Posts

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The era of the printing press was not normal times, and it led to centuries of intense conflict and turbulent technological growth after centuries of sleepy normalcy. The period of the American and French Revolutions was not normal times, and Americans flourished while France entered a period of repeated wars, regime changes, and social uncertainty before a new order asserted itself. The Age of Wonders, called by some the Gilded Age, was not normal times, and those born in 1875 in frontier cabins without plumbing or electricity lived to see almost nothing but abnormal times, as electricity and cars and airplanes and two world wars and nuclear bombs and the space race fundamentally and irrevocably changed the nature of the world they lived in. ... Each time, people in the moment felt both the blessing and the curse of living in interesting times.

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https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/we-will-never-have-normal-times-again

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The Naked Emperor is an expression of power… People trick themselves into believing it, and even staking their wealth and reputations on it… It is a relationship of power and the purchase into power. The lie gains power the more people repeat it. It snowballs. It becomes impossible to break it… Or at least impossible to break it without violence. That people will fight to maintain the lie, that they’d be ruined if they ever acknowledged it was false.

They are not tricked. They know that they are lying.

Even if the linguistic part of their brain tries to trick themselves into thinking that they are tricked.

If a child could dispel it, it would mean that the spell was already broken by the Emperor and his attendants' poor maintenance of the power relations… One might as well say that the “clothes” blew off the emperor in the wind, or a wizard stole them, as attribute it to anything said by the child.

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https://substack.com/home/post/p-213234525

Mercadona is Spain's largest supermarket chain. One of their goals is to replace all third-party products with products from their supplier network under the unified brand name Hacendado. There are many other examples of this pattern worldwide, such as Kirkland Signature in the United States.

During a lecture on the Mercadona business philosophy in the Lanzadera Startup Accelerator, a longtime veteran of Mercadona leadership noted with frustration that they had been unable to displace products like Coca Cola with the Hacendado brand.

The advantage of competitive capitalism, where multiple companies offer similar products, is that users give clear signals via their behaviour. It would seem to me that by unifying all products under a single brand, you capture this user signal once, but then never again. You lose the ability to respond to user input.

An alternative could be: temporary series of new products that compete directly with existing products to see what users prefer.

Cultural assumption in modernity:
- Each interaction is standalone by default.
-- This is the "normal" / "default" case.
--- Example: Calendly meeting
---- We assume two strangers meet.
---- In the case where the two people know each other well, we don't treat this as a different case mechanically. The software is the same.

- This is quite strange, historically speaking.

- The way human activity actually works is that most transactions flow through established relationships. Including talking to each other, a drink, a meal, a business opportunity, a job, a project. This is 90%, or even 95-98%, of all human socially-mediated activity (as opposed to individual).
-- Therefore, ideally, a social software system should be weighted towards supporting the happy path(s), instead of assuming the strangers-meet path and supporting that over other paths.
-- Tela: A public log is a piece of shared social reality / facts, on which items arrive by consensus. So there must be a consensus protocol.

To expand:
- modern software treats human interactions as _stateless_.
- whether I've booked a meeting with you 40 times or 0 times, the underlying interaction primitive does not vary.
- this is simpler to build.
- it also scales much more rapidly. it helps to maximises engagement.
- but it has the effect of treating the "stranger meets stranger" case as the default case.
-- which is strange and causes uncanny ripples through our social fabric.
-- the effect reminds me of Annihilation / The Backrooms.
-- it pushes everyone towards interacting with each other as though they were strangers or light acquaintances.
- So: A missing primitive in modern social software is the _shared history_.
- Shared history is what makes social life meaningful.
- Today we are making do with posts, likes, and comments to construct meaningful shared history, and it doesn't work very well.
- we should build "thicker" connections rather than "more" connections.