But actually, egregores
In the last post I gestured at the concept of ideas and technology as monsters that can perniciously use you for their own ends.
This framing has served me well. The idea that not only are there things which are not necessarily aligned with what’s good for you, but, in a way, these things want and act in the world. Social media serves me addictive videos because it wants me to keep using it, wants me to share with my friends and get them to use it.
It’s easy to blame Tik Tok executives or something, but that seems misplaced. They are part of a broader system of incentives that rewards platforms and creators for developing more attention-grabbing content. In some sense, the system *wants* to develop more addictive content, and wants users to become more addicted. It seems like everyone involved thinks this process is bad, but there’s *something* that keeps driving it forward.
My intellectual mind can sometimes grasp the mechanisms underlying these processes, like memetic fitness and malthusian traps. But I didn’t significantly change my behavior until I toyed with the idea of these processes as a Big Bad, something that might Get Me.
Personifying these processes as a Big Bad got me taking them more seriously, and generally I started thinking about them more1.
I started taking my social media habits more seriously, and thinking much more critically about all the other processes that might be working against my interests, even if all the humans involved were well-intentioned.
The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system _isn’t_ an agent.
Meditations on Moloch has a wealth of example processes
Even if all the employees at the health insurance company are nice humans doing their best it can still be the case that there is another *something* that is Up to No Good. This framing allows me to navigate insurance bureaucracy with a delightful mix of love and forgiveness for my fellow humans trapped in a terrible system along with a steeled will and sharpened mind ready to do battle with the Beast.
Come to think of it, the Christian concept of the Beast is a nice example of this frame, which I think allows people to orient with love towards humans but caution towards the various processes that drive human behavior. And speaking of religion - there is a rich vein of examples in there of ‘memeplexes which don’t necessarily work for the benefit of their constituents’. Don’t get me wrong; there is a lot of religious tech that I am a fan of. Which is part of the trickiness - every good idea is mired in the muck of the beast.
(and here is where I write some extra words because Inkhaven has silly word count rules and a system that doesn't count footnotes)
of course, the concept of egregores is an infectious meme in its own right. And an obviously abusable instance of agent detection. So yeah. No idea is safe.