On simulacra, noopolitik and regenerative futures
Noopolitik shouldn’t be only about “Whose story wins” in the short term. But more about whose story is the most regenerative to our global commons in the long term.
I noticed that the rationalist community around LessWrong got recently interested in simulacra levels. They took the original concept from Baudrillard and discarded almost all the rest of his thinking and just playfully engaged with the simulacra model in their further explorations.
In other words, they managed to separate a weak signal from the noise, and find “a jewel among a pile of not so useful rubbish”. Seeing rationalists using a model developed by postmodern thinker is a good sign of a novel approach — of digesting something painful and synthesizing it into something beautiful or useful.
I call this syngesting, but it can be just called prosuming — a combination of producing and consuming. Stealing a concept of a natural opponent to use it in our own projects. A project of stealing culture. Instead of cultural wars, some engage in cultural cannibalizing, or I would suggest cultural prospecting for gold, or cultural and conceptual cooking of poisonous Fugu fish — where one needs to delicately separate toxic parts from the delicious ones.
I think this is the difference between postmodern culture wars 2.0, with tens or hundreds of memetic tribes, AI sects or autocults, warring in multipolar conflicts for the control of the noosphere — and more metamodern or transmodern approaches.
The existence of rationality diaspora, that inspired also the effective altruism movement, and the interest of this community in a simulacra model developed by a postmodern thinker, is by itself a testimony to development of noosphere, the growing inter-connection of grains of thought as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, when he coined the term noosphere.
These transcultural approaches try to create meta-sanghas, communities of practice in psycho-technologies, like The Stoa, inspired by golden nuggets present in many traditions. Or they can result in what Gregory Rawlins calls metaconcerts — distributed ad hoc groups focused on one immediate objective and project in novel, complex or chaotic, domain, that can dissolve in few hours or minutes after the project is completed.
These transcultural approaches are more nuanced and discerning and are more pluralistic in the sense of fractal localism and less focused on fighting for universalism of their view with a missionary fervor.
Level zero simulacra: Flow versus insight
A blogger from rationalist diaspora, The Zvi mentions a useful definition of various simulacra levels that uses an example with a lion:
“Level 1: “There’s a lion across the river.” = There’s a lion across the river.
Level 2: “There’s a lion across the river.” = I don’t want to go (or have other people go) across the river.
Level 3: “There’s a lion across the river.” = I’m with the popular kids who are too cool to go across the river.
Level 4: “There’s a lion across the river.” = A firm stance against trans-river expansionism focus grouped well with undecided voters in my constituency.”
Another rationalist blogger, Ben Hoffman, created this abstract definition:
“Simulacrum Level 1: Objectivity as Subject (objectivism, or epistemic consciousness)
Simulacrum Level 2: Objectivity as Object (lying)
Simulacrum Level 3: Relating as Subject (power relation, or ritual magic)
Simulacrum Level 4: Relating as Object (chaos magic, hedge magic, postmodernity)”
Jordan Hall uses a practical example of a leaking plumbing to illustrate levels of simulacra and connects it to his notion of individual sovereignty. I am paraphrasing it from a podcast I cannot quickly find:
L1 Simulacra: My plumbing is leaking (= I am going to fix my plumbing myself)
L2 Simulacra: My plumbing is leaking (= I am calling a plumber to fix it)
L3 Simulacra: My plumbing is leaking (= I am complaining at the homeowners’ association meeting as a part of a coalition of homeowners who want the HOA to finally call the plumber to fix it)
L4 Simulacra: My plumbing is leaking (= I am lobbying regulators to regulate plumbing or HOA)
The Zvi also suggests, there must be a Level zero of simulacra — when an actor gets an insight that there is a lion across river, but doesn’t share it with others using language. But as soon as you manifest this insight by your behavior of not crossing the river, you are signaling to others, and they are in Level 1. You would need to be a hermit without interaction with others to remain in Level 0.
We could explore Level 0 a lot using various concepts. Gregg Henriques came up with a justification hypothesis (language and lying) as a basis of the emergence of culture as separate from the animal mind. When we are asking how do our actions look to others and reflect on us, we come up with various justifications of why we did, what we did.
We could use John Vervaeke’s language of agent-arena relationship and focus on their reciprocal closing (addiction) or reciprocal opening (addition/regeneration). One’s ability to dynamically switch from mindfulness to active open-mindedness and be present and introspective, as well as connected with the base reality and perceiving weak signals that are vital for adaptive sensemaking.
Using Ben Hoffman’s definition from above, we could speculate what other combination could enrich the simulacra framework. One can think of Level 0 simulacra either as Subjectivity as Subject when one has mystical experiences of introspection and mindfulness. Or maybe better Subjectivity as Void (the Barred Subject in lacanese).
We could also call the active open-mindedness mode as pure relating — Relating as Relating. Together this skillful and dynamic interplay of mindfulness and active open-mindedness modes enhance sovereignty of an individual actor, their sensemaking and their action-taking capacity in the arena (local context, world).
The combination of mindfulness and active open-mindedness is also vital for a flow state, when one feels optimally present and also optimally effective and rich with affordances from the arena.
People can pursue various mental states, including flow, to gain some valuable insights, or they can pursue them for the sake of those states alone. While in the first case it helps to regenerate someone and sort his thought and make some lateral connection, in the second case people can get addicted.
Before leaving this tangent, I would like to make a point that a mental state is not a developmental stage. Flow (feeling of unity) is not insight (discernment). And similarly, pathos is not logos, or mortido is not libido. But according to Alexander Bard, a narrative — mythos is a skillful combination of both pathos and logos. A skillful combination of subjective and objective views meant to create an adaptive intersubjective reality of a tribe.
For a deep dive into relationships of the first-person (subjective) view, the third person (objective) view and the second-person (intersubjective) view I recommend Forrest Landry’s book An Immanent Metaphysics.
David Snowden often mentions how Chinese have an ability to scan twice as much from the environment compared to us, due to their character-based writing. So, when a Westerner sees a picture with a tiger, a Chinese sees the trees behind a tiger more than a tiger.
Dave Snowden also often mentions how visual language (cave drawings) existed well before the spoken language. Therefore, art, memes, maps can compress and carry much more information than spoken words. And one can speak much more than one can write. And one can write much more than one can comprehend. A map is not a territory, but a map is much more than a story.
Oscillating between L1 and L2 simulacra: Bootstrapping the desired future with counterfactuals
While a spoken language brought about systems of justification (~lying), it also brought an ability to create coherence and punish defection on band, clan and tribal levels. The written language enabled the creation of first settlements, and later city states, empires and nations. The printed language enabled the most recent and outdated paradigm of industrial revolution.
Alexander Bard talks how an interactive language has brought about a new paradigm of an informational age. The old Napoleon’s hierarchies enabled by the printed language give way to new distributed networks. Power is not in ownership of land anymore, as in the agrarian societies, nor in ownership of factories and luxury condos as in the industrial age. Power today is in the attention economy underpinned by skillful curation of data and narratives. Also, individualism and collectivism are out, and (digital) tribalism is back with a vengeance.
A spoken language enabled the creation of counterfactuals. According to John Vervaeke, counterfactuals are central to our cognitive development as humans, and they are important for what Gregg Henriques calls systems of justification.
Counterfactuals involve time. Moreover, they involve a special kind of time, that Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls projected time. One projects from a fixed future point backwards towards the present:
“If we don’t cut GHG emissions now, planet will be inhabitable by 2100.”
“If we don’t act on the generator functions of existential risk, such as rivalry, excessive extraction/pollution and exponential tech, we will likely not survive as a humanity to see the 22nd century.”
Counterfactuals are connected with projected time, and thus also with projects — tasks that have a finite amount of time, a deadline. As goes the saying: “Without a deadline nothing gets done”.
Above we mentioned, that one needs to create a skillful combination of pathos and logos to arrive at an effective mythos. These effective narratives serve to bootstrap a desired future and coordinate around avoiding some catastrophe.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy talks about the importance of an enlightened doomsaying and puts a prophet in a technical sense in the middle of a triad: futurist-prophet-expert. A futurist has too little constrains (too much pathos and artistic license) and an expert has too many constraints (too much logos and technical language).
But the prophet is able to build an effective narrative that will cause people to coordinate around some fixed point in time and some project that will bootstrap a desired future through projected time that flows backwards — from the fixed point in future to our current present that needs to change.
(And a failed prophet often becomes a scapegoat and later a saint. This is a nod to René Girard and mimetic theory that illustrates how people reduce widespread rivalry and coordinate through scapegoating.)
So a prophet, in a technical sense, employs a well-crafted narrative, combining art and design (pathos) with engineering and science (logos), to inspire people to coordinate around a specific goal, like creating electric vehicles that are safer, cheaper, more ecological and durable than traditional gas powered cars by 2030. Or starting a cell agriculture industry to produce cultured meat that will be cheaper than normal meat by 2030.
Prophets manipulate, or maybe better seduce, people into bootstrapping the desired future, and if they succeeds in their project of creating a thriving cell agriculture industry and creating cheaper cultured meat alternatives, e.g. by 2030, prophets were counterfactually not lying back then in e.g. 2015 when they made a promise of cheap cultured meat while the first such burger cost more than a luxury vehicle.
So, the prophet employs counterfactuals and well-crafted mythos to seduce people on L2 simulacra to bootstrap a new base reality at L1 simulacra through projected time and backcasting from the fixed point in the future back to the present that needs to change.
Re/generating commons with L3 and L4 simulacra: Orthogonal approaches in noopolitik
We should avoid dualism of “physical is good and virtual is bad” or vice versa. Also, we should avoid dualism in a sense that repetition is good and difference is bad, or vice versa. Or that a basic research is good and product development is bad, or vice versa. In the same way we should avoid thinking that L1 simulacra is good and L2–4 is bad.
But we can say, that it is maladaptive to be mostly in L2-L4 simulacra when you are living in the metaphoric Winterfell, where natural forces are raging and you need to perceive the base reality sharply and act swiftly. And the opposite is true as well, if you live in the metaphoric King’s Landing of intrigue and power games, it is maladaptive to be mostly focused on L1 simulacra and just “speak the naked truth to power”.
Most people then engage in what Timur Kuran calls preference falsification. Not many people criticized socialism a week before the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, but a week after the event, western journalists couldn’t find an ardent socialist to speak to.
Alexander Bard, inspired by Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, describes two ancient and fundamental modes of thinking as eventology and nomadology. For vast majority of our history, we lived in a nomadological universe — constantly being on the move, but experiencing a constant repetition and return of the same. Since the dawn of civilization and written language, we could expand information and knowledge storage and sharing over generations. And this allowed a possibility of permanent settlements and a slight improvement and progress every year — an eventological universe with events that represent progressive and linear, protopian, improvements.
And even with some rare and much bigger events that represent non-linear shifts, phase changes and emergences. Since the dawn of civilization, we live in a combination of eventology and nomadology — in a combination of linear time and circular time.
Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One describes something similar — an event of a radical innovation and a subsequent process of commodification of that innovation and a monopolistic power stemming from being early in the game and controlling the market. Alexander Bard in his forthcoming book called Process and Event focuses on these dynamics of eventology and nomadology that have a conceptual origin in Zoroastrianism some 4,000 years ago.
Dave Snowden in his Cynefin framework distinguishes five domains: chaotic, complex, complicated and obvious systems of order, and a domain of disorder, when you don’t know in which of the four domains you are.
I find Simon Wardley and his Wardley Mapping very similar to above mentioned concepts: an event of radical innovation in chaotic and complex domains and a subsequent process of commodification in the complicated and obvious domains. And this commodification is good, because it allows to create an ever-higher stack of (psycho)technologies. For example, a company can dominate cloud technology, or what Amazon has done with their AWS, and then leverage it not just as a platform for others to produce their services, but also as a rich source of data on the overall market and the future of innovation.
Simon Wardley describes three distinct cultures present in every company: pioneers, settlers and city planners. Thus, a company or a team, if we apply fractal localism, shouldn’t aim at mono-culture at a cultural imperialism of let’s say pioneers, or city planners, but acknowledge that each of these three cultures is important for a different stage of research versus development — pioneers create new innovations and concepts, settlers scale them into products/services and compete for dominance, and city planners standardize the production for volume and cost and commoditize these products as commodities/utilities.
This division between three cultures is somewhat similar to Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle of office politics, where he divides employees into Losers, Clueless, and Sociopaths and states that Sociopaths promote over-performing Losers into the middle-management (Clueless) and the under-performing Losers into C-Suite (Sociopaths). And this is similar to what The Zvi describes in his articles on moral mazes where he stressed the importance of slack as a concept vital to life, and how super-perfect competition of middle managers destroys all slack, all difference and uniqueness and competes away all energies and vitality in a dog-eat-dog and zero-sum finite game.
There is one obvious solution against mazedom of office politics or city (state) politics — just exit the King’s Landing, leave. And spend most of your time in Winterfell with base reality of nature, and deep tribal connection with your close friends around the Dunbar’s number.
Take a concept of a healthy food pyramid and apply it on noosphere and a healthy noospheric diet — a healthy noofood pyramid or a healthy information and knowledge food pyramid.
If you are in Winterfell your discourse analysis of power dynamics won’t work on a circular saw — you need to be mindful and present when working with such dangerous tools to cut wood without hurting yourself. But I guess the opposite is true when you are in King’s Landing — you cannot just proclaim some innovative and novel truth and expect people to take it at face value.
You need to sell your truth with an effective narrative, as we discussed in the futurist-prophet-expert distinction. Not too much pathos, and not too much logos either. But their proper combination creates and effective narrative.
So, this was quite a long way to make a non-dualistic (monist) argument against Gnosticism — against considering a body sinful and a soul beautiful or vice versa. They are intertwined and interconnected, and both body and soul need to be nurtured with a proper and healthy (noo)food pyramid.
The same is true for innovation versus commodities. They are in a loop and a circular process of commodification that enables new events, new emergencies and new innovations. Electricity as a commodity enabled iPhone. The improvement of batteries in smartphones enabled the rise of electric vehicles.
Many innovations start as toys. It took millennia for a steam engine to develop from an ancient toy meant for amusement into an industrial tool. Incas had toys with wheels but didn’t use wheels for transporting things.
In 2009, Thomas Thwaites, a graduate of Royal College of Art created a toaster from scratch, it cost him over 1000 pounds to replicate a value toaster he bought for 5 pounds. And his toaster project burst into flames few seconds after operation. And the artist used many commodified products, such as microwave oven in his creation. Simon Wardley often mentions this example to illustrate the importance of commodities for further innovations and also the futility of trying to do your custom-made oven from scratch.
Many innovations follow S-Curves and so do also peak predators — successful companies that dominate a certain market. Thus Microsoft dominated software, after IBM that was preoccupied with hardware paradigm, and later Apple dominated an ecosystem of neat hardware and applications after Microsoft missed the bus. Peak predators have a huge influence on the whole ecosystem — reintroducing grey wolves into Yellowstone created trophic cascade effects that made the rivers cleaner. But peak predators are also fragile — they create too much of a monoculture.
Over our history we turned complex systems into complicated ones. We took global commons, such as forests, cut down wood and turned them into two-by-fours to build a house. But recently we were experimenting with some novel approaches like circular economy, or using mycelium as building material that can repair itself once broken. Companies such as BioCarbon Engineering develop drones to plant trees 60x faster and cheaper.
Forrest Landry explains that we need to start building machines that will not serve us but that will serve nature to move into regenerative paradigm away from the extractive paradigm.
The authors at RethinkX thinktank published a report in 2020 titled Rethinking Humanity, where they divide our big history into three ages: The Age of Survival, The Age of Extraction and The Age of Freedom based on unleashing creativity through exponential tech like digital fabrication and precision fermentation.
But I think the key idea is that we need to craft compelling stories that don’t just win in the short term, but that are the most regenerative to our global commons in the long term.
Level 2 simulacra is about the ability to skillfully manipulate reality, to shape it and bootstrap it into a regenerative future where global commons and communing play a decisive role.
L3 Simulacra — Ontological capture versus ethical cults
We could combine Kegan’s five stages of adult development with Baudrillard’s levels of simulacra:
1. I can perceive reality
2. I can manipulate reality
3. I belong to a tribe
4. I can manipulate tribes
5. I can skillfully match my (mental) state to the task at hand
Kegan’s stage 3 of adult development is about the socialized mind — about a need to belong to a subculture or a tribe and find a specific personal archetype.
Alexander Bard talks about the need to have two archetypes — similarly to picking subjects in college — one major and one minor archetype. The major archetype is what you do with ease and people respect you for that. The minor archetype is something that you are able to do well when you put enough effort into it.
The need to belong is a strong one. Once some innovation gets traction it attracts not just early pioneers who are good at creativity, but not so good at scaling their inventions. It also later attracts a different type of personalities that Simon Wardley calls settlers with their own culture and skills to scale and standardize innovations into reliable products and services. And these are followed by city planners that have a skill to produce big volume of commodified products at a low cost.
Jamie Wheal has a similar framework to describe the evolution of current psychedelic renaissance: from creators to curators and sociopaths that then sell tickets to the latecomers that he calls tourists.
When we talk about L3 simulacra, we talk about belonging to a tribe or a subculture, and we talk about settlers and tourists. This subculture can be ontologically captured in their own symbols and virtualism.
But we talk also about the need for a collective intelligence and a collective wisdom, because humans are fundamentally tribal. A need to find your own community of practice. What Buddhists call sangha.
But these subcultures can turn into cults — often as a result that their products became after some time widely accepted commodities and thus these communities lost their original sense of purpose and providence.
Or these subcultures are manipulated by sociopaths who are good at power games. Evan McMullen has a great series on The Stoa called The Bridge, where he talks about Kegan stages, simulacra and sanghas, and the need for developing good power literacy to inoculate ourselves against such sociopaths.
The problem of cultish tendencies is aggravated by algorithmic manipulation, filter bubbles, AI driven sects and autocults. Social networks that optimize time spent on site and advertising revenue thus drive polarization, extremism and cultish behavior.
Arquilla and Ronfeldt in their recent work on noopolitik called Whose Story Wins explain that currently the problem is not so much brainwashing of people, as in the past, but brain-boxing and thought-scripting by memetic filter bubbles.
Brainwashing as an idea has dubious origins in the Cold War propaganda and was introduced in The Manchurian Candidate. But the imprint vulnerability (a concept I heard from Evan McMullen at The Stoa) is in my opinion real and is often enhanced by sleep and food deprivation, psychedelics, spending time only with members of a certain cultish subculture.
Jamie Wheal and others talk about ethical cults as a theoretical alternative to abusive cults that mentally enslave people and deprive them of their sovereignty, and thus reduce their sensemaking, choice-making and actuation capacities. So, an ethical cult would be focused on increasing individual sovereignty and at the same time also increasing collective wisdom and a group sovereignty — as in a team of elite athletes or elite forces.
Another proposition coming from The Stoa community and discussed also by Evan McMullen is the idea of meta-sanghas. Communities similar to the metaphor of MMA, that serve as memetic mediators and combine various psychotechnologies and ancient arts and are able to select grains of wisdom from various ancient traditions and discard the rest.
One can participate in various meta-sanghas and thus help to create a mesh of meta-sanghas akin to the concept of the noosphere. The examples of such meta-sanghas are for example The Stoa, Intellectual Deep Web, Inter-Intellect and community around Rebel Wisdom.
L4 Simulacra — Ontological design and noopolitik
Ontological design or context engineering is a concept promoted by Daniel Fraga and Owen Cox and discussed with various guests at their Technosocial podcast.
The idea of ontological design is similar to L4 simulacra and the ability to manipulate memetic tribes, for example through chaos magic and meme magic. It is also related to Kegan’s stage 4 of self-authorship, being able to achieve such situational awareness, that one considers herself above various tribes that one is member of.
Both context engineering and magic focus on perception hacking, and an interesting fact is that they are culturally universal. As Tristan Harris says — magic tricks work on people with various personalities and cultural backgrounds.
The saying is that today’s technology is yesterday’s magic. John Vervaeke uses a concept of psycho-technologies to describe an ecology of various practices that are derived from ancient traditions but can be recombined without using their outdated epistemologies.
This idea of ability to pick nuggets of wisdoms and discarding the rest is also central to noopolitik, as Arquilla and Ronfeldt describe it in their recent work. Noopolitik is derived from the concept of a noosphere, that originated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky.
The idea of prospecting for the noospheric gold is related to the signal vs noise metaphor (no one is genius enough to produce pure signal or pure noise) and it is also a subject to Pareto distribution — the vast majority of places and dirt don’t have golden nuggets, but there are a few places where the most (conceptual) gold reserves are.
Similarly, also the global problems and their solutions are very unequally distributed, and thus this metaphor of prospecting for gold is suitable, and we can apply it also to the noosphere.
An important concept related to magic and alchemy is blackboxing. Just focusing on the inputs and outputs, even without the ability to fully explain how the magic trick is being done. This is related to the Cynefin Framework and the fact that in complex systems one needs to run small and safe-to-fail experiments in parallel to test opposite hypotheses.
The complex domain is characteristic of dark constrains and also the existence of competing theories and explanations. One way to get closer to the objective truth is to run experiments. This is how new technology is developed, and this is how magic is done.
In January 2021 we have witnessed events related to concepts like alternate reality games, deep play and kayfabe. Eric Weinstein has an important and counterintuitive point related to this pure virtuality and L4 simulacra — American Wresting with nested levels of deception saw much more deadly injuries than MMA.
Similarly, we can see people being hurt and killed when the virtual reality of filter bubbles spills into physical world and people engage in LARPing and alternate reality games.
Level 5? Dynamic and efficient matching of mental states to the task at hand
Now the question is what is Kegan’s developmental stage number 5? A stage beyond self-authorship into self-transcendence. The Bridge sessions by Evan McMullen at The Stoa focused on bridging these 4 to 5 stages (as well as bridging earlier stages, like 3 to 4). He focused on what he calls phenomenological self-inquiry and posits that via negativa — e.g. fasting is the way to hack the perception of what is possible and engage in ontological design.
Jamie Wheal, who co-wrote Stealing Fire and focuses on elite performance and founded The Flow Genome Project, says that the key skill is to efficiently match (mental) state to the task at hand. In other words, to be fully present when doing something — and use various skills sets required for it. Daniel Schmachtenberger says similar thing quoting Ecclesiastes from the Old Testament: “There is a time to kill, and a time to heal”.
So there are times where one needs to be in fight or flight mode. And times where one needs to practice mindfulness and personal phenomenological self-inquiry, or PSI, as Evan McMullen calls it.
John Vervaeke distinguishes active open-mindedness from mindfulness. The first one focuses on external reality and various affordances, and the second one focuses on self-inquiry. We need to efficiently combine both.
This brings us back to what John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall call the religion of no religion. As I mentioned above, we definitely can and should find golden nuggets from various ancient traditions and subcultures — both in terms of conceptual ecology and ecology of practices. But we also need a bold vision. This is the critique that Alexander Bard has for this type of Californian thinking influenced by complexity and Game B. This subculture is full of brilliant minds, but they are often too much focused on talking and exploring various group flow practices.
I partly share this sentiment and think that meaning is derived from bold and higher visions — not just from communitas, peak performance and peak experiences.
Partly I think that there are already Game B adjacent startups and innovations that focus on holistic improvement and increasing individual and group sovereignty as opposed to increasing addiction. But there are only a few of them and we need orders of magnitude more startups in this problem space of X Risk, and generator functions of X Risk, ontological design and context engineering.
Opaque Renaissance
Game B is inherently liminal, full of local experimentation and testing of opposite hypotheses. Game B is played in the chaotic and complex domains of the Cynefin Framework, or in a Genesis/Conceptual stage of the Wardley Map. Where pioneers create some innovations, and later settlers scale them, and later city planners turn them into commodities — essential for building a yet higher stack of (psycho)technologies that were pure magic just a few years ago.
But I see it as a process not a thing — an ever refreshing renewal, as Alexander Bard would put it. Something starts as a concept, gets scaled and later commodified for volume production. Something starts like a Game B (infinite game of playful collaboration) and turns into Game A (finite game with winners and losers). But then the key is to never get stuck on one finite game and mistaking it for an infinite game.
This is similar to Peter Thiel’s concept: from zero to one (where true innovation happens) versus from one to infinity (where copycats happen).
The practical example of startups from the Game B and adjacent spaces is Neurohacker Collective, founded by Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall, and their Qualia products. Or the idea of planting trees 60x faster and cheaper using drones and AI, tested by companies such as BioCarbon Engineering.
Or plant-based meat and cultured meat based on novel technologies such as precision fermentation that represent according to Rethink Humanity a radical revolution of taming micro-organisms in cell agriculture, as opposed to traditional agriculture that started some 10,000 years ago by taming macro-organisms such as cows. This new paradigm is about disrupting the cow and can have profound and beneficial consequences to food security and climate change.
Another ambitious project is Civium — a global community/city that combines the best of virtual and physical worlds, created by Jordan Hall. He was inspired by Geoffrey West’s Scale and the idea of super-linear scaling, and focuses on building something like transculture (related to the idea of transmedia). He also collaborates with John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques and uses his Tree of Knowledge System.
Daniel Schmachtenberger did a great series of videos for Rebel Wisdom, titled The War on Sensemaking. He also founded The Consilience Project focused on repairing broken information ecology and “doing broadcast right”.
This is what Alexander Bard calls protopian approaches towards ecotopia. We also need to embrace dialectic and paradox, by using antagonistic collaboration we can get closer to ideas, such as Greg Thomas’ rooted cosmopolitanism.
But we need to nurture orthogonal approaches and other ways of going meta, that are inherently opaque to the majority of people who live in the increasingly outdated paradigm.
Some people call this move and movement dark renaissance, but I prefer calling it opaque renaissance. It relates to two ideas:
The first one is blackboxing — using practical parallel experiments in the complex domain akin to magic that later becomes (psycho)technology. The second idea is choosing only the opaque box B in the Newcomb’s Paradox. Which is a meta-rational move of bootstrapping a desired future by a consistent and long-term good-faith engagement despite setbacks and painful experiences.
I think opaque renaissance can be characterized also by three key concepts I explored in my previous writings:
1. syngesting is my term similar to prosuming and being a prosumer, which means consuming and producing at the same time — digesting the painful experiences of everyday life and synthesizing them into something beautiful. This is a first-person/subjective view . And it should help reduce rivalry — one of three generator functions of X Risk as defined by Daniel Schmachtenberger.
2. imploitation is Alexander Bard’s term that is the opposite of exploitation and refers to a tantric practice of withholding, of saving up, delaying gratification, and repairing and renovating. It could be related to re/generation. This is the second-person/intersubjective view. And it should help reduce excessive extraction and pollution — another of the generator functions of X Risk.
3. exaptation — a term promoted by Dave Snowden that refers to radical repurposing and serendipity. This is in opposition to adaptation. This is the third-person/objective view as Forrest Landry would put it. And it should help reduce the impact of exponential technologies — the third generator function of X Risk. Exaptation can help to change paradigms more quickly and produce new peak predators — and thus turn the exponential functions into S-Curves quicker.
These three concepts and practices can shift the addictive behaviors that lead to, what John Vervaeke calls, reciprocal narrowing of agent and their arena, into regenerative behaviors or what he calls a reciprocal opening of agent and their arena.
We also need to have a well-grounded and healthy noospheric food pyramid. Most people engage too much time in virtual cocktail parties on social media and in the L4 simulacra and too little time in L1 simulacra of base reality. Too much time in the metaphoric King’s Landing and too little time in Winterfell.
But a food pyramid might not be the best concept — we need concepts from living and complex domain — such as a healthy noospheric tree — with deep roots in L1 simulacra and wide branches in L4 simulacra — reaching across all levels of simulacra and Kegan’s stages.
I think we need to do prospecting for noospheric gold and find nuggets of wisdom from ancient traditions and recombine them into new (psycho)technologies. We also need to have bold visions and build new companies with novel products such as nootropics, or plant-based burgers that taste better than normal meat and can become widely spread commodities. Building ethical cults and a mesh of meta-sanghas is very important, but not enough.
In this article I wanted to reflect on Baudrillard’s four levels of simulacra as one nugget of wisdom and a useful framework originating from postmodernism, and being recently discovered by the rationalist diaspora.
I was inspired by Evan McMullen’s lectures at The Stoa and combined it with Kegan’s five stages of adult development. So, the result is something like this:
1. I can perceive reality
2. I can manipulate reality
3. I belong to a tribe
4. I can manipulate tribes
5. I can skillfully match my (mental) state to the task at hand
And my second contribution on noopolitik is based on reading Whose Story Wins report by RAND is:
Noopolitik shouldn´t be only about “whose story wins” in the short term. But more about whose story is the most regenerative to our global commons in the long term.
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