A Random Walk Down Meme Street

Living in cultural index-fund Mary Sue civilizations

I’m in India, where the downside of the scorching heat is only just beaten out by the upside of being here during mango season. I am conducting certain experiments while I’m here. For science.

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The Contraptions Book club May pick is The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth S. Eisenstein. Discussion starts May 25.

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Yesterday was a festival I was not aware existed, called Akshaya Tritya. That itself is not particularly surprising. The Hindu religious calendar is full of way more festivals than you can keep track of, which is why there are special calendars to keep track of it all.

But the reason I didn’t know about this particular festival is that it has only recently been adopted and reinvented by the commercial sector as an opportunity to sell gold and investments. Which means it now pops on the religious calendar.

The high concept behind the festival is that whatever you buy on this day, you will supposedly get more of through the year. It’s an abundance priming festival. TV and newspapers have been full of ads for gold in particular. India remains the world’s largest gold sink. Buy gold on Akshaya Tritya, get more gold through the year through divine favor. I don’t buy the theory of course, but I bought some good mangoes, and if I get more good mangoes through the year, I won’t complain.

This is newish, as of the last few years. Traditionally, afaik, there are no notable observances associated with the festival beyond “buy something you want more of.” It’s not like Diwali or Holi or any of the other big ones. I expect if it was observed at all when I was a kid, it likely involved no more than getting some payasam at lunch and not bothering to inquire why.

There are a dozen legends attached to the date, but the festival is named for the episode in the Mahabharata where, during their exile, the Pandavas receive an akshaya patra from Surya the sun god: a magical bottomless vessel that never runs out of food until all of them have eaten. There is more to the story, involving an angry sage, which you can look up if you like.

So this is the Abundance Festival. Indian edition.

The akshaya patra tale reminds me of a Russian folk tale with a similar premise, where Baba Yaga the witch shows up at a poor woman’s house one morning, gets treated well, and tells the woman “what you do in the morning, so you will in the evening.” The next morning, the woman randomly finds a gold coin, and weighs it in her scale. Miraculously, when she takes it off, the scales refill with more gold. She keeps weighing gold till dusk, getting rich. There’s more to the tale, involving a jealous sister-in-law, which you can look up if you like.

The motif of endless unearned abundance in these tales is interesting. Especially given the rise of Abundance Theology in America. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen an evangelical Christian version of it, a Trumpist version of it, and now we are witnessing the rise of a left-liberal Vox-Nisaken version of it. Arguably, between ~2000-20, we also witnessed a Chinese version of it. Wherever in the world I traveled, I seemed to run into shopaholic rich Chinese (and tourist/shopping sectors organized around their presence) filled with unshakeable and unfounded confidence in an indefinitely abundant Chinese future.

All these abundance theologies, like the Indian Akshaya Tritya festival and the Russian folk tale, are driven by dreams of abundance on autopilot. One Weird Trick you can pull to ensure indefinitely extended abundance.

Now, this wouldn’t matter much if there was nothing you could do about this wishful impulse other than try the ceremonial One Weird Trick on your local Abundance Day festival (I think it’s Black Friday in the US?). For the other 364 days of the year, you would still have to grind out your life, hustling and working, and figuring out your cunning plans to get ahead. You’d still have to live by no-free-lunch rules, and the world would go on in a more reasonable way.

Except there is a tempting candidate for a literal abundance hack — passive index fund investing. And we now have an analogous abundance instrument for culture — AI.

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I’m trying a new experiment with this post — it is mostly written by me, but I had ChatGPT beef up one of the sections, by adding additional supporting text (which you’ll see called out inline). Less than 10% of the word count, I’d guess. For now, I’ve still tagged this under sloptraptions, but in future, I think I won’t bother to call out such low-levels of generated text.

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What happens when the world revolves around really big Weird Tricks that promise endless abundance for little to no effort? What happens when those promises are based on actual features of the engines of the world, rather than mere religious beliefs? Features that come with a hidden price-tag attached?