an exoteric doctrine out front and an esotetric doctrine once you are committed.

What you are describing here is the definition of occultism. There’s different lessons for the “inner door” students, and getting there requires buy-in to the group’s differentiating ideas. The Xenu story in Scientology’s OT3 is a galvanizing popular example, the Catholic practice of adolescent confirmation is a more mainstream example that we’re more likely to have encountered in daily life. To summarize my spiel above with this context, I would say that Chapman’s problem is he thought he could replace the harmful occultisms coming to predominate in Silicon Valley and associated spaces with a kinder, gentler, more scientifically informed occultism. It ain’t worked yet, you gotta give up the whole idea of progressing to a “higher level” or “deeper truth.”

Kurz “We’re Sorry for Summarizing a Pop-Sci Book” Gesagt

Geshundheit

read: “our product development is a black hole of cost, and our big investors are breathing down our necks to grab this cash while it’s there”

I was somewhat influenced by Chapman myself, so naturally I find it hard to call his efforts a complete smokescreen. I think it’s more a matter of the subculture he’s addressing simply being too damned insular and full of itself. A little less than a decade ago, he seemed like one of the few people trying to help the extremely online think past Yuddite rationalism, EA longtermism, and the incipient weirdo cryptocurrency cults that were springing up. He has expressed being somewhat baffled and bemused by “TPOT,” such as it was, but I think it’s fair to say that his writings were one very important nucleus around which the TPOT social graph coalesced. That said, my impression of TPOT quickly became, and has since always been, that it’s mainly a bunch of people with advanced degrees and/or technical training and experience who are resentful that all that hasn’t given them greater status and influence. Hence the commitment to pseudonymy among many of the bigger personalities; that ship may still come in one of these days. Alex Karp is what TPOT people would become if they had the power they thought they deserved. Thus, up until the current rules-free era, the Bay Area moneymen have been careful to fund very very few of these guys, because they risk bringing the whole edifice down with their severe personal instability.

The “Geeks, Mops, Sociopaths” article is what’s most commonly passed around, but the foundational material of Chapman’s project is this developmental psychologist Robert Kegan: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence Kegan builds on theories of childhood psychological development from people like Jean Piaget*, and seeks to extend them into adulthood. As Chapman says:

Most Western adults reach stage 3—the ethics of empathy—during adolescence. However, one needs to be at stage 4—the ethics of systems—to fully meet the demands of modern society. Unfortunately, getting to stage 4 is difficult, and only a minority of Westerners ever do. Kegan suggested that it’s critically important for our society to find ways to support the transition from stage 3 to 4—and I agree.

Stage 3 in this model finds one conceiving of one’s identity relative to communal relationships such as family, cohort, and local community, while stage 4 has one conceiving of oneself relative to rationally-designed systems of laws and processes, i.e. a modern professional organization. Stage 5 is something that both Kegan and Chapman seem to be conjecturing about and actively seeking, rather than living or cultivating in others. Its ideal is for one to be able to hold the rules of various social systems and modes of interpersonal relation as objects separate from the self, rather than something in which one is irretrievably subjectively embedded, and to be able to gracefully transition between these systems as a given situation demands. Chapman’s Meaningness project is all about building a framework for people to transition from a stage 4 personality to a stage 5 personality, even though the stage 5 personality is as yet loosely defined.

On Chapman’s suggestion, I read Kegan’s “The Evolving Self,” and at the time it did in fact help me make sense of people I knew who had gone to prestigious schools and attained advanced degrees, but nonetheless allowed themselves to be heavily influenced by woo and toxic spiritualism. But herein lies the pebble under the mattress of Chapman’s program: I was able to understand and deplore these people as stuck in a “less developed” “stage 3” personality and that they simply hadn’t made the most of the opportunities they had with the “stage 4-scaffolding” institutions they had been associated with. But you see, I had the key now, I was able to understand myself as a “stage 4” personality who wanted to make sense of the world via necessarily flawed rational systems, and I’m going to transcend beyond that any day now!

Better understanding of myself came later; suffice it to say that I’ve gotten more out of the material on resentment and personal accountability in 12-step programs than I have from Chapman and Kegan. The last fucking thing I, or any of these other weirdos, needed was another progressive framework for personal development. The in-built ability to hold oneself up as more advanced or more capable is a fatal flaw for the people Chapman was trying to reach, who already had plenty of excuses to see themselves as superior. Chapman’s biggest vulnerability is that he insists on practicing empathy for people who are at best selectively empathetic, and at worst have abandoned empathy entirely. If he wants to hold onto that as a core spiritual commitment, fine, but it’s been long enough now to reflect that his project so far has basically been a failure. I don’t think he’s lived in the Bay Area for a while now, so I have to imagine his direct interaction with a lot of the big-name “stage 4” personalities he was implicitly criticizing has been limited, but it’s pretty plain to see that there has been no progress towards spiritually reforming the scene that he and they both influence.

*Jean Piaget was really influential on a lot of the early computer-interaction thinkers like Alan Kay and the Macintosh design team, so having that link is another big “in” for savvier Silicon Valley types.

Is Pulse the Jony Ive device thing? I had half a suspicion that will never come to market anyway.

Based on my cursory perusal of CCRU lore, it all seems to boil down to amphetamine-induced mania and hallucinations

So, yeah, probably

ghosTTy is the username of a schizoposter on Something Awful who only shows up to post bitcoin price charts and get mocked into oblivion. I wonder if there’s any connection?

This seems like a bit of a desperation pivot while the bubble money is still flowing. I’ve heard they struggled a bit with shipping PCIE CXL memory that’s capable of memory sharing between rackmount nodes, so they’re probably taking everything from the consumer channel and cramming it into the enterprise channel in a bid to be the low-cost/high-volume provider. I would expect them to eventually come limping back into the consumer market to much marketing fanfare, alongside trying to set a higher price floor there, similar to Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican pizza.

I’ll tell you what, it is fantastic to be clean and sober today

Also credulously reiterating Trump’s stupid “Department of War” rebrand… makes me think his writing is narrowly targeted at a certain group

Reeks to me of a mad dash for all-important “exit” on the part of the VC firms who invested. Especially as public-market IPOs have become so rare compared to M&A deals or SPAC bullshit.

obligatory: lmao ro khanna

Awkwardly reimplementing formal logic through obtuse fan fiction seems to be a core faith practice of these folks, so I think you’re onto something here

I wanted to highlight this post from our own @self: https://mas.to/@zzt/115545758401562713

the feeling of launching an unreal tournament 2004 server by telling ucc-bin, the unrealscript compilation environment that knows itself as UnrealOS, to evaluate the editable scripts that made up the core of unreal tournament, its rich web admin interface, and the ecosystem of tools and facilities that make it nicer to host than quake, and remembering that unrealscript and self-hosted servers are both long dead and all this tech is used to make kids gamble in fortnite now

betrayal, that’s it

I hardly ever ran a server, as during the era I lived out in the country and could only get barely-capable rural wireless broadband, but it is galling what Epic threw away, especially now that they’ve memory-holed UT2K3/2K4 off of storefronts like GOG. It was perhaps the first commercial game I remember having a completely seamless cross-platform experience with, including Linux. As long as I had my CD key and the data files handy, it didn’t matter what OS I was installing on, just download the installer and go. I remember provisioning entire LAN parties and having a blast (and then reusing the CD key didn’t matter because we were partying out in the country with no chance of a good online experience anyway). Glad I was able to snag it from GOG before delisting, because I don’t know what happen to my original Mac DVD.

There’s maybe still a concise social history to be written of how all this crap congealed together. I’m particularly interested in the overlap between the AI doomers, the ancap libertarian weirdos who wanted to nail down their economics as capital-S Science™, and even the online poker grinders of the 2000s who aspired to become statistical-thinking robots. I hesitate to say any of this is undocumented, because the reams of posts are still out there, but a Michael Lewis-style pop history of it all would be a hoot. I understand Elizabeth Sandifer has it all well-covered from the ideological angle, and Adam Becker’s new book looks good too, but having something covering it from the forum/feed-poster angle might end up being the epitaph the movement deserves.

I would say that the in-group jargon is more of a retention tactic than an attraction tactic, although it can become that for people who are desperately looking for an ordered view of the world. Certainly I’ve seen it a lot in recovering Scientologists, expressing how that edifice of jargon, colloquialisms, and redefined words shaped their worldview and how they related to other people. In this case here, if you’ve been nodding along for a while and want to continue to be one of the cool guys, how could you not glomarize? Peek coolly out from beneath your fedora and neither confirm nor deny?

I will agree that the ratsphere has softer boundaries and is not particularly competently managed as a cult. As you allude to, too, there isn’t a clear induction ritual or psychological turning point, just a mass of material that you’re supposed to absorb and internalize over a necessarily lengthy stretch of time. Hence the most clearly identifiable cults are splinter groups.

I understand where he probably got the neologism “glomarize” from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer) but his willingness to beat you in the face with it until you accept it is a big part of what makes his writing style so offputting. And, uh, this level of enthusiasm for specialized jargon continues to fail to overcome the cult allegations.

Two cases that are a bit less clear, but still show some structural similarities: Peter Thiel, Sam Altman.

A bit less clear because these two have a bit more money to throw around, and damn would it be good if they started throwing some in our direction again

Probably ought to apply real bleach should you discover one languishing nonfunctionally in the back of a Goodwill a couple years from now - the form factor invites some unsanitary possibilities (as the below comment has already pointed out)

“Agentic” is meant to seem sci-fi, but I can’t help but think it’s terminal business-speak. It’s the clearest statement yet of the attempted redesign of the computer from a personal device to a distinct entity separate from oneself. One is no longer a user or administrator, one is instead passively waiting for “agents” to complete a task on one’s behalf. This model is imposed from the top down, to be the strongest reinforcement yet of the all-important moat around the big vendors’ cloud businesses. Once you’re in deep with “agents,” your workflows will probably be so hopelessly tangled, vendor-specific, and non-debuggable/non-reimplementable that migrating them to another vendor would be a nightmare task orders of magnitude beyond any database or CRM migration. If your workflows even get any work done anymore at all.