cells in the gut of massive informational beasts, and conceptualizing them as real animals rather than intangible concepts is the first step in taming them. All of these articles are me turning over pieces of the puzzle; thinking through the hold infolife has over the physical world, and what changes we can make in our everyday interactions to improve the circumstances of your average person through husbandry of the informational life that steers our society.

This post is far from complete, but I hope I’ve given you some food for thought. Let me know in the comments if you have any good suggested reading, additions, or criticisms. It’s all welcome!

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In June of 2020 Google fired an AI engineer for making a loud public statement that its AI was sentient. At the time, the news was amusing; and my social circle joked about it. One of those jokes has stuck with me for the past 10 months:

Associative learning

Why has this silly take stayed with me for so long? I’m similar to Blake Lemoine (the Google engineer) in that recent advancements have changed my opinions about sentience. However, that change has taken me in the opposite direction: I don’t have a higher opinion of machine sentience, I have a lower opinion of my own.

Over the past few years I’ve been playing dabbling in the generative AI space. I’ve used LLM’s and image diffusion models to write a children’s book (although, who hasn’t 😅), used gpt3 to generate flashcard decks, graphed character relationships in fiction, and developed what is essential an “ai-dungeon” discord bot.

Throughout this process I’ve been stunned by the results LLM’s and diffusion models are able to produce through statistical weighting. They are funny, creative, and often surprising in the originality of their output. This makes sense, since we trained them on billions of online interactions where those “sentient” qualities were well-represented.

In the sense of training, we’re very much looking in a mirror when we ask AI to remix and regurgitate the creativity of human beings. But the process of association and weighting by which the results are achieved doesn’t strike me as all that different from social development. We embed in society when we’re similarly young and neuroplastic and develop the associations that allow us to recognize that mobsters in media should talk a certain way, and that certain artistic movements can be alluded to with visual archetypes.

Humans also learn and develop via association, we just do it slower and with wetware instead of circuity and linear algebra.

Feelings

Does this indicate AI is more human than we think? No. It means we are vain.

Human creativity isn’t special. Taking in your environment and parroting it back with a twist isn’t an indicator of sentience, it’s an indicator of learning. Any living system is capable of this, be it through reinforcement and habituation (a la Pavlov), or sheer tenacity and adaptation through selection (a la drug resistant bacteria).

Most often we define sentience as the ability to feel- to experience qualia and emotion, to ruminate internally and arrive at new conclusions about the nature of being. Machines lack that capacity by nature of being created rather than evolved.

Biological sentience has been bootstrapped via billions of years of selection necessary to coordinate complex organisms into coordinated action via signaling mechanisms like hormones and innervation. The “feelings” we use to arrive at logical courses of action are just an interface the rest of our nervous system uses to communicate somatic state to the part of our body making decisions. Grief, rage, lust- all just dashboards the executive team in our brain is using to get a vague sense of the best course of action.

We have feelings because of their adaptive utility. If they didn’t make our predecessors more fit to survive and pass on their genes, we wouldn’t have them. It’s possible to make AI feel, but we haven’t added that functionality to the current models. There’s no reason for it to develop spontaneously.

Ego death

What the current stage of machine intelligence has to offer is an opportunity to humble ourselves and our intellect. We aren’t special. Other animals learn and feel. This aligns with much of what the animal welfare movement has already put forward. Now that we have machines up to speed with the learning part, the morality of sentience should only align with AI if we decided to take the inhumane path of programming emotions and qualia alongside learning and association.

In the meantime, accept that human society isn’t sentient, only the pieces that make it up. As a collective, we’re as intelligent as an anthill or a slime mold: a senseless squirming mass, all thumbs and greedy meat. We need to surrender the vanity that expression makes us special, and accept our idiocy.

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To: Tuesday

Hi there, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles, and Happy New Year! I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is To: Tuesday, where we continue the ongoing letter series we started last month with Mark P Xu Neyer, or apxhard.

If you’d like to catch up, here’s the first post in the series by yours truly:

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

Letters with apxhard

Epistolary Thursday Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles! I hope you enjoyed the November break and holidays. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Epistolary Thursday, in which we share letters that have shepherded shared conversations…

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3 years ago · 1 like · Paul Logan

And here’s Mark’s reply:

apxhard

Letters with LaulPogan

I recently have discovered the joy of finding someone else with similar niche interests. It’s like meeting an old friend for the first time; your relationship unfolds naturally from the fact that you’ve walked the same roads many times, and usually find yourself alone…

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3 years ago · Mark P Xu Neyer (apxhard)

Looking back, I wish I’d been as forward thinking as Mark to inline things a bit, but c’est la vie.

Response to Mark

I had the impression that intense competition among members of a species was a big driver of natural selection.

So re: competition among members of a species- this is the big split in evolutionary biology about multilevel selection and hierarchical selection. Check out the wiki on group selection.

Basically, the argument is that selection and competition are always active among individuals, but once those individuals organize into groups that compete with one another, the fitness function changes. “Fitness” is basically just a way of evaluating how adaptive a trait is by measuring how much more likely it makes you to reproduce.

Multi level selection theory states that in the long run, it’s the top level of selection that determines the fitness of a trait. A common example they use is hens- who can decrease the eggs of others around them by pecking them. So an aggressive hen might obtain a reproductive advantage by pecking all of the other hens it sees, and then the next generation would have more aggressive hens - this is a process that compounds over the generations until you only have a bunch of aggressive hens pecking each other  because the non-aggressive  hens have been outcompeted moloch-style.

Now let’s say there’s another group of hens in the next valley where the aggressive gene never came into being. Those hens spend the same number of generations cooperating. At the end of the same span of time, the aggressive hens may be much more individually fit, but there will be a lot more of the cooperating hens. This means ultimately the cooperation gene is more fit/adaptive than the aggressive gene because it was more successful in reproduction.

So this is one of the big examples of how a trait can be individually adaptive but cooperatively maladaptive. 

The individual traits you shared from your coach are adaptive for you, the individual- which is why you share them with your family. But if we zoom out, do they over time increase your family’s likelihood of success and propagation? 

I think the Catholic Church is a great example of this- On an individual level it’s maladaptive to be a holier-than-thou dogmatic moralist. But when enough of them got together it became an adaptive trait for the group, which became Europe’s moral conscious for several hundred years. Those maladaptive traits survived and thrived not because priests were just more fit in the medieval environment, but because their group was. 

Can you say more about why you think organizations aren't intelligent? 

I don’t believe organizations are intelligent because I think human intelligence was just a bizarre fluke of the brain as a  hyper-correlative logical engine. Increasing reasoning, abstraction, and self awareness were all adaptive traits for both individuals and groups. There’s a great book, “Blindsight” that deals with the idea that maybe self awareness is actually a maladaptive trait. 

Sure, organizations might borrow intellectual compute time from their humans, but ultimately they are a network of individual actors attempting to achieve common goals. More like an ant hive than a human mind. 

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Would you consider something like 'a family' as being a kind of informational life?

Families are definitely social/informational organisms, yeah. Any grouping of individuals represents a step up in hierarchy, and should thus be looked at as separate life. 

Which group has to be helped for a trait to work?  Could there be traits that help me do better at work, and help my company perform better, but are bad for, say, America?  I think I'll need to better understand what a 'solidarity group' is in your language.

When it comes to figuring out which level is determining fitness currently, it’s a hard question to ask- you have two sliding factors you want to use to ask the question: duration and scope. Because we’re in the sauce, so to speak, we don’t get the privilege of looking into the future or looking down at things from a god’s eye view. This is why I like biological analogy. 

Let’s go back to cancer- if we zoom down to the level of cells and set our timespan to test fitness to a few years, then becoming cancerous is definitely an adaptive trait. At the end of those two years, cancerous cells have reproduced vastly more than non cancerous cells, and seem be the most fit in the cellular environment. As we know, this is a local maxima- in another few years the progress of the cancer cells will have killed all cells in the body, and we see that what was a competitive trait was actually tragically maladaptive when we zoom out a level or increase our timescale.

Hence the hierarchies approach, the highest level of selection is the place to focus on: what do individual family values matter if the community can’t come together to source water, food, and goods to keep itself alive. 

From what I can tell, the biggest human superorganisms have always depended, at some level, on their ability to successfully deploy violence. I suspect that the advent of bitcoin changes the game completely for human superorganisms, because coercion is no longer workable as a mechanism for keeping a superorganism "fed".   

With your note that superorganisms must eat, drink, etc., We get into the idea of homeostasis. One of the chief functions of each level is to maintain the requisite living environment for the level below it. Humans need food to convert into chemical energy for cells, families need food to feed their humans, communities need food to feed their families, nations need food to feed their communities. In order for communities to source food within nations they need networks of commerce and transportation infrastructure, which the nation maintains. In order for families to source food in communities they need safe spaces to conduct commerce and thus communities negotiate policing to protect them. 

So we can look at how things are doing on the international level and see that the values you are sharing with your family aren’t adaptive if Russia decides to start a nuclear war tomorrow. The level of selection for adaptive traits in an individual is way past anything a single human on their own can influence. 

This is the issue with moloch: the values held at the lower levels aren’t impactful to the fitness of the highest levels, and aren’t requisite for homeostasis, and so thus can be cut with impunity. Once evolution has moved up a level it begins to slowly lose the positive adaptations that were fit for the previous levels, initiating a race to the bottom to sacrifice values in exchange for competitiveness. 

I hope that clears things up a bit! 

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Until next time…

Oh man, this is getting good! I’m remember how exciting it was to find someone interested in talking about similar topics! Please subscribe to Mark’s Substack to see the next entry, where we dive more deeply into how our views diverge, and we get closer to introducing his concept of adaptive/essential “goodness,” which I really wish he’d write more about because it’s cool!

apxhard

Our brains are computers. What does that mean and why does it matter?

By Mark P Xu Neyer (apxhard)

And if you’ve stumbled here through some odd door on the web, please don’t hesitate to sign the guest book:

Epistolary Thursday

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles! I hope you enjoyed the November break and holidays. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Epistolary Thursday, in which we share letters that have shepherded shared conversations.

In June I wrote an article entitled “The Cultural Microbiome: A brief introduction to Hierarchical Cultural Selection.” I was delighted to find that Mark Xu Neyer liked the piece enough to comment on it, starting up a conversation about how it related to their own work. That conversation started what has been a 6 month correspondence that I’m going to share with you today.

Mark:

AWESOME, so glad i found this post / substack. I think you and i are in a similar space, but your knowledge of evolution and biology look much more complex that mine.

Here's some thoughts i've had in the space:

- do you think memes exhibit r/k selection dichotomies?

- https://apxhard.com/2021/03/17/are-you-hosting-a-mimetic-parasite/ - suggests that memetic parasites exist

what do you think of the notion of a 'memetic superorganism' ?

or, say, 'memetic innoculuation', where being exposed to a shitty copy of a complex idea can 'innoculate' a thinker against the complex idea, by making them consider the complex idea as being not worth investigating, by comparison to the simple one?

sorry these thoughts are all disconnected / rambly - i'm a parent too and this is how i spend my time off duty - hah

Paul:

We seem to be in a VERY similar place! It sounds like you're where I was at the beginning of the year.

- I hadn't thought about memes and r/k selection, but I don't see why not- there's very obviously memes like useful academic and scientific theory that require a huge amount of upfront investment but receive nearly universal adoption in their domain, whereas others like urban legends and wive's tails that achieve much more widespread adoption but at lower rates by being short and easy to communicate.

- The first three posts of the blog are actually about memetic parasitism, superorganism, and informational life, they are definitely scruffier than this post though:

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

EoSV, TL;DR

So, we got off on the wrong foot. I should have tried to deliver you a thesis, or general purpose before throwing you off the deep end into a bunch of memetics bullshit. This is a personal philosophy and framework for individual action. I believe that…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Paul Logan

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

20 Things I Hate About You

For the past 6 months I have been bull-dozing, rail-roading people into conversations about my personal philosophy. This reached a head when important people in my life strongly encouraged me to find an outlet for it. So here we are. I don’t really want to publish anything about these thoughts until I feel they are complete and sound, but I think my rela…

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4 years ago · 1 like · Paul Logan

Engineering Our Social Vehicles

Abstraction and Informational Mediums

Over time ant colonies have evolved the ability to tend aphids and fungus- agriculture and husbandry not dissimilar to our own. Ants evolved this trait over billions of years. Humans figured it out over the course of tens of thousands. How is that possible…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · Paul Logan

- I read something on memetic inoculation somewhere but I'm having trouble remembering where. I think it's possible, but much more likely that there's just selection occurring on a different level. IMO most of the reason memetics failed was an addiction to Darwinian "fitness" thinking, such that theories expected "fit" ideas to spread on their own- which just isn't the case.

please DM me on twitter or reach out on reddit or something- I'd love to chat more :)

Though we started the conversation in the comments section on Substack, it meandered briefly into a Reddit message before coming to rest in what would become a 28-message long email thread.

Paul:

Hey! Thanks for commenting on my post- you're definitely thinking in the same direction as me in terms of the shape of cultural evolution. I tend to think or large organizations- companies, countries, churches- as primitive informational life. Not intelligent in any way, but resourceful enough to utilize humanity as a resource, similar to how early eukaryotes harnessed mitochondria and chloroplasts. 

I'm still split on the parasitism thing, and have removed references to it as I do more research from the biological side. I'd be more inclined to call social organisms (governments etc) obligate symbionts of humanity, similar to ant species that farm aphids and fungus. Most of my current theory involves the idea that we look at species wrong, and thus look at selection wrong- species are actually cooperating groups of organisms that form "solidarity groups". For example, humans are a solidarity group of homo sapiens, their microbiomes, and the meta-aware informational organism that conceives of itself as you. 

This is interesting to me in regards to hierarchical/multi level selection because it means that while competition is constantly occurring, it only has relevance on the highest operative level of solidarity- cancer is technically an adaptation of some cells in your body to outcompete others, but no matter how much more competitive that adaptation is it will always be limited by the success of its host (which it kills), and thus the adaptation never carries on. Again in regards to humans, it doesn't matter how adaptive an individual trait is if it doesn't ultimately help the group's survivability. I like to think of greek fire and roman concrete: even though the memes themselves were adaptive enough to become widespread, they vanished with their societies. 

It's for this reason that the majority of "people powered" movements get things wrong. We're past the stage in human history where we can effectively implement policy that centers human rights, because it will be outcompeted. Scott's "Meditations on Moloch" gives a good side of the story in how societies sacrifice values on a race to the bottom. 

Let me know what you think about all this- and what you've been thinking! I'm very excited to talk with others who are curious about cultural evolution and memetics.

I went ahead and emailed Mark, and he got back to me in a jiffy:

Awesome - will respond shortly, doing family stuff at the moment. Love the domain!1

Next Up: Mark’s Response

The messages get rather long in the email thread, so Mark and I decided to do a similar call and response on our respective blogs! You can look out for a post with his reply to these initial messages on his Substack:

apxhard

Our brains are computers. What does that mean and why does it matter?

By Mark P Xu Neyer (apxhard)

Please don’t forget to subscribe to this publication as well, if you’re new!

Subscribe now

Did some of the ideas in these initial messages intrigue you, or do you have something relevant to add? Please leave a comment, or contact me on twitter. If you know someone who happens to be a fan of these topics of conversation, why not share it with them?

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Thank you for reading, and until next time!

Fond Regards,

Paul

Foragin’ Friday

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles— I’m your host, Paul Logan! Today is Foragin’ Friday. If you’re new to the blog, that means we spend Fridays talking about searching for things. Today, we’re going to talk about Google Search.

Innovation & Expiry

Google search is a filter. It is intended to separate the wheat of relevant information from the chaff of internet spam, hearsay, and advertising. If you’ve been using Google long enough, you’ve no doubt noticed that it does this job much worse than it did 10 years ago. This article is the first in a series about expiry of societal filters. In it, I’m going to discuss several theories from the field of evolutionary biology, and apply their lessons to the decline of Google search.

Things age. Things decline. Certain innovations in history represent saltatory restructurings of society, and spur massive improvements in quality of life over short periods of time.1 These revolutions exist in every category (science, technology, politics), and Google search was one of them: it shepherded the internet from a series of muddy backwater roads into the superhighway it is today.

However, the world eventually catches up to the rapid change, the benefit of the innovation effectively “expires.” A reduction in quality of life follows; necessitating further revolution. For this reason the pattern of human social progress mirrors the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium.

The Red Queen: Search Engine Optimization

Are you familiar with the Red Queen Hypothesis? It’s a description of parasitism as a biological arms race. Host and parasite are in constant adaptation to outsmart one another. The result is global equilibrium, despite massive local energy expenditure.2

If you’re unfamiliar, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the industry that has grown up around manipulating search engines for financial gain. The “optimization” title is euphemistic. Since the majority of traffic on the internet is directed by search engines like Google, there’s a lot of money to be made by putting a thumb on the scale to appear higher in the rankings and grab a larger slice of traffic.

Google and other search providers OK some SEO strategies, making them “white-hat,” and punish/disallow others, making them “black-hat”. Despite the division, all SEO techniques boil down to reverse engineering the algorithm used for search, and then attempting to game it in some way. A few examples of these techniques:

• White Hat:

  • Meta tagging— adding additional hidden information to sites that can be used to “hydrate” search results with images, categories, and description text.

  • Crawlability— formatting sites to make them consumable to the web-crawlers that feed information to search algorithms.

  • Content Marketing— producing in-depth content tied to your brand in order to draw traffic and buoy sales with non-advertising search entries.

• Black Hat:

  • Content Farming— producing mass amounts of low-quality content geared towards capturing traffic from search engines by leveraging keywords.

  • Click Farming— employing large amounts of people to visit and sign up to sites, spoofing organic traffic and boosting search rankings

  • Link Farming— creating a network of interlinked sites to create the illusion of a greater depth of discussion or interest than really exists.

Google is essential web infrastructure— the interstate highway to the internet’s road system. This infrastructure is so vital that some have argued it shouldn’t be held privately, or that it should be held to a standard of neutrality. These argument reiterate the common argument against all societal filters: there exists bias, and not everyone can benefit.

As a for profit entity, Google is locked in an eternal struggle to preserve its own bias (and thus potential for profit) against the bias introduced by SEO. With an industry market cap some estimate at ~50 billion, there is a lot riding on the degree to which Google and other search engines can be biased. Multiple suits against Google by SEO firms have already seen court.

Over the years, Google has repeatedly reworked its search algorithms to stay ahead of SEO. It’s a game of cat and mouse, and the two will never be rid of one another. The situation calls to mind the Alice In Wonderland scene for which the Red Queen is named:

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." — Lewis Carroll

Of late, AI generated sites have begun to overwhelm the search giant in its battle with SEO. However, SEO isn’t the solely to blame for ruining Google search— self interest and the profit motive take their toll as well.

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The Red King: Monopoly & Corporate Bloat

The Red Queen has a lesser-known twin, born of the Mutualism-Parasitism Continuum: The Red King Hypothesis. The Red King is brother and complement to the Red Queen, and suggests that slow coevolution between mutualistic symbionts allows them to eke out fitness and superiority over time.

The Red King holds court with an estranged cousin, the Symbiogenesis Speciation Hypothesis (SSH). Both suggest mutualism and symbiosis as primary drivers of evolution. SSH, however, suggests explosive evolutionary events via breakthrough-symbiotic events like mitochondrial capture, which stands in contrast to the Red King’s slow change.

As Google has grown into a global monopoly, it has consumed and created hundreds of smaller services, from YouTube to Maps to Shopping. There’s money to be made in synergy, and redirecting users back to Google properties keeps valuable traffic and data “in the family.” Internally developed products like Maps represent the gradual mutualistic incorporation of the Red King. Externally developed and quickly subsumed products like YouTube are closer to SSH. Both represent mutualism driving change.

As the company has progressed from the singular focus of search, it has refined the way it makes money. The focus on profit is reflected in search results themselves over time. Here’s a comparison of results over the years:

It’s not only bloat from internal services, but ads as well. 20 years ago, Google highlighted inline ads, nowadays, they are made to blend in:

As incentive to keep traffic in-house has grown, the quality of Google search has waned. Google now often functions as a directory of services that make the search provider money, rather than an integral piece of infrastructure correctly routing traffic to relevant sites.

This is mutualism through and through: Google is tripping over itself to favor its own internal business units. When combined with the SEO issues we discussed before, we are trudging uphill against the bias injected into search both by external actors and the search provider itself.

The Court Jester: Mobile Phones

The Court Jester Hypothesis is a foil to the Red Queen that posits abiotic environmental changes are the major driving force behind evolutionary change, rather than interspecies competition.

The move from majority desktop to majority mobile user agents changed the game vis-a-vis what an optimal return is from a search service. If someone is sitting at a desk, they’re likely more willing to do in depth reading or research. If someone is looking at a mobile phone, they likely want a quick answer. Smaller screens also contribute to the sense that one has to scroll further to see relevant results.

The Google we have today may be different, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily worse— just optimized to a different environment than before. The many services like Google Plus that have been introduced and then dismissed over time have further altered that environment and caused the service to slip.

The Black Queen: Loss of functionality

Some communities of micro-organisms actually simplify their genome over time. The Black Queen Hypothesis attempts to explain this gene loss via symbiosis. The basic gist is that in communities, individual species of micro-organisms become specialized in production of vital resources, allowing other species to drop the coding for production of those resources from their genome. This increases replication/reproduction speed and drives loss of genes over time. Both the Red King and SSH support the Black Queen.

As Google has grown, it has also stripped many of the features that once made it a powerful search platform. It has killed or stopped supporting upwards of 10 search operators over time:

• +— Force an exact-match search on a single word or phrase.3 (Deprecated 2011)

• ~— Include synonyms. Doesn’t work, because Google now includes synonyms by default. (Deprecated 2013)

• inpostauthor:— Find blog posts written by a specific author. This only worked in Google Blog search, not regular Google search. (Deprecated 2011)

• allinpostauthor:— Similar to “inpostauthor,” but removes the need for quotes (if you want to search for a specific author, including surname.) (Deprecated 2011)

• inposttitle:— Find blog posts with specific words in the title. No longer works, as this operator was unique to the discontinued Google blog search. (Deprecated 2011)

• link:— Find pages linking to a specific domain or URL. Google killed this operator in 2017, but it does still show some results—they likely aren’t particularly accurate though. (Deprecated in 2017)

• info:— Find information about a specific page, including the most recent cache, similar pages, etc. (Deprecated in 2017).4

• daterange:— Find results from a certain date range. Uses the Julian date format, for some reason. (Not officially deprecated, but doesn’t seem to work.)

• phonebook:— Find someone’s phone number. (Deprecated in 2010)

• #— Searches #hashtags. Introduced for Google+; (Deprecated 2019)

After monopoly is achieved, there’s incentive to remove features and bring them back as paid, or simply leave them dead if they stand in the way of profit. 2023 should usher in changes to certain Google APIs that make full adblock possible only for paid enterprise users.

If you have trouble buying the idea that Google might intentionally deprecate functionality for profit, I have good news! There exists an obscure fourth monarch who agrees with you: the Grey Queen.

The Grey Queen: Subfunctionalization

The Grey Queen is the figurehead of Constructive Neutral Evolution (CNE); an approach to evolutionary biology that attempts to explain change without the need for it to be “driven” by anything more than neutral random error.

An example of this is “subfunctionalization,” which is essentially the process I’ve described above for delegation of vital genetic processes across the genome. Instead of taking the adaptationist angle that the division of labor speeds reproduction, the Grey Queen instead proposes the division of labor as a natural consequence of genetic drift. To illustrate:

You start with some vital function A, coded for by gene A1. Function A produces materials B and C, then combines them to make vital nutrient D.

Then, a gene duplication event happens, and A1 now exists in two places in the genome; A1 and A2.

Now, mutation occurs and causes errors in A1, such that it is no longer able to produce material C. Now A1 can’t produce vital nutrient D. This doesn’t cause any disruption to the overall system, since gene A2 still produces D. A1 has now become B1.

This process repeats with A2, which loses the coding to produce B, and becomes C1.

The host organism can’t survive without vital nutrient D. Any mutation that loses the ability to produce either subcomponent B or C is weeded out via negative selection.

At the end of the process of subfunctionalization, vital function A is maintained, and the genome is still able to produce vital nutrient D. The difference is that now instead of the single gene A1, we have two genes B1 and C1 that perform the same function through a division of labor.

No step in this process was adaptive or advantageous to the host organism. It is a series of random events that establish path dependence in such a way that there is low likelihood of undoing random drift. CNE’s wikipedia article says it well:

While each of these steps are individually reversible (for example, A may regain the capacity to function independently or the A:B interaction may be lost), a random sequence of mutations tends to further reduce the capacity of A to function independently and a random walk through the dependency space may very well result in a configuration in which a return to functional independence of A is far too unlikely to occur, making CNE a one-directional or "ratchet-like" process

You might think of the Grey Queen as a “runaway bureaucracy,” where increasing complexity of systems is driven by random drift, not adaptation.

Nowadays, many append “reddit” onto their Google search to get actual information and sidestep the issues discussed above. This functions in much the same way as subfunctionalization: Google has sufficient search and deficient information, Reddit has deficient search and sufficient information. Separately they aren’t game-changing, but as parts of a complex whole they yield the same functionality Google once provided on its own.

This arrangement did not arise through consultation between the two services. It is the end result of a series of random events that have aligned through time and circumstance to make odd bedfellows. It’s very difficult for either company independently to reverse the situation without shooting themselves in the foot. As such, the arrangement persists due to the complexity of systems, not due to incentive or advantage derived by either party.

Conclusion

Over the years Google search has gotten worse due to a variety source from without and within. The point I want to make here, and in the forthcoming article, is that all things expire. Google was a great product when it first came out. After almost 30 years of entropy, it’s time to let go, and search for the next innovation that will improve quality of life.

Be sure to subscribe so you can read Pt:II, which will deal with the idea that any societal filter you can pay to bypass is inherently broken, and bring back the idea of forced expiry we explored in Surrogation Nation. Until then, leave a comment or tweet at me and let me know what you thought of this piece!

Housekeeping and Guest Post by Tar Miriel

Hey there! Today I’m sharing a guest post by a regular reader who displayed so much wisdom in her comments on Stop Saying Neurotypical that I invited her to share her thoughts on EoSV. Tar Miriel has a brilliant, insightful take on graciousness and extending kindness and patience to both ourselves and to strangers.

One note of housekeeping, congratulations to reader Brent, who won the August hat drawing. Enjoy the sun hat, dude!

Without further ado, Tar Miriel:

Grace

I struggled with writing this. I asked myself, am I truly the right person to write about this topic? After all, grace  (withholding judgment) is a value I find personally very difficult to live out. But then I recalled being told that the best teachers aren’t the people who take to a concept naturally so perhaps I’ll have something valuable to impart. 

Most of us have encountered the stories designed to remind us not to judge too hastily - the ones where some passerby vocally criticized someone’s parenting only to be told the unruly child just lost a parent or was recently out of the hospital. Religion, while a source of many societal ills, also not infrequently deals with the necessity of generosity both materially and emotionally. 

When we call someone judgmental that’s usually not a compliment, and yet it’s so easy to fall into a judgmental mindset. And that’s true of everyone; no religion or lack thereof, no political orientation frees us from the human desire to judge other people. I’ve spent time among many branches of both the American Left and the American Right and they all use many of the same criticisms of whoever their opponents happen to be. And in most cases I’ve found that being gracious towards the outgroup is not well regarded and being judgmental is encouraged as a means of signaling group loyalty. 

To be clear, I don’t believe that using your in-group's belief system as a default is inherently a bad thing. It’s impossible to research deeply on every single topic on which you could possibly have an opinion, so it makes sense that most people outsource this to a group they know they’ve already aligned with on other topics. There are some drawbacks to this, obviously, especially for people who refuse to acknowledge any contrary evidence that’s presented to them, but overall I don’t want to be critical of people for defaulting to in group standards. 

That said, I do have a problem with the way people divide themselves up into groups and then sort these groups into Good and Bad. And I’m not talking about calling Nazis bad, because I know how people get about this particular criticism - yes, I am all for calling Nazis bad. But on the whole, people are not Good or Bad. They are people. And most divisions of other people are also not wholly good or wholly bad, but a mixture of the two because we are humans. 

But this goes back to the difficulty of behaving graciously, and I’m going to discuss a bit why I personally find it hard because I believe that my reasons are probably universal problems. 

It’s important to keep in mind that grace isn’t a single skill but rather multiple skills and most of us could use improvement in at least one of these. 

The first thing that grace requires of us is that we set aside any tendency towards black and white thinking. I hate this. It’s so much simpler to think in black and white terms; it’s much more difficult to accept that reality doesn’t work that way. I have absolutely found myself being angry that someone had good points because I wanted to indulge in my feelings and hate them for some reason or other. But no, they had to be complicated and human instead of irredeemably awful. I would prefer the world be black and white, and acknowledging that it isn’t can be very challenging. 

The second thing grace requires of us is an ability to consider another person’s perspective. Oh, this is hard for nearly everyone because you simply don’t have the entire context in which another person exists and you never will. Even the people you’re closest with and know the best you’ll always be missing some of their context. So you have to fill in the blanks. If we’re not being charitable then we fill in the blanks with assumed character flaws on the part of the other person. 

Much like black and white thinking I find that assuming character flaws is easier than contemplating less judgmental context and I’m not sure I would have ever gotten past that if it hadn’t been for something my mother once told me. She’s very religious and we were talking about Jesus’s command that we love our neighbors as we love ourselves. She told me that her interpretation of that was that we make excuses for other people in the same way that we make excuses for our own failings. We know if we were hungry or stressed or tired and we want other people to understand those factors, but we don’t always accept them as mitigating factors for other people. 

I know some people who judge themselves more harshly than they judge other people, but I do think there’s some truth to what my mother said - regardless of how we judge ourselves in comparison to other people we always have much more information about our own contexts than we do other people’s. Even at our most self-deluding we have more information about our own context. Because of that, other people’s behavior may seem completely irrational. It can be very challenging to figure out what could possibly be driving them - but people are rational creatures. Even the people who are considered ‘Crazy’ are behaving in ways that are rational for the reality they are experiencing. The actual underlying problem isn’t about their rationality; it’s about the way they’re experiencing reality. 

Note that by rational I don’t mean that there’s no such thing as ethical or unethical behavior. I believe that you can make ethical or unethical choices within any context; by rational I only mean that if you actually see what point A is, you’ll understand how someone got to point B even if you disapprove of the choices involved. 

Of course, it’s also important to remind ourselves that many human needs are universal. Even those of us with various disorder labels still need to feel valued or a sense of belonging or security - maybe a particular need is heightened or dampened on an individual basis, but the needs are still there. So while we can’t know anyone else’s full context, we can try to keep in mind that if someone is behaving inexplicably that “this is intentionally obnoxious because they like being obnoxious” is less probable than “whatever their personal context is has taught them that this is the most effective manner to get one of their needs met.” 

This is also hard to keep in mind. It’s more reassuring to assume that if someone’s behavior caused harm that it was because the harm was intentional. When we accept that harm can come about even from well intentioned acts then we have to accept that acting on the best knowledge we have and trying very hard won’t always lead down the right path and sometimes we’ll harm another person even though we acted the very very best we could have at the time. That’s a scary thought! I would rather have certainty that if I’m not deliberately setting out to hurt people that I won’t hurt them. 

That said, knowing that someone else’s most troublesome behavior isn’t intentional or is caused because they learned a less than productive means of getting a need met is not a reason to remain in contact with them if your well-being is on the line. I still find it helpful to think about their behavior in those terms rather than writing them off as being a Bad Person, but that’s because I think the negatives of slipping into black and white thinking are worse for me than accepting someone is complicated but not good for me. 

The third skill we have to keep in mind if we want to be gracious is adjusting our expectations of other people. Expectations are important, but often we base our expectations on a theory of what your average person should be able to do and not based on the capabilities of the people we’re dealing with, and to quote a favorite child psychologist of mine, Dr. Ross Greene, “When do all human beings look bad? When there are expectations we’re having difficulty meeting. And we all look bad sometimes.”  

It’s important to accept people as they are. It doesn’t matter if people ‘SHOULD’ be punctual or exhibit greater self-control or have better listening skills or any number of other skills we expect out of people at whatever age someone happens to be. If the person in question consistently exhibits a lack of a particular skill then we need to factor that into our judgment - going back to universal experiences and needs, most people don’t want to be considered unreliable or bad-tempered or neurotic or a chaotic unsanitary gremlin and if they say they don’t care I’ve found that’s often a defense mechanism by someone who doesn’t know how to build the skills they’re missing. 

Most of us know all of this - we know that other people are fully human, that nobody is all good or all bad, that we don’t know all of another person’s experiences, that everyone has weaknesses, that intent and outcome aren’t always related. But knowing doesn’t make it easy to put into practice. It’s hard to act on this knowledge. Hard, but important. Grace allows us to solve conflicts more productively while decreasing conflict’s more unproductive forms. It gives both ourselves and others the space for self improvement. It reduces our disappointment in other people for being unable to live up to expectations we’ve placed upon them. It also forces us to assess ourselves a bit more realistically, to the extent that we as humans are capable of realistic self assessment.

Maybe there’s a particular area of grace that you need to work on; maybe you’re more like me and find all of it challenging. Either way, strengthening these skills is worth the effort. Even if we fail more than we succeed, that small sliver of increased success will improve our lives and the lives of the people we interact with. 

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Ursine Sunday. If you’re new in these parts, that means around here we like to spend our Sundays talking about bears. Today, we’re going to be talking about bear canisters.

Bear Resistant Food Containers (BRFCs)

Recently I posted a long article about a run in with some grizzlies in Glacier National Park. One of the undercurrents of the piece was that I’d brought along a bear bin, even though it wasn’t required, much to the amusement of locals.

For the uninitiated; “bear bin” is a nickname for a Bear Resistant Food Container. These are basically small portable vaults where you keep all of the smelly stuff in your pack- from food to sunscreen to chapstick. You keep it 100+ feet from your camp so that Yogi’s real-life cousins aren’t lured into your campsite while you sleep.

The reason that the locals in Montana found our BRFC funny is that none of the wilderness areas in the state have regulations mandating their use. Since these things are made to withstand a bear attack, they are often pretty heavy— adding 2-3 pounds to your pack. This is a gargantuan amount of weight for the “ultralight” hobbyist community; where people cut the ends off their toothbrushes in an effort to shave ounces.

So, when hikers see people carrying heavy bear bins around in places where it isn’t required, this is what they see:

Why keep food from bears?

Keeping your food bear-safe has the added benefit of keeping YOU bear-safe, since it often involves keeping food far from where you are sleeping. Bears that get food from humans pose a risk, as they can become habituated and seek humans out as a source of food. This raises the risk of bear attacks, and as such it is blanket policy to euthanize bears that have been fed, or manage to get food from campsites.

Hence the classic slogan rattled off by every ranger:

“A fed bear is a dead bear.”

Bear hangs: the alternative

Instead of carrying a bin, most hikers would rather carry rope and a smell-proof food bag that they can hang in a tree.

If you’re from the generation of hikers before bear bins, or are used to always having trees around, bear bins seem silly or ridiculous.

However, if you’ve done any amount of west-coast alpine hiking, you know that you’re often camping over treeline. On the PCT you have to use a bin on and off throughout California. Andrew Skurka lists this and other reasons in his piece on why hangs are often problematic; the comments on it give a good example of the division bear bins cause in the outdoors community.

In Glacier, they’ve solved the tree problem by erecting iron bars to hang from. When we asked about just using a bin instead, the rangers said we should still bring 25 feet of rope to tie the bin down so a grizzly wouldn’t just walk away with it.

The ranger’s comments, plus the comments of various hikers we ran into in the backcountry, and others online like “Maybe bear cans work for black bears, but they’re just a puzzle for grizzly” all add up to suggest there’s a general misconception that BRFC’s don’t work on grizzlies. I’d like to set that record straight.

Bear bins stop grizzlies

If a bear can is certified, it is certified on grizzlies. I can see where the misconception might come from, considering that there are no grizzlies in CA, which notoriously requires bear bins, but many in MT- which doesn’t. I heard this reasoning repeated once or twice in Glacier for why it was stupid to carry a bin.

This got me curious, so I decided to look into it. Here are the BRFC regulations for every national park with a grizzly population:

• Strongly recommended in Glacier Bay (AK)

• Canister Required in Grand Teton (WY)

• Hanging OK in Glacier (MT)

• Hanging OK in Yellowstone (WY)

• Mandatory in Katmai (AK)

• Required in Denali (AK)

• Required during bear season at North Cascades (WA)

• Recommended but not required in Lake Clark (AK)

• Required in Gates of the Arctic (AK)

• Optional in Kenai (AK)

So it seems like out of the 10 National Parks that have grizzlies, 5 require them, 2 recommend them, and 3 don't differentiate between a BRFC and hanging as proper storage.

For the life of me I can't tell what this split is. It certainly isn't geographic. I guess I have to accept that it just comes down to what that specific park's administration has decided. Which leads me to the question: how does a specific park’s administration decide to require bear bins? It doesn’t seem to be related to bear attacks.

Bear attacks and BRFC requirments

I want to add a disclaimer here that this data isn’t granular enough to draw any firm conclusions. That said, both Yellowstone and Glacier hold the records for bear fatalities in national parks, and neither distinguish between hanging and BRFC’s for food storage. Here’s a map of bear fatalities by state from 1900-2016:

For comparison, here are the states with at least one wilderness area requiring BRFC’s:

Every incident is unique, and many aren’t at all related to food storage, so this isn’t a great comparison. If anything, I think analysis should be done looking at the relation between policy around bear-safe food storage and park administration stance on bear safety.

Going back to Glacier and Yellowstone, they also happen to be some of the most popular and car-friendly national parks, which puts uninformed frontcountry tourists in contact with wild animals at a higher rate. Less car-friendly parks create a higher barrier to entry, meaning the people who do encounter bears are likely more informed and prepared.

The national stance on bears was redefined in August 1967 when Glacier had two fatal bear attacks in the same night, only about 10 miles apart. The narrative eventually landed on exposure to human food and garbage, and the event became the impetus for the bear-proof trash cans in almost every national park to this day.

The slow march of BRFC’s into the kit of backcountry hikers is a repetition of this drama on a smaller stage. Even the Continental Divide Trail lists bear cans as required in Glacier, despite the park’s rules stating otherwise.

What determines BRFC requirements?

Since it definitely isn’t geography, bear attacks, deaths, or frequency of encounters; I’m left wondering how parks determine their BRFC requirements. It seems that each park has been left to decide backcountry food storage requirements for themselves. Without a national standard, we’re left trusting the rules of individual park’s administrators.

After visiting Glacier and studying their rules, I think they make sense: The park’s rules explicitly allow hanging only from their designated pole system. If it isn’t hanging from the poles, it needs to be in an otherwise bear-safe container, which means an approved BRFC or one of the permanent bins installed at some sites.

However, I can’t speak for other parks. As a matter of policy left up to the administration of the park itself- there’s no rhyme or reason. Even in Glacier, you aren’t guaranteed to be around a set of poles to hang should you need to camp in an emergency. In this case, a bear bin could be a life-saver.

Conclusion

I think eventually bear bins will be universally encouraged, especially for parks without a hang system like Glacier. For now, hikers will continue to ridicule bins as ridiculous wastes of weight and space, and refuse to use them when they aren’t required to. Until there’s any sort of national consensus among park administration, the community will be divided in taking BRFC’s seriously.

Do you think there should be a national standard around when BRFC’s are required? Let me know in the comments, or shoot me a tweet @laul_pogan.

One of my favorite things about the Internet is the way subject-matter experts leave comments that open windows into worlds you'd otherwise never experience. Reddit in particular branded itself as a reliable source of information from industry insiders with IAmA, a popular mid-2010s series of posts wherein plumbers, pilots, deep-sea welders, and the details of every other odd profession under the sun were laid bare by insiders. 

For the past 6 years on Reddit, it’s been a regular occurrence to find yourself reading a comment from an expert discussing Hollywood makeup, lava-lamp-generated encryption, or heavy equipment operation… when their story suddenly derails into a familiar phrase: “in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.” 

This line has become an iconic Reddit meme, and it’s all due to one user: Shittymorph. Morph draws in and quickly disarms readers in only a few sentences, then springs what has been described as a “text-based RickRoll” on them.

As a writer, I would never consider myself concise. I’ve admired Morph’s skill and use of medium ever since I was tricked by his early work. As my fascination with the future of storytelling and technology’s role in it grew, I began to view his writing as not just a meme, but as flash fiction. In July, I decided to reach out and ask if he’d be open to doing an interview on EoSV. Morph replied that he didn’t want to do any more standard interviews, since the interviews he had already done with both CNET and KnowYourMeme, covered his online persona.

Instead, after reading my blog and seeing I had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, Morph suggested that I should fly from San Francisco to Missoula, where he would pick me up at the airport for a hike through Glacier National Park. When finished, we could write about the experience. 

I said “what the hell-” and bought a plane ticket to go into the backwoods with an Internet stranger. This article is that collaboration.

Day 0

We shake hands, I throw my pack in the back of the silver minivan, and we pull away from the Missoula airport, all in just over a minute. He’s got a little Reddit goody bag ready for me in the passenger seat.

We take a lazy pace North towards Glacier National Park, making several stops along the way, grabbing food, fuel, and fun. Morph suggests a Malte Shoppe he used to frequent in St. Ignatius as a meal stop. After I order a bubblegum milkshake and chicken fingers, Morph points out that chickens don’t have fingers. The cook beams proudly when Morph says he likes his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt. He gets two grilled cheese sandwiches with extra pickles, opening the sandwiches and adding the pickles as he eats.

We wander into the St. Ignatius grocery store for last minute supplies, and Morph lets someone with a single item I hadn’t noticed skip line to check out before us. I remark how he’s more observant than me, words I would repeat several times before he dropped me back off at the airport. I’ve come to think of his perceptiveness as part of the engine powering a modest superpower— virality. 

Morph has found Internet notoriety on so many separate unrelated occasions that it led us to an ongoing discussion of the skill/luck divide, and my frequent questioning as to whether he thought he could “see” something about the Internet’s economy of attention that most can’t. 

Morph was at one point on Jimmy Kimmel Live for an episode involving the theft of his son’s backpack. His send-off tribute for his beloved dog(which involved sending hundreds of tennis balls to strangers) was featured on every major television network and many radio stations. 300,000 followers know him as “Juicemorph” on TikTok, where he shares videos documenting the rehabilitation of his new dog Scooby, the sole survivor from a group of dogs that were confiscated during a dogfighting bust. Morph has hours of stories about catching the Internet’s interest. This all in addition to the millions of people who know him on Reddit. 

Despite all this, Morph hasn’t monetized beyond participating in an experimental tipping program run by the Reddit administration team. He’s continued to live the quiet, itinerant life he’s always lived. He’s worked as a carpenter, electrician, and an I.T. professional. He was licensed to grow cannabis for medical patients in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before all that, at 18 years old, he joined Actors Equity Association, acting in both film and theater into his 20s. He tells me his favorite job ever paid $6.00 an hour cash— washing dishes with an ocean view in the back of a loud, smoky fishermans’ bar on a pier jutting off the Oregon Coast. Most recently, he owned, operated, and closed a tech-repair shop in a sleepy midwest town. Last year, he purchased a home there with hopes of “settling down,” but never slept a night in the place.  Now he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Morph isn’t particularly fond of planning ahead, and the road is calling him once again, so loud I can practically hear it myself.

Ironically, On The Road is his favorite novel, and he admires the Beats. Gonzo journalism and work like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas motivated him to propose the adventure we’re on right now. Morph is writing a book of his own, but he dodges my questions about its contents as our drive takes us north into the mountains.

All this comes out as we swap stories of adventure, misadventure, and life. Morph has a humble familiarity about him, and I feel I’ve known him for a long time even though we’ve just met in person. We get on the subjects of altruism and the desire (or need) to show the good behind a story.  I explain how I feel core emotions drive narrative; Morph details the philosophy behind his online presence: He wants his story to be an inspiring one highlighted by kindness, not mired in the divisiveness that drives the majority of online clicks. On that, we agree. 

On the road to Glacier, we drive past Flathead Lake. It seems to tail us for over an hour— never-ending, expansive, beautiful. Morph tells me about other Redditors that he’s met over the years, both in person and online. His interaction and private messages with actor Val Kilmer have been his favorite. He rattles off names of Redditors that he’s interacted with, listing “405Freeway”, “Abagelnamedswag”, “MontanaTrev”, “RamsesThePigeon”, and “SubieFiles.” He talks about “SoDakZak” and “PleaseCallMeTall”, a prolific writer and trainhopping, vagabond musician. As we drive by cherry stands and apple orchards, he tells me about a Redditor who was convinced that Morph was a CIA plant. That same Redditor would end up being known for trying to start an all-out war on “the elites” in Sun Valley, Idaho:

“It was sad to watch all that unfold,” Morph says, “because I had hung out with the dude... and even though he initially thought I was some undercover CIA operative – which is strange – I couldn’t help but wonder what his personal demons looked like.”

Glacier 

@juicemorphHiking Glacier was insane. #glacier #glaciernationalpark #incredible #beautiful #gnp #grizzly #hiking #outdoors #camping #fyp #foryoupage #travel #mt

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Glacier is one of the most-popular national parks, and as such, it has strict permit-requirements.  The “gates” are open between 6AM and 8PM. As luck would have it, we pass the abandoned entry-kiosk at 8:10 PM, as the sunset turns the sky and mountains purple-orange with its last gasps of light. We only see a few cars about; nothing compared to the midday locust-swarms. The valley feels giant, empty, and serene. We trade idle chatter about the park’s majesty while I scan the map for potential campsites. Beyond two cans of bear mace, a week’s worth of dehydrated meals, and our gear, we haven’t exactly planned ahead for the trip. Morph tells me he prefers it that way, unless he’s headed into extreme elements.

We pull into the lodge 7 miles inside the park and attempt to figure out details. Morph talks with a Park Ranger who’s short with us for trying to walk-up-camp in one of the nation’s most-popular outdoor attractions during peak season. Morph wonders who put a bee in her bonnet as we go into a gift shop to buy some water. The clerk there is more kind and lets us know about a few spots for dispersed camping outside the park. The clerk compliments my “Bad Bad Hats” tee, saying he saw them open for the FrontBottoms a few years back. I take it as a good omen: The world’s killers tend to get balanced out by its chillers.

Finding our way back onto National Forest Land after sunset, we drive down a dark (except for stars and headlights) dirt road for 20 minutes. I’m a little anxious about finding a good spot. Morph keeps the mood up and light with a wacky exultation: “DON’T PAINT THE DEVIL ON THE WALL!” He’s been on this refrain since grilled cheese and chicken fingers, and I’m amused by the folksy, bible-beating pastor persona he affects while he belts out the saying, which basically means “don’t jinx it, bro.” He talks about first learning the phrase while acting in an Irish play with The Salt Lake Acting Company. The character calls to mind why I’m out here in the first place— to meet some crazy human who manages to conjure vivid windows into the fake lives of fake people in the span of sentences, all for the sake of an Internet joke that has tricked millions of people. 

“DON’T PAINT THE DEVIL ON THE WALL!”

We find a pretty awful, slightly sloped spot that would make for an uncomfortable first night in the backcountry. After a coin-flip, we decide to backtrack to a location Morph correctly called out as superior. Following tire tracks leading off the road behind trees, we find our first camp. The air smells of dry earth, pine, and moss. There are crickets chirping over the muted phwushhhhhh of an adjacent stream at the bottom of a ravine. I can just barely make out the (literally) nebulous clouds of The Milky Way, and the stars are ten times more brilliant than when I left them in the city. Tents are up quickly: We are in grizzly country, so Morph hauls the locked-down bear-canister back up the road and away from camp. We both set alarms to ensure we will be up early enough to arrive at the permitting office before it opens at 7:30 AM. 

Day 1

Our first full day in the park is marked by self-imposed grief. We manage to forget the bear-canister in a rush to make it to the permit office on time, and arrive at 7:29 to find ourselves at the back of a long line. A middle school teacher shows up behind us and gives some advice on good routes to take. She needs to be back for school at 9 AM, and is an equal mix of helpful and in a hurry. I fill out the permit application based on the park map, and when we hand it to the ranger, he chuckles: The locations we’ve chosen have been booked for months, and what walkups had been available were already taken. Not to worry, though: He points us towards a campsite called “Fifty Mountain,” which would be the first stop on a 60-mile loop. I feel  apprehensive that I can finish 60 miles in 3 days, especially considering all the elevation gain and loss. This isn’t the PCT, and my hiker legs have been gone for almost a year. The ranger (a liar from Georgia) assures us that it isn’t too hard of a hike at all. He wants to book it for us in a hurry, before any of the other sites on our potential loop are taken. 

Just like that, we have a route to follow and a campsite to get to… 17.5 miles away, mostly uphill. First things first, we drive back to last night’s site to retrieve the bear-canister. Again in a hurry, we take a wrong turn, but we correct the error when the dirt road turns from a recognizable, bumpy-but-passable affair into what looks like the aftermath of an artillery strike. We retrieve the canister and head back to the trailhead.

Morph and I have both hiked significant parts of the Pacific Crest Trail. Despite having a bear-hanging method named after it, large swathes of the P.C.T. require hikers to carry a bear-canister, which is basically an indestructible bin where you keep all your food at night. I had read online that they weren’t required in Glacier but chose to bring one as a safety blanket anyway. Our bear can would provide most of the day’s consternation while also drawing snide remarks from hikers that were more experienced with the area.

We set out from a trailhead called “The Loop.” We’re lucky to find a parking spot amongst a bustling bathroom area halfway up the main road’s climb into the mountains. We check gear while eating clementines and homemade zucchini bread. The forgotten bin had put us behind for the day and is now overladen with food for the short, three-day trek. Show me a person who doesn’t slightly overpack food for a long-weekend backpacking trip, and I’ll show you a CHAMPION. The bin must add a good 10– 5 pounds to whatever pack it’s in.

Morph and I take “Granite Chalet Trail” – a steep, 4-mile climb from “The Loop” – to the chalet, which I am surprised to find isn’t some sort of in-joke or crumbled historical site, but an actual little set of buildings on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.  If they’re more proactive than the two of us, people can book stays there in what look like quaint, old-timey motel accommodations. On the way up, we pass a gaunt, mustached man that might be cosplaying an 1850s cowpoke. He leads a train of 6 pack mules down the mountain. 

“Y’all should stand over there so ya’ll don’t get kicked off the side of the cliff!” he calls gruffly as his mules pass us. They’re laden with trash and spent fuel-canisters from the chalet above.

This trail happens to be the descent for the highline trail, the most-popular day-hike in the park. We pass chipper day-hikers on a merry jaunt back to the shuttle and their cars, some of whom decide to get clever with remarks about how we are “taking the hard way up.” One even stops to ask if we were “gluttons for punishment.” It is, indeed, punishing. I drag my feet under the weight of the bear-canister and mid-day sun, which has the temperature in the mid 90s; hotter than I’m used to for alpine hiking. Halfway up, I ask Morph to take the bear-can, and we swap it every so often from here on out. When we finally reach the chalet, they don’t have a fresh water source on site. Instead, they offer bottled water... for $7.50 a liter.

Now that we are up at elevation, our campsite is still 12 miles north over what the chalet attendant refers to as “rolling terrain.” Things are rough on both Morph and I as we set out. I start getting hangry around 3pm since I haven't eaten a real meal today beyond the clementines and zucchini bread I’d stuffed into my mouth at the trailhead. Morph isn’t hungry and says he’s content with water but is getting some cramps in his legs. Lacking group consensus, I foolishly decide food can wait a few more miles. The lack of electrolytes and calories start to weigh on me (in addition to the damned bin). Any hiker who sees the thing stops with a dumb grin to say something along the lines of “ya know you didn’t have to bring that, right?”

Over the next few hours, I note the difference in mood between Morph and me. I’m not what you would call an aggressive optimist. Frustrated and feeling like we’ve bitten off more miles than we can chew, I lock eyes on the trail 10 feet ahead of me while Morph soaks in the sweeping alpine views, chipper and positive. At around 5pm, we seek shade behind a large boulder for a long break. I eat a “chili mac” dehydrated meal, drink electrolyte water, and split a bag of sour spaghetti with Morph. My mood is instantly bolstered. We make the decision to split the weight of the food from the bin more evenly, which leaves me a much happier hiker than had sat down an hour before.

The sun is starting to go down, and in consultation with the map, I’m not optimistic about our likelihood of reaching the Fifty Mountain campsite, more than 9 miles away through “aggressive terrain.” The hiking path is wide enough to feel safe, but there are places – like the cliff ledge of Ahern Pass – where a fall would mean certain, messy death. It feels foolish and unnecessary to chance this trail in the dark.

A brief aside: 

    Glacier is built differently than other parks that I’ve had the pleasure of hiking. Its paths are cut at much more-aggressive slopes, and its campsites are set further apart and with rigid permitting for where you can and can’t stake tents. With a pit toilet at every designated campsite, Glacier has an odd combination of the curated camping you get closer to the frontcountry and the more-rugged, dispersed camping you see in other mountainous parks. The locked-down camping environment in Glacier is presumably due to the grizzlies roaming the park; bears that occasionally attack (and kill) visitors. Every hiker you see is carrying a can of bear mace, should they happen to run into one of the park’s murder bears.

Things cool down as we press on. We agree to see how far we can get, but I am emphatic that I don’t want to overdo it and injure myself, saying that I will settle for setting up camp anywhere circumstance or fatigue dictate. Morph reluctantly agrees, then says he knows we can make it to Fifty Mountain. After dinner there is a long, 3-to-4-mile descent. The dropping temperature makes perfect hiking weather, and the steady downhill has us making awesome time. We pass a sign indicating that the Fifty Mountain campsite is only 7.5 miles away, which is 2 miles closer than I’d predicted based on the map. 

While we jaunt down the easy slope, we talk more earnestly about things going on in both our lives. Morph has just experienced a difficult breakup: He’s left feeling inadequate; that the best version of himself wasn’t enough to make things work. In response to the turmoil, he closed his techrepair shop and put his house on the market. He talks excitedly about not knowing what the future holds while reviewing unpredictable variables. I talk about my own issues with people close to me doubting or trying to tear down accomplishments that I’m proud of. We commiserate, and I find catharsis in hearing that even someone as accomplished and recognized as Morph – with his platforms reaching millions – is experiencing similar issues. Despite those issues, Morph seems to be keeping his head down and remains optimistic, forging forward in his own way, at his own pace. I’ve known people who would be so embittered by what Morph experienced that they’d be sidled with a venomous pessimism about other people in perpetuity. Not Morph. His tenacity on the trail mirrors that resolve.

As the light wanes, the trail begins to climb again. My mood sours, and I push to find any site to settle down, park rules be damned. We see headlamps on the side of a mountain in the distance, maybe a mile or two ahead of us. Morph calls out the lamps and keeps us driving towards them. As I mentioned earlier, he’s much more tuned-in to the world around us. While I sweat and silently curse the darkness and slope, he calls out some heat-lightning forming in the distance that I won’t notice for another hour.

Up and up and up into the night. I like to think I have a good internal pedometer, and it is telling me that we had hit 7.5 miles around 9 pm. It’s 9:45 and we’re still climbing. The headlamps we’d seen before are now higher up on the mountain side. We’re standing where they’d been when we first saw them. I know I’m not fun to be around at this point: I tend to be very critical of unprotected cliff-hikes in the dark, especially with exhaustion looming.  We stop multiple times in the dying light and disagree: I feel like we could set up camp in some areas, but Morph prefers to try and push on. He tells me he’s game to follow suit with whatever I decide, but I never feel strong enough to actually take action and make camp, and so we walk on. 

Still up we go. It’s around 10:30 when we finally stop climbing. I’m sure the view would be stunning in the daylight, but all I can see in the dark are those same headlamps bobbing in the night; fairy spirits now hundreds of feet below us. We come across a sign that marks the fork to head towards Fifty Mountain Campsite, and I practically jump for joy. We’re almost there.

We begin a VERY sketchy descent. Morph remarks how dangerous the path has become: Any slip could send us hurtling down the slope with no hope of stopping save the valley floor. The trail is collapsed in many spots where the gravel, shale, and skree have slid down the mountainside... and pieces unnervingly tumble with each of our steps through the darkness. I wonder multiple times if we have wandered onto a goatpath, but my determination for camp and sleep drives me ever downwards. The only way forward is down, down towards the headlamps.  

Eventually, we hit level ground and surge up and over a series of hills into the campsite, startling the two hikers who we’ve been following for the past several hours. It’s around 11pm, and the stars and Milky Way are out again. I see flashes of lightning miles off over the lip of the valley. 

The hiking pair we have been following turn out to be a couple from Chattanooga. We share introductions and exchange incredulity about the trail. The same ranger (the liar from Georgia) had also told them it was an easy do-able hike... and while it had been do-able, it hadn’t been particularly easy. 

Morph asks for the bear-bin so he can have some gummy bears. I’d purchased them for myself and say I want to save them, which he calls out as a dick move. It is: He’s been generous with the items he had, and this isn’t really about gummy bears. We’re just two grumpy people who have pushed themselves beyond their safe limits on day one. I’m not looking forward to another two and a half days of similar strain, and although Morph says he is still up for the hike, I sense his fire has dimmed after today’s strenuous miles. 

I come into the backcountry to relax, not push myself. This was always an inherent tension of mine while on the Pacific Crest Trail: I’m much more “smiles” than “miles.” It’s a tension you’ll find in any hobbyist community, that of skill and challenge versus enjoyment. Every moment you spend relaxing is a moment you aren’t making progress. Backpacking is further muddled by the concept of “type-2 fun,” which isn’t fun while you do it, but you’re glad you did it later. 

The couple from Chatanooga stays up to eat a “ramen bomb” (instant ramen and instant mashed potatoes in the same pot, a hiker staple). They say they are heading back to the Loop Trailhead in two 6-to-7-mile days – stopping at a campground halfway – and they encourage us to tag along. Morph and I discuss and agree that would be a better route and safer pace for the rest of our trip. We pitch tents, hang our food (and the damn bear-can), and turn in for the night. I stay up to read a little, and the thunderstorm’s far edge finds and patters my tent with rain as I drift off to sleep.

Day 2

In the morning, I wake to find 3 friendly Pittsburghers in the cooking area. The conversation turns quickly to the trail the day before. They’d started at Granite Chalet – bypassing the 4 miles of straight up that we had started with yesterday – and still found the path difficult. The Pittsburghers universally decry the 7.5-mile sign, and all agree it has to be off by at least 2 miles of pure uphill. It is a boisterous, friendly morning at the campground, and we’re soon joined by Morph and the Chattanoogan couple from the night before— Kyle and Amanda.

Water is scarce at Fifty Mountain campsite, so we both set out with a liter and a half, hoping to find a source in the intervening 6 miles. We leave late in the morning – around 10 – and another climb brings us to a plateau full of dead trees. 

As we walk, we talk about the responsibility of individuals with large platforms, and whether or not they are exerting positive or negative force in the world. The conversation ranges broadly, moving from death of the author, to Chris Brown, to cancel culture, to Ted Kaczynski. Morph’s general philosophy is that he only wants to have positivity associated with his online persona: He finds the easiest way to accomplish this across platforms is by avoiding political and religious debates, and he reasons this leads him to having a much larger and – more importantly – happier, kinder demographic to interact with. I praise the position: I’ve seen just a sliver of the good and bad of controversy-driven traffic in my brief time creating content, and I agree with the general consensus that rage-baiting is one of the things undoing our society. 

When he first started out, people would respond to Morph with comments like “You’ll never be Rogersimon10,” who was a Redditor who’d had a similar bit that always involved with his dad beating him with jumper cables. Morph didn’t ever know about the similar account when he started out, and ignored the haters. Now commenters will put down users imitating the style with “You’ll never be Shittymorph.” He says it’s bizarre, and that his focus on keeping positivity around the account often leads him to comment on those threads and tell the haters to chill out, or say he likes the work they are criticizing. We’ve both had our fair share of Reddit haters, and I can’t help but feel delighted he shuts down that negativity. There’s catharsis there for anyone who’s dealt with trolls in the past.

“When you have a platform, you have a responsibility to the community to set a good example,” he tells me. “That’s all I’m trying to do.”

The land of dead trees has little in the way of liquid. Color me surprised. As my water dwindles, I remember the desert sections of the PCT and 20-mile water-carries. I pick up the pace, hoping to reach a source before I turn into a thirst-gremlin. 

I’m pressing down the trail into a hollow when Morph’s observant nature saves my life: There's a pile of bear scat in the path, and it looks like the bear passed a parasitic worm. I’m disgusted but unable to look away, staring down at it as I step over. Morph yells out from behind me in alarm.  

“Bear! Come back this way.” 

I stop and see nothing but a large downed tree and the path ahead. Puzzled, I begin to back up towards Morph, who’s standing on a hill with a view of the whole area. As I back away, the huge head of a grizzly peaks out from behind the downed tree I had been standing next to 15 seconds ago, followed by a cub. If you’re unaware, grizzlies are most dangerous to humans when they perceive a threat to their young. Mother grizzlies have killed their fair share of hikers just by being startled. I had been standing no more than ten feet away from this bear, separated only by a log. Had I rounded that corner and startled her and her cub, I may not be writing this right now. Morph’s attentiveness saved my skin.

Morph heads backwards up the hill we’d just come down, and we briefly bicker on what we should do. Morph argues we should wait for the Chattanoogans to make a group of 4, citing how groups of more than 4 have never been attacked, but groups of 2 have. Not two hours before, he’d mentioned he had hoped to see a grizzly in Glacier, albeit from far away. I’d retorted that I’d prefer to see no grizzlies at all if it came down to flipping a coin between seeing one up close or far away, and he agreed. That conversation is suddenly prescient. 

Despite the near brush with death, my thirst is getting the better of me. I argue that we can give them a wide berth and continue down trail, since the Chattanoogans had planned to take a leisurely pace, and we have no idea how long we would be waiting. A tense 20 minutes pass while the bears wander the area, crisscrossing back and forth over the trail. The cub stands on its hindlegs to stare and whiff the air with curiosity as we bang our trekking poles and yell for the bears to “git!”

Eventually, they wander far enough that I am able to convince a skittish Morph to skirt their perimeter with me. We safely circumnavigate them, one grizzly encounter now under our belts, and continue on into what seems to be a bone-dry marshland.

No doubt earlier in the season, the landscape was flowing with fresh snowmelt, but now the cracked creek beds we cross exist just to taunt our thirst. I constantly think I hear water rushing but never see any. We take a break in the shade of a young pine, and I tell Morph I’m looking forward to swimming at Flattop Campground (the next campsite). Sadly, I’ve mixed up Flattop and Flathead (the large lake we drove by on the way to Glacier): There will be no lake to swim in.

Pushing forwards, we stumble upon a pool that looks stagnant. I’m thirsty enough to try and filter it, only to find that it is cold to the touch and flowing! The clouds grace the little oasis with 20 minutes of shade while we throw off our packs and sit to celebrate fresh, cold water.

Not a mile down the trail is the Flattop campsite. There’s an ice-cold creek flowing just downhill from the site that puts our little oasis to shame. It’s irresistible in the afternoon heat.

We find a group of 4 brothers out on a 1-night trip and get to talking with them in the food-prep area. As chance would have it, they are from my home town. We learn each of their professions. When the conversation turns to our origins, Morph relates the story of me being crazy enough to fly out and hike with an Internet stranger, to much amusement. The brothers ask about the reason I’d want to interview Morph in the first place, so I explain how the trip came together and how it all relates to that one time in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table. One of the brothers perks up, incredulous and questions Morph:

“No way? You’re the Hell In A Cell guy?!”

For someone who commands so much attention online, it’s obvious that Morph wants none of it in person. He gives a nervous laugh and replies:

“Haha, yeah, that’s me.” 

We keep chatting with the brothers, and eventually move on to the topic of the bears, each recounting our side of the day’s encounter.

Before we know it, a few hours have passed, and Kyle and Amanda arrive.  Up to now we have been unsure if we want to push another 6 miles and attempt to leave the park. They ask if we’ll be spending the night at the site. I mention we don’t have a permit, and since Morph and I want to respect park rules, we are leaning towards leaving. One of the brothers is quick to offer an extra permit the walk-up office had forced them to take due to the number of people in their party, which they weren’t using. Morph asks if the person who forced them to take the extra permit was a ranger from Georgia, and they don’t understand why Morph, the Chatanoogans, and I are laughing.

That decided, we settle into the site and chat with Kyle and Amanda about their hiking YouTube channel and life in Tennessee. Amanda decides to do a review for a new brand of backcountry instant meal the couple picked up on their way into Glacier. She films an intro and bumper, and begins to cook the meal. Morph tells me how much he enjoys her quirky impromptu script.  Continuing the theme of observant individuals, Amanda perks up after borrowing my pot and asks:

“Do y’all hear that crashing?”

She stands up to check on the noise, and comes back 10 seconds later shouting “BEAR.”

Everyone in the site is there within a minute, and though the first of us think it’s a black bear because of its dark fur, Morph correctly points out that it had the characteristic “hump” of a grizzly. Despite everyone yelling at it to leave, it continues to graze in the creekbed just down from the designated cooking area,  then moseys up and into the campsites. Even with all the excitement, it goes on its way without incident. 

Amanda finishes her review of the mac and cheese: “it’s so delicious it attracted a bear.”

Day 3

The next day is a simple, 5-mile walk back to the car. While we pack up camp in the morning, we discuss ethical hacking, one of Morph's interests. Morph walks me through the technical details behind a basic deauthentication attack to sniff a WiFi handshake... and then how to crack the captured password using rented cloud computing services from Amazon. He hasn’t talked much about his tech background before this, and I’m surprised by the depth of his knowledge on the subject (especially for someone who claims to have no formal education on it).

The first 3 miles are a return of the alarmingly steep switchbacks from day 1, but downhill this time. The constant impact slope makes short work of my knee, and we are forced to reduce our pace.

Still, the miles are easy, and we’re in no rush to be anywhere. It feels like nature as was intended, unhurried and at peace.

We talk about the past and Morph’s early days on Reddit under a suspension bridge where the water is cool but not ice-cold. Fish jump out of the stream. We are unrushed by the day and the distance left to walk. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sunlight dapples reflections off the stream onto the bottom of the bridge and rocks around us.

Morph stands on rock under the bridge and jokes that he’s a real-life troll. He skips a stone and wonders out loud about LNT, or “leave no trace”. 

“Is it Leave No Trace to throw a rock into a stream?”

“Probably not,” I say. He throws another.

“They’ll all just get pushed back up on shore after winter.”

“How’s that?” I ask.

“The snowmelt swells the stream and pushes the sediment from the bed back up onto the shore.”

I’ve never thought about the mechanics of it. Either way, I don’t think most rangers will ticket you for skipping stones.

“I don’t mean to sound like an authority on the subject,” Morph adds. “I just made all that up and don’t know if it’s true or not... but it sounds right to me” We laugh and wonder what will happen to the rest of our lackadaisical day. Morph tells me about his uncle, who in real life is called Hippie Longstocking. He’s featured as a prominent character in Morph’s novel. Morph paints a vivid picture of a lovable yet rabidly defiant rapscallion who enjoys getting a rise out of people ; a troll from before the “art” of trolling was considered a thing. 

Up and over the bridge, we decide to walk to the road instead of a steep switchback climb. Within 30 seconds of crossing to the correct side of the street and putting out my thumb, a car stops. It’s only the second one that’s come by, and I can honestly say this is the quickest hitch I have ever received in my decade of hitchhiking. A nice couple from Seattle shepherds us back to the dusty silver minivan. As I place the now-lighter bear canister into the back of the car; it feels like all the frustration of its extra weight has sublimated into fond recollection– a type 2 fun watermark.

Back to Civilization 

Driving on the way out of the park, we discuss Morph’s book titled “Morph” (surprise!), which he has been chiseling away at and revising for several years. I excitedly suggest he find an agent and offer to help on the search. 

I insist on buying Morph a big meal on the way back to Missoula, and we stop for barbecue in Kalispell. There’s nothing that feels quite so decadent as eating at a restaurant after time in the backcountry, and we make the most of it. Morph spends the better part of an hour responding to tags and messages on Reddit. I send friends and family photos of bears. 

After dinner, we are without a goal, and we decide to look for a campsite using freecampsites.net. It leads us on a seemingly endless drive up a mountain dirt road that deposits us at a site overlooking Flathead Lake. It’s gorgeous, and both of us are stuffed and content. I spend a long time looking out over rolling hills to the lake, but wildfire smoke and waning sunlight slowly crowd it out of view. We talk for a while, and neither of us are dead-set on camping right off of a gravel road.

We flip another coin, and it decides we will head back towards Missoula to be closer to the airport. Before we leave, Morph reads out loud the ending of On the Road (the original scroll version). His delivery is compelling, and I’m reminded of his background in hip hop, beat poetry, and acting.

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just NOBODY knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old - I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady, the father we never found, I think of Neil Cassady.” 

I don’t know who Neil Cassady is, so Morph does his best to encapsulate Jack Kerouac’s high-strung right-hand man in a few words, briefly touching on psychotic irresponsibility, the worship or excess, willful arrested development, and a manic self-destructive hedonism, a crescendo that never reaches a satisfying peak before… well, Morph makes the sound of an airplane nosediving and crashing. 

We talk about Morph’s various platforms, and of rubbing shoulders with other influencers who are trying to change the world. This time, I dig into the meat of one of the big questions I came here to ask. Morph has had lightning strike time and time again, “going viral” so frequently that at a certain point, you’re forced to stop and consider: Is that viral success really just a coincidence and dumb luck if an individual makes it happen over and over again? Is there something Morph sees that the rest of us don’t? He gives me an answer I’m not expecting:

“I don’t think I’m special or some overly insightful savant for getting clicks, but it does seem I have a knack for what might be called guerrilla-style viral marketing.  I see it as a kind of evolving artform that hasn’t entirely defined itself yet. Maybe it's just a natural understanding of social engineering and how it can be applied to mass interaction on the Internet. I think I’m good at finding social engineering vulnerabilities that haven’t been exploited or manipulated… and they CAN be for both good and bad. So, if I were to write a recipe to help someone “see what I’m seeing” as far as virality, the ingredient list would include:

• a heightened empathy, 

• some basic common sense,

• a creative imagination, 

• and probably, most importantly, a willingness to shamelessly manipulate, present, or otherwise interact with information in such a way that could potentially move a large swath of the targeted population in the exact direction you want them to go

But for the love of god, if you figure out this equation, don’t be evil while using it.”

As I’ve come to expect from Morph, he adds a characteristic “not an expert” disclaimer at the end.

His reasonings are always just over the hill from intuitive to me. We discuss other viral episodes of his. He once created a video of an anonymous man rapping in a Spider-Man mask, then unashamedly manufactured a backstory for it, claiming that “someone found this USB at the Apple store, and the rapping Spider-Man video was the only file on it.” Those Spider-Man videos (Morph did this twice, with one video featuring himself, and the other including his friend) went viral and were discussed a couple of times on a TV show called “Right This Minute”. One of the show's hosts speculated the videos were an elaborate ruse, saying “I think someone is using these videos to get people talking, and guess what, it’s working!” Morph explains there was no financial benefit from The Rapping Spider-Man affair, but he and his friends have enjoyed some good laughs about it. I’m left convinced that there’s skill behind the perceptiveness he’s demonstrated the whole time I’ve been around him... one that most people simply don’t have. 

The drive back to Missoula takes us into the night. Morph opens up as he details scenes from his novel more vividly. I’m reminded again how effortlessly he conjures vivid and interesting characters, both real and fake, to entertain. He imitates his late mentor 880 (pronounced Eight-Eighty) with the voice of a crotchety old man, detailing all sorts of trouble you wouldn’t expect a senior citizen to get involved in, including freestyle rapping.

Day 4

The following morning, I meet Morph’s mom and her 5 Bernese mountain dogs. This is a special moment for me, as I lost my Berner, Pancake, 6 months ago, and the wound is still fresh.

She and I talk about her incredible son. Morph wanders in and out of the conversation, again ironically uncomfortable as the center of attention. He pokes at his mother’s desire to have purebred dogs when so many good dogs die in shelters. She acknowledges that her position on the matter is conflicted, and that she does her part with rescue cats. Despite their obvious differences, they both ended up with a passion for animals: If Morph had all the money in the world, he’d start his own no-kill dog-rescue. His mother is deeply passionate about the ethics of purebred dogs, and speaks at length on the woes of what happens when the industry is driven towards profit. 

This leads into a discussion about how Morph hasn’t used his platforms for profit. I tell her I think it’s because at heart, he fears that introducing financial incentives into his work might interrupt altruistic motivations. That fear seems to drive him to frequently question many of his actions, all in an effort to evaluate them for positive impact. There’s irony in the fact that the people who should worry the least about where they stand morally are the ones who do so the most. 

Before I know it, the time has come to get to the airport or miss my flight. I hug Morph’s mom goodbye and give the berners each a pat, then follow Morph out the door.  

Goodbyes

Morph drives me to the airport, and we stop at a small Mexican restaurant on the way. We talk more about the way we’d like the world to look, how we can collaborate on this article, and in general share a positive outlook for our futures. 

After he drops me off, I sit in the Missoula airport, fat and happy. Content to simply exist. I haven’t felt such an undercurrent of wellbeing in a long time.

I’m so glad I made this trip. Morph confessed that he hadn’t expected me to come out. Hell, I surprised myself by buying a ticket to Montana to meet a stranger on the Internet. With Glacier in the rearview, I can confidently say all the effort to make it happen was the right decision. 

So, now in Montana, the sun falls down around glacier-carved mountains. Long, big sky stretches over a vast empty nothingness, and one can sense how minuscule they are between the piles of rocks split by the frozen wanderings of daydreamers. Distant galaxies shed pieces of themselves through a darkness that caresses entirety, cools the elements, and cloaks each massive peak. When I think of Morph, I think of integrity. I think of radical integrity. 

Melancholy Monday

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host; Paul Logan. Today is Melancholy Monday. If you’re new around these parts, that means that on Mondays we like to talk about stuff that’s kind of a bummer. Today, we’re going to talk about where I’ve been for a few weeks and why you lovely folks haven’t been getting your newsletter.

One quick moment of housekeeping, I’d like to congratulate reader Brent on winning the the collapsible hat giveaway. It’s in the mail buddy!

Sad Clown

Once, about a third of the way through a date, the other person turned to me and said:

“You know what you are? You’re a sad clown.”

“What’s a sad clown?” I asked.

“People like Chris Farley, Robin Williams. You know, they make other people laugh to hide their own pain.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked.

“It’s not a good or a bad thing. It’s just how it is.”

In the moment, I found I couldn’t disagree with them. I still can’t to this day. I’m always someone who functions better turned outward cheering others up, rather than staring down my inner turmoil.

The Pagliacci meme is the most common instance of the sad clown trope that I run into. It’s hundreds of years old, but was revivified by Alan Moore in Watchmen, where the joke is delivered in stunted dialogue by a psychopathic social outcast. It’s a shame it’s been so raked over the coals by troll communities, because I love the artistry of Moore’s presentation, even if it is a little ham-fisted.

Moore tells us the joke in text boxes over the death scene of Blake, a mass-murdering “American hero” who used the sobriquet “The Comedian”. The original packaging is intended to underscore the idea that the Comedian saw how nonsensical and petty society is and decided the only thing to do was laugh.

From Rorschach:

"Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together...he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That's why he was lonely."

From Blake himself:

"Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense."

The Comedian is basically Captain America if cap knew all the terrible things America had done and that he stood for, and continued to fight for it anyways because why not. He’s learned helplessness and nihilistic hedonism incarnate.

Since then, the internet has excised the joke from its context and boiled it down into metahumor, oftentimes being referenced by responding to self pity with “but doctor… I am Pagliacci!” Here’s an example of that got meme’d immediately after Robin Williams’ suicide:

I’m not trying to claim any special insight into the world in referencing the “seeing the sick joke of society and deciding the only thing left to do is laugh” aspect of Moore’s presentation. Everyone sees the nonsensicality of society to one extent or another, most people just decide that it’s not funny; that they can change it, that it’s justified, that things have to be this way. I’ve just always been the class clown who found more sense in highlighting the contradiction and trying to make others laugh about it. Always been the person prattling on through his own pain.

Clinically, sad clowns are more related to cyclothymia than what’s be up with me: dysthymia (depression), but it’s a fine edge to walk— especially if you’ve got bipolar disorder in your family (which I do). Like the rest of my ilk, the laughter is only a defense mechanism; a cross borne against darkness with a trembling hand; a brief reprieve from the beating of a hollow drum.

Let’s be honest

I’m going to be honest here, though I worry it may impact my future employability once background-checking AI becomes standard: I’ve had depression the majority of my life.

Specifically a type of low-grade constant depression known as dysthymia, or persistent depressive disorder. Dysthymia is different from major depressive disorder (MDD) in that it doesn’t normally strand you in bed or cause huge dysfunction. It’s more of a depressive tinnitus, a sad mosquito buzzing in your ear for a good decade on end, instead of a donkey-kick in the gut from Eeyore.

The kicker is that since they are different disorders, the two can co-occur. That’s what’s been up with me for the last month or so. I’ve been locked in a death-spiral of self criticism over failure to meet ridiculously high standards I set for myself. This causes a cascading negative feedback cycle that’s a lot like a muscle cramp.

The charley horse, the monkey trap

If you’re unfamiliar, a “charley horse” is baby-talk for a muscle cramp/spasm. Depressive episodes work like a cramp: a negative feedback cycle in which pain causes a reflexive tightening, leading to more pain. Depression is a feedback loop of actions and emotional responses to those actions; which self perpetuate.

I don’t post an article →

I view myself as worthless for not posting an article →

I’m too mentally taxed from enumerating all the ways I’m worthless to write an article. →

I don’t post an article. →

Repeat; ad nauseum.

The inability to decide to relax, only intensify and tighten could also be characterized as a myopia of choice. You become so locked in the feedback loop you’re unable to look away from it, unable to see simple actions that might break you out of the prison you made for yourself. This is the decision-making equivalent of a charley horse: a monkey trap.

From Wiktionary:

monkey trap: A cage containing a banana with a hole large enough for a monkey's hand to fit in, but not large enough for a monkey's fist (clutching a banana) to come out; anecdotally used to catch monkeys that lack the intellect to let go of the banana and run away.

This newsletter is the banana in a monkey trap of my own design. I’ve spent a good deal of the past several months overstressed because I needed to get a new article out on schedule. I never stopped to ask myself what the consequences of failing to do so would be, because I’d myopically limited my options to “post about x or post about y” without the thought of “don’t post.” I can’t let go of the posting deadline, I can’t let go of the banana.

So it is with depression, with most stressful and unpleasant situations in our lives. We can’t leave an unhealthy relationship because… reasons. We can’t quite a job we hate because… reasons. We can’t show our true selves to the people we love because…. reasons. So instead we stay in bad relationships, working bad jobs, surrounded by people who might hate the real us— all because we lack the imagination to seek a better life, or are too cowed by fear of short term pain to push through it for long term contentment.

This is all normal, and feeds into the cyclic learned helpless of depression. Depression is a charley horse that leaves you too locked up by your own pain to pursue lateral action escaping it. Depression is a monkey trap that leaves your vision so narrowed to the options you don’t want that you have trouble imagining the ones you do. To top it all off, depression leaves you insensate, and unable to discern what actions will lead to future contentment and pleasure.

Real winners quit

For the past few weeks I stepped away from things I’d told myself I need to do. Instead, I relaxed. I played Elden Ring, went to a judo class for the first time in a decade, visited my nephew, and went and saw the new Top Gun before it left theaters.

I did all of this because I’d backed myself into a corner in life. So, I decided to remind myself that I’m allowed to chill. Between MBA applications, posting on EoSV, applying to jobs, and various personal projects; it had been months since I did anything with the sole purpose of enjoyment.

This ties directly into the emotional state I discuss in On Tilt, where focus on purely instrumental goals leads to negative feedback cycle. In order to function well, we must regularly remind ourselves of the actual end goal of our labor: the things that have value in and of themselves— not status, money, and recognition but love, contentment, and satisfaction.

On Tilt itself could probably be considered Pt. 1 of this article, which is more of a reflection of what happens when you fail to resolve tilt- and instead fall into depression. The final section of that article describes the really big issue I’ve been having for about a month: Anhedonia.

Anhedonia is defined as an inability to feel pleasure, and it’s one of the classic markers of depression. I’m going to repost that section here in full because it’s extremely relevant to why I’ve been gone:

Resetting

A little while back I gave some advice to someone who was frustrated with their life. They didn’t find joy in anything they did anymore, and were left doubting the value in any action. This is anhedonia, an early marker of depression wherein you stop enjoying… well, everything.

I’ve spent a lot of time anhedonic, and think it has the same macro-shape as tilt: attempting to feel joy and being frustrated when you can’t, fueling more frantic attempts and more intense frustration with their failure. My philosophy of “safe failure” is born of these struggles. Here’s what I told our anhedonic friend:

1. Make it your goal to try and fail. If you expect success you will pressure yourself out of it. You’re too much of an amateur at getting out of ruts to have the context to know what is and isn’t a good action to take, so you’ll be stuck in trial and error for a while. Unfortunately there’s not really any helping this since what will get you out is unique to you. Don’t even let yourself hope that an activity or action will “cure” you. There is no cure.

2. Now that your spirit is properly broken, recognize that you can do whatever you want. Like the journey from nihilism to existentialism: if nothing matters, then you get to decide what matters.

3. Find something you enjoy so much you don’t mind being bad at it. For me, it’s writing. This is NOT your lifeline. It is a fun thing you do.

4. Find a goal you want to work towards- a specific goal, not “getting better” for me, it’s getting a book published.

5. The thing that you gives you the good chemicals and the goals you want to achieve are very likely going to be misaligned. One of the first times I tried this I put so much pressure on myself to achieve the goal of making money off a video game that I was petrified of making mistakes, and couldn’t enjoy programming anymore.

6. That sucks, dude. Seems like you failed.

7. AHA! You’ve succeeded in your first goal: failure.

8. Now you’ve got the taste for the cycle:

   1. Find satisfying atomic activity

   2. Attempt to slot it into an aligned goal.

   3. Fail.

   4. If you still want to try again, you know you are working towards your goal simply by doing something you enjoy so much you don’t mind messing up.

9. You may never find your combination. That’s OK. Remember this was never about success in crawling out of the hole- this was about rebooting your brain’s cycle of interest and reward so that you can enjoy life again.

10. Remember: Fail often, fail fast, have fun.
    

Conclusion

Sometimes the we fail at the instrumental pursuits we do to support the activities that give us joy. It’s easy in those moments to get upset, and let negative emotion taint our intrinsic pursuits; those that give us joy regardless of success. This is tilt.

Whenever I feel myself tilting — instead of screaming back at unnecessarily harsh critics — I go back and read the advice above. It reminds me that I’m writing for the joy of the activity alone- not success, not attention, not interaction. It helps me calm down, tune the screaming out, and live to write another day.

Now that I’ve got a speck of distance between me and the feelsbad, I’ve pinpointed one of the more toxic contagions that started this entire negative feedback cycle in the first place. Business authenticity.

Business Authenticity (let’s not be honest)

One of the biggest driving forces behind all this dysphoria for me has been MBA and job applications. In many ways, conversing in your opponent’s terms cedes mental ground, and heavy exposure to the upside-down world of business doublespeak has left my head spinning.

These days, there’s great emphasis put on leadership from a place of “vulnerability” and “authenticity.” These words do not mean what you think they mean in the context of meritocratic review.

When I think of authenticity, I generally think of displaying the whole of one’s person without affectation. Someone who is authentic speaks their whole mind, and not just what is convenient for them at that moment. Someone who is vulnerable shows their true self.

Society does want you to be genuine, it just doesn’t want the genuine parts of you that aren’t useful— only the ones that fit through the filter. Think about it like a garlic press where the skin is leftover and discarded. That skin is the “authentic” parts of your person that are inconvenient, unprofitable, or undesirable.

When you’re told to “be yourself,” you are not being told to be your whole self. You are instead being told to present the genuine aspects of your person that are acceptable or fit the correct narrative. It isn’t that societal filters force us to leave behind aspects of our person that are inconvenient. It’s just that they select for the most convenient & profitable characteristics.

To filters, some people will just be skin to be discarded. If you are unwilling to fit through the holes of the filter into the specific shapes it has grown to reproduce, then you will find yourself discarded in favor of someone who will cut from their flesh to fit the filter, or someone who was fortunate enough to fit the filter all along.

Corporations and schools that encourage “authenticity” in this fashion likely don’t realize they are engaging in doublespeak, they are simply playing a different game than the applicants— a numbers game. If you’re an individual shooting for a prestigious job, you’ll likely need to conform in some way to fit the filter. If you’re a prestigious job searching for individuals, some number will fit the filter— you don’t care how much skin you’re going to throw away because eventually you’ll find some meat.

Conclusion, what this means for the future

Authenticity is an issue I’ve been having with the newsletter of late. I want to speak truthfully, but find myself pulled increasingly towards the thinkpiece articles that generate traffic and subscriptions.

This blog is specifically anti-meritocracy, or at least against the ingenuine article currently on display in society. I don’t want to engage in the same doublespeak as those I criticize. For that reason, I’m going to try to be more honest with my writing here. That means more skin, less zest. I want to push for a world where people can be authentic, worts and all, and that involves leading by example.

When I started EoSV, I imagined it would be an even mix of fiction and nonfiction. I quickly found out that the original fiction grind is a much more difficult one than punditry, and lazily stuck to the content that was best for audience building. I think this has led to me putting out content that while good for my personal growth, felt a little forced.

In the future, I’m going to move into a non-guaranteed posting schedule. I’m going to focus on making more content that is true to me, which will involve a lot more fiction, and potentially even a serially published novel. I’ve also taken on a new job that starts mid-September, so frequency may bob a bit. What I lack in frequency I promise to make up for in quality, and believe me, I’ve got a lot of bangers on the bench just waiting to get fleshed out:1

With that in mind, I’m going to be absent again for another week or so while I hike into Glacier National Park with the infamous shittymorph for a gonzo-journalism style… something that remains to be seen. My intention is that things only get stranger from here on out, and I’m very excited you’ll be here to take the journey with me.

As always, share this with people who you think will find it relevant, and tweet your favorite line at me.

Move Over Monday

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Move Over Monday. If you’re new around here, that means that on Mondays I try to keep my writing brief to point you towards more important goings on. Today, I’m going to recommend you read a NYT article about productivity tracking.

Read this NYT article about productivity tracking.

Remember that whole "Inflate the Productivity Economy" thing? It's here.

Productivity tracking software is on the rise. Here’s are some of the terrible ways it is already being used, including, but not limited to:

• Tracking efficiency among chaplains responsible for providing grief counseling to the dying.

• Random webcam snapshots that invalidate 10min of work if you go to the bathroom at the wrong time.

• Inability to measure offline work, so you just don’t get paid for it.

This has been coming for a long time — Amazon warehouse workers have been the victims of performance incentives that punish them for natural human behavior like needing to pee for over a decade now. The pandemic threw fuel on the fire and forced this ugly monster into the light of white-collar remote work.

As an accelerationist I have to say this article excited me. There will be no worker solidarity across classes without the necessary decrease in living standards to show white collar workers that they are still chattel regardless of whether or not they get to wear fancy clothes and work in the big house. Bring on the cattle prod and eye movement tracker for the WFH crowd!

I’m glad the NYT made sure to interview at least one pickme who is willing to accept terrible working conditions because they think they work harder than everyone else on their team. Those are the workers who will power the race to the bottom. The ones who say “it really shows you how inefficient you were being” and “it keeps me honest,” as if the people to whom it’s keeping you honest aren’t robbing you blind at every corner and laughing all the way to the bank. 

On a slightly brighter note, I think the article’s inbuilt “productivity tracker” is an excellent example of narrative technology. It uses code to create a dynamic, immersive experience that really heightens your empathy for those described.

I think we all know this won’t end until there’s a machine inside your brain docking pay every second you aren’t striving to make a bigger buck for dear leader. With that in mind, I wrote a greentext:

> 2045

> be me, medical ai exorcist

> walking into hospital to fix MRI machine that thinks it is Angela Merkel.

> planning intricate demonic expulsion dance step by step in my head

> neuralink coos and releases goodboy chemicals to reward my professional focus.

> workerHUD shows a 6 cent hourly bonus for my dedication.

> fuck yes, no nutrient mush for this top earner tonight

> Have bestFriendAI book me a waifuSim table at Kentucky Printed Chikken

> almost at the hospital entrance, I pick up the pace, I’m getting close to the dentistry benefit unlock and don’t want to get dinged for mistiming automatic sliding doors again.

> orderly sprints by pushing three-seater wheelchair full of elderly boomers foaming at the mouth from FoxNewsItol™️ withdrawal, damn supply chain.

> runs over my foot.

> workerHUD immediately informs me all of my toes are broken

> I fall over screaming.

> dinged for unprofessional language

> dinged for lying down on the job

> dinged for mistiming automatic door

> my compensation is now negative, and funds are being withdrawn from my retirement account to compensate the company for my laziness

> issued warning to get up in the next 10 seconds or I’ll be let go

> Boston dynamics dogs auto dispatched to eject my daughter from company kindergarten into adjacent broken glass and used needles factory

> try to get up, can’t put weight on my foot

> 5 seconds left, start dragging myself towards the door

> neuralink releases half dose of Motivationol™️, reposesses my car to pay for it.

> I. CAN. DO. THIS.

> Second orderly runs over my hand

> scream in agony

> haven’t pooped in days for max efficiency; shit myself

> workerHUD informs me my fingers are broken and I’ve been terminated

> unemploymentHUD shows me live feed of my daughter getting thrown into pile of broken glass and used needles, asks if I’d like to leave a tip

> losing consciousness, see paramedics running towards me

> try to get up and run away

> automatic door can’t see me on ground, closes on my neck

> I’m trapped

> paramedics too efficient to be fought off,

> can hear their neuralink ka-ching bonus multipliers going off

> they pick me up and carry me 5 feet into emergency wing

> place me in waiting room chair, walk away

> unemploymentHUD informs me my house and daughter have been repossessed to pay for emergency transit.

Conclusion

I hope you’re as scared as I am. I can’t imagine in working in such inhumane conditions, but also feel a grim certainty that this will be everyone, everywhere’s reality by the time I retire. Has your workplace implemented any productivity tracking? Let me know in the comments, or reach out on twitter.

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Thèque Thursday

Hi! Welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Thèque Thursday. If you’re new around these parts, that means that on Thursdays we like to go to the club and then write about technology. Today we’re going to be asking the question: is technology unnatural?

The soundtrack this Thèque Thursday is Walter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven. Please turn on your disco ball and laser lights now and play it on repeat while you enjoy the article.

Is technology unnatural?

The thesis of this post could be stated as “if it occurs, it is natural.” I’m going to start with my definition of technology, just so we’re on the same ground for terms.

In the framework of EoSV, technology does not have physical form. It is solely informational. A sandwich is not technology. The recipe to make a sandwich is technology.

All the rocks we tricked into thinking aren’t technology. They are the physical byproducts of informational life that reproduces by being useful to humanity. Since information lives in human brains, if it isn’t useful to them then it’s unlikely to be reproduced.1 If you can destroy the physical thing without destroying the knowledge to reproduce it, then it is informational life.

I think of technological advancement much the same way I think of culinary advancement: No one wrote a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich before someone had written a recipe for cheese, and a recipe for bread. It’s both hierarchical and evolving— so it follows the same patterns as social vehicles.

Technology is the additive process by which we as humans develop attendant species of symbiotic informational life; put simply, knowledge. This is analogous to artificial selection and animal husbandry, just in the much faster medium of abstraction. Technology encompasses everything from mathematics to theater (can’t have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead without first having Hamlet). Technological advancement relies on cross-pollination of discoveries and methods among fields of human endeavor.

For example, virtually all human weaponry outside of explosives has been variations on thin pointy rocks or big dull rocks. Now that ancient technology has reared its head again as the US army’s favorite new assasination toy, the R9X Hellfire Missile (colloquially known as the “knife missile,” or “Flying ginsu2”).

In 2022, human knowledge- and thus human technology- is more centralized than ever. With the level of open discussion in research and the free availability of information online to the majority of the world, one might start to think of technology as a collective repository, rather than a distributed mass of knowledge. This is not the case — if the central repository goes down, or is corrupted3, then we are back to fragmented knowledge.

I would argue that technology is specific to social vehicle. With Rome we lost concrete, with Tesla wireless current. What can be added to can also be taken from and lost. The things we think of as modern day “technology” are trappings of knowledge specific to this incarnation of civilization, and are not guaranteed to persist beyond it. 

All of these things qualify technology as informational life, just like social vehicles, and just like the meta-aware information inhabiting our meatsuits that we like to call “self.” The fact that technology has repeatedly experienced convergent evolution via multiple discovery counts towards the fact that it’s as natural as homo-sapiens. And we are 100% natural.

What is “natural?” (a reddit conversation)

A while back there was a post on /r/philosophy entitled Nature doesn’t care if we drive ourselves to extinction. Solving the ecological and climate crises we face rests on reconsidering our relationship to nature, and understanding we are part of it.

There was a comment chain I couldn’t resist hopping in on that went like this:

There are millions of people (indigenous to every continent) living in harmony with nature and who want to continue to do so. Certain groups are killing the world and our species as we know it.

Someone replied with a comment stupid enough to get me going:

This is factually wrong. the only reasons indigenous people seem to live in harmony with nature is because they lack the technology to cause real damage. The native Americans burned down huge forests so the could farm buffalo for example. Humans have always exploited nature.

And this is how I replied to the reply:

This is factually wrong. The only reasons ants seem to live in harmony with nature is because they lack the technology to cause real damage. Ants destroyed huge earthworm environments so they could farm aphids for example. Ants have always exploited nature.

Imagine what they could do with turbo laser jet packs. 🤯

Your distinction is meaningless. If our standard of unnatural is manipulation of the population of other species, ants meet the requirements. But nearly EVERY species manipulates and is manipulated by its environment and its neighbors.

Humans are nature, nature doesn’t care. If humanity eventually sublimates all matter in existence into grey goop, that will have been a natural process arriving from natural means to natural ends.

The commenter I replied to fired back:

That is an anthropogenic process you described and not how a scientist views natural processes. You are right that nature doesn’t care as it is a mass of varying processes that are constantly evolving. However, changing variables in that equation results in changing the solution that might not have occurred in a “natural” or unaltered state. Your example is like saying a GMO is organic when it is made of organic compounds but was engineered.

Not to be outdone, I pushed back:

Yeah, “anthropogenic” processes are only anthropogenic because we’re anthropocentric.

I also described some “ant”thropogenic4 processes that scientists shouldn’t view as natural under the same standards.

You’re acting like humans are sitting above nature fiddling with the dials. We die to disease and disaster just like deer and fish. We aren’t the masters of the grand equation you describe- we are just variables affecting other variables, as we’ve always been, as all life always has.

The conception of a natural or unaltered state is flawed at a base because it imagines a timeline without humanity that doesn’t exist. We do exist, nature produced us, we are natural, so are the things we produce in turn. Anthills and skyscrapers are equally natural.

I love the GMO example because it displays such a blatant disregard for existing biological knowledge. Did you know that in response to stressors plants greatly increase their rate of mutation (via creative transposon usage)? They diverge from a “natural” state intentionally as a mechanism to survive environmental stress. Plants have been genetically modifying themselves since long before humanity was a twinkle in the missing link’s eye.

We just showed up, and decided that since we were so awesome we must be ruining everything. If we were around to commentate on the rise of dinosaurs and mammals and other bottleneck environmental evolution events, I’m sure we would have found a way to anthropocentrize them as well.

I don’t think we really have the ability to destroy all life. We just have the ability to end human habitability, which is again just anthropocentrism and hand wringing over a road bump that an intelligent observer evolved in a post-humanity future wouldn’t mark as distinct or significant from any other mass-extinction event.5

/u/ Congenita1_Optimist jumped in with a great elaboration on the GMO point:

Many forms of GMO are things that 100% could feasibly happen in nature, they're just done in a targeted way instead of waiting for a random process to do it.

Sure you would never see a gene for am anti-freeze protein in flounders just get shuttled over to a tomato. But you could (and already have) seen a single gene mutate to become non-functional in corn, leading to it growing much taller and having more cobs. And in nature there are plenty of bacteria and viruses that just infect plants and shove their own genes (and others they've picked up) into said plants. This is actually the origin of the most commonly used form of genetically modifying plants (it's based off a bacteria). Hell, a great many of the tools used in molecular biology are physical processes or derived from (or are) living things.

Things like up- or down- regulating extant genes or knock-outs (breaking previously functional genes) happen all the time in nature, just as a random process.

If an agrobacterium modifies a plants genes so that it produces a new form of sugar (that only the agrobacterium can digest), it doesn't strike me as particularly more natural than a human using that agrobacterium to do the same. Do we not call ants that farm their own fungus "natural"? It reeks of anthropocentrism.

Anthrop-obscene

To sum up the arguments from the reddit discussion:

• Everything that exists, exists naturally.

• Humans die to nature just like any other animal. We get killed by disease and disaster and even occasionally we are predated. We aren’t above nature, we’re in it and of it.

• All sufficiently complex life develops technology like plaque on teeth. As we saw in the introduction, this is because knowledge itself is just an living informational symbiont.

• If our standards for “unnatural” are manipulation of the environment or manipulation of another species’ population, then the majority of life on this planet is unnatural.

• If our standards for “unnatural” are intentional genetic manipulation; then many plants and bacteria are unnatural, and in fact, are GMO’s.

• We only think of ourselves as unnatural because we are vain, and believe the world revolves around us. Hence the word: anthropocentric.

Let’s say humans do cause the end of all life on the planet.

Is it sad? Yes.

Is it bad? Yes.

Without humanity, will there be anyone left around to care? No.

This is Anthropocentrism in a nutshell. We only matter to ourselves. to the rest of nature, we’re just more nature.

It’s been proposed that we refer to the period of time since humanity evolved as “The Anthropocene” due to the massive effects we’ve had on the environment. I think this is a great idea, considering that we’re far from the first, or even the deadliest, organism to have caused a mass extinction event.

The Great Oxidation Event occurred ~2 billion years ago and is inferred to have driven most of the biosphere on the planet to extinction. The Earth had barely any freely available oxygen before the GOE. So most life around that time would have been anaerobic. Oxygen is toxic to anaerobes, so it’s good that there wasn’t any; until cyanobacteria started terraforming the atmosphere by pumping out enough oxygen to kill everything else. What a chad move.

We may think we’re all that, but humanity is likely going to just be another sedimentary band to any future intelligent observer that decides to look. We’ll probably be responsible for some valuable natural resource similar to oil, but instead made of compressed plastic and Shen Yun fliers. I hope it has a cool name like “anthropotanium” or “people juice.”

Counterarguments

• Nature only includes organic life.

  • So Mars isn’t natural?

• Shen Yun was actually pretty good.

  • I haven’t seen show, just the fliers.

• Anthropogenic processes are a valuable distinction for scientific study.

  • I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t distinguish human activity from nonhuman activity, just that using the term “unnatural” to describe human activity is disingenuous. I’d hope we can agree that uses of “unnatural” to describe homosexuality and areligiosity have been globally damaging to culture and that allowing a false dichotomy that can be bent to political aims is a dangerous thing. The point is that the distinction has never been useful and always been political.

• Show me the replicator for informational life that lets it evolve. If you can’t then it isn’t alive.

  • Ah, the argument that killed memetics. We don’t need a replicator to see that information obviously affects the physical world and biology, and that it can be both adapted maladapted. See Dual Inheritance Theory for arguments for those more cogent than I that information/culture/cultural selection is real. In terms of whether information can be alive, I address this question in You are parasitizing your body, The Cultural Microbiome, and What are social vehicles anyways? Suffice to say, the most convincing argument I can give is that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…. then we might just need to expand our definition of duck life.

• Physical embodiment of knowledge are technology.

  • Sure, that’s fine. Though an interesting philosophical question, to me this is a semantic distinction that doesn’t have a lot of relevance outside of the EoSV framework.

• Just because you say that something existing makes it natural doesn’t mean it is.

  • If we take the term natural to mean “anything arising from nature,” I don’t see how you can argue that humankind hasn’t arisen from nature. Transitively, I don’t see how you can argue that anything that naturally-begot humanity produces isn’t also natural. Humans are natural organisms that take natural materials and forge them into artificial form. If human innovation isn’t natural, than neither are anthills, or spiderwebs, or beehives.

Conclusion

Technology is alive, just like us. It is natural, just like us. To consider anything that exists unnatural is to deny the fact that the universe has arrived at this point without any external muddling or tomfoolery, and all things that exist have arisen through natural processes.

If it occurs, it is natural. Follow me on twitter.

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Terror Tuesday

When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.

Welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Terror Tuesday. If you’re new around these parts, that means that on Tuesdays we like to talk about fear, and the actions that cause it. Today we’re going to talk about Expropriative Altruism.

Effective Altruism’s instrumental convergence

If you’re unfamiliar, Effective Altruism is a new-age secular philanthropic philosophy dedicated to maximizing good via rational analysis rather than emotional reasoning. At its inception, proponents lived in squalor and donated their salaries to anti-malaria foundations- commonly saying they could save a life for $4000. One of the movement’s founders, Will MacAskill likened donating to poorer nations as a citizen of the developed world was akin to “attending a happy hour where you can buy a pint for yourself at $5.00 or one for a stranger for 50 cents.”

Instrumental convergence should not be a new term if you are one of the thousands of Effective Altruists who mark AI existential risk as their chief aim for the movement. To understand them you should first consider instrumental and intrinsic value. I’ve discussed this topic before, in my article On Tilt. The basic idea is such:

• Intrinsic value: anything that is valuable in and of itself. This basically boils down to anything that is its own motivation. Think the smile of a loved one, the thrill of athletic competition, the gratification of sexual release.

• Instrumental value: anything that is valuable because it helps you obtain something with intrinsic value. The example I used in On Tilt was that you don’t obtain money with the intention of literally burning cash to heat your home in the winter, you obtain it for the once-removed purpose of purchasing wood to stock your fireplace.

Instrumental convergence refers to the tendency of intelligent systems to all seek the same instrumental goals to accomplish their intrinsic ones. Most decision-making entities do this; the ones that fail to are outcompeted.

In AI, this idea is often linked with a “Paperclip Maximizer” which, with the intrinsic goal of making paper clips, eliminates humanity so they can’t get in the way and uses their atoms to make more paper clips. Outside of AI, governments and militaries pursue power for power’s sake with the understanding that politics is zero-sum, and failing to capture any valuable resource means ceding it to the competition. Religions fight for adherents, recognizing that they must perpetuate in order to spread the good word. The same fate awaits organizations.

Effective Altruism has become enough of a force of its own that it exhibits convergence. It now turns to survival and propagation as a social vehicle— all still with the intrinsic goal of helping people, but one that seems further and further away with each billion dollar donation. This is the first stage of convergence: Aggrandizement.

Stage 1: Aggrandizement

A decade and change after the movement’s founding, Effective Altruism has begun its period of self obsession; as evidence by a recent $10 million wasted in Oregonian politics. The reasoning is the reasoning of any group that’s consumed too much of its own Kool-Aid: EA is inherently good, and therefore any growth in EA is good as well.

A recent New Yorker profile on Will MacAskill details the slide from “$4k to save a life” into “building a campus with laundry service” and “donating $1b to Stanford.” It asks an important question: In a movement dedicated to helping people, how do you measure the difference in impact between growing the movement and actually helping people? The New Yorker piece surfaces a particularly damning remark from the 2013 dissertation of the head of the Future Fund, Nick Beckstead:

“Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards—at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards—saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country.”

The quote from Beckstead’s dissertation is blaring alarm klaxon that something has gone wrong in a movement dedicated to helping people. When a sufficient crowd of thinkers gather around any functional work, some of them inevitably find ways to back-justify selfish action in the name of the cause.

Now that we’ve attained the “aggrandizement” stage of convergence, in which the decisionmaking entity convinces itself its mission is holy and thus any action it takes is justified as instrumental means to intrinsic ends, it is time for stage two: Augmentation.

Stage 2: Augmentation

Funding a political candidate actually qualifies EA for the “augmentation” stage already. At this point in convergence, the decision maker is assured not only that any use of its own resources is justified, but that any use of external resources is also justified. EA is all about helping people— that’s more than you can say for the majority of political candidates or corporations. Why shouldn’t EA begin to influence the expenditure of public resources.

If EA as a movement can augment its resources with those of external, more powerful entities, it will increase the ability of the movement to achieve its intrinsic goal of helping people. Surely any expenditure of its own resources is justified in achieving that access?

This isn’t limited solely to political candidacy. We will see private organizations begin to contribute to EA as the movement gains influence and individuals within other bureaucracies subscribe. Education efforts like The Introductory EA Program will begin to yield results in the form of network effect— where alumni favor one another with professional preference, yielding jobs and increased influence. Proselytization efforts will swell ranks even further, and any media attention is good attention, even when critical— all things serve the cause, the cause must grow.

Give it another decade, and EA will have effectively infiltrated many external organizations in the same fashion as organized religion. These organizations will serve as the instrumental periphery to the core of EA-exclusive groups dedicated to serving intrinsic goals. That periphery expedites the transfer of resources into the core, while less scrupulous late-adopters take their highwayman’s fee for their contributions to the cause.

At a certain point, EA will hit saturation- it will exit rapid growth and begin to resemble established philanthropic movements and religions. This is where most modern organizations stop, but only because they lack true believers willing to take extreme action in the name of achieving their organization’s intrinsic goals. I don’t believe this is the case for EA— adherents have already demonstrated a willingness to live drastically below societal standards in the name of those intrinsic goals.

For groups with true believers, saturation is not the end. Religions and Nations don’t stop at just influencing external resources, they can go further: exerting control over them. This is stage 3: aggression.

Stage 3: Aggression

If you have true faith in the justness of your cause, then any who stand in your way stand in the way of goodness. Any who possess resources that they don’t use in service of your goals do not have right to those resources. The only true cause is your cause, and all others must either bow or die in its stead.

Welcome to aggression, and its favorite child: expropriation. Every great power in history has righteously wielded expropriation. In America, manifest destiny justified a bloody roil across the great plains. If you’re familiar with Soviet history, Stalin was a bank robber in the name of the revolution long before he ever sent armies marching to their death or dissidents to camps. The Catholic Church had the crusades.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire behind the failed Oregon election, has at times spoken about purchasing coal mines to leave the coal in the ground. I imagine EA’s expropriative action will look a lot more like corporate disobedience than outright theft and violence. Why buy the coal mines when you can hire a private military contractor to bar entry into the sites? Why play within the system when money might go further outside of it? Talent, especially, has the potential to upend the corporate landscape in favor of mass human welfare.

Why do explicit financial battle with Nestle for control of Africa’s water supply when you can infiltrate its upper ranks and mismanage it into disrepair. Or, better yet, simply change the corporate strategy to align with EA goals? There exist entire untapped routes of corporate and civil expropriative action waiting only for truly committed and intelligent white-color actors to play the game.

These are all near term suggestions for alleviating current social ills. EA has recently turned its sights on the future of all mankind. If a cause is truly just, it must not stop at expanding its own influence— it must stop at nothing to destroy its enemies, for to ignore them is to invite defeat. Welcome to Stage 4: Assassination.

Stage 4: Assassination

If EA is truly serious about the threat of human extinction, then it should not shy away from resorting to violence in order to achieve its goals. A hallmark of the movement is a willingness to set emotion aside in the name of logic. While there is clear logic in forming think-tanks and attempting to peacefully influence public policy, the failed electoral experiment in Oregon should show that politicking is far from a sure thing.

Do you believe that an AI apocalypse is not just imminent but unavoidable? Are you not then complacent in failing to stop continuing research at any cost? A chorus of gentle chiding and hand wringing has done nothing to stem the surging tide of progress in AI research. If Open Philanthropy is to be believed, a true civilization-scale AI threat could be less than two decades away. Let’s do a thought experiment:

There’s a man who works in the office next to yours. Y’all see one another in the hall, make small talk about your families and the weather, and occasionally exchange small remarks over lunch. One day you finally get around to asking exactly what he gets up to, working long hours in that mysterious office.

“Oh, he says, we’re trying to build a button that will kill everyone if you push it.”

“What?” You ask.

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s just theoretical. Besides, it’s not like anyone would ever push it.” He assures you.

“How’s it … going?” You might ask.

“Not so bad, not so good. We’re probably about 20 years away from a breakthrough. But some of my colleagues are optimists, and think they might have something in the next five years!”

“And how will you know if it works?” You ask.

“Oh, we test our theories in simulations so there’s no chance of accidentally killing everyone.” He replies.

“But you are still researching how to kill everyone?”

“Well it sounds bad when you put it like that!” He responds, then stalks away in a huff.

What moral obligation do you have, knowing that the man in the office next to yours wakes up every day and researches how to kill everyone you’ve ever known and loved?

Now instead, replace “everyone” in that situation with “your mother.” What is your moral obligation knowing that the man in the office next to yours wakes up every day and researches how to kill your mum?

Now imagine that no one else thinks that the man in the office next to yours will ever succeed in making a button that will kill your mum. You plead with the local authorities, the internet, the news-media— no one seems to really care that this everyday dude is just happily ticking the days away towards killing the woman who birthed you.

As the years pass, more and more people seem to be joining the enterprise— you hear they’ve taken on new investments. You start to see news reports that the man in the office next to you is confident he’s pretty close to finishing the button. Everyone is very excited by the possibility of a button that can kill an arbitrary individual when pressed. You hear that animal trials have been successful. No one, of course, will push the button- but the man in the office next to you is getting really close to a pushable button.

At what point do you take things into your own hands? If they complete the button, and someone kills your Mom, is that your fault? Is the threat alone not enough to justify defense? When you magnify that threat to the whole human race does it not seem silly to even allow someone to toy around with life and death on that scale?

If EA is truly dedicated to spending money efficiently, would a darknet assassin or a private military contractor not have more impact than a bunch of white collar professionals whining in a professional capacity? This is the movement that said “yeah volunteering a soup kitchen is nice but you’d be doing a lot more good for humanity if you spent that time working at a hedge fund.”

If the stakes truly are life and death, then it is foolish to refuse to play for keeps. I don’t know whether EA will produce the radical faction necessary to take strong action against existential threat, but if it fails to do so then it is a toothless movement. Lethal threats must be met with lethal responses.

Conclusion

Effective Altruism is having growing pains and being pulled between its intrinsic and instrumental goals. The instrumental goals are winning, and the community will increasingly seek growth for growth’s sake, which will end with nuanced, non-altruistic action in the name of expansion.

It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. Expropriation offers a more moderate form of radical action than explicit violence, yet both represent a more impact than wasting $10 million on tone-deaf elections.

Before you report me to the authorities, give me a follow on twitter, and subscribe— I promise my posts will be just as interesting from prison.

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Suddenly, Sunday

Hi there, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles! I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Suddenly, Sunday. If you’re a first time reader, that means that on Sundays around these parts we like to…

Oh wait, shit.

It’s Sunday already?

On Sundays around here, we like to wonder how the hell it’s already Sunday. Where did the time go? Oh right, I spent it on TikTok.

ExplainTok

Over the weekend I decided to try my hand at ExplainTok - the part of tiktok where people post short form video essays. I was surprised to find how easy it was. Here’s my shot at converting Consensitivity: Why you don't have synesthesia into ExplainTok format:

@laul_poganCheck out the article about “consenitivity” on laulpogan.substack.com for more information. #synesthesiatok #synesthesia #synesthesiacheck #synesthesiatiktok #ideasthesia

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This took me about 45 minutes to film, cut, and post. The original essay took about 5 hours to research, compose, draft, and post- with an additional hour or two interacting and posting. As of right now, the original article has 278 views. 1

The TikTok video, on the other hand, cleared a thousand views and got over 100 likes in a day. Excuse me, what?

Not only did the video do better, but it didn’t immediately send people into my DM’s threatening to harm/dox me like with the neurodivergence article, and it also didn’t provoke a bunch of people to say shitty things because I shared my own content that I worked hard on and wanted to discuss. There wasn’t even anyone in the comments bikeshedding about irrelevant details and credentials (as with Begging the Serotonin Hypothesis); just people there to consume content who were stoked on interesting information.

I was quite frankly amazed to post something, let alone something that had under an hour of polish, and have 0 interactions where someone was gross to me. After several months of content creation on Reddit, I’ve accepted that there’s many commenters that treat OP as a raid boss whose HP is self esteem.

Not to be the victim of a improper outlook due to beginner’s luck, I tried again, this time on a topic that I know:

1. Would get torn apart on Reddit just ‘cuz.

2. Actually it wouldn’t, because it would be impossible to find a place to post it without getting banned (unless I disingenuously skinned a personal site as a professional news site).

The title of the video essay was “How the Shyamalan twist ruined modern storytelling.” It took about 35 minutes to film, put together, and post, all told. It received a few hundred views and got 56 likes:

@laul_poganHow the #Shyamalan #twist ruined modern #storytelling by setting a precedent of #subvertingexpectations #sixthsense #gameofthrones #westworld #saw #film #filmmaking #plottwist #plot

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My weekend vacation on ExplainTok has left me with one question:

What the hell is wrong with Reddit?

If you haven’t guess yet, the TL;DR of this post is in the title: TikTok isn't a conversation forum, it's a content channel. What I mean by this is that TikTok as a product is not formatted to get people discussing or thinking critically about things. Actually, quite the opposite- it’s meant to get people sucked into a bubble of interesting but non-oppositional content.

TikTok feels like a product. Reddit feels like a forum someone has been trying to reverse-justify into money unsuccessfully for almost a decade. This difference underscores all the other reasons I’m about to list for why it’s so much easier to get away with lazy work on TikTok.

• Platform Ethos:

  • Reddit values anonymity: A nonzero number of the people you waste your time arguing with on Reddit are teenagers who have a lot more time to waste than you do.2 The same is true on TikTok, but there you’ll see they are a teenager.

  • Reddit hates self promotion. Like, has a certifiable paradoxical hate for self promotion considering its users hunger for original content. TikTok is all self promotion. This is why I’m not going to buy Reddit stock if it ever IPOs: it’s a social media company that likes to ban content creators for posting content.

  • Reddit is a sort of e-libertarian paradise in that it is pretty hands-off in allowing communities to moderate themselves. TikTok’s entire sell is that its algorithm does the moderating for you. They sit at opposite ends of a spectrum.

• Content format:

  • It’s quite easy to parse an essay and pause to ponder or decide if you agree. With video, the hits don’t stop coming. It’s a lot easier to cover up sloppy work or leave unsubstantiated claims hanging when.

  • No links, not even in the comments. This virtually removes burden of proof.

  • TikTok’s shortform content doesn’t promote deep engagement. This isn’t a statement that Redditors deeply engage with content; I don’t think they often do, but when it happens there is simply just more to engage with.

• Platform Format:

  • TikTok is content first; Reddit is comments first. Most Redditors are arguing in the comments before they’ve consumed the content. There’s no reason for a TikToker to go to the comments of a video they haven’t seen, and they actually can’t look at the comments without the video playing unless they pause it.

  • As I mentioned earlier, Reddit relies on its communities to select content- often falling into a lot of issues with vote manipulation and people nuking content they disagree with. Some of the most Successful Reddit content gets destroyed or ignored the first time it’s posted. TikTok does an objectively amazing job at amplifying the signal of upstart creators, and though I’m sure reposting unnoticed content could be beneficial, it’s much more about correct tagging.

  • Communities vs. Tags: This all comes to a T with the fact that it’s often impossible to find a friendly place on Reddit to post OC. I’ve been banned permanently from subreddits for trying to start conversation- you can’t get banned from a hashtag. I think this all speaks to why algorithmically selected content is going to quickly replace community driven social content. Here’s a good essay on the replacement of social-connection driven content with algorithmically selected content.

Downsides

Although I’m obviously a little spiteful of how hostile Reddit is to upstart creators, I appreciate that it forced me to operate to a higher standard of creation. I really cut my teeth trying to post content Redditors wouldn’t immediately eviscerate. The reaction to The Great Filter and Utilitarian Ethics on r/philosophy is to this day some of the best feedback I’ve ever received on my writing, including courses I took at Oxford. I will say, however, that 80% of the comments section was still people being mean.

Coming up on Reddit quickly led me into a practice of spending 6+ hours on articles to make sure they had substantial quality to attract attention. I regularly had my facts or conclusions challenged and had the opportunity to converse extensively with those doing the challenging. It’s led to much more nuanced positions that I feel better able to support and defend.

TikTok doesn’t have anything approaching a standard of quality or rigor. An hour on ExplainTok yielded… diverse outcomes. I learned about the Battle of Blair Mountain, which I’d only read about in passing before. I also watched a user attempt to explain the physical concept of time as a subjective illusion, and was a little alarmed by the level of mouth jazz to substantive thought occuring. It doesn’t matter, though, both videos seemed to be smash hits with millions of views. This is the problem with content forward platforms: they are not doing anything to encourage critical interpretation of the information being delivered.

Conclusion

I wish there was a Reddit that had the celebration of new creators that is prevalent in the TikTok community. I wish there was a TikTok that had the critical eye for facts and opinions that Reddit fosters. I’m sure in the future we’ll see something along those lines. But for now, I’m going to see how long I can keep a foot planted in both lanes.

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Fedora Friday

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Fedora Friday. If you’re new to the newsletter, that means that on Fridays ‘round these parts we like to talk about famous fedoras. Today, we’re going to talk about The Semiotics of Silly Hats.

Silver Pass

When it rains continuously for days on end in the backcountry, you hit a point where everything you own is “soaked through.” You end the day staring down your wrinkly little piggy toes in between replacing your waterlogged socks with a damp pair from your pack to sleep in.

I had been storming for 3 days straight when we saved Charlie from falling off a waterfall on the way up to Silver Pass. Here’s the ever-so-lovely Pain Perdu walking through the waterfall in question about 5 minutes before the incident. You can see McQueen, her husband and all-around awesome dude (who was featured in The Crest) come up right after:

As you can tell, we were all well and truly soaked. When you’re that soaked and it’s still raining, you really only have one recourse to get dry: fire. In the Sierra, one of the catches with fire (ha) is that you shouldn’t have a one above 9,000 feet. We got Charlie settled at about 9,100 ft., and were within spitting distance of the pass itself.

Even though there’s no service in the backcountry, thru-hikers still use an app called farOut as a trail map to check water sources, campsites, etc.

Silver pass is 9,855 ft tall. It is the last pass of a week long backcountry section of the Sierra, so getting over it felt like slaying the symbolic dragon lying between us and much-deserved town food.1 FarOut placed the first fire-safe campsite at around 2 miles and 1,000 feet down from the pass itself- we decided to push for it.

The storm broke and the sunset dipped under the cloud cover as we came down from the pass, which made for some gorgeous views. Here’s me recounting the whole episode as I hustle my lil bootie off trying to make that campsite before dark so I can set up a fire:

It was well and truly dark 40 minutes later when I turned the bend to see the campsite, a big fire already burning. Shit.

On the trail it’s a coinflip as to whether someone will view it as polite to ask to share a site, since it can quickly turn a comfortable, serene camping spot into a cramped frustrating mess. We had been hoping this one would be empty. No such luck.

Exhausted as I was, I built up the courage to ask if they might share their fire with some weary fellow travellers. I debated and rehearsed the most diplomatic way to broach the subject as I weaved my way down the switchback to the site.

“Hey all- I’m sharing your fire and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“Hi friends- mind sharing your fire?”

“Hey! I’m soggy and I just saved a guy’s life- would you be so kind as to share you fire?”

*Wordless walk into camp and begin to dry feet on the fire*

Mind racing as I entered the clearing of the fire, I opened my mouth to speak and was immediately cut off before I could when someone shouted my trail name:

“Heaves?!”

Heaves’ Hats

The campsite was full of people I’d never met, but who somehow knew me by my dimly lit profile. I should explain:

In the desert, I was gifted a Baggu Collapsible Sun Hat.

It quickly became my favorite piece of kit. To the degree that I gifted my original black hat to my friend Cinderella when he joined me on trail in the Sierra, and bought a new lavender one. That hat is the inspiration for EoSV’s color scheme.

The giant purple hat became my trademark on trail, in the same way that wearing a dress became my trademark in town. See a guy in a dress or with a giant purple hat? Yep, that’s Heaves.

So, when I walked into that campsite the giant floppy disk of my hat alone marked me. The hikers who had built the fire were my friend Cinderella’s trail family. He’d told them about me, and they’d seen him wearing my former sun cover. Even in the dark, they knew my instantly by my silly hat.

The Ministry of Silly Hats

Religions have been leveraging the value of decorative hats since long before I walked into that campsite. Across the world special hats separate men from boys, devout from gentiles, and clergy from congregation. Hats have a funny way of shaping to hierarchy, such that we know popes from bishops from cardinals from priests from nuns.

It seems that hats started out as a functional cultural adaptation- used to protect heads, keep them warm, keep them shaded, and keep them safe from lice. Convergent social evolution deposited each culture with its own specific ceremonial and institutional headgear.

Most cultures reverse-justify the symbolism of hats and caps. For example, the Talmud teaches that the Kippah exists to remind its wearer of their relationship to God, yet it’s more likely that the hat originated from the same source as the Catholic zucchetti: to protect bald spots from the sun.

Overwhelmingly, if a hat isn’t meant to do a job, it’s meant to mark importance: whether of an occasion or of a person. Often times the hat accompanies a uniform, but the two serve as redundant markers of the same status, and can be recognized independently of one another. If you’re like me, your brain can fill in the blanks to imagine a uniform with the prompt of these hats alone:

Vice-versa, if shown uniforms you could probably imagine the hats. Incredible pattern matching machines that our brains are, hats have developed as a secondary language used to signal social significance, function, and rank.

Why silly hats?

• Hat’s require very infrequent laundering.

• They represent the smallest amount of fabric to customize a uniform.

• They are the first visual marker in line of sight.

• They increase the height of their wearers.

• They form a non-semantic, visual marker in memory.

• They provide an immediate contrast between members of a hierarchy.

• The passively indicate purpose, specialness, and significance.

Individuals who made hats iconic

There are plenty of people who made history. There are relatively few who did it all while wearing the same hat. Not everyone in this list was associated with their iconic style of hat while alive. Crockett, for example, only started wearing his coonskin cap after his popularity had begun to wane. All of these individuals understood the psychological power of silly hats, and used it to their advantage.

• The Licoln-Stovepipe.

  

• The Holmes-Deerstalker.

  

• The Sinatra-Fedora.

  

• The Keaton-Porkpie.

  

• The Kennedy-Pillbox.

  

• The Churchill-Homburg.

  

• The Chaplin-Bowler.

  

• The More-Bonnet.

  

• The Bonaparte-Bicorne.

  

• The Crockett-Coonskin.

  

• The Fawkes-Sugarloaf.

  

• The Roosevelt-Panama.

  

• The Marley-Rastacap.

  

I’m making a bid for it with my sun hat. I even bought a third one when I got off trail. Dog owners in the park will sometimes refer to me as “the guy with the big floral hat.” And you know what? People often know who they are talking about.

Hats that make individuals iconic.

Like I said earlier- where hierarchy forms, hats seem to follow; God help us if it’s the other way around. These are hats that let even the uninitiated know that someone has a role they are playing within an organization, and should be left to perform that role:

• Chef’s Hat

• Bearskin Hat

• Captain’s Hat

• Barrister’s Peruke

• Policeman’s cap

In addition to role-based hats ceremonial hats mark days like graduations and weddings. If you’re in a foreign culture and someone is wearing a particularly elaborate or silly hat, you can make a safe guess that they are either doing an important job or in the middle of an important day, or both!

Conclusion

A social philosopher who I can’t currently remember the name of once said “a perfect society is one in which no one knows who their parents are.” I disagree. An ideal society is one in which everyone wears an appropriate silly hat. Don’t cross me on this, I’ll fight you- and I won’t take off my big floppy hat first; so it will probably hit you in and about the face and eyes. That’s what you get for bringing words to a hat fight.

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Wu Wensdei

Hi, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m you’re host, Paul Logan. Today is Wu Wensdei. If you’re new to the blog, that means that on Wednesday we talk about the Wu Wei, or “action without intention.” Today we’re going to talk about mediocrity

Exceptionalism isn’t exceptional

Have you ever been called “mediocre?”

Think about how that experience made you feel. Probably not so good, right? It strikes me as odd that there’s so much hate — including a lot of self hate — implied in a term that means “medium, moderate, ordinary, common, average, everyday, middling.” The only time that average is a bad thing is if you’ve got an expectation of being exceptional.

I recently came across a 3 year old r/applyingtocollege post about a particularly over the top interviewer had insane expectations:

He asked me about what I want to do when I’m older. I told him I want to start a company. He responded “there’s no evidence you can do this. You have no evidence. You’re 17,18, why haven’t you built a successful company already?”

I have family responsibilities and don’t even know which area I love most to start a company in. What does he expect from me? He then told me “real passion and evidence” is like this example of a girl who did debating since she was 9.

Societal filters don’t just want to know you’ve got goals. They want to know that you’ve got goals you’ve been actively pursuing for decades. The focus is on taking the elite and making them more elite. Every program is the next tier up in a pyramid of filters attempting to find John Galt. I say find because they aren’t interested in making one unless they start with the best materials.

Everyone wants the best of the best. I’m reminded of a comedy bit from the late aughts about buying things on Amazon, it went something like:

“When did we become convinced we deserve the best of everything? I wasted 2 hours the other day comparison shopping to find the best toaster; as if one would produce better quality burned bread than the others. How is half of a star rating going to change that? Who am I, the King of France?”

This is a star-ranked world where everyone expects the best of everything all the time. This is a meritocratic nightmare where your moral value is determined by your ability to pass through an admissions pyramid.

In an environment that expects exceptionalism, it paradoxically becomes the norm. In a world that settles for nothing but excellence, you quickly understand the implication that “mediocre” is an insult.

The Middle Way

Mediocrity isn’t something to be ashamed of. In fact, it’s something that many cultures celebrate. Buddhism specifically has at its center “The Middle Way.”

The Middle Way speaks to two principles of Buddhist, both forms of moderation:

• The first is a practical application: to follow the Middle Way is to indulge excesses of both self-denial and self-indulgence. Instead of asceticism, instead of hedonism, a happy medium.

• The second is a philosophical application: to follow the Middle Way is to refuse belief in both eternalism— the belief your soul is immortal — and annihilationism— the belief you cease to exist upon death.

This concept is repeated in Taoism as jian, 儉 - which is normally translated as “moderation” or “frugality.” It is one of the “Three Treasures,” the three central pillars or values of Taoist philosophy.

Buddhist and Taoist thought both stress the acceptance of the natural way of things, and caution against striving for excellence or dominance in anything. In Taoism, the celebration of moderation comes from a recognition of the importance of balance. In Buddhism, their is a distinct belief that to hoard exceptional material wealth is to doom others to exceptional material want and the social woes that accompany it:

Hearing about this, people thought: “Now let us get sharp swords made for us, and then we can take from anybody what is not given, we will make an end of them, finish them off once and for all and cut off their heads.” So, having procured some sharp swords, they launched murderous assaults on villages, towns and cities, and went in for highway robbery, killing their victims by cutting off their heads.

Thus, from the not giving of property to the needy, poverty became widespread, from the growth of poverty, the taking of what was not given increased, from the increase of theft, the use of weapons increased, from the increased use of weapons, the taking of life increased . . .

(Digha-Nikaya iii 65)

Exceptionalism defines itself by distance from the mean. In order to have a “the best” we must have “the rest.” This brings up a frequently asked question of Ivy League admissions processes: “With such giant endowments, why not just admit more people?” It makes sense from a societal perspective— if the educations are as transformatively superior as they are touted to be, would the whole world not benefit from a doubling or tripling of the übermenschen exiting those hallowed halls?

Of course, as I addressed in “The Eye of Jabaari,” the product being sold by elite institutions is not education, but prestige. As I mentioned in “Stop saying neurodivergent,” the rates of acceptance have actually been going down. When our institutions buy into exceptionalism the level of inequity in our society grows. If we check in with reality, it’s impossible for everyone to be exceptional- it’s expected that everyone be mediocre.

Exceptionalism creates the opposite of a balanced world. We inhabit a world already mid-nosedive into a repeat of the hard lessons of the gilded age, but this time everyone is on fire or drowning. The solution, according to ancient teachings, is to give more and want less. Peace and prosperity lie in moderation; in mediocrity.

Moneyball

It’s no wonder we’re obsessed with excellence; we’re a culture dedicated to individuals. Individuals can only achieve great things through exceptional feats. This is not so with teams.

In the first episode of HBO’s Industry, an ambitious go-getter (Harper) has a discussion about meritocracy with a seasoned industry veteran (Eric) The vibe is that the position she’s interviewing for isn’t just competitive, but elite to a degree of insanity.

Eric: Why are you here then?

Harper: Well, it's not a very political answer, but I think mediocrity is too well hidden by parents who hire private tutors. I am here on my own.

Eric: Every successful business is full of people who spent money nurturing unremarkable talent.

Harper: I think this is the closest thing to a meritocracy there is, and I only ever want to be judged on the strength of my abilities.

When I saw this conversation, I loved it so much that I knew it would make it into an article. The two are talking past one another. Eric literally tells Harper that skill isn’t the foundation of a successful business. One more time for the folks in the back:

Every successful business is full of people who spent money nurturing unremarkable talent.

Let’s talk about one of my favorite stories of unremarkable talent: Moneyball.

I really like the story of Moneyball because it’s about winning with intentionality and solidarity rather than excellence. Instead of relying on the collective unconscious to label player value by salary, Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta used sabermetrics (a fancy word for Baseball statistics) to find the most undervalued players in the league to sign to the Oakland A’s.

The players who had been selected for the 2002 team were, by all traditional accounts, mediocre. This approach was panned by established industry voices and old-timers on team management. Those voices were promptly silenced when the strategy created a 20-game winning streak and took the A’s to the playoffs two years in a row, in 2002 and 2003 despite being the third-to-last in the league for team salary.

“But wait!” you might say, “Didn’t this approach just change one standard of excellence for another?” And you’d be right! It exchanged individual exceptionalism for group exceptionalism. One of the tenants of EoSV is that solidarity will beat skill 9 times out of 10. It’s a no brainer why I like Moneyball: they put together a winning team with losing players. Individual performance only matters in the context of the collective. A team of winners fails together in the same way a team of losers wins together.

This is one of the biggest reasons I’m so down on meritocratic culture: it’s got a narrow minded, reductionist view of team building— one in which every candidate stands on their own to be measured for excellence. Though hiring and admissions bureaucracies may claim to select for “culture fit” and a “well rounded class,” there’s no real metrics by which these things can be evaluated. They’re so subjective as to be meaningless or so reductive as to be offensive.

If YoUr lOvEd OnE wAs GeTtInG SuRgEry, wouldn’t you want them to be operated on by the best surgeon?

….. I hate this meme, and yes, it’s a meme. Here’s my counter-meme:

If you had to decide between the only surgeon in the hospital operating to save your loved one or to save the next Einstein, which would you choose?

The quiet part that no one says out loud when they pose the best surgeon question is the implication that the best, most important people deserve the best surgeons. This is the root rot of exceptionalism— that there must always be a choice between saving the next Einstein and saving a crackhead.

The way we avoid having to choose between saving two people is to create a system equitable enough to produce enough medical personnel to meet demand— which is literally the opposite of the what the current system does. Medical School is one of the most difficult and exclusive secondary educations to obtain in the nation, largely due to an idiotic moratorium on enrollment from 1980 2005.

As a result of this shortage MD’s have become increasingly prestigious. If you meet an actual doctor, it means that they had to beat out a lot of other applicants to get where they are.

My answer to the best surgeon question has always been an emphatic NO. I want my loved one to have their surgery unit staffed with the correct team as mandated by triage procedure. Unless they are undergoing the riskiest, most skill intensive surgery in the hospital at that moment, I don’t think they need the best surgeon.

The mentality that you deserve the best is an artifact of a culture recklessly bent on individualism that’s ready to disregard any negative externalities at the cost of self. No one deserves the best. Searching for the best leads us to situations like the active physician shortage. We all deserve the same, and we’ll get it by practicing mediocrity.

Practicing Mediocrity; Practicing Moderation

As I mentioned in The Tiger Keeper, I’m not great at moderation. I’ve always been a person of absolutes. I don’t often go hiking for a weekend, but I quit my job to hike the PCT. When I lost 80 pounds, I did it through fasting, not moderating my diet. I didn’t really publish much writing at all until I decided to go on this 84 day publishing streak.

I’m currently applying to MBA programs. It is a lot of writing. Every school wants to know what your goals are and the impact you’ve had in pursuing them up to now. When I say impact, I mean they want to know how many teams you’ve led, hours you’ve saved, dollars you’ve raised- business metrics that reflect your value as a human being.

I have a very wise former mentor who I asked to serve as a recommender in the admissions process. While we were speaking, I brought up my recent focus on interactive storytelling and emergent narrative. He responded by mentioning that he was around 70 hours into Elden Ring and that the stories he encountered were fantastic, and enhanced by the player’s role in drawing them out.

“That’s lovely,” I said. “That game has been at the top of my list for months but I can’t find the time to play it. Since I started publishing an article a day I haven’t been able to play games at all.”

Sage and casual as always, he said:

You can’t produce 100% of the time. You need to take time to consume, or you’ll run out of things to write about.

I’ve been thinking on his words for the past few weeks. He’s correct, as always. I pour all the knowledge and experience I can bring to bear into my writing. With every article I publish, I feel the well run closer to dry. If I don’t take time to refresh it, I won’t have many interesting things to say.

With MBA applications, I can’t really afford to let that well run dry. I need to give myself time to both write and draft admissions material, and to relax and consume enough interesting content to have interesting thoughts to share. The conclusion I’ve come to is such: I need to practice mediocrity.

When I say I want to practice mediocrity, I mean I need to reduce the amount of time and effort I pour into EoSV. So I can either decide to sacrifice quality, and still post every day, or sacrifice frequency, and post every other day.

My argument to be mediocre isn’t an argument against self improvement. On the contrary, it’s an argument for a realistic self image. Try to be the person you want to be, but accept that very, very few of us will change the world. Just because I’m not going to be the next Joseph Heller, doesn’t mean I can’t try my darndest to deliver articles I’m proud of. With that in mind, I’m taking EoSV to an every-other-day posting schedule from now until I’m finished with applications in the late fall. That means there won’t be a post tomorrow.

Conclusion

The Taoist concept of Wu-wei, 無為, is translated as “effortless action” or “action without intention.” I’d say the closest concept in western thinking is Flow. It’s a combination radical acceptance of one’s situation and action according to that situation. Posting less often here is me striving for improvement in moderation, something I think we all need to do. It will push me to work on goals both personal and professional, but do so through the Middle Way.

I can rail against meritocracy as much as I want, but in the end I really believe the stuff I’m saying: passing societal filters is a mark that it’s ok to pay you well, and the more exclusive the filter, the better the pay. I wish I lived in a world where everyone strived for cooperation and mediocrity, not excellence. I don’t. In fact, that world sits at odds with my need to eat.

Until next time, stay in touch on twitter, and I’ll see you in two days.

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Tail Tuesday

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host- Paul Logan. Today is Tail Tuesday. If you’re new around here, pull up a chair and settle in: time for a tale. On Tuesdays around here, we like to talk about things with tails. Today, we’re going to talk about Bummer and Lazarus, two inseparable OG Bay Area celebrities.

San Francisco’s first power couple

Bummer and Lazarus were the darlings of early 1860’s San Francisco. Their antics were catalogued by Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, and depicted in caricature by Edward Jump. They were rumored to be close companions of Norton I. Emperor of the United States, and Jump often depicted them as such, though no documentation exists of the pair’s exploits in the imperial court.

The two made their living as rat-catchers. They were fixtures at Martin’s Saloon— a favorite among the newspapermen of Market St— which may explain their celebrity. Their antics were reported over the years in the Californian, Daily Alta California, Daily Morning Call, and Daily Evening Bulletin.

Bummer, the gentlemen of the two, rescued Lazarus after a fight with a much larger opponent left him with a seemingly fatal leg-wound. Not to be deterred, Bummer nursed his new friend back to health, and Lazarus returned from death’s door in a matter of days- earning him his nickname.

However, Lazarus proved a ne'er-do-well and fair weather friend. When Bummer was shot in the leg only a few months after rescuing Lazarus, his friend left him in the street to die. This drama suited the press, who reported vividly on Lazarus’ betrayal. The press had a field day when Lazarus later returned after Bummer’s recovery, only to have the two make up and resume their friendship.

A Bay Area obsession

The pair were so beloved by the population of San Francisco that when Lazarus was imprisoned for vagrancy by a city official, a mob of angry citizens demanded his release. A petition was circulated to exempt them from the law. The city supervisors released Lazarus and declared that he and Bummer were exempt from city ordinance.

The duo’s antics continued in the papers— a week after Lazarus was released from custody they were reported to have stopped a runaway horse. Bummer was reported to have slain a sheep. The pair became notorious for sneaking into shops to ransack them after being locked in by the owners.

In one episode Henry Rippey— a local drunk — kicked Bummer and was immediately arrested by the city to avoid mob justice. When Rippey’s cellmate David Popley heard what he was in for, he “popped him in the smeller.”

Alas, all great tales must come to an end. In October of 1863 Lazarus was either kicked by a fire engine horse (as reported by the San Francisco Kaleidoscope) or poisoned (there was a $50 reward offered for the capture of the poisoner). The Daily Evening Bulletin featured a long obituary titled Lament for Lazarus praising the adventures of the pair. It was suggested he be buried “in a place of honor” amongst the other great men of the city.

Bummer followed suit 2 years later in November of 1865 and was eulogized by Mark Twain in the Virginia City Enterprise and Californian. The two were commemorated in 1992 with a brass plaque placed in Transamerica Redwood Park by E Clampus Vitus.

Here are Twain’s final words for the city’s favorite dynamic duo:

The old vagrant 'Bummer' is really dead at last; and although he was always more respected than his obsequious vassal, the dog 'Lazarus,' his exit has not made half as much stir in the newspaper world as signalised the departure of the latter. I think it is because he died a natural death: died with friends around him to smooth his pillow and wipe the death-damps from his brow, and receive his last words of love and resignation; because he died full of years, and honor, and disease, and fleas. He was permitted to die a natural death, as I have said, but poor Lazarus 'died with his boots on' - which is to say, he lost his life by violence; he gave up the ghost mysteriously, at dead of night, with none to cheer his last moments or soothe his dying pains. So the murdered dog was canonized in the newspapers, his shortcomings excused and his virtues heralded to the world; but his superior, parting with his life in the fullness of time, and in the due course of nature, sinks as quietly as might the mangiest cur among us. Well, let him go. In earlier days he was courted and caressed; but latterly he has lost his comeliness - his dignity had given place to a want of self-respect, which allowed him to practice mean deceptions to regain for a moment that sympathy and notice which had become necessary to his very existence, and it was evident to all that the dog had had his day; his great popularity was gone forever. In fact, Bummer should have died sooner: there was a time when his death would have left a lasting legacy of fame to his name. Now, however, he will be forgotten in a few days. Bummer's skin is to be stuffed and placed with that of Lazarus.

— Mark Twain

You didn’t read that wrong- though a Jump cartoon caused rumors that a massive crowd attended Lazarus’ funeral, he didn’t have one. Bummer and Lazarus were taxidermied, stuffed, and displayed behind the bar in their iconic haunt, Martin’s Saloon:

Oh, did I forget to mention they were dogs?

Dogs about town

TWO DOGS WITH BUT A SINGLE BARK,

TWO TAILS THAT WAGGED AS ONE

— S.F. Bulletin

The most famous writer in American history published articles about a pair of street dogs not just once, but many times. Here are some of the many cartoons that were published of the two over the years:

Jump’s depiction of Lazarus’ funeral:

Jump’s send-off to Bummer.

Another Jump cartoon depicting the pair:

Emperor Norton actually threw a fit in public and demanded this cartoon be stricken from publication:

The plaque in Transamerica Redwood Park, still there today:

Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed this jaunt down San Francisco’s memory lane. We salute you, Bummer and Lazarus! Forever in our hearts. Never Forget. America.

Follow me on twitter for more SF (both San Francisco and Sci-fi) plus random daily goodies.

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Metropolis Monday

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles! I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Metropolis Monday. If you’re new around here, that means that on Mondays we like to talk about cyberpunk works in the lineage of the classic 1927 film Metropolis. Today, we’re going to talk about Batman Beyond.

Disclaimer (Publication Date): This article was upcycled from my old Medium blog, and as such the writing style may be a bit jarring for newer readers.

Cyberpunk Canon

If you asked me for a 5-point cyberpunk canon, here is what I would give you: Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Blade Runner, Cowboy Bebop, and Akira with honorable mention to Daemon and Transmetropolitan. If you asked me a second time, and said “but really”, Batman Beyond would be the first thing out of my mouth. For nearly two decades I’ve stood silent, too embarrassed to list it along such other legendary and beloved media properties. No longer- Batman Beyond is a cyberpunk masterpiece, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.

The original Batman: The Animated Series is a beloved hallmark of Animated Cinema and culture. Why not Batman Beyond? It has all the complexity of character, situation, society, and identity that the original series had in spades. And it does it all while paying homage to the original series, as if the writers had sat through each and every scene diligently scribbling notes (Rather than blatantly copy pasting plot).

Batman Beyond, however, also has all the hallmarks of a piece of cyberpunk canon:

• Rogue AI spawned from a demented billionaire’s quest for immortality.

• Thugs holding up a cybernetics surgeon to get free mods which they then use to do 🔥CRIMES🔥.

• Young athletes get addicted to a powerful new form of steroid that can double your strength in minutes (which they then use to do 🔥crimes🔥).

• Half-animal half-human hybrid cult (The 🐍Splicers🐍).

• Boy and 5 story tall autonomous construction robot become psionically connected, boy uses said robot to get revenge on his bully.

• Cybernetic supersuit.

• A highschool virgin buys a fully functioning fembot android off the internet.

• Flying cars with doors that go like this: \ /

• Massive skyscrapers that disappear into a layer of smog.

• Megacorps with cool names like Wayne Powers Industries

• A sentient assault drone with the ability to project a holographic disguise of any person real or otherwise. All it wants to do is live in peace and not be used as a tool of war, but to achieve that dream it must fight. (This one spawned its own show).

• Full body immersive VR that is so real people become literally addicted to it and attempt to spend their whole lives in it, basically becoming junkies.

• Holographic newscasts.

• Floating platforms at massive cyber raves.

• Femme-Fatale turned cat-burgling shapeshifter mercenary in an industrial experiment gone awry.

• Weaponized sound in a cool suit that makes you look like a polar bear.

Cyberpunk Setting

This is not a bright, happy world. This world has grime, this world has crime, this world has layers of history and tragedy that stack up from the foundations of the city itself. The mechanical design and technology present in Gotham, along with the new styles and fashions seen being worn by different segments of society- from the destitute to the criminal to the partiers to bourgeoisie- show a lot of thought and intention behind them. For example, The costumes were designed after The Stars My Destination- a granddaddy cyberpunk influence.

(I’m curious about the decision to largely ignore the spikey-haired techno-punks getting mudded in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, though elements of their style show up here and there.)

The mechanics of cars, elevators, doors, even student’s lockers have been updated to a consistent technological standard that feels real (everything in the universe uses keycards, even money)- the interior of the Batmobile feels tech-y without resorting to gimmick. Everything looks like it has a use.

Indeed, the show is comfortable enough in its own skin to give us offbeat episodes like Joy Ride which give us glimpses into the operations of the military and its technology through the hilarious lens of out of control teens; and Heroes, which does a spot on The Boys impression.

MORE!

This world lives, this world breathes. It was compelling enough for companion shows to be influenced into crossover events in which the world outside of Gotham was surprisingly… normal. I’m not sure how to interpret this beyond differences between showrunners.

It is the longest piece of cyberpunk media you haven’t consumed. I periodically rewatch it, about every three years or so, because of how stellar a television show it was. I can’t recommend it enough, which brings me to my most important point, and the reason I’m writing the article.

I want more content in this universe. It’s interesting, it’s compelling, and now more than ever its setting is relevant to current discussions around society.

I didn’t know when I was watching it as a child, but the show sparked an enduring love of cyberpunk that has me still writing short stories in my late 20’s.

A few ideas for storylines that could tie into current properties but also be unique and compelling on their own:

• Has the court of owls lasted through all this time? What does a techno-talon look like

• What other characters might exist in this universe? I would sell my left kidney to have the HBO Harley Quinn team on something like this.

• Exploring Bruce Wayne or someone similar through the conflict of having to run a MegaCorp while simultaneously foiling their evil plots at night- this was present in the original series, but not always in spades.

Cyberpunk and Social Commentary

Does Batman Beyond have enough self awareness in its social commentary to qualify as a significant work of cyberpunk media? I think yes.

Bruce Wayne has always been a billionaire, at odds from the common man. He swoops down from his mansion every night and cripples people on welfare for committing petty crimes. It’s not a good look. Terry is an everyman. He has enough complication for us to believe him as a character and find empathy for his situation: single mom, younger brother he’s trying to parent, shitty job — he’s trying to make the world a better place for people like him, not impose his will onto a spineless society (of course Batman would have become popular around the time of the “Great Men” period in historical discourse. 😛) This flips the entire narrative of Batman on its head and casts the biggest villains in the series as white collar criminals (also very cyberpunk).

Batman Beyond, however, is curiously mum about the state of political power in its society. Obviously the rich still seem to have power, but the police still exist. Gotham is filled with MegaCorps, but they don’t seem to be anything but a reskinned version of the warehouses and manufacturing plants the original Batman was always chasing villains into.

Why is that, I wonder? Often times the moral seemed to point at one or two individuals turning the levers of power, applying the downward pressure of evil. Maxwell Powers is a so-so nemesis that becomes almost sympathetic in the end due to his desire to just be left alone.

But what of his company and board who no doubt profited from his outrageous actions? They are shown to be sycophants, incompetent stammerers in the face of Maxwell’s rage. In this way, Batman Beyond hoists the societal weight from the shoulders of the collective onto the back of a scapegoat. The machinery of society in Batman Beyond is obviously broken, the rich enjoying fabulous lives of luxury while the poor live in the literal gutters under them, harassed by roving gangs of ne’er-do-wells and well-to-dos. Sound familiar at all?

Conclusion

I think that perhaps there isn’t as much room as one would like for social commentary in a children’s TV show about a man who flies around with jet boots and bat wings. The decisions to hold up the mirror to the startling inequity in Gotham still present in the future is an admirable one, and has enough merit that Batman Beyond should be cyberpunk-canonized.

Sloppy Sunday

Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles— I’m your host, Paul Logan. We’ve got a doozy of a show for you today- it’s Sloppy Sunday. If you’re new around these parts, that means on Sundays we like to get those longer pieces out there, even if it means they are a little rough around the edges. Today, I’m going to be talking about a topic that’s sort of central to EoSV: Symbiogenesis.

Scientific Backgrounds

One of the most interesting topics in biology to me is the differences in evolution theory that cropped up in different societies. Biology has a history of seminal works from perspectives on the fringe influencing the field:

• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

• What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger

• Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin (which we’re about to talk about)

Fringe theories are often informed by the political and social environments of their authors. People who teach history of science really like to lean on the fact that russians came up with ideas about life and adaptation that revolved around cooperation against harsh environments, and that Western scientists arrived at theories of rugged genetic individualism. Today, I want to discuss fringe evolutionary beliefs and the ideological underpinnings that polarized them.

Anarchic Altruism

In 1892 Peter Kropotkin— a russian revolutionary in exile for his participation in The Circle of Tchaikovsky — published The Conquest of Bread. It was one of the first works arguing for communal anarchism as opposed to the individual anarchism espoused by Proudhon and collective anarchism proposed by Bakunin in the prior generation of revolutionaries.

A decade later Kropotkin published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.1 In it he argued a distinction between individual competitive struggle and cooperative struggle against environment. It would have been easy to dismiss Kropotkin’s work as it comes from a time when everyone and their mother couldn’t stop talking about social darwinism. Many labeled Kropotkin as another radical dipping into the scientific honey-pot for ideologically affirming goodies.

This isn’t the case— Stephen Gould2, who developed and popularized punctuated equilibrium theory 3 and the term “Spandrel”, spoke out in support of the validity of Kropotkin’s theories.4 Mutual Aid anticipated mutualism and provided one of the first theoretical frameworks to understand altruism among individuals in biology.

Kropotkin would go on to return to Russia in 1917 after the February Revolution. Though initially excited by the political turn to communism, he died criticizing the Bolshevik dictatorship for overreach.

The Symbiogenesis Collective

Symbiogenesis is taught in contemporary biology as the theory that eukaryotes (cells with membrane-bound organelles) were created when free-living prokaryotes (cells without membrane-bound organelles) merged via endosymbiosis. Essentially, some organelles are prokaryotic symbiotes living inside of a larger cell. Mitochondria and chloroplasts are definite results of this process. This is a big deal because it means that the only reason multicellular life exists on this planet is due to cross-species cooperation.

Three years after Kropotkin published Mutual Aid, russian botanist and generally not-good-person5 Konstantin Mereschkowski outlined symbiogenesis as a novel theory of selection and speciation in The nature and origins of chromatophores in the plant kingdom.

Kropotklaborated on a footnote from Andreas Schumper’s work that proposed green plants had arisen from a symbiotic union of two organisms after comparing chloroplasts to cyanobacterium.

Ivan Wal a first-generation swedish-american academic known for organizing his students into “Club Wallin,” which drank lavishly and built his house for him— followed up Mereschkowski with a series of experiments on mitochondria that were compiled, published, and ignored in a 1927 book Symbionticism and the Origin of Species.

Boyis Kozo-Polyansky, another russian, was ridiculed for synthesizing symbiogenesis and darwinism in his 1924 The New Principle of Biology: An Essay on the Theory of Symbiogenesis, which had a bit of collectivist slant to its language:

It was not the drive toward the division of labor that led to the formation of these organoids, but the fact that certain partners joined the system that made a specific scheme of labor division possible.

The rise and fall of Lynn Margulis

The symbiogenesis theorists sat ridiculed in the waste bin of history until Lynn Margulis’s6 1967 paper On the origin of mitosing cells, which revivified the old theory with microbiological backing. Margulis synthesized new evidence of separate, unique DNA in organelles to argue for an endosymbiotic origin. A massive body of research documenting the truth of an ancient endosymbiotic merger came soon after, and the field concluded the theory aptly explained the origin of eukaryotic life and moved on. However, Lynn wasn’t done.

Lynn Margulis made her career as a revolutionary scientist. By that, I mean she was a scientist in constant revolt against the commonly held beliefs of the field. She championed both the Gaia hypothesis and “Five Kingdoms” taxonomic classification from their early status as fringe theories into more generally accepted beliefs. She regularly criticized neo-darwinism, leading to career-spanning debate with prominent figures in evolutionary theory.

What was she constantly arguing about? Margulis believed that symbiosis was the most important mechanism in evolution. She was emphatic that life was about cooperation between systems, not competition between individuals.

[Neo-darwinists] wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin – having mistaken him.

— Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother

Margulis held this conviction as an extension of hey work on endosymbiotic theory, which she saw as foundational evidence for her assertions. Wikipedia confuses this issue by redirecting “endosymbiotic theory” to “symbiogenesis.” According to Margulis, these were not the same thing:

• Endosymbiotic theory is the theory of the birth of eukaryota via symbiotic merger of prokaryotes.

• Symbiogenesis, if taken as described by its benefactors, is the theory that symbiosis is the primary driving force behind speciation and evolution.

"Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking."

— Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan

The contemporary theory of symbiogenesis taught in school stops short of the full theory proposed by its discoverers. Symbiogenesis as speciation was not a popular theory, and has been written off by neo-darwinists7 to the degree of being almost impossible to find stated discretely on Wikipedia outside of mentions of Lynn Margulis.

This is odd, as there’s a diverse, active, and longstanding body of research on the theory. As the role of microbiomes and endosymbionts become increasingly studied, many are shifting to her view of things, especially communities that study co-evolution and hologenomics.

Sadly, Margulis died accused of AIDS denialism and as an outspoken 9/11 conspiracy theorist. In an interview with her published just 5 months before her death in 2011 she explains her position on evolution, AIDS actually being syphilis, and more. Though she saw some of her theories vindicated, she saw many more vilified.

Just-so speciation

Before microbiology, all of evolutionary theory was just vibes. You came up with a story and tried to find evidence that best fit that story. When it came down to figuring out the truth between two competing theories, the story with the better fit won. Microscopy and genetics spoiled the party by requiring DNA evidence for evolutionary theory. These were “just-so” stories, a phrase popularized by Stephen Jay Gould to criticize theories on evolutionary psychology as unprovable with objective science.

Darwin himself had a problem, what we now call “Darwin’s dilemma”. He didn’t know why speciation happened. Despite proponents of the 20th century synthesis declaring the problem “solved,” the literature is far from settled. We still haven’t proven a true mechanism for sympatric speciation (speciation that doesn’t involve geographic separation). Our current ideas are all just-so stories without anything more than situational evidence that can be used to suggest truth. We’ve been able to speciate fruit flies and yeasts in laboratory experiments, but these studies haven’t resulted in conclusive evidence of a specific mechanism powering species differentiation. We can use sequencing and viability experiments to prove speciation happened, but we can’t use them to prove how it happened.8

I’m inclined to believe the foundations of Margulis’s theories on cooperation as the principle evolutionary driver. I can’t speak to all the weird spirochete stuff, but the research that’s regularly emerging on the importance of microbiomes and endosymbiotes nowadays inclines me towards a solidarity-centric model of evolution over a competition based model. I think the two can co-exist, but as I’ve elaborated in past articles, I believe in group and hierarchical selection. I’ve previously posed a sort of symbiosis between homo sapiens and self as informational life, which I’d view as symbiogenesis speciation. In my recent article What are social vehicles anyways? I mentioned that most of the philosophy I expound in this newsletter can be likened to metasystem transition, which is very much a cooperation & group selection model of evolution.

Here are a few of the just-so stories that convince me towards believing Margulis:

• The original 1967 On the origin of mitosing cells and the following acceptance of the endosymbiotic theory of eukaryotic speciation.

• Brucker and Bordensteins’s 2012 “Speciation by Symbiosis” which synthesizes contemporary microbiological research to support the hypothesis.

• There’s a famous 1976 paper by K W Jeon in which a paramecium induced into endosymbiosis began to die without its symbiont after only a few generations.

• Blank and Trench’s 1985 “Speciation and Symbiotic Dinoflagellates” which found differentiated chromosomal numbers and volume in a strain of algae that was symbiotic with marine invertebrates as opposed to other strains.

• A 2002 paper that suggests symbiosis could play a role in the evolution of mating preference.

• Bordenstein’s 2015 work on the effect of hologenomics and holobiome on host biology.

Bonus Round: Wikipedia Problems

In general, evolution Wikipedia is a mess. There’s too many independent theories, too much history, too many crackpots.

In the article History of evolutionary thought, endosymbiotic theory is mentioned only in passing as support for the importance of horizontal gene transfer. To add insult to injury, the symbiogenesis theory of speciation is mentioned under “Gaia hypothesis” in the section “Unconventional evolutionary theory,” which is a gross mischaracterization of the independence of the two ideas. History of speciation has the same problem of omitting symbiosis based theory.

The gold star goes to “Universal Darwinism," a theory proposed by John Campbell, who seems to be the exclusive editor of the page and owner of www.universaldarwinism.com. It also links to universalselection.com, which is owner and maintained by D.B. Kelley:

D. B. Kelley, Author of The Origin of Phenomena

Born in 1970, author D. B. Kelley attended the Ohio State University from 1989 to 1993 where he majored in architecture but focused heavily upon science as a whole. He discovered his theory of ‘universal selection’ only months later at just 24 years of age. Kelley has thus spent more than two decades applying selection to science in its entirety, his primary focus being in astronomy, physics and quantum physics. He has therein exposed many deterministic mechanisms by which phenomena have emerged, including even life some 3.7 billion years ago. In an effort to further confirm these resounding implications, Kelley has now tailored a complete rewrite of Darwin’s ‘book that shook the world,’ logically titled The Origin of Phenomena.

As another person whose qualifications are just some guy who thinks about stuff, I really shouldn’t say anything. But… the line“at just 24 years of age" cracks me up so much that I had to share it.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a central knowledge repository, not a transitive content platform, so manipulating it to promote your own ideas feels scummy to me.9 The wiki page woozle-washes blatant self-entry with a bunch of random links to research that’s only related in that it at some point leans on darwinism as a metaphor. The talk page is pure gold:

This article appears to be an indiscriminate list of mentions of the phrase "universal darwinism", without any indication that it is a coherent heterogeneous topic.

— Hrafn, 2008

The first five paragraphs in this section is cited solely to the writings of the parties involved -- not a single third-party source in them.
— Hranf, 2011

Conclusion

Scientist’s worldviews often color their work. A series of collectivist scientists have produced a body of work leading to the symbiogenesis theory of speciation— one that centers cooperation, not competition as the base mechanism of evolution. The convoluted history and narratives surrounding evolutionary biology seems to have erased this theory of change from common knowledge, especially Wikipedia. This article has been my attempt to educate you, dear reader, on a collaborative side of… well, life.

Follow me on twitter and tell me what you thought about this tome of an article!

7

I should clarify that i’m talking about supporters of the 20th century “modern synthesis” of darwinism and mendelian genetics.