ȘȈǤƝȘ 70: Small Games

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In this issue, you'll learn about:

• Why it's better to win gold in a small game rather than silver in a big game

• An obscure journal of art and literature from post-war Japan

• DarkFi

• The cyberpunk aesthetics of the year 2000

• The curse of grit and the concept of personality war

• And more

Dear reader, I just wanted to start this week's letter with a few time-sensitive events coming up.

• On Wednesday I'll be giving a lecture and hosting a discussion seminar on Albert Hirschman's classic book from 1970: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. You can register here.

• For any of you in the Denver area, a few people in the Other Life orbit are hosting a meetup in Denver this Friday, November 19, at 6:00 PM MST. Just hit reply if you want the details!

Winning gold in a small game is better than winning silver in a large game

Early web3 is showing us that winning gold in a small, weird game will accrue more power than winning silver in a bigger and more normal game. Basically, the old winners of big normal games are going to get rekt by freaks playing weird, small games. A fraction of the weird, small games will periodically become billion-dollar companies, which will also be cults.

Charismatic leaders will enjoy strong privacy, members and shareholders will enjoy securely pseudonymous identities, and everything will operate on decentralized markets with no plug that any law enforcement agency could pull. You can shut down Mt. Gox, but you can’t shut down 10,000 Mt. Gox’s at the same time. Crypto-criminals will buy-off US politicians before US politicians will be able to stop the tsunami that’s coming.

Throughout the twentieth century, social power and publicity were highly correlated. The most important exertions of social power came from people that everyone’s heard of. Or if we never heard of them initially, we heard about them later, due to the power they exercised. This is because anyone gaining any kind of power was highly incentivized to exchange some of it for media power. Broadcast power was an unmitigated good in the twentieth century, but no longer today: Mass broadcasting no longer works due to accelerating social fragmentation. Only specific messages work for specific communities.

In short, massive social power redistributions are no longer reflected in mass media—at all. This is because the payoff to mass broadcasting power is decreasing, while the payoff to pseudonymity and privacy and niche psycho-social cohesion are increasing.

From now on, everything that is most important happens at the hands of people who most other people have never heard of.

The key players are not going to bubble up into one large, shared Yearbook like they did in the twentieth century. There are already too many Yearbooks, and there’s no syncing mechanism (at least not yet). There will be local pockets of lore and myth about who has power and who doesn’t, who is important and who isn’t, but it will be highly fragmented and ideologically conditioned.

With the exception of what’s happening in their own personal, human community, from now on most people won’t know about most things that involve most exercises of social power—until it's too late.

DarkFi

In contrast to the saccharine positivity bias saturating popular crypto culture at the moment, the DarkFi manifesto was music to my ears.

Unreconstructed crypto-anarchy with DeFi primitives and zero-knowledge proofs. Buckle up.

The Seikigun pamphlets

I learned about these from Thomas Murphy, who says:

Personality war

Very few traits or behavioral tendencies are unconditionally good. Take grit, for instance. It’s generally good to work hard; perseverance, discipline, etc.

But sometimes too much of a good trait can get you into life situations where you can’t really excel, because everyone you’re competing with got there through other traits.

Throughout my life, I’ve generally exploited my grit to compensate for other things, such as raw IQ and social class. I wasn’t the smartest person in my PhD cohort, and I was certainly one of the poorest, but I outperformed and eventually got a competitive tenured professorship just by working harder and being craftier. It felt like life or death for me, because I had no family safety net, so I pursued my academic career accordingly.

When you come from a working-class family and you break into the middle class thanks to grit and craftiness, the problem is you have to stay there through grit and craftiness. Many others stay there by just staying there. For most of the people you find there, they are gifted enough to just coast at that level, and/or their upper-class peer pressure acts as a floor beneath which they really don't want to sink.

At the time I became a professor, nobody in my family would have felt any differently had I started adjuncting at the local community college. Which sounds loving, but really it just meant that the psychological payoff to institutional success was lower for me than it was for most of the people I was competing with. Many professors come from families that would be disappointed if they got tenured at Rutgers instead of Princeton. I’m not complaining about any of this, it's not injustice. I'm just pointing out that upper-class family peer-pressure is a PED.

In any high-performance domain, the margin for error is small. You can break through the initial institutional gates through grit alone, and even rise quite high. But when your rise is based on the over-exploitation of one trait, such as grit, you’re probably not going to achieve world-class results from there, in the long run, through that trait alone. Or perhaps you can, but you might be significantly more miserable than everyone else. I think this happened to me, as well.

If you can break through an institutional gate by hacking it in this way, it’s generally worth doing. But instead of trying to win that game in the long run, which will make you miserable and probably not work anyway, consider using your accumulated cultural capital inside of that game to declare war on that game—specifically against the parts of it that cut against your natural traits. In short, consider hard-forking reality. You need to spin off a new game that is purposely structured to complement your natural strengths and ignore your weaknesses.

A great deal of society is covert personality war.

Beware large rooms