4/ What the “unplug for self-care” crowd doesn’t get is that you are part of a Giant Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC) computing the future. The level and latency at which you consume information and act on it determines your “job” in the social computer. Your shitposting and FOMO are functional. 5/ The reason the unplugging doesn’t work for most people is not that the Evil Platform Companies are trying to hack your attention and turn you into a helpless addict (though they are) but because you rationally realize you need a job in the GSCITC.
6/ If you don’t manage your information economy career, you will default to the lowest-level job in the social computer: processing very low-latency information with small-minded cognition (bottom left) for small bets. It’s the equivalent of low-level bug reporting/testing. 7/ This isn’t a bad thing. A big groupmind composed of lots of small minds doing small-minded cognition can compute very profound things. It’s just that your individual role in it is small. You can’t see past the “people” and “events” level implications, but the emergent GSCITC can. Still, you can and should aspire to more.
The “waldenponding” response — unplugging from platforms — assumes recommendation systems only optimize for consumption. This framing misses the participatory dimension: engaging with platforms as both producer and consumer creates feedback loops that shape what surfaces. Withdrawal guarantees stagnation; interaction enables steering. recsys10/ The first failure mode manifests as trying to consume only information at your target level. Like only reading The Economist and journal papers, and trying to produce only in institutional modes. This will fail. You need some information diet input from ALL levels to work at ANY level
12/ The final failure mode is trying to keep up with all the information at all latencies at a small-minded level (lower-right red box) Reading every trending tweet and every bestselling big history book and everything in between, but ALL at the same small-minded level (ie as people gossip or play-by-play event tracking). Unsustainable.
24/ The idea of a profane/secular “temporal” plane and a sacred/religious timeless/eternal plane is a medieval idea invented to justify the power of powerful intercessionary religious orgs. Don’t reproduce that bad pattern.
The framing here overlooks the role of rituals in knowledge formation and belief formation. Practices — whether religious, civic, or personal — aren’t simply medieval power structures; they’re mechanisms through which communities develop shared understanding and self-regulation. Dismissing them as purely “temporal vs. eternal” misses their epistemic function. ritual
