What the redpill dare not say

 There is a common consensus amoung a bunch of the red pill channels on youtube that social media has somehow changed the world.  Usually its something along the lines of "social media runined women and lead them astray"  some variation anyway.  There is this unsaid idea that if only social media would "stop" everything would be ok and women would go back to being "normal'.

The issue is that social media is still just people. Its just human nature with a megaphone.  It did not create anything new, just put everyone in a bigger room together.  Then mixed in capitalism and competition.

The red pill community is benefitting from social media the same way that they are pointing the finger and claiming it has ruined the world (or at least the bit they don't like) it has allowed them to group toether and imagine they are a pattern.

Hypergamy is a real thing.  Attention seeking is a real thing.  Shitty lives is a real thing.  Being able to see over the next hill is now a real thing.  Knowing (or thinking ) that the grass is greener has always beena  real thing. These are just human nature that has always been with us.  There are also lots of little quirks of human nature that social media is allowing to bloom that previously were probably too small and too isolated for anyone to even start to identify.  Social media has shone a 1000w spotlight on them and humans are still figuring out how to live with these new ideas. 

One of the pervasive ideas is that 'back in the day" people's choices where constrained to a geographical region, they found their mates in that region and got on with life.

There are stories and social memes from generations ago about women in small towns having their heads turned by a "tall dark stranger".  (Usually with a maserati... as the story goes) and running away with them.  Why would such a story exist if it did not speak to human nature (and mens fears of external competition)  The exciting traveller who will sweep in and woo the town's virgins.  This stirs something primal and threatening in all "hard working men".

The island effect is real. Is it possible that the whole of western civilisation is actually just a side effect of isolation and limited choice? Given complete freedom, will society just decay back to tribes of monkeys with one alpha and a hareem of women? 

The truths are that the majority of men are not winners.  They are not needed for the species to continue. They are needed for the machinery of society to keep chugging along.  They are consumed in the process...  

The converse is also true.  The majority of women are not winners.  They are also filler matieral for society. They are also consumed in the process...

 This is the true horror that social media is revealing, its just that most people are too busy to notice or even consider it.  They cannot see the forest for the trees. Thankfully for most people do not yet have a strategy to deal with this kind of big life question. 

Social media has let loose the emergent behaviour of the mob in ways that the mob is not ready for.  Society has turned out to be a collective figment of their imagination... and quite a few are now imagining different things.

There are interesting glimses of this realisation starting to spring up in all sorts of corners.  "Quiet quitting", MGTOW, "laying flat" etc are all ways of trying to check out of the game.  "Self deletion" is another but more tragic.  An interesting one that is not obvious is the whole "bushcrafting" and back to nature themes that pop up.  Early retirement, van life, travel and backpacking... the more you look the more you can find.  These are all ways of "escaping" the ratrace.  Passport bros is an interesting half step... but its still a step off the path. 

The core theme is that for the past few thousand years is that people comming together into bigger and bigger piles (urbanisation) was beneficial. Collectivly they benefitted, but the social structures had to evolve to make towns and then cities function.  Law and custom emerged as they best tools.  The convention of marriage, trade, ecconomy and industry were interesting side effects.  The fact that the ecconomy has grown into this massive abstract game that has a life all of its own is endlessly fascinating... but is still essentially a side effect of urbanisation and the trade that was required to make that work. 

What happens when urbanisation is no longer pulling in the crowds?  What happens when urbanisation is no longer self-sustaining and only mass migration can be used to jam enough people into one place to keep the game going?  What happens when social media unpicks the island effect and people start acting like monkeys again? 

Its interesting that there are all solved problems.  Its also interesting that we are living in a moment of change and its so disconcerting, because "change is hard".  Watching politicians unpick society for their own self-interests is a kind of karmic balancing that takes a kind of crazy to appreciate.

Finally we circle around to politics... or otherwise know as "human nature" at scale.  

Politics is just one of the emergent behaviours that urbanisation has created.  There are no politcians when everyone is working to feed themselves.  Politics and trade need each other.  

The fun fact to realise is that without trade, politics stops.  Without trade and politics, law iis irrelevant.  That older darker aspects of human nature manifest... those survival traits and strategies start to come back into focus.  

On that theme, we get to homelessness and "illegal" migration.  These are manifestations of the simpler human strategy.  The one that says 'move toward opportunity".  

What if the opportunity is no longer in big urban piles?  How much of a percentage change would it take before the urban environment was no longer 'oppertune" for the "average" person?  With the way the ecconomy machine has managed to mine all the inefficiency and profit out of "modern western life" there is nothing left on the bone for your "average" people.  They are all starting to look for where the grass is greener. 

The girls are looking for some rich chad somewhere and the boys are looking for some foreign girl in a distant land... thats broken.  Not to mention the middle class "the average folk" do not see a future for their kids in the cities.  Every institution looks like it has cultural change sweeping through it and its being over taken by ideologies.  Nothing unusual here, this is the eternal fight that has raged in every city as new ideas take over and transform old.  The only problem with this one is that the new lifestyles are now completely childless.  The machine cannot self-sustain except by constant migration for replacement parts. 

What more can the machine do?  Where is the new resources to mine?  Where is the profit? The machine has canibalised all the players in the game and extracted value from every single aspect of their lives... about the only thing left is to sell debit to the migrants before they even arrive.  How about sell debit to the countries that the migrants are comming from so that the countries actually force the migrants to leave for the ubran machine so that the machine can keep chugging along?  

One of the interesting side effects of this change has been the complete collapse of the millitary.  The mechanisms that previously worked to convince people (mainly men) to sacrifice themselves for "the greater good".... are just gone.  Previously the whole of society was geared toward producing a functional military... with no end of problems... but anyway the point is valid.  What happens when the emergent behaviour that created a functional military gets disturbed?  THe only possible result is a non-functional military.  

why did the roman empire fall?   Because its leadership did not understand or were unable to effect the emergent behaviour of its population to keep it going.  It took hundreds of years and thousands of threads getting cut before the consequences became inevitable.  was there ever a point in time where anyone could have seen enough of the issues to have changed the outcome?  Perhaps.  Was there ever a person who was able to stand against the tide of eveyrone elses self interest and change the course of an empire?  A few, but the rest of them just went with the flow and society fell apart and reformed itno the next day.  Change happened. 

A fun question is 'do you think anyone in the roman empire was aware of it falling"?  Did they perceive it as falling or just changing?  Did they see the forest or the trees?  

Keep in mind that society is an illusion that is shared but not the same shared illusion.  Everyone is playing their own game at all times. 

So what is the trueth that the red-pill community does not want to speak?  

"Change is hard"!

The most attactive IP

 Watching the mad scramble for literiture and games to turn into movies and tv series is interesting.  I guess the professionals in hollywood etc have always done this, but its now a bit more obvious with the almost live tracking by channels on youtube.

The point is that it always seems to be a search for a "good" story or a "good character" that would sell tickets at the box office.  This idea pushed the money to chase all the cunning writers and to troll through obscure novels in a search for some gold. 

Then we had the age of the immitators.  One studio would do something novel and all the second rate  studios would do copies or derivitive works.... and they milked that strategy as dry as they could. 

Then the studios tried to gain commercial advantage by pushing the budgets to ridiculous sizes.... and tried to out muscle each other in a last man standing kind of stratgey. 

Now with the feeding frenzie of the streaming services trying to kill each other for market dominance, they are desperatly trying all these strategies at the same time.  But wait, theres more... 

The new add is politics.  

Hollywood has been on this pain train for the past few decades but its become more obvious as the politics have become more radical.  They have historically injected the politics of the day in all sorts of ways that wester audiences were blind to... because it agreed with how they thougth of themselves.  But with the extreeme radicalisation of the minority politics at the moment, the hollywood machine does not know which way to thrash.... so they are trying to follow the trends of the cool kids but the cool kids will not agree... so they end up picking one or the other trend and pissng off everyone else. 

This is emergent behaviour at its finest and is only really obvious at the moment because of the concentration of productions.  If there was thousands of small studios making all kinds of stuff, then these train wreck movies with political adgendas would be lost in the crowd and not float to the top.  Its just with the limited number of massive budget movies and the desperation of the production process trying to jam a bit of everything into every single production, we have this situation where all the strategies are being mangled together and making a camel. (horse designed by a committee joke)

The other strategy that seems to be flaring up is not about bringing anything new to the audience, but rather looking for where the audience attention is now... and trying to climb on board.  Sort of like the old politician strategy of finding a mab and then getting in front of it. Now its more about finding a popular IP, no matter what... comic, game, novels, anime, whatever and buying the IP and the community.  Then trying to commrcialise the community by adding enough of a mix of other popular tropes to try to generallise it to an even bigger community.  This is what the pop culture types call "tourists" in their communities. 

This has resulted in politics being injected randomly into smaller and smaller niche IP's that are looking more and more out of place.  Its just the emergent behaviour of the whole system trying to throw everything at a new project to try to make it successful + big budget + edgy+ conservative + whatever... and with the concentration effect of the current market we end up with all the eggs in one basket and it turns out to be a shit show. 

You see the same evolutionary pressures in other market segments like tools and homewares. As the markets get more saturated and the strategies get more agressive, the products start to try to be a bit of every strategy.  cheap + good + colourful + features + expensive + mid + brand loyal + new + old.  The marketing folk must go insane trying to tick all the boxes at the same time.  

This is the beauty of the free market.  Watching the evolution of these strategies is better than watching virus dna recombination.  Its the same process but more colourful. 

The only really novel bit of this is the "intelligent life" search strategy is starting to come into play. 

Just as a background,  most of the recombinant strategies are pretty simple.  they use random mutation or large volume cross overs etc to create the next generation and then use selection to find the most successful in the environment.  These strategies work when the system can afford to cull large numbers in parallel or has long time frames to cull serieally. But eventually, the organism or strategy gets too complex and is too expensive and the cost of these simple strategies is a handicap... which is why I think the birth rate is dropping in advanced ecconomies.... but thats an aside.  THe point is that the strategy changes to what I call an "intelligent selection". (whether it is or not is easily debatable but thats what they call themselves....)  the point is that the life form or strategy starts to encode more and more tricky senses and decision making and the strategy starts to try to "see" the advantage rather than blindly searching with the dumb search.  The characteristic of the intelligent search is that it can observe the topology of the environment and make larger leaps from resource rich areas to new resource ritch areas.  This solves some of the problems that the dumb search strategies cannot solve.  the island effects usually trap dumb search methods.  On the other hand more tricky search can bridge over chasms and leap across large regions of poor resources to get to distant opportunities.  

 

The key idea is that the intelligent search uses signals and stimuli to form a hypothesis about where the resources are and then goes and acts upon the hypothesis.  Due to the complexity fo the strategy (or organism that expresses that strategy) it is more costly and complex in energy and structure. So if it get it wrong the whole thing can die quickly.  Have a look at the failures of large organisations that make big bets and then either live or die because they cannot re-adjust quickly enough to a bad call. 

Hollywood is doing the same thing at the moment.  Large and larger structures are being built around productions that are trying to be all things to all people and the bets are getting more extreem.  Consolidation has made them big and fragile but harder to steer.

 

Anyway, the point I started with was about the intelligent search being the new evolutionary trick.of note is that now they are trying to spot the resources at greater and greater distances and leap to the next island of resources because they are so hungry and take so much resources to survive that they cannot exist in the areas between the islands.  They need larger and larger markets to keep the line going up, but all the easy markets have been exploited by small outfits with dumb strategies.  So now the intelligent strategy is jumping around hunting any community that looks like it has an exploitable IP.  They are no longer specialising in similar material (super hero movies, or historical fiction or comedy movies) now they are just jumping to anything that looks popular... this is why the light is being shone on more and more niche communities that nerds used to have all to themselves.  

The issue is that all the easy general population stuff like sport and romance has been fragmented and diluted to the point where the general population is sick of the sight of it and the "yoof' has shattered the topic into a million variations that the big producers cannot taget. 

Perhaps this is an interesting counter-strategy to the mega-corp model?  Shatter and fragment the resources so the mega-organism cannot find enough resoures and canot adapt to the new environment.

This is what happened with the bud light situation.  The organsm tried to adapt to what they thought the environment represented and found that the market was not like their hypothesis and that the market had fragmented.  One brand could not be generalised to many different segments at the same time. I understand why they would want to do that, the efficiency of being able to produce the one generic product and deliver it into many markets is what makes the mega-corps work. However, when that doesn't work, usually they just by a whole pile of small niche brands and try to find efficiency by amalgamating their back end processes while keeping the illusion of diversity at the market facing side. 

I think the big lesson from the bud ligth event was that its hard to take a very amalgamated brand and try to shatter it into diversity, so it represents very different things in different parts of many markets. I think the biggest mistkae was not realising that the market place has become homogenised.  Its gettting harder and harder to segment the market.  Used to be geography was the major limitig factors and allowed regional variation to thrive, but with the online space and laguages starting to be homogenised, its getting harder and harder to be able to vary messages or find "new regions". 

I think this is the same issue that has changed the landscape in politics.  Watching the major parties trying to evolve and deal with the lack of agility while the microparties bloom like weeds is eternally entertaining.  But the problem has become that even the microparties are no longer regionally diverse.  they immediatly go on line and start to generalise away all their unique identities and become the same mush of whatever attention seeking topics. 

I have noticed the same fatige in youtube channels.  they are all seekign attention and once they run out of their unique ideas, they start to borrow from their successful neighbours and rapidly evolve to look the same and cover the same content. 

The cross fertilisation of ideas is happening so much faster.  But there are still cultural divisions and regions that seem to be robustly immune.  Different nations and ethnic identities are still doing their thing.  As much as the digital nomads think they are changing the world, the reality of the local environmental pressures are still the dominant forces on the way people live out side of urban areas.  More and more of the urban areas are blurring together, but the regional areas are still strongly pressured by their physical environments.  

Bringing these ideas back to IP squatting by mega-corps trying to make Tv programs.... is challenging because geography does not quite map... pun intended.  But if we argue that different genre and tropes are like the geography in physical environments then the idea kind of translates. 

So, the urbanised stories are like the mashups of all sorts of crap into the post-modern urban stories that are being mapped onto older genre projects.  For instance where a super hero move gets a bunch of post-modern politics and "updates" shoved in to make it palitable for the generic online consumers.  While there are still genres that are "hard" to inject modernity simply because the tropes in that genre have such speific "regional" nuances that are still hard to bend and the audicne archs up a lot more.  Trying to think of an example.  Things like the rings of power, i would argue is a shockingly bad from a traditional fantasy audience point of view, but a success to a more generalised audience who just wanted to watch something that they could understand.  It may not have had critical success (and should be burned from a "tolkein fan" point of view) but as an exercise in generalising a nich IP it shows some success simply by existing. 

The quetion is can IP's be generalised in a market the is fragmenting and was never really generaliseable? Trying to pretend that the international market is somehow homogenous is a delusion that only really ivory tower idiots could cling to.  But its the sort of thing that a mega-corp has to beleive and lie about to its shareholders to convince them that it can continue to grow when there are less and less opportunities of scale. 

  This reminds me of something warren buffet said, and i am paraphrasing, that as the size of the capital grows there are less and less opportunities at that scale.  

I think this is the problem facing hollywood and the big production houses.  There is simply less and less large IP's to canabalise.  The Marvel universe had been developed for decades and had a huge corpus of material to mine... but its done.  Tolkein has been ravaged.   Harry potter has been mined out. The witcher got trashed so quickly. Starwars has been milked pretty dry.  Animated films and kids movies have been plowed over so many times they are almost unrecognisable.

 The phrase, "the next big thing' has been over ued but for these large production houses.. there is a size problem that they need behemoth size IPs to feed their beast and there are not that many left.  

So now they are hunting anything that is left that a community forms around....

metoo eventually?

 I have seen a couple of stories about the mess of high profile allegation fueled cases cropping up recently along with a couple of articles about workplace culture changing between men and women due to the perceived threat of accusations. 

The interesting aspect of this is that its mostly a perception issue at the moment. However it does ignore the problem of time. 

The current politics around metoo and sexual harrasment in the workplace means that it perceived as easier to lodge a complaint and at least in high profile cases, get a settlement.  It does make you wonder if anyone in the finance dept has started to do any risk calculations based on this trend? Got to imagine someone in an insurance company has at least poked it. 

So here is a risk scenario for you. 

Worker at given company A gets into financial or social situation and feels the need to "cash out" all their options.  For ethics free employees this used to be things like injury claims, compo for emotional distress etc.  But now we seem to have a trend to try to cash out historical "sexual harrassment/assult" claims even after long periods.  

You would have to imagine that people who have a potential meal ticket and are pushed by life, vengence, fame seeking or any other motivaion might be considering taking a run at this kind of payout.  Harrassment litigation has always been a thing, but with the threat of reputational damage magnified by social media, this has got to be a new dimension with a new risk profile. 

As this idea is really only taken hold recently and the population who has seen this stratgegy work, start to come to the ends of their employment, one wonders if there will be more opportunistic attempts to milk the situations that cannot be proven but can be harrassed into a settlement by the threat of social media.  

There is an argument to be made that there is a more socially actuve generation rolling into workplaces that potentially pose a risk to organisations based on their attitudes and the culture they have been in through their formative years that may be different to any generation past.  Seeing celebrities "cash out" awkward workplace incidents has got to be giving some ideas lower down the social ladder. 

The question is whether this will become a known pressure in hiring policy or if anyone would dare to write it down anywhere for fear of a discrimination suite.  

These kind of emergent behaviours are always fun to speculate about but very hard to actually prove because they are as much perception as reality and the reality is often something that is hard to admit to.  They also dont happen in a vacume.  There are other factors that could appear as more primary drivers, while thse sub-text type factors mearly make the opportunity seem more possible or socially acceptable.  Sort of like nudge theory but at a population scale. 

Does make you wonder if the predetory legal firms will start to victimise particular employers or celebrities like they did with the high profile hollywood cases and trawl for any previous employees who might be inclined to make a claim.  Based on previous behaviour, this has got to be a highly lucrative strategy.  

You could imagine the lawyers waiting at the exit door for any employees who get dismissed and seeing if they can do a wrongful dismissal, injury, harrassment etc case. At some point this will get normalised and turned into a business model.  This will just be part of leaving a job.  

Got to imagine this will eventually be part of the considerations for hiring practices. Although its hard to see if it will be a significant pressure as the 'shock' value of metoo has already worn off and the value of trying to damage a celebrity reputation is not exactly new. Shame is one of those tools that needs both parties to play the game for it to work.  Business ethics and repuations make shame a little less effective as a weapon than for celebrities who may have a more emotional based reputation. 

I guess it all comes back to that game of trying to see the future when hiring a new employee.  Nothing really new there. Relationships are always about taking a chance.... 

The only new dynamic in this equation that we have not clearly seen play out is the decay in private relationships in the US that mean women are having to look at their financial welfare through a different lens when they hit the wall socially as well as financially.  It would suggest that women who have not got any other "safety net" might be incentivised to make this kind of a play out of a need to try to "secure the bag" as the gold diggers are alledged to say.