When Kamala replaced Biden with all the care of one 18th century gear replacing another, I saw it as such a good sign - of a not-so-bright machine acknowledging a reality that neither Trump nor the R machine was able to see. This essay presents such a great model, I hope it or a similar argument becomes available outside the paywall someday
I Read this and your prior post a couple of times. I can see a couple things. Pretty much all the og norcal communes were big man operations, the placemaking was easy, buy a big old house(s) or some cheap land. The tricky part was the meaning making but a gullible crowd, with only tv for tech made that easier back in the day, all you needed was some flash and a modest amount of charisma.
I see the advantage of the low bar setting, allowing the community to coalesce and structure itself without first having to plant a flag somewhere, not to say esmerelda, etc aren’t doing some flag planting but it seems it wasn’t the first step or priority. I can see the value in exploring how tech and crypto can help even though i don’t understand much about how.
I haven’t thought it through but am wondering if there are many examples of communally living people that don’t run on a strong man model? So many people require a man behind the curtain to feel alright.
Im personally most interested in seeing how folks decide to live as in sleep when they’re not nomadic. Unless human nature has changed it seems as folks age they want more ‘permanence’, security, etc from the actual place they want to mainly stay. I can see a network of somehow affiliated living places, perhaps like esmerelda, offering a deluxe hostel type arrangement for upscale nomads but that leaves out essential classes of people like families who aren’t about international living, elders looking to stay put, service providers, etc To me it’s the most challenging part of the communal topic.
Our cul de sac has about a dozen houses clustered together averaging 3000’ and 1/3 acre. All were designed for family living. 90% of them are occupied by empty nest couples like us. Everyone on tge outside blames prop 13 property tax protections but the thing I see is there’s no attractive alternative. We have no particular fondness for having 50% more space than we need and aren’t trying to chisel young families from their spots to save some taxes. The flashy developments with some communal grounds with $3-4 mil price tags are way more larp than commune from what i can see. Plus they’re designed for larger families anyway.
Thanks venkatesh, i always learn when i read your work. I appreciate following your work.
Porous boundaries, engineered arguments. If Mandalas have a theoritcal maximum size (Thailand, Texas), how does that drape onto a country the size of USA or China? (Maybe it fits better in Europe?). Contrasting Europe vs USA again, European countries have cultural languages and traditions as a base substrate. The US states, have not so much of a Mandala substrate but much more of a mechanists structure without strong statewide cultures.
Thanks for sharing this framework. Looking forward to seeing you flesh it out.
Have you thought of Mandalas and Machines as societal-level manifestations of Iain McGilchrist's "master" and "emissary"? Loosely speaking, that would make Mandalas a right hemisphere-driven holistic, relational way of viewing things, and would make Machines a left hemisphere-driven technical, instrumental way of viewing things. I think it's an interesting comparison.
It could be I'm falling in a trap of dichotomies and 2x2 matrices -- it's easy to overlay them, and wrongly think you've achieved an insight. But I think there's something to this.
The idea of a machine that reaches out into the void is a good clarification on the concept of an antimeme as I defined in a previous comment. What I was thinking of as an antimeme is something machine-like that gets internalized because it is hostile to being expressed in the space of mandala politics.
One thing I'm skeptical of is to the idea of the new machine being something porous. This sounds almost as nonsensical to me as an idea of a life-form that doesn't have a clearly defined inside and outside. All life-forms are made up of an inside and an outside, and keeping the inside alive while using and killing the outside. I feel that having this inside-outside distinction is a prerequisite to being something that can know and store information, something on the level of entropy.
Is there any sort of physical metaphor for a machine without an inside or an outside, like some sort of intelligent goo? And if not a physical metaphor, then at least a mathematical one? Will there be some sort of Maxwell's demon that will keep track of what is inside and outside, without having to actually create a boundary?
A swarm of bees is the most intelligent thing (or so people like to meme) that still has some sort of respect/care for each constituent member as some sort of special snowflake, and yet I still think that an elephant is more of an impressive machine than a swarm of bees. And once you're in the inside of an elephant, you are not an individual, and not a thing that is cared for.
One factor in all this mandala politics that's not mentioned here is the role of algorithmically curated information. One human being navigating an algorithmically curated information space might feel the illusion of navigating a random forest, but algorithmically generated randomness does not contain as much information as actual randomness. Many human beings navigating the same algorithmically curated information space (going on the same roller coaster ride, at once) does not contain as much information as many human beings individually navigating a forest. If my intuition is right, this would lead to a collapse of useful information/knowledge that a political machine can extract, which is why the political machine is losing to the political mandala, because everyone's experiences are becoming more similar, and less diverse.
We can approximate that one human being can pay attention and follow the curated information of one person at a time. (On the order of magnitude. Maybe one person can pay attention to, and make coherent sense of, the curated information of 10 people over the course of their lifetime. Maybe someone like you can make sense of the curated information of 100 people.) If 40 people read and digested your post, then does that mean that 40 people don't get the chance to have anyone hear and listen to their thoughts at all? What about those posts, podcasts, videos with 10,000 views? Does that mean that 10,000 people didn't get to have their voices heard?
This new media is different from the old media because the difference is, everyone is on the new media, all the time. Maybe a person used to have 5 friends they cared about, and one New York Times subscription that they read for 10 minutes a day. Now, maybe a digital native is browsing the new media for hours a day - and maybe they have 5 friends - but maybe they are all browsing the same media, which is providing all of them with the same roller coaster experience.
It's the danger of monoculture, the danger of high authoritarianism, the danger of centralized planning - except it's all disguised because it's algorithmically generated randomness, not actual randomness, and it's the same movie being played for all of us, all the time.
The mandala vs machine framework reminded me of the transition between the renaissance and enlightenment. This time around, I suspect AI will serve as a mediating force that blurs the binary between mandala and machines, creating a three way interaction between:
- Strong protocols (formal systems/machines)
- Weak protocols (human social norms/mandala)
- Strange protocols (emergent AI behaviours)
I suspect navigating this future isn't about choosing between care and knowledge, but about developing human acumen.
When Kamala replaced Biden with all the care of one 18th century gear replacing another, I saw it as such a good sign - of a not-so-bright machine acknowledging a reality that neither Trump nor the R machine was able to see. This essay presents such a great model, I hope it or a similar argument becomes available outside the paywall someday
I Read this and your prior post a couple of times. I can see a couple things. Pretty much all the og norcal communes were big man operations, the placemaking was easy, buy a big old house(s) or some cheap land. The tricky part was the meaning making but a gullible crowd, with only tv for tech made that easier back in the day, all you needed was some flash and a modest amount of charisma.
I see the advantage of the low bar setting, allowing the community to coalesce and structure itself without first having to plant a flag somewhere, not to say esmerelda, etc aren’t doing some flag planting but it seems it wasn’t the first step or priority. I can see the value in exploring how tech and crypto can help even though i don’t understand much about how.
I haven’t thought it through but am wondering if there are many examples of communally living people that don’t run on a strong man model? So many people require a man behind the curtain to feel alright.
Im personally most interested in seeing how folks decide to live as in sleep when they’re not nomadic. Unless human nature has changed it seems as folks age they want more ‘permanence’, security, etc from the actual place they want to mainly stay. I can see a network of somehow affiliated living places, perhaps like esmerelda, offering a deluxe hostel type arrangement for upscale nomads but that leaves out essential classes of people like families who aren’t about international living, elders looking to stay put, service providers, etc To me it’s the most challenging part of the communal topic.
Our cul de sac has about a dozen houses clustered together averaging 3000’ and 1/3 acre. All were designed for family living. 90% of them are occupied by empty nest couples like us. Everyone on tge outside blames prop 13 property tax protections but the thing I see is there’s no attractive alternative. We have no particular fondness for having 50% more space than we need and aren’t trying to chisel young families from their spots to save some taxes. The flashy developments with some communal grounds with $3-4 mil price tags are way more larp than commune from what i can see. Plus they’re designed for larger families anyway.
Thanks venkatesh, i always learn when i read your work. I appreciate following your work.
Porous boundaries, engineered arguments. If Mandalas have a theoritcal maximum size (Thailand, Texas), how does that drape onto a country the size of USA or China? (Maybe it fits better in Europe?). Contrasting Europe vs USA again, European countries have cultural languages and traditions as a base substrate. The US states, have not so much of a Mandala substrate but much more of a mechanists structure without strong statewide cultures.
Thanks for sharing this framework. Looking forward to seeing you flesh it out.
Have you thought of Mandalas and Machines as societal-level manifestations of Iain McGilchrist's "master" and "emissary"? Loosely speaking, that would make Mandalas a right hemisphere-driven holistic, relational way of viewing things, and would make Machines a left hemisphere-driven technical, instrumental way of viewing things. I think it's an interesting comparison.
It could be I'm falling in a trap of dichotomies and 2x2 matrices -- it's easy to overlay them, and wrongly think you've achieved an insight. But I think there's something to this.
The idea of a machine that reaches out into the void is a good clarification on the concept of an antimeme as I defined in a previous comment. What I was thinking of as an antimeme is something machine-like that gets internalized because it is hostile to being expressed in the space of mandala politics.
One thing I'm skeptical of is to the idea of the new machine being something porous. This sounds almost as nonsensical to me as an idea of a life-form that doesn't have a clearly defined inside and outside. All life-forms are made up of an inside and an outside, and keeping the inside alive while using and killing the outside. I feel that having this inside-outside distinction is a prerequisite to being something that can know and store information, something on the level of entropy.
Is there any sort of physical metaphor for a machine without an inside or an outside, like some sort of intelligent goo? And if not a physical metaphor, then at least a mathematical one? Will there be some sort of Maxwell's demon that will keep track of what is inside and outside, without having to actually create a boundary?
A swarm of bees is the most intelligent thing (or so people like to meme) that still has some sort of respect/care for each constituent member as some sort of special snowflake, and yet I still think that an elephant is more of an impressive machine than a swarm of bees. And once you're in the inside of an elephant, you are not an individual, and not a thing that is cared for.
One factor in all this mandala politics that's not mentioned here is the role of algorithmically curated information. One human being navigating an algorithmically curated information space might feel the illusion of navigating a random forest, but algorithmically generated randomness does not contain as much information as actual randomness. Many human beings navigating the same algorithmically curated information space (going on the same roller coaster ride, at once) does not contain as much information as many human beings individually navigating a forest. If my intuition is right, this would lead to a collapse of useful information/knowledge that a political machine can extract, which is why the political machine is losing to the political mandala, because everyone's experiences are becoming more similar, and less diverse.
We can approximate that one human being can pay attention and follow the curated information of one person at a time. (On the order of magnitude. Maybe one person can pay attention to, and make coherent sense of, the curated information of 10 people over the course of their lifetime. Maybe someone like you can make sense of the curated information of 100 people.) If 40 people read and digested your post, then does that mean that 40 people don't get the chance to have anyone hear and listen to their thoughts at all? What about those posts, podcasts, videos with 10,000 views? Does that mean that 10,000 people didn't get to have their voices heard?
This new media is different from the old media because the difference is, everyone is on the new media, all the time. Maybe a person used to have 5 friends they cared about, and one New York Times subscription that they read for 10 minutes a day. Now, maybe a digital native is browsing the new media for hours a day - and maybe they have 5 friends - but maybe they are all browsing the same media, which is providing all of them with the same roller coaster experience.
It's the danger of monoculture, the danger of high authoritarianism, the danger of centralized planning - except it's all disguised because it's algorithmically generated randomness, not actual randomness, and it's the same movie being played for all of us, all the time.
The mandala vs machine framework reminded me of the transition between the renaissance and enlightenment. This time around, I suspect AI will serve as a mediating force that blurs the binary between mandala and machines, creating a three way interaction between:
- Strong protocols (formal systems/machines)
- Weak protocols (human social norms/mandala)
- Strange protocols (emergent AI behaviours)
I suspect navigating this future isn't about choosing between care and knowledge, but about developing human acumen.
Bottom of the email version of this I got still refers to the newsletter as Breaking Smart.
“This post is only for paying subscribers of Breaking Smart, but occasional forwarding is fine!”
fixed, thanks!