Crash Early, Crash Often (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 3)

by Venkatesh G. Rao

After a decade of Ribbonfarm, and with Venkatesh Rao an auspicious 42, this collection of essays has Rao responding to four decades of culture having been done to him by turning around to do culture at others. Guided throughout by the twin saints James Carse (Finite and Infinite Games) and Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Rao takes his two minutes on life's stage to speak weirdness to truth, communicating to the few listeners still in his light cone before the expanding universe makes contact impossible.

Human life is like walking into a movie halfway through, and having to walk out again two minutes later. You’ll have no idea what’s going on when you walk in. And chances are, just as you begin to get a clue, you’ll be kicked out. So unless you are lucky enough to walk in during a scene that is satisfying without any longer narrative context (think sex or violence), your ability to derive satisfaction from your two-minute glimpse will depend partly on your ability to construct meaning out of it.

To pretend to be immortal is to approach your limited two-minute glimpse of the movie as though you’ve been watching all along, and as though you might stick around to see how it all ends. You will have to manufacture unverifiable memories and unfalsifiable foreshadowings. You will have to devote some of your limited time whispering to your neighbors, and perhaps surreptitiously looking up reviews with spoilers on your cellphone. But at least you’ll walk out with a satisfying story, even if not the story. So long as you walk away feeling like you’ve just enjoyed an entire movie, it doesn’t matter. To do this at the level of an entire life is to spend much of your time having one-way conversations with the dead and the unborn, through books read and written. You inhabit a world of ghosts while walking among the living.

There is a key distinction between pretend and literal immortality seekers. The former want to experience more in order to extract more meaning, which means vicarious, non-participatory experience is valuable on its own. Direct experience is just a bonus, except where it is necessary for extracting any meaning they decide is essential. The latter want to experience more because being alive itself is a valuable state to them. They prefer being alive to being dead, and being young to being old. They want to live a full, direct and pleasurable life rather than a ghostly, indirect and meaningful one. Vicarious experience is at best a means to an end for them. Ultimately, they want to personally experience all that life has to offer. Becoming a pretend-immortal ghost, living a life that is vicarious to any significant degree, is unbearable to them.

An appetite for meaning is satiated when patterns start to repeat themselves with no stimulating variations requiring explanation. This is why it is easy to lose interest in a murder mystery (particularly poorly written ones that are nothing more than logic puzzles) if you peek ahead.

Most of us consume our favorite works of comforting junk-food fiction multiple times. I suspect I’ll do at least one re-read of Lord of the Rings in my 70s, if I live that long. But we typically re-consume non-fiction only enough times to understand it as deeply as as we care to.

Life for a vampire is about viewing life as a play rather than a movie, and making your way to the stage within those two minutes and scoring at least a bit part for 20 seconds. If that means you miss much of the on-stage action during your two minutes, so be it.

What really drives home the visceral sense of the transience of all meaning is the realization, around forty, that not only is nobody going to supply you with comforting permanences anymore, but that you have to begin to repay a debt you did not realize you had incurred. You have to create meaning games for others to play. There are not many other jobs for the 40-to-Ω crowd.

Culture is the necessary art of perpetuating the disturbing rumor that reality is meaningful. That beneath the pain and the pleasure, the cruelty and the compassion, the estranging and the connecting, the breaking and the making, the ugliness and the beauty, the losing and the winning, the dying and the living, there is Something More.™

For example, an investor-agent that perpetuates your investment philosophy after you are dead. In this view, the design of the after-life agent is really the main act, with the life being the startup phase, devoted to perfecting a highly survivable investment philosophy before death-time. This is like the sea squirt: a creature that swims around when young until it finds a good rock to anchor itself to, and then eats its own brain, turning into something more like a plant in a personalized heaven.

The structure of society does not enforce imitation and conformity. The human fear of self-actualization necessitates structures that enable imitation and conformity. There would be riots demanding such structures if they didn’t exist. No government in history has ever had to deal with the problem of too many of its citizens wanting to live so imaginatively that institutions based on conformity and imitation become unsustainable. If anything, the problem has always been the reverse one: getting enough of the population to act with enough imagination to keep the institutions alive.

The rare twenty-somethings who accidentally respond to the true self-actualization imperative when it is just a pinprick sign up for a ride that either puts a dent in the universe or kills them, whether or not they are documenting their journeys on Medium. But by the time you hit your mid-thirties, the self-actualization imperative turns into an urgent and unavoidable concern, where continued neglect can be fatal. If current efforts to extend the average human lifespan to beyond a century succeed, I suspect failure-to-self-actualize will become the leading cause of death (or madness) in the developed world.

I have this rather offensive hypothesis that what separates a healthy sociopath from the unhealthy kind is extroversion. An unimaginative sociopath extrovert is almost certain to develop a taste for sadism if he or she rises high enough in the hierarchy, a toxic kind of “getting energized by interaction with others.”

If you top out at esteem, and lack the imagination to move on to self-actualization, you’re at the top of a zero-sum esteem game where the best outcome for the rest of your life is locking onto a pattern of insulting others.

This describes every white guy under age 40 that I've met.

Imagination is not the same as creativity. If it were, artists would not commit suicide as often as they do. Creative expression that lacks imagination is often the result of shadowyak shaving. A dead giveaway is when the primary consumer of a kind of creative output is other creators of similar kinds of output (often true of small, artistic subcultures or writers of Medium self-actualization posts). The creativity of the shadow acts as a sort of internal terrorist insurrection against the tyranny of the mask. It is never strong enough to defeat the mask, or open enough to integrate it, but is strong enough to prevent the mask from winning. This makes shadow creativity no more than a controlled, self-limiting and aestheticized version of the homeless man’s rant on the street corner. It serves to create a unique identity for the speaker and signal that the mask is not dominant, but it does not actually have much effect beyond that. The reason such creativity only attracts similar creators is that the shadows of similar people are similar, and tend to project onto shared external realities. The result is shared meaning and patterns of mutual esteem that exclude those who are dissimilar. Such creativity does not put a dent in the universe. At best it puts a dent in your bank account.

Without imagination, all you can do is creatively shave the shadowyak until the angst becomes unbearable. Then you can dispense with the creative control and aestheticization and simply go rant on the streets (you’ll make about the same amount of money both ways, in the median case). With imagination though, you can play a new game.

Unlike creativity, imagination is an appreciative skill with an external locus, rather than an instrumental capacity with an internal locus. To notice a pattern in current events that could serve as a premise for a movie is imagination. To be able to develop that premise into an actual screenplay with compelling characters, fresh dialog and an engrossing plot is creativity. You feed creativity by making things. You feed imagination by being curious about things beyond your own shadow.

What is created during self-actualization is free in a sense: it is not owned by the creator’s shadow or identified with it. Others have the ability to read or project their own, highly dissimilar meanings into it. That ultimately is the sine qua non of self-actualization: the creation of a net return on invested freedom, or what is usually called generativity. Everything else, good or bad, is an accidental side effect.

Unlike creative projection, the process operates through the mask instead of sneaking past it, and the new external realities are recognizable as being authored by the integrated part of the self, but not exclusively claimed by it. Such a surprising, new and free reality is a dent in the universe. An example is a new technological artifact that might be put to wildly different uses by a kid in Mongolia and an executive in New York, with very different shadows.

The second line, the generativity constraint, is crucial. You must create more freedom than you consume, either during the creation or after. If only you find relief in the creation, it is projection. If only people very similar to you find relief in the creation, it is still projection. If surprising people find surprising sorts of meaning in the creation, it is self-actualization.

If you do not create enough returns from the freedom you possess, you lose it. The unimaginative and their surplus freedom are soon parted. This process is made socially visible by the mask (one of its many necessary functions that you dispense with at your peril if you really decide to bypass it to express the “real you”).

The impressionist mode can be fatal if the external environment is too chaotic for the daemon to process — this is why we seek out familiarity and beauty when the daemon is weak. If we fail to take such restorative actions, the mask deadens and the light starts to visibly go out behind the eyes. That is one kind of death of generativity. The expressionist mode operates in exactly the reverse way. It seeks to create unfamiliar new beauty. When the outflow of imaginative creativity is not strong enough to conquer the chaos in the environment with a sufficiently large dent, it backslides into projective authoritarianism. If we fail to rein in ambition when such overreach happens, the mask of authority turns cruel, demanding and grasping. The eyes turn a cartoon-villain red. That is the other kind of death of generativity.

When outflow and inflow are in a dynamic balance, harmonizing mask and daemon continuously, in an environment with just enough surplus chaos to occupy surplus freedom and drive the process, you get sustained generativity: the process of manufacturing more freedom than you consume through the act of living. The mask comes alive and the daemon shines through. The longer you are able to do that, the bigger the dent you leave behind in the universe.

The key is to freak out early and freak out often (FEFO) in an agile way, and work towards a lifestyle that (ideally) feels like one continuously integrated and deployed mid-life crisis. There is actually good intellectual justification for approaching life this way. It’s called the Lindy effect, which says you’ll live as long again as you already have, until you don’t. Which means you’re always at mid-life. Until you’re not.

Drugs and grand narratives are inextricably linked in history. We can plausibly conjecture a precise relationship: the more incoherent the prevailing story, the stronger, and more varied, the drugs required to navigate it while the retconning is in progress. I’ve always found it odd that in the Dune science fiction series, the hyperspace navigators were the ones who lived suspended in a psychotropic “spice” melange: it is not those who can successfully navigate strange new realities who need drugs, it is everybody else.

It was not the first or last time in history the noble medical profession devoted a great deal of resources to its shadow purpose in civilization: helping societies navigate rough grand narrative shifts by appropriately medicating potentially troublesome groups. Which is all groups caught between safely fossilized rentier enclaves that can ride out tumultuous change, and chaotic frontier populations that can surf it to power and new wealth. The story of civilization is the story of the one-eyed drunk on kool-aid leading the blind, who grope their way forward in a pharmaceutical haze, while secure gods gaze down from rentier heavens, sipping their champagne.

Unless they are musicians for whom listening to a lot of music is part of their work, I am deeply suspicious of people who need a constant background of music to function. And I don’t mean here the headphones-as-social-defenses use-case. I mean people who actually like to have musical accompaniment for everything they do. It seems to me the cognitive equivalent of carrying a bag of candy with you at all times, and eating a piece every few seconds.

I also formed a “detective club” with a couple of friends. We solved no mysteries, but had a lot of fun being mysterious and meeting in secret places and writing messages in code to each other. For a while, I was inhabiting an escaped reality full of crimes requiring detection and with dangers that required ropes and knives to face at every turn. Being a kid, of course I was smart enough to realize I was just pretending. Many lose those smarts when they grow up and become blind to the self-constructed and virtual nature of the realities they inhabit.

See, the difference between leading and leadering is that leading is an extraordinarily rare event: one person getting it right for 20 seconds instead of 5 seconds. And in those 20 seconds, getting enough right, and getting it right enough, that the precious, gooey rightness can be shared with others. When some of this precious, gooey shared rightness gives an entire group a bit of an edge for a while, we call it leading. Given the default randomness of the human condition, and the extreme power of compound interest, a little bit of leading goes a long way. Many thriving corporations, for instance, live out their entire lifespans fueled by about five minutes of actual leadership.

Leadering is the art of creating a self-serving account of whatever is already happening, and inserting yourself into it in a prominent role. This requires doing things that don’t mess with success (and the baseline for success is continued survival), but allow you to take credit for it. Successful companies might have only about five minutes of actual leading in their stories, but they have hour after endless hour of leadering.

Being a “leader” in the sense of being the starling that is closest to the average direction and geometric center of the flock is so ephemeral a condition that it might get you no more than a pat on the back and fifteen minutes of fame. Lions get big paychecks and bonuses, geese get bonuses when they do play V-apex so it is smarter to pretend you’re a lion if you can and a goose if you cannot. The starling leadership narrative gets you nothing. Most of the time, misreporting the actual mix is harmless. Leadering being the junk DNA of organizational behaviors, it merely imposes a tolerable burden. Under benign and slow-changing conditions, it really doesn’t matter what the mix is and whether the CEO pretends to be a lion, first among a bunch of equal geese, or one anonymous starling among thousands. Everybody gets to enjoy a false sense of determinate control over the narrative, and some also get paid more for their more charismatic roles in the theater. But when the environment is changing, assuming the wrong ratio can be fatal. The false sense of high agency inherited from peaceful periods turns into a kind of blindness to whatever little agency does exist in chaotic, transient times. During such times, agility is worth more than a mission, and a mission is worth more than a vision.

A narrative vacuum is a condition where you don’t know how to feel about what you’re doing. It is difficult to engage in action with absent or incoherent emotional content. Our narrative capacity is what suffuses action with an emotional texture that sustains it.

According to the James Carse model, a finite game is one where the goal is to win. An infinite game is one where the objective is to continue playing.

When I was in grad school studying control theory — a field that attracts glum, pessimistic people — I used to hang out a lot with AI people, since I was using some AI methods in my work. Back then, AI people were even more glum and pessimistic than controls people, which is an achievement worthy of the Nobel prize in literature. This whole deep learning thing, which has turned AI people into cheerful optimists, happened after I left academia. Back in my day, the AI people were still stuck in what is known as GOFAI land, or “Good Old-Fashioned AI.” Instead of using psychotic deep-dreaming convolutional neural nets to kimchify overconfident Koreans, AI people back then focused on playing an academic game called “Complain about Moving Goalposts” or CAMG.

The writing down of history turned out to be a self-perpetuating activity. Anytime kids asked questions, adults would yell, “READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!” (later shortened to “BECAUSE I SAID SO”). These kids, when they grew up, tended to reproduce this behavior. This was called culture.

Then a few people figured out that if, instead of calling it all “murder,” you called some of it “honorable acts,” and if you carefully forgot some bits of history, made some stuff up to fill the holes, and called it “legends,” something very interesting happened. Assuming you did this delicate surgery correctly, the future would sometimes turn into something that caused pleasant anticipation instead of anxiety. If you figured out, in addition, the right set of people to do honorable acts to — simply for visibly existing outside your legends this time, not for pissing you off — not only could you make the future something to look forward to, you could make the present look like it was actually going there.

The poets of the early days graduated from simply recording history to make future generations miserable, to performing the delicate tactical forgetting surgeries that created legends, honorable acts, and heroes. These were the first true historians. Poets who had forgotten the original mission of spreading unhappiness about unhappiness, and had taken to phoning it in by merely recording genealogies in rhyme, generally failed to pivot to new careers as historians. They were marginalized, and have since gone on to become acutely sensitive observers of reality whom nobody listens to (a fact they find bittersweet and write poignant poems about these days).

So the result was that as they fruitlessly multiplied and spread across the earth, led by their heroes, the peoples of the world increasingly began running into each other. And they learned that others had a tendency to talk about non-interoperable legends that really kinda ruined their legends and killed their happiness buzz. Back to square one. The only solution was to start doing lots more honorable acts efficiently, at scale. This was the invention of war.

Rao is describing monotheism without recognizing it. Pity he didn't read more history.

Then history actually ended for everybody, with unceremonious, unseemly quickness. This happened in 1993, when the neutral finally prevailed over the good by gently persuading most guardians to go play video games instead of committing honorable acts, largely leaving the running of the world to traders. The transition is not yet complete, but it is mostly a done deal.

This aged poorly. (It was written 6 months before Trump's election.) Rao is of my parents' generation. He reminds me of them.

Here’s the thing though: many people who like to trot out the George Box quote, “all models are wrong, some are useful” have never truly experienced mental models going wrong. They imagine it will feel like a certain critical weight of countervailing evidence accumulating, followed by some sort of reasoned swapping out an “falsified” model for a superior one. A sort of philosophical analog to trading the null hypothesis for the alternative hypothesis in some statistician’s utopia. No, it’s a critical weight of weirdness accumulating in your mental climate, under the tumult of everyday emotional weather, followed by a crash.

What it doesn’t feel like is a rational process of in-control “changing your mind.” This is because your mental models are also your identity. I’ve never met anyone who has ever peacefully changed their mind on anything in which they have significant identity investment. All I’ve seen is people crashing and recovering, with various degrees of religious transformation.

“Gritty” procedurals and more “psychological” detective stories (often involving serial killers whose identities you know from page 1) are also often just grown-up puzzles, not real mysteries. Mysteries in the sense of weirding truly begin in the post-Christie era, though Christie herself saw it coming, in her pushing-the-envelope plots (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, and most significantly, Curtain, Poirot’s last case, which is almost a true mystery).

One reason I no longer really enjoy writing posts in the red-pill mode of The Gervais Principle is that my aesthetic sensibilities have done a 180. I no longer get a kick out of speaking truth to power in that particular way. I get more of a kick out of speaking weirdness to truth. So if you’ve been waiting for more posts in that vein, you’re probably going to disappointed.

A pity.