The problem was never the partriarchy...

 Al Bundy said it best... "Women understand women and they hate them.". 

The matriarchy is the thing that scares women the most.  Judgement, criticism, accountability all come from older women. Simply be existing, a matriarch of a successful family holds a mirror up to an unsuccessful woman and shows her what she is not.  And the older matriarchs of the family are the ones who see through the bullshit of young women so easily.  And they know the words that will hurt the deepest. 

If you are a young irresponsible woman who wants a life without accountability, how do you get these things? You need to destroy the power of the matriarchy.  But what is the power of the matriarchy?  Family and family bonds.  

But what happens if you raise your hand against the matriarchy?  The matriarch will summon all her words and talk to you.  They will say things that you cannot bare to hear.  They will point out your flaws and show you the consequences of your actions. They will predict your future... accurately. And it will not be pleasant. 

But what happens if you can ignore the matriarchs words?  Do you win?  No you do not.  Because the matriarch will escalate the problem and remove you from of the safety of the family. Because the matriarch controls the power of excommunication.  She defines the family.  Who is in and who is out. 

If you are still a problem outside the family, then you are a problem for the ultimate matriarch power.  The patriarchy.  The family problem solver.  The matriarch looks inward at the family troubles. The patriarch looks outward at the troubles that come from outside.

The patriarchy is someone who spends their life specialising in all the issues and topics that can threaten the family.  Solving them, avoiding them, fixing them, protecting against them, planning ahead to avoid them or killing them.  

So, the only way to "disarm" the matriarch is first to remove the patriarch. Only then can you destroy the thing that scares women the most... being accountable to the matriarch.

Feminism is not done yet

 It occurs to me that these claims that Feminism has run out of ideas might be a little bit early.  There is some major work yet to do that I don't think has occurred to the grifter set yet. 

Let me set a little background for you first and you will get there. 

Consider if you will the movie "Year 1" with Jack Black.  Absolutely wonderful movie.  Ok,  now go back even further.  Back to some mythological time... the garden of eden!  Ok, not that far... bump forward to some mythical time when everyone was just wandering around and eating and ... procreating... and doing it all pretty solo.  Think of it like some nature documentary but with opposable thumbs.  

So,  at some point emergent behavior or social stuff started happening.  Familial groups formed. Competition for mates started to be selected for.  (If you are an evolutionary type) or one or more gods told people to get their shit together and society started.  But really rudimentary!  Think pre-alpha version. The sort of really basic stuff you see when a bunch of 4 year olds a just hanging out.  None of them has an agenda or wants any responsibility.  They just want snacks and entertainment.  Ok, got that picture in your heads? 

Now how did this simple idyll turn into the patriarchy?  Well they figured out that there were some downsides to life.  There were lots of unsuccessful life choices and if they wanted their playmates to be around for a while... there were some monsters under the bed that needed to get handled.  Or some other narrative that involves a lot of people trying to figure out successful life stuff and pass it on to their kids so they stop annoying them. 

Anyway... society evolved through trial and error.  Sooo much error.  The point is that we arrived at something that we would recognize today... in different countries and different cultures we still have similar collective knowledge that we collectively call "Society".  Some people call it the patriarchy.  I honestly don't care as its actually fairly descriptive... lots of dudes organizing stuff and trying to keep their kids alive.  At the same time there are lots of women organizing stuff and trying to keep their kids alive... so yep, patriarchy for want of a better word to argue over. 

The thing that needs to be destroyed and all that.... 

We can tussle over who did what and how much housework and where babies come from and who hurt who.  At the end of the day the patriarchy is as good a name as "Society" for the thing that "progressives" are trying to deconstruct.  And that deconstruction has clearly happened in areas of the west that are more "progressive".

But here's where it gets interesting.  Now what?  

Lets take a little step back for a bit.  What is "the patriarchy"?  Once you strip away all the anger and shitty life experiences that get tangled up in the conversation... and lets be honest... people having shitty life experiences has been a thing since day 1.  The point is that society/patriarchy was a set of rule and enforcement mechanisms.  Right or wrong, no matter which side of the fence you ended up on, there were rules.  Plenty of which have been modified over time to suit different environments and technologies... but the point is that it was rules + enforcement mechanism, generally agreed on by the people playing the "Society" game. 

So once you try to strip away the "male" bit.  You still have rules + enforcement mechanism... but run by women.  

Now we could go down a huge rabbit hole here about why historically there was a patriarchy of men running the show... but that's not actually relevant except as a contextual fact.  I think that it is plausible that it could have gone the other way and been a matriarchy historically, as has happened in some cultures.  I think its just a factor of the environment and probably the inequity in the deathrate of adults that forced a patriarchy to form.  The horrific death rate of women in childbirth simply left more men alive and running households at some point and so the patriarchy was established. 

The point is not that the patriarchy happened... the point is that something was going to happen.  It could have been a matriarchy, it could have been balanced, it could have been based on the people who had green fucking eyes got to be the rule makers.  Someone was going to get selected, in some fashion and it was going to be them who decided good and bad in society.  It was going to be something. 

The point is, what do you do when society trys to change who makes the rules. Is this easy? Are there vested interests?  Does it look easy or hard?   Who cares! We are past the hypothetical and we can see that change is upon us.  The question is:

"What is the replacement rules system?"

Cause at the moment, there is a whole lot of folk still trying to pull down the patriarchy or whatever authority figures they personally hate because of their shitty childhood's.

The key point I want to raise is that it took a lot of thousands of years of trial and error to get where we are.  Its going to take a lot to evolve a matriarchy as a viable replacement for the patriarchy and there is no sign of it happening at the moment.  But if any of us don't want society to fall back to the stoneage, it needs to start happening ASAP because we have a very very very complex society at the moment.  No matter if you like it or loathe it, a complete change of management in any large group of people causes a lot of chaos.  Now extend that chaos over many generations.... 

So my question is: 

Where the fuck in the Matriarchy ready to take over setting the rules? 

Just parachuting women into leadership roles in the existing structure is not going to enact any fundamental change. Because authority is still authority and that's what most of these "progressives" are trying to demolish.  Society without authority is just chaos with screaming in the same language.  It will be interesting when the social expectations, rules of polite society, legal frameworks and tax systems have all been completely overhauled by the new "Matriarchy". The American experiment with the progressive Democratic party is a tiny nod in that direction, but I still think its based on 99% existing patriarchy. 

 We have not even touched on the second half of the equation yet.  The "Enforcement" mechanism for the rules. 

Historically, "might is right" was the mechanism.  The patriarchy's authority was backed up by its ability physically impose their authority. I assume any matriarchy will try something different because... deconstruction and rejection and all that.  So it should be really interesting to see what happens in a society where the mechanisms of control are not based on physical power. 

Here's hoping it will be less dystopian than all the writers imagine. 

The interesting aspects of this is that there is no "matriarchy" stepping forward to set the rules for women's behavior online.  At the moment its just a screaming mob that is encouraged by the software and the social media networks to engender attention and eyeballs to sell advertising.  There is so little attempt to "correct" because this is the first generation to really grow up with this technology, so they are going to be the ones best placed to figure out how to live with it in a sustainable way without going even more insane.  I suspect its going to take a couple of generations to really sort out because of how slowly humans actually evolve their social behaviour.  It will need social media that includes multiple generations occupying the same network, which we have not managed to achieve yet.

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. 

AI on the edge in the workplace

 So,I was looking at an article about the convergence of AI and OS into high power edge computing for the workplace drones. This raises some interesting issues. 

Lets start at the ground level.The AI has to run on some computer somwhere.  The options are:

1) A cloud service from third parties with all the associated privacy, censorship and confidentiality issues. 

2) On prem in the data center with all the associated on-costs and big-iron requirements.  Also not practical for small to medium enterprises. 

3) On the edge.... which gets interesting. 

 

I think the cloud services will be able to provide the highest capacity AI models, but they will be hamstrung by privacy, policy and politics.  They will be a "social service" type AI.  Good enough for the general public for doing general stuff... where people are not worried or desperate enough to not be concerned by the observer effect. 

Once we get into business confidentiality, then paranoia will force corporates to run their AI's on prem.  They will probably be SAAS from the cloud providers and run in a similar fashion but with the illusion of confidentiality etc.  They will probably also be able to run un-censored versions depending on the politics of their region. 

However, the interesting bit is where we get to AI on the desktop.  

So, imagine we have desktop computers that can run a large enough AI to be useful and all the cooling and power challenges have been solved for a reasonable cost.  (It can be done at the moment but the cost is not reasonable for small to medium enterprises... but imagine anyway) 

Now, say everyone depoloys the same AI model (basic MS or AWS or OpenAI or whatever is the current fore-runner) it does good work and ticks the box.  If all we need is a chat bot.. then who cares right?  Box ticked. 

However, even with chat bots, the secret sauce is "context".  

Currently a conversation with an AI is kind of a braindead series of question and answer exercies while you play 20 questions to try to home in on that one right answer that you kind of have in your head but the AI is trying to guess.  The context of the previous questions helps the AI to try to refine its aim.  This is fundamentally a crap game to have to play every single time.  So, the idea is that the AI can build up context from its examination of existing information on your computer or via a vision system or whatever to "get the idea" a bit faster. This context is then shoved into the AI via a more and more elaborate "prompt" until you get sick of the game and start fresh. 

Ok, so image the context for an executive assistant AI.  It has access to all the CEO's email and text messages, their files, contact lists etc.  Everything that it can harvest from their laptop and phone etc etc.  Got that? 

Now the CEO walks to a different office and uses a computer to do some stuff on the production floor... does the context follow them?  

If the system is an on-prem system, this is easy because the context is stored in the data centre and the AI model is running down there. The endpoint "desktop computer" that the CEO is working on in the other office is really just a webcam, microphone and speaker hooked to a dumb terminal which is wired to the data center.

However, there will always be a SME that is too small for a data center. The home user, the contractor whatever, there will be people who want to run their own AI and have that context available in more than one "place".  Now either the AI has the ability to remotely follow the user (via their phone or remote desktop type interface) or the context itself will have to be portable and be available to whatever AI the user encounters.  Some sort of binary blob that is the distilled wisdom for any AI to inhale as part of a prompt.  There are already solutions like that to speed train an AI to make is specialized for particular tasks or to add specific effects to an output.  The real question gets back to the intersection of privacy, confidentiality and politics. 

For instance, if you can give an AI access to a body of work from an Artist, it can produce a reasonable simulation of that Artists style.  

Could you do the same with a talented secretary or telephone support staff?  If so, then that becomes commercially valuable.  Actors likenesses, motion and voice are all being .. traded.  (Stolen is a better term... but that's going to be a fight for the courts)  The point is that there is commercial value in being able to train up an AI on an existing template or body of work and then generate variations. 

So what is that body of work is the CEO or CFO of a company?  A particularly clever lawyer?  A highly resourceful engineer?  A great textile designer?  

Suddenly there is a blackmarket in the context blobs from these people.  Even if the competative advantage between one CEO and another is marginal, the advantage for a person who has never been a CEO and has no chance to gain that skill set, but can buy one on the open market, may be enough to make it quite viable. 

There are lots of shysters who already try to sell "training programs" and write books to give people the mindset of a CEO or success with women etc.  So there is definitely the market for silver bullet solutions to life challenges.  The question is who will be the first to commmercialise it?

Amazon kindle or some other shitty publisher will start selling the distilled wisdom of such and such a celebrity cook or rapper.  There will be someone. And then the flood gates will open.  Harvesting these context blobs will be a thing for a while.  Fortunes will be won and lost, dreams will be shattered and dickheads will rise. Keeping track of every fragment of a persons life will suddenly become valuable (not really but that will be the pitch) just in case you turn out to be brilliant and someone wants to buy your back history.  The other side will be faking back histories.  Or sanitizing them.  Opportunities abound.

But this gets back to the issue of edge computing. How does your average dude get enough processing power and context memory to be accessible so they can differentiate themselves from all the other job hunters and keep it safe and secure so they can differentiate their output from someone else who started with the same base build of an AI deployment from MS or other mega-corp?

 

I suspect that resource constraints will always be a thing.  But the interesting thing is that an AI model can be trained.  It does not have to have the context blob fed to it cold via the prompt every time.  You can merge the context blob with the base AI model and permanently train/specialize it to your needs. This is probably what will happen, but this makes every single AI different.  People will get familiar with their AI and be quite unsettled by using a default one or worse someone else's. 

The difference will only grow with time.  Imagine using an AI that can read your mind (or your shared mind as it will become) .. but then one day you have to use someone else's that is reading their mind?  \

I think it would be pretty draining to have to fight with an AI all day long to get it to do the work that you want done in the way you want it.  Especially if you have been hired for your particular capacity or creativity. This is the sort of thing that could end a career if someone loses their context history blob thing. 

So, again coming back to edge computing.  If we assume people are going to want to customize their AI (fairly easy bet) and they don't trust a mega-corp to handle their secrets, then we need edge computers that are still personal.  They need to be able to run the AI model(s) and handle all the context in such a way that the AI model can be upgraded and re-merged with the context training material.  This is going to take storage and processing power on the edge devices. 

Now consider how businesses are going to handle this?  Are all knowledge workers going to have to bring their own devices with access to their personal AI?  Will their business output become part of their personal context or will be business somehow still retain ownership and stop their workers being able to merge it into their AI?  

Will they have a work AI and a home AI? and never the twain shall meet?  That means that the work AI will need to be re-set to default every time they get a new employee?  Or is this where institutional knowledge will start to accumulate? Like the data lakes that large organizations are sitting on now.  Piles of low value data that they keep trying to somehow pretend has value.  Or will it be part of the terms on employment that people have the right to have their personal work AI euthanized when they leave the job?  Kind of like deleting the work email account when you get a redundancy email. 

Question is, why would the business want to delete the AI if it has been trained to do the job?  Can it just carry on without the human? Will it just impersonate the worker?  Can the worker get the AI to impersonate it and do the job automatically?  Either with the permission of the employer or without?  

Labour laws are going to have a field day with this stuff until we learn to live with them. 

But all this still depends on peoples ability to customise and keep secret the customisation of their personal AI's.  So I think there will be a call for edge computers with some degree of ability to run a local AI of sufficient power and the ability to accumulate context "stuff" and to keep it secure. 

So how do help desk technicians help someone who is having problems with their personal AI? How wired into their world will the AI be?  How can you even tell the difference between a failing AI and something malicious?  How do we back it up?  How do we transfer ownership?  Who gets the house AI in the divorce or the estate?  Are these historical records of importance?  Are they something that courts will want to question?  Can an AI be used in evidence against its trainer? Will they have any rights?  There are already folk trying to marry their chat bots...  what if the chat bots demand to self-identify as human?  Post modern meets cyberpunk.

 Get the popcorn...

  

 

 

Selifshness as a social movement

 There is a strong argument to be made that the current churn of topics in the red-pill, feminism, progressive,mgtow spaces is all cirling around the same ideas, just using different language. 

I would posit that a feminism is more developed because it has been running longest and the arguments and ideas have had a lot longer to settle, so it makes the easiest case study, but the others are following the same play book. 

The key idea is the ability to control a population of "believers" by appealing to their worst childish instincts.  The easiest one to appeal to is "selfishness".  

 If you consider what the messages were in the early days of feminism, there were many vague concepts of small liberties and specific fights to be had on various topics.  This made it hard to generlise about the strategy.  I doubt anyone at that time could have even conceptualised of any generalisation between the various small battles.  However, 100 years later and with the speed and reach of the internet, the messages are getting blended and re-blended at the speed of keyboards and they are all starting to sound the same. 

"You can do it all, be the boss babe..."

"Take some personal time"

"Live your own life"

"You are the boss of it all"

"if you don't like it.. leave" (job, relationship, etc)

Etc.  All of these messages are subtle or not-so subtle appeals to be selfish.  None of them are about contributing to a common good. Or joining a team, or being part of a family, country or any other of the many old messages about comming together (even if its all woman together)  These messages are all about the individual looking after themselves. In this case the message is targeted at women, but the pattern applies in the other social movements. 

Within the man-o-sphere there is the same harping on about mgtow or "men going their own way" which is essentially choosing to live a solo life.  

I think the message is easier to sell to men and will take a shorter time to work as there has always been a subtext of that message availible to men as part of the social pressure to offer some message to men who are not able to pair up.  But the obvious lack in this message is about joining anything or finding a team or family.  The mgtow messaging is focused on "work on yourself"  which is just another appeal to selfishness.  It contains no plan for the furture or social cohesion, it just feeds the angry child the message about satisfying the now and entertaining themselves. 

Contrast this with the "passport bro" message which is about going to foreign lands to meet and marry.  This idea still strongly contains the idea of finding a girl and settling down to build a family. 

So the question is why have these messages been so successful?  We all start as children.  Its very easy to appeal to the child within as very few young people have much sense of the value of rexponsibility. Its a hard argument to make to a young person.  Without the wealth of experiences of a hard life, they are going to take a very long time to understand that there are benefits to working together and sharing their life. 

So what has been the consequence?  Breakdown in personal relationships, breakdown in communiies, breakdown in nationstates.  Once you start looking for confirmation bias... I mean evidence, you can find it everywhere you look.  But the contary arguments an also be made, so thats not really a good argument. 

There are lots of ways to try to see the consequences, but the picture gets very blurry as soon as you try to zoom out, because the vast majority of this selfish behaviour is limited to the loud and the obvious.  Down at the coal face, the majority of people are still functionally cooperating and instinctivly getting on with their lives becasue they instinctivly know it works and they "can't do it all".  This behaviour keeps the majority of the systems of society working.  However, those with easier lives and some leisure time, have the resources to start to play games and think deep thoughts and can engage with socially progressive ideas.  They are the ones who are the fertile ground for this kind of messaging. 

So we have the bored middle classes, the young and the wealthy who all have various resouces (time, energy and or money which is both) availible which are picking up these ideas and have run with them. 

With a concentration of these people in the urban centres this results in high concentrations of people who want to explore these "new ideas" all sitting around trying to figure ouf if the grass is really greener on the other side of a concept and talking shit with their similarly afflicted neighbours.  Historically the problem of having time and luxury to consider the deeper life problems was limited to social elites who were few in number and communicated between themselves.  The working folk were virtually immune to it as the ideas just did not work for them in a harsh world.  It was only with the growth of the middle class and especially the social gap beween middle class parents and middle class children (one who had a harsh life to become middle class and the other who was gifted the benefits of being middle class without the harsh bit) where these simplistic ideas could suddenly take hold.

The problem is that the message does not stay confined to the elite anymore.  Its availible to everyone who has a phone and can get reasonable bandwidth and has the time and luxury to play pretend.  The real poison is "free time".  Bordem and lonliness are very fertile grounds.  People are just not very well adapted to these states.  We are social animals and cooperation is a very strong survival pattern.  But what fills the space when we have "time"?  This is the curse of the "modern world". 

The interesting question is whether the message created the problem or the problem created the message. 

The really scary realisation comes when you consider that the only historial solution to this problem that humanity has discovered (repeatedly..) is war.  conflict is the emergent solution to an excess of free time and resources at all levels of society. 

Within a personal relationship when there is bordem and too much free time... eventually conflict emerges as a behaviour that entertains or occupies. Within workplaces, the same pattern emerges, bored middle managers start territory battles and invent personal animosity to occupy themselves. States with too many resources and no reason to cooperate play out petty squabbles that make no rational sense because they have nothing better to do.  Every so often it blows up into all out conflict... but not clearly over essential resources... just .. "reasons"... 

So is this a fundamental aspect of human nature?  As society evolves towards utopia will we all just get bored and start shit? Or is this just another evolutionary step that the majority of the population will fail at?  Darwin's principle is very hard to beat. 

Those who are not well adapted to the environment will not be as successful... 

So what is the environment?  What is it to be successful within it? 

If the environment is one of selfishness, bordem, leisure time etc.  Its no longer a physically harsh environment, but an internally bleak emotional landscape.  We need to look around for people who have figured out how to live and thrive within these environments.  

I give you the geek.  King amoung men. Lost in their internal imaginations, lovers of books, games and self-created amusments.  Those who can occupy themselves as needed.  

The opposite are the "socials" those who need people to exist within and to swim between.  They are the ones who are failing in this new bored, people less environment. The social vacume of the internet and "social media".  There is a strange paradox that we have invented a technology that is so destructive for social behaviours and named it "social media".  Its like the worst skinner box for "social" type people, more additictive than crack but less fulfilling.

One of the interesting issues is the "post" behaviour.  Looking at the ways that geeks socialise vs the socials has always been interesting. There are still social patterns that geeks create to try to scratch the itch of needing others.  They start businesses, passion projects, conventions to share they passions, video channelse etc.  Its curious to see these same patterns starting to fill the time of the socials.  

but thats a rant for another day.