Starting today, I’m abstaining from A.I. feeds like Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube for one month.
I'm reserving Sundays for sacred shitposting, permitting myself one cheat day per week. The goal is to make my infosphere consist entirely of people, books, and referenceable material, so the arms of tech have minimal influence on my mind.
My distrust of screens is accelerating, a sense of paranoia noticeably creeping inwards. Am I losing my mind, or am I intelligently responding to an environment in which everyone else is losing theirs? I don’t know, but newsfeeds are beginning to feel net-negative to my development.
I. Capture
Recent advancements like DALLE-2 have skyrocketed my appraisal of machine intelligence. And because AI’s control my infosphere, I feel forced to increase my estimation of the degree to which my reality is being injected with camouflaged nonsense.
I loved the internet as a boy. But surfing the web now feels like being hurled through a hall of mirrors. Engaging in online discourse has become a daring dance with alluring bait. Trails crumbed with hearts & thumbs lead down slick valleys from which there’s no escape. At the flick of a finger, I find content I genuinely enjoy, plus indistinguishable tidbits running adjacent to my interests. On a case by base basis, I can’t honestly tell the difference. Realizing that I’m being mislead is a feeling that builds over time. My mood grows frustrated, even content I want forces me wonder: Why was this content being served to me?
Media is now molded to fit my cybernetic life. My profile is pattern-matched with mid-30’s white dudes who love philosophy and boobs, and my brainstem is seduced by arousing thumbnails. Provocative headlines trigger my amygdala, like insecurity heat seeking missiles.
The social media engines running this scheme are empowered by the greatest financial reserves the world has ever seen, and designed by the most intelligent machines ever created. In a twist of tragic irony, the cubicle imprisoned 9-5’ers are finding newfound purpose and meaning in these social casinos.
Tech algorithms are spreading memes which maximize engagement. And this flurry of activity fosters fertile grounds for growing digital tribes. When new communities emerge, they are grown on the very backbones of the platforms which enabled their genesis. Big Tech, therefore, has discovered ways to profiteer from the basic human need of belonging. Like McDonalds offering delicious malnourishing calories, social media platforms now offer their own socially validating gruel.
I’ve written about the degradation of the infosphere in previous essays, and because I believe it to be an issue of civilizational importance, I’ll continue beating the drum.
But the purpose of this essay is to resolve a confusion which continues to perplex me:
Why do so many public intellectuals get captured by these digital dynamics?
II. Capture the smarty pants
There’s a predictable trajectory: Someone bursts onto the scene — A magnetic voice with fresh ideas — only to be slowly pulled toward whichever tribe most glorifies their reputation. Their nuance softens, and their intellect transforms into a soapbox for their newfound tribe’s collective ambitions.
Audience Capture is a commonly offered as an explanation here. But I find it inadequate to explain the ubiquity of the corruption of public intellectuals. Plainly, audience capture is a theory of perverse incentives: For example, while a Twitter mob acquires a #superstar to their ranks, an intellectual gets validation of their genius (and often dollars) in return. The thesis is that a superstar will undermine their integrity by subconsciously morphing their intellect to fit a high status role atop any ingroup that will advance their power and prestige. This under-the-table deal is masked by cognitive dissonance, blinding everyone suffering from the awareness of their ignobility.
This theory partially satisfies me... But the phenomenon of audience capture continues to pinball inside my brain. Namely, since the pitfalls are well known in advance, why aren’t they straight-up avoided more often?
Simple steps can be taken to immunize oneself from audience capture:
Exit environments where audience dynamics are amplifying.
Stop doing public speeches
Delete social media
Spend more time in wild nature
Leave the limelight for anonymous immersion in a culture where you’re unknown (Like when Dave Chappelle left America for in Africa)
Cultivate friendships of virtue which encourage constructive criticism (rather than tolerate it).
Practice method acting / ontological flooding outgroup perspectives.
Truly feel the anger of a Capital insurrectionist, or a BLM protestor. Think their thoughts, embody their logic, experience their pain. (If you’re incapable of this exercise, this is a sign you might be captured already)
Proactively steelman opposing views
etc.
So many options!
III. Anyone can avoid capture.
I’m a dimly lit bulb compared the intellectuals I’m criticizing, which only compounds my confusion. In the 2010’s, I attempted to hype interest in scientific literacy by popularizing the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan, as well as the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. My YouTube videos — to my pride and joy — went viral. They reached tens of millions of people, several hundred thousand of whom became “fans”.
These fans assembled and invited me to deliver speeches for their organizations. I was rewarded with dollars and social status for doing so. At first, these all seemed like terrific opportunities. Prestigious organizations like NASA were inviting me to speak about issues of civilizational importance??? Hooray! My first few speeches were positively transformative. Being well received by people I admired was extremely validating. Gradually however, I gathered an audience. As I began hitting my stride, a tension grew between:
Sharing ideas I believed to be important.
Becoming a “successful” speaker.
Vaguely aware that my “success” depended on delivering to my audience memes compatible with their interests, which would permit market/crowd dynamics to influence my thinking.
I did not want to be influenced by the appetite of my audience. My fears of corruption were flamed by the behavior of other public speakers backstage. I was shocked at how often my attempts to converse with others were torpedoed unless my voice fluttered with praise. Everyone was seemingly a bureaucrat of their own brand.
So, why would I - a naïve philosophy student overly serious in pursuit of the truth - permit myself to linger in spaces corrupting to that enterprise? I understood basic sociology, and had every reason to expect that I would become part of the atmosphere in which I was becoming embedded. Perhaps there was a more mature way to handle that time in my life, but whatever that was wasn’t available to me. So I threw that career away. The whirlwind of virality opened doors that some part of me knew I couldn’t responsibly enter. My integrity felt threatened, and so it was as simple as that.
What frustrates me then, is that the public intellectuals I’m criticizing aren’t viral YouTube darlings enjoying their 10 minutes of fame - They’re ivy-league scholars. Fully grown adults who teach developmental psychology. People who should definitely know better and have vastly more access to networks of people capable of challenging them.
This essay is not meant to be a stealthy brag about how I escaped the pitfalls of Audience Capture better than others. It’s an honest frustration, a puzzlement toward begging for a deeper explanation.
IV. Enter the Egregore.
If intellectuals grow into popularity with their integrity intact, something must happen to them. Something that shifts the evolution of their thinking and pulls them into cognitive black holes.
As a recovering materialist, this is going to get a little spooky. So, please take the following ideas as explorations to hold, rather than arguments to be believed.
Egregore - is an occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people.
Before I get into collectives of people and how Egregores relate to them, let’s talk about bees as it will ground the conversation. Beekeepers often talk about their hives having personalities like “calm” and “angry”. Taken at face value, that makes sense. But technically speaking individual bees have feelings, not whole hives. A hive is really just a collection of individual bees - who are the real feelers. Therefore (again, technically speaking) hives don’t have anything like “moods”.
Try telling that to a beekeeper. A beekeeper would be extremely foolish to ignore the general mood of the hive. The keeper must interact with the overarching tenor of the collective so that, for example, they can assess the hive’s willingness to be transferred to another bee box. Treating hives as unified entities bolsters the relationship with the colony, so the mood of the hive is functionally real. It may also be physiologically real, for example individual bees may be part of a superorganism. What cells are to bodies, bees may be to hives. Which makes me wonder — If swarms of bees develop overarching and distinct attitudes, might hordes of primates do something similar?
Humans don’t exactly live in hives, but we interface with hiveminds. A hivemind is often viewed as a form of groupthink - a recognizable pattern of ideologically coordinated people. The hivemind or ideology itself is rarely considered to be alive — it’s a dead information packages comprised of memes (Build that wall!), which construct memeplexes (#MAGA), which compete in the great memosphere (Western moral and political code, for exmaple). But what if memes compiled into something more, like hiveminds with attitude - A memeplex with a human face.
Like a cobra emerging from a basket, this is how I understand Egregores. Viewed this way, ideologies are no longer dead memetic viruses whose spread requires infected humans to breathe near one another. They have a life of their own. They exist over and above the people who adhere to them, and are an emergent property of their interactions.
What might these emergent properties be? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Egregores have “thoughts” or “feelings”, but since they use large-brained primates as substrates, they might be capable of more complex behavior than “anger” exhibited by beehives. They may even have “targets” or “goals”.
Egregores might even “seek” or “hunt” agents in competing meme space. They may “seduce” individuals with outsized influence, then swallow them into their spheres of capture. If you aren’t spooked out yet, just take this one step further - Due to their public profile and prowess for rhetoric, public intellectuals have the unique ability to reshape the memetic landscapes in which Egregores swim. And here we have one possible explanation for the reliable capture of intellectuals.
In the belly of these ideological beasts, intellectuals become the queen bees of their new hives and are offered a lifetime supply of royal jelly. Socioeconomic tradeoffs appear once again, but if we take the idea of the Egregore seriously, audience capture occurs at the memetic level by the agency of a memeplex.
V. Feeling the Egregores Movement
If you want to feel these things move, take the following example. Imagine you’re in conversation with friends and a topic comes up that elevates your heart rate. Maybe the word “transgender” is spoken in a particular tone, causing an adrenaline spike in your body. You wait to see how the conversation unfolds before advancing further.
You then realize that nobody in the room is uncomfortable. You’ve misread the situation somehow. People are unexpectedly calm. From this example, it would be easy to conclude that you were in your own head.
Ok, but what does “in my own head” mean, exactly? Here’s one explanation: You were engaging with the Woke Egregore. There is an aspect of your psyche that is in relationship with the memeplex of Woke. And despite the fact that no individual member of the Woke Egregore was present to conduct battle - you reacted nevertheless because the memeplex is distributed in the minds of the collective, including your own.
Like selfish genes are evolutionarily incentivized to replicate, memes have their own animating logic to carve out niche habitats in the memosphere. A blockchain metaphor fits nicely here. Those invested in Woke-memes have an interest to see woke-coin succeed. Those with small wallets are aware of the overall entity, but don’t really track it’s movement. Those with thick wallets feel the entity move, and engage with the real world seeking to shape it to Woke-coin’s ends. Their lens on the world is filtered to enact a reality in which woke-memes thrive.
It’s easy to stop the analysis here and simply say that woke-coin is an unconscious, dead, memetic virus. Fair enough, maybe it is. But life is full of examples of emergence, novel properties that arise from the complex dynamics which underpin it. It doesn’t seem outrageous that something could emerge out of the memetic layer of human groups, and woke-coin could be a force born into nature that’s in relationship with — but somewhat independent of it’s investors.
VI. Cyber Egregores
Something that wigs me out is that social media profits from the creation of Egregores — In vitro memeplexes which would never have emerged organically. The current holy war being waged between the Woke Egregore and MAGA Egregore would’ve never arisen without ad-driven tech. Social media has enabled these cyborg Egregores to not only be born, but to dominate the memetic landscape.
What’s so bothersome about these ideological beasts influencing intellectuals is that we want thinkers who think for themselves and are oriented towards truth. But if intellectuals are being hunted in the memosphere by memeplexes with appetites, then once they’re captured they’re liable to think for the group and orient towards their allies and foes.
I don’t know what to make of any of this. Obviously it all sounds a little spooky to be actually real. Currently, I view the concept of the Egregore as a metaphorically useful description of the dynamics of the human memosphere.
At the very least, it’s my hope that, like responsible beekeepers, we can begin to understand how the hiveminds operate as unified entities. Then we can respond to their “anger” with conscious grace.