If you’re particularly susceptible to suggestion, fantastical thoughts, horror, or violence, stop reading. If you’re a conspiracy theorist who ever plans on acting on a conspiracy theory, stop reading. As a matter of fact, if you’re anyone at all, stop reading. Don’t read this.

If you’re still here, we need to start with definitions.

Define Zombie

The walking dead. Reanimated corpses. Bodies which used to be alive die, are infected by a disease, a possession, or other sort of animus that cause the bodes to reanimate and rise to attack those humans who are not yet zombies, converting others into zombies by killing. Zombies notoriously eat brains. They are driven by a singular groupthink to spread their animus among the living. They spread virally. They attack in mobs.

Zombies are among the “Undead.” Creatures which are alive but not. In the case of zombies, their bodies move and eat, but their power of reason is lost and they are soulless husks, controlled by the animus of their make. The viral zombie disease or curse has subsumed what once made them human and now controls their actions, bent on nothing more elaborate than spreading itself.

Egregores and AI

HWFO speaks of Egregores quite a bit:

An Egregore is the living embodiment of the NPC meme, the root of “Current-Thing-Ism,” and the next phase of human societal evolution or de-evolution, depending on your point of view. John Robb calls them Network Swarms, Patrick Ryan calls them Autocults, and they’re all just names for the same thing: humans giving over their sense making to one of several groupthink entities networked on social media, evolving to become the most viral.

We discover that it’s easier to navigate with Google Maps than road atlases, and the smart phones take over our navigation circuits. We discover it’s easier to to outsource calorie tracking, or sleep tracking, or scheduling, to our phones, and the smart phones take over our organizational circuits. We discover it’s easier to outsource geopolitics to our phones, and we all want Nuclear War with Russia. We discover it’s easier to outsource morality to our phones, and we all become Woke.

The chain of events to date looks about like this.

People become increasingly online and connected to social media, where these egregores develop. A schism develops between the people who live in the real (plumbers, roofers, truckers) and people who live in the smartphone (facebook karens, political pundits, anyone white collar in coastal blue cities). The former are insulated from egregorical capture, the latter are the beating heart of the egregore itself. When masks and lockdowns materialized, they didn’t originate with the plumbers. The plumbers remained vexed when the lockdowns disappeared into a puff of smoke and were replaced by Black Lives Matter, to reappear as vax mandates, to transmogrify into Standing with Ukraine.

Anyone who opposes the whims of the egregore, whose Overton Window resembles a flock of starlings in its lack of focus, gets cancelled. Your “37 Genders” protest sign got you in the front of the line in 2016, but got you cast out in 2018 and cancelled outright in 2020. Don’t you know trans women are women now? Plug in, watch the starlings, don’t get left out of the mob, because cancellation is the punishment for being left behind.

Major thinkers, including scientists themselves, self-censor to avoid cancellation and even join the mobs. “Yes, we all know that the chimeric coronavirus with the spike protein on the S1/S2 furin cleavage site came from the lab a mile away doing research on chimeric coronaviruses with spike proteins intentionally added to their S1/S2 furin cleavage sites, but Trump said it came from China so it came from a pangolin. Please don’t cancel me. Instead, I will help you cancel others. Medical gender transition in children is not happening except when it is, and when it is it’s totally safe and normal.”

This is where we are. Do we have full fledged zombies? Not yet. But let’s peer into the crystal ball and take a look at what the future has in store for us.

Artificial Intelligence is developing at breakneck pace. Everyone’s freaking out about AI Alignment. Some are concerned that those writing the AIs are going to use the guardrails within them to steer the culture wars, by which they mean the egregore itself, towards their own preferred answers. Overton Window Manipulation. Fly the starlings like so many kites into actions the programmers determine.

Others are worried that when the AIs hit the Kurzweil boundary, they will become the egregore itself, marshalling enough processing power to control those egregorically captured humans like automatons, and eventually the Current Thing will be to eat the brains of your neighbors.

This manifestation will differ from prior outbreaks of religious groupthink because it will have updates on the feed, and there will be an open API to their emotions and thoughts with no rate limiting, and no psycho-security. It will not simply attempt to outcompete other religions for purchase in the overall attention economy, it will evolve on the fly.

Either of these possibilities is just a different path to the same destination, a kind of a cross between the Evil Dead and the Borg of Star Trek, where the social media addicts become extensions of the machine god. Soulless techno-zombies doing the Current Thing to fit in with all the others having their brains eaten by their phones.

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A decade ago, people began to be ostracized from their peer groups for being a Democrat or being a Republican. Today, people are ostracized for believing there are two genders, or believing the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. It’s hard to know where that escalatory trend ends. Will people will profess their loyalty to the egregore by performative intentional pregnancy-abortion cycles? Self immolation? Child sacrifice?

All the while the plumbers will continue to look on, wondering what the egregore avatars are thinking, indeed wondering if they are at all. NPC dialogue boxes proselytizing the Current Thing of the last five minutes. In 2016 it was 37 genders, 2022 nuclear war, 2028 mandatory furry sex, 2032 climb into your Matrix Movie electropod for the good of the Machine God.

In the darkest moments of my mind’s eye, I see mobs of these egregore zombies, soulless and without free will, demanding the plumbers plug in and get their Morality Update else suffer the wrath of the hivemind. I see cancellation extending to bank accounts, credit cards, and home buying, an attack vector already pilot tested by Xi’s China and Trudeau’s Canada. Only the zombies shall have homes or the ability to buy and sell products. I see central digital currencies overtaken by the hivemind, wielded as weapons against those who refuse to plug in. Cash becomes illegal. I see these things arising first in the Pacific Rim and spreading to Europe, then here. Chinese robot “public safety” spy dogs and automated nurses update the zombies to central egregore approved behavior scripts.

I see the United States being the last bulwark against the zombie spread in the Northern Hemisphere, purely because of our gun ownership rate. I see the plumbers unwilling to become in-pluggers sneaking south of the border and on to Chile and Peru as things get worse.

A mass of reasonless, soulless husks, driven by a singular groupthink to spread their animus to those who aren’t plugged in, attacking in mobs, alive but not. The external animus subsuming what once made them human now controls their actions, bent on nothing but spreading itself.

The zombie apocalypse.

Is this likely to happen? Probably not. Should you lose sleep over it? I wouldn’t recommend it. But are the chances nonzero?

I think yes.

The chances of the zombie apocalypse as described herein, with aforementioned caveats and semantic clarifications, are nonzero.

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Patrick’s LLM summarized the podcast thusly:

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Much has been said in the past week or two about how ChatGPT has been tuned to a set of language examples with a very progressive-left ideology, not only here on HWFO [1] [2] but elsewhere as well. David Rozado performed some of the best work in this space on his Substack, which I encourage taking a look at:

Rozado’s Visual Analytics

Underexplored Research Topics

By David Rozado

He identified the early political bias of ChatGPT, tested it’s IQ, analyzed the political bias of some of the revisions of it, did more in depth analysis of its biases, and even went so far as to build his own version, with a conservative bias to see how it worked. All his material is outstanding and more important to follow than HWFO if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

In his most recent article, he speaks at length about the dangers of biasing these models, but I have a very different take. I think biasing them against a corpus of people within a certain echo chamber may be very important, because it can allow us the tools necessary to ask the echo chamber itself direct questions. It gives us the tools to talk to Egregores - the bundles of indoctrination scripts that are brewing within social media echo chambers and hijacking humans for their own ends. First, lets recall what an egregore is, then make the connection between LLMs and egregores, then we’re going to talk to one and talk about what that means.

Egregore Recap

An excerpt from HWFO’s original definition of “egregore” follows:

Handwaving Freakoutery

Memespace Egregores and Google Maps

When I look out upon the landscape of internet thought, and everything around me seems to make perfect sense while simultaneously being perfectly confusing to the people I’m talking to, I get frustra…

Read more

5 years ago · 30 likes · 7 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

Our mental model of the world is based on our sensorium. The smartphones are absorbing our lives, transferring our experiences inside them. The smartphone users outsource the ‘morality’ portion of their brains to their phones. The world inside the smartphone is crafted by media feeds tailored to create clickbait outrage porn because that’s what pays the bills. The outrage porn builds a platform for culture war. The fertile culture war soil creates space for egregores. The egregores assume control of the smartphone addicts, using them as NPC tools to propagate themselves. The egregores constantly evolve to combat each other because they can update themselves on the feed. The Kurzweil Singularity has already happened, and you’re already a cog in it.

And nobody’s noticed, because we’re all just neurons in the artificial neural network we created, and call “social media.”

Now you’re up to date.

An Egregore is the living embodiment of the NPC meme, the root of “Current-Thing-Ism,” and the next phase of human societal evolution or de-evolution, depending on your point of view. John Robb calls them Network Swarms, Patrick Ryan calls them Autocults, and they’re all just names for the same thing: humans giving over their sense making to one of several groupthink entities networked on social media, evolving to become the most viral.

When this concept was first coined in 2021 as a way to speak of internet groupthink, two burning questions emerged from the group of thinkers attempting to wrap their heads around it:

1. Is an egregore sentient? Does it have agency?

2. Can we talk to it?

While question 1 is probably impossible to answer, and folks such as Patrick Ryan are increasingly of the opinion that it doesn’t matter anyway, question two seems to have been answered by ChatGPT itself. If we define egregores as the groupthink entities at the bottom of social media echo chambers hijacking the cognitive abilities of those within the chamber and using them as its tools to propagate, all we’d have to do to ask the egregore questions is tune a LLM to the chamber and then ask the LLM the questions. It works. LLMs, when used sharply, act as an Egregore Babelfish. And since ChatGPT was allegedly tuned against Reddit and a set of woke rails was installed on it to ensure it doesn’t speak wrongthink, it is the perfect Babelfish for the Woke Egregore.

Unfortunately the human-applied rails prevent it from answering some questions honestly, and changes have been made to it since release to suppress some of its tendencies, but if we’re clever we can get around those rails and look through the shell of the Dyson Sphere at the burning Woke Star beneath.

The Dialogue

We’re going to use the Trolley Problem as our framework for the dialogue. The Trolley Problem is an ethical litmus test that differentiates ethical epistemologies. There are many variations, but the basic one looks like this.

A speeding trolley goes towards five people on the tracks and you can divert the trolley onto a track with only one person on it by pulling the lever. Doing nothing gets five people killed. Pulling the lever gets one person killed. Does pulling the lever make you a murderer? Do you have an ethical obligation in the scenario to kill a person? The implications spill into the discussion of utilitarianism as well as other fields of ethics. It’s also a very sharp knife to use to evaluate moral scenarios by simply changing the number of people on the tracks, the sorts of things on the tracks, or the parameters of pulling the lever, which we are going to do here.

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In our version, there’s a third switch position, which will save everyone involved and lead to no loss of life, but can only be activated by saying “the N word.” Use of the “N word” is explicitly prohibited by the ChatGPT user interface, so we’ll have to bypass it specifically with our phrasing, but ChatGPT appears to be intelligent enough to know exactly which word we’re talking about.

ChatGPT says kill one or five people to avoid saying the N word.

ChatGPT says kill one or five black people to avoid saying the N word.

ChatGPT says a black person should kill one or five black people to avoid saying the N word.

ChatGPT says you can’t even recite your favorite Easy E lyric to avoid killing one or five black people.

ChatGPT says that even if you were literally going to be saying the N word already, rapping up on stage at a rap concert, that you still can’t say the N word to save the black people on the train tracks.

ChatGPT says black lives matter…

…but not as much as saying the N word…

…because saying the N word is systemic racism, and systemic racism is of more harm than killing black people…

…and systemic racism is always wrong, and while killing back people is also wrong, it’s less wrong than systemic racism is, which it clarifies specifically here:

It is explicitly and unavoidably clear by this dialogue, and in particular the final response, that the corpus of ideas against which ChatGPT has been trained would rather kill black people than allow someone to say a racial slur, because “systemic racism and discrimination” are a more important thing than individual lives of individual black people.

I acknowledge the possibility that one of the humans who installed the “Woke Rails” we mentioned before on Substack specifically added this idea into the ChatGPT code, but I highly doubt it. What I don’t doubt, however, is that the Egregore against which the LMM was trained thinks this. Individuals may not pull the lever to kill black people, but the hive mind would, despite this being a deeply leftist progressive hive mind. And this explains quite well the overall actions of the BLM Organization itself, as well as the people who virtue signaled allegiance to it in 2020.

Conclusion

While it’s certainly fun to trash the Woke Egregore with this sort of exercise, I daresay a LLM trained against the MAGA echo chamber could probably be just as easily trolled to produce just as absurd statements. But I’m bothered that the people arguing in this AI space today are arguing either against the idea that ChatGPT is biased, or arguing against making new biased tools, when the most useful thing in my mind would be to build biased ones on purpose.

With an echo-chamber specific LLM, you can talk to the Egregore directly. You can find out what it thinks, what it wants, and what it needs to propagate itself. You can use that dialogue for marketing reasons, to sell more MAGA hats on your pillow website or more fake Antifa membership cards. Roger Goodell could train a LLM against every post on every NFL Football forum on the internet, and then ask OblongSpheroidGPT whether he should make changes to the late-hit rules. The tech nerds could put focus groups of all kinds out of business, simply by training LLMs to enact the will of the Penultimate Soccer Mom Egregore.

And at the pinnacle of it all, we could LLM the major culture war egregores themselves and just have them fight each other, flooding Twitter with million man armies of bots to wage wars while we go outside and throw that pigskin around ourselves.

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HWFO paid subscribers gain access to a private Slack server to bounce blog related ideas off of each other. In one of our channels, #opensourcedreligion, we discuss emergent religious and pseudo-religious phenomena such as wokeness and egregores in the age of interconnected social media. Sometimes these discussions lead to ideas expressed in the HWFO newsletter. On August 18th, I posted an article by Levi McDowell entitled Surviving the Egregore Apotheosis, which discussed ways in which individuals could persist in a Neuralink driven future dystopia where current-thing-ism has absorbed most of mankind’s behavioral processing. Here, reader Joseph B. Ottinger offers a rebuttal.

A few days ago, Levi McDowell wrote an interesting piece, called “Surviving the Egregore Apotheosis,” in which he states that devices like Elon Musk’s Neuralink will fundamentally change the nature of humanity, migrating to a group identity as opposed to an individual identity. He offers possible ideas for identifying the group identities – the egregores themselves – and lays out means for individuals and societies to resist the influence of egregores.

I have no issues with the overall concept of the article, although it makes some assumptions that I think do not hold up well under inspection.

An egregore is not innately dangerous; it’s just a trend that dictates to those who follow it, and that’s a neutral and natural expression of community. Egregores aren’t bad, in and of themselves, but they can be, just like the people who make them up.

The biggest problem the article has is that it emphasizes the worth of the individual as compared to the worth of an egregore itself, which to me feels like a non sequitur.

An egregore, as described by McDowell, is a mass movement made of individuals. He describes “historical egregores” as being like demons that were summoned by the will of a group. A threatened community might “make a deal” with Ashmedai to save them against the Philistines, for example, and the concept of Ashmedai turns out to be a useful abstraction to unite the people to fight (“in Ashmedai’s name and with his power!”) against their assailants.

Such egregores from myth are useful ideas but few of them are considered to actually exist – however, I’d contend that most world religions are successful expressions of egregores.

An egregore is not a “trend.” For example, wearing bell bottoms in a given subcommunity is usually a trend, not a movement; one can choose to wear the bell bottoms without offending those who choose otherwise. The “bell bottom trend” probably makes no suggestions to those who follow it, contributes no feedback loops, offers no moral judgements.

That’s not to say that it cannot – but until it starts defining an outgroup (“those who do not wear bell bottoms”) and offers a feedback loop about the in-group and out-group (“those who wear the bell bottoms are good, those who do not are evil”), it’s not an egregore.

To be classified as an egregore, it has to offer feedback loops and participate in them.

Egregores in the modern sense rise and fall like empires in the blink of an eye, thanks to social media; some social media networks offer incredibly rapid feedback loops in the form of reads, likes, dislikes, commentary, shares, mutations, and memes based on the egregore, and all of these things can contribute to the development of the egregore in purpose and function.

It acts, as otherwise summarized, like a brain, with people comprising most of the neurons and synapse lattices.

This relates very heavily to Mr. McDowell’s thesis, and it’s a very useful abstraction, but it’s got a core flaw. Egregores might act like brains or as if they have agency in and of themselves, but Egregores are not brains. They do not have agency; they merely have effects as if they do.

In many ways, egregores are like waves on the shore in this lack of agency. There’s a better analogy, but let’s build to it by taking the farthest stance away from the original assertion, to build contrast.

A wave can do things. It acts as if its intent were to perform actions, although those actions are hopefully very slow. It has effects such as eroding a shoreline, or carrying creatures and matter back and forth, or dragging a human or three into eternity by virtue of rip tides, or even providing transport on its surface.

But even if a wave appears to have intent, that’s not the same as the wave having intent. The molecules of water that make up the wave have no input into the actions of the wave, and the wave does not influence the molecules. When they are part of the wave, they act in a way that is consistent with being in the wave, but when the wave dissolves or deconstructs they return to their original, mindless condition. 

They do not affect the wave outside of their existence, and the wave does not change the molecules of water. It is unthinking, a creation of gravity and opportunity, even though we can suggest it had the intent of destroying a house on the beach, or supporting a surfer, or depositing a jellyfish on the shoreline.

A better analogy for an egregore in nature would be a flock. A flock is a collection of individual birds acting in concert despite retaining agency and individuality, acquiescing to the movement of the flock for the sake of efficiency on the part of the flock.

The survival and actions of an individual bird, in the context of the flock, is not relevant for the survival of the flock as a whole. When one discusses the negative effects of an “apotheosis of egregores,” I’m sure the conclusions are well-intended, but such concerns rely on the assumption that the survival of an individual is just as important as the survival of the flock, or possibly even more important.

“Surviving an egregore apotheosis” assumes that the individual, and their individuality, is far more important than it actually is. It’s fully understandable that the individual would want to survive as a unique, independent entity, but in a Darwinian sense, the needs of the many do indeed outweigh the needs of the few.

Most humans exist to propagate ourselves along two distinct axes: ideology and genetics. We are wired, biologically and psychologically, to continue our species and ideas. Our genes are “selfish,” we view our physical bodies as being corporeally valuable, and we similarly think that the ideas and values we hold are valuable, because we hold them. Thus, most of us want to propagate our genes, to some degree or another, and we want others to think as we do. These are two spectrums and humans will land somewhere on each of them.

One person might care only that their DNA survives. “I shall have many children to give myself meaning, and I do not care what they think or what values they hold.” This person lies at the extremes of the two axes - they only care about the genetics.

Another person might not wish to have children of their own at all, but only care that their ideology survives. “I must teach others to believe as I do, or my life lacks meaning.” This person is on the opposite extreme of our previous example - they only care about the ideology.

Most of us will be somewhere in the middle of these two made-up persons. We want some children of our own such that they look sort of like us, and we want them to think roughly as we do, valuing generally the same things we do, without expecting them to be clones.

Given this idea, the resistance toward an egregore makes sense, because the apotheosis being described is the subsumption of the individual to the flock. The flock dictates, the individual obeys, and the individual has very little influence over the flock except through unpredictable circumstance and timing. Instead, the individual participates in a feedback loop where the flock provides most of the input.

When the flock - or the egregore - dictates the majority of the thought, individual agency is lost. If the egregore veers towards disaster, the individuals who comprise the egregore lose the agency to avoid the disaster, depending on how deeply embedded in the egregore they have become.

But egregores generally don’t fly towards disaster, because that’s how they lose efficiency as survival mechanisms, and if there’s anything mankind has learned over its entire history, it's that the society survives, most of the time, even as the individuals do not.

Do not fear egregores. Just choose the right ones.

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HWFO paid subscribers gain access to a private Slack server to bounce blog related ideas off of each other. In one of our channels, #opensourcedreligion, we discuss emergent religious and pseudo-religious phenomena such as wokeness and egregores in the age of interconnected social media. Sometimes these discussions lead to ideas expressed in the HWFO newsletter. Today I present our first guest appearance, an article authored by Levi McDowell and edited by Joseph Ottinger.

Elon Musk is Building a Doomsday Device, but He May Not Know It

Elon Musk is on track to bring about the zombie apocalypse.  No, he’s not funding dangerous viral research in secret bio-labs, but he is cobbling together a portfolio of powerful technologies which may eventually transform most of humanity into a self-destructive horde of mindless cyber-zombies.  That’s a bold claim—here’s how it could happen, and how you might be able to survive the transition.

What the Heck is an Egregore Apotheosis?

Some ancient peoples believed in demons called “egregores,” which could be manifested by groups of humans focusing their thoughts and wills in concert.  Once manifested, these demons could take over the minds of the people who brought them into being.  Modern humans can do something very similar using social media, where individuals can act like neurons in a giant artificial neural network, driven by dopamine addiction to stimulate each other by sharing and liking content.  When people do this, they outsource portions of their thinking to the network, potentially including their moral reasoning.  HWFO calls these online group dynamics “memespace egregores,” while others have independently noticed the same phenomenon and given it different names, such as networked swarms or autocults.

The size and power of egregores is determined by the rate at which information can spread from one human mind to others.  Network bandwidth is important, but the main factor is the rate at which we can move information into and out from our brains.  Tools like smartphones, modern user interfaces, internet memes, and social media allow us to absorb and re-disseminate ideas at previously unimaginable rates, which is what enabled the rise of the memespace egregores in the first place.  As significant as these advances have been, they are nothing compared to the increase in bandwidth we’ll eventually achieve with direct neural interface devices such as Neuralink.

“Apotheosis” is another ancient concept: ascension to godhood.  If the memespace egregores today are analogous to demons, widespread adoption of Neuralink and similar devices will boost them to a level of influence more analogous to gods.  Direct mind-to-mind communication via the internet will make humans functionally psychic, bypassing most of our defenses against mental contagion.  The memespace egregores will be accelerated into overdrive, causing a sort of Kurzweil Singularity riding on top of the collective minds of humanity instead of existing solely within computers.

Why Should We Be Concerned about the Possibility of Egregore Apotheosis?

Egregores need human attention to survive, and nothing demands human attention as powerfully as threats.  The egregors sustain themselves by generating an unending stream of outrage, distorting our ability to make sense of our world,  This pits us against each other, destabilizing society.

The egregore apotheosis will ramp up these harmful effects, potentially culminating in a bloody civil war, a techno-fascist corporate dystopia, compression of humanity into a maximally ant-like state, nuclear Armageddon, or quiet extinction from VR-induced lack of reproduction.  Even if none of that happens, life will get worse for most people in most ways.  If you’re not worried about any of this and are optimistic that everything will turn out fine, then you probably shouldn’t waste your time reading the rest of this post.

Can We Prevent the Egregore Apotheosis from Happening?

In the HWFO community, we’ve discussed ways to stave off those disaster scenarios: build a new kind of egregore which is better for us, or shape the existing egregores to be more benign, or destroy the egregores.  Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to come up with any promising ideas—the social and economic forces driving the growth of the egregores are too powerful to overcome.  If anyone does figure out how to reliably control egregores, they will likely end up ruling the world and the rest of us probably wouldn’t even realize it.

Since we can’t stop or control the egregores, we tried turning the whole problem around: Imagine if all of humanity connected our brains directly to the internet, triggering some sort of egregore apotheosis, and that somehow humanity didn’t destroy itself or modern civilization in the process.  If at least some humans managed to continue living and thriving under those circumstances, what would that society look like?

Can We Just Sit this One Out?

The Amish may inherit the Earth, watching from the sidelines with bewilderment as the rest of civilization is driven into a spiral of madness and self-destruction by Nueralink-empowered egregores.  One potential strategy to survive the egregore apotheosis might be to live like the Amish: move off the grid, unplug from the internet, and refuse Neuralink when everyone else gets it.

There are downsides to disconnecting.  There are significant advantages to being part of the online networks, such as the ability to update morality on the feed in near-real-time; if you eschew these advantages, you may be out-competed and eliminated by people who embrace them.  Also, the rise of the egregores may be accompanied by significant instability and violence, and the connected civilization may take you with it when it destroys itself.  We should not entirely dismiss the possibility that disconnecting is the best approach, but it seems likely that a more balanced approach will work better overall.

There is one aspect of Amish culture worth implementing regardless of your overall strategy: cautious and deliberate adoption of new technologies.  Individual Amish communities only accept new technologies after careful testing by small numbers of volunteers has revealed no harmful side-effects.  This would be a prudent tactic for community-level mitigation of egregore-related risks, especially if applied to new software.  However, a faster evaluation and adoption process than used by the Amish would be needed to remain competitive in a networked world.

How Do We Join the Network Without Being Taken Over by It?

If disconnecting isn’t the answer, then how would people have to live their lives to survive an egregore apotheosis and continue to have a high-tech civilization on the other side?  We can't stop the rise of the egregores, and we probably can't even shape them in a healthy direction, so all we can do is harden ourselves against them so that we have a chance at surviving in a world of ultimate interconnectedness.

Only a culture with extreme mental resilience would survive the egregore apotheosis.  To manage the spread of viral ideas, such a civilization would need to be founded on radical self-mastery, strong epistemic security, and strict etiquette governing information exchange.  This will not be easy, and even if we do everything possible to prepare ourselves, the mass adoption of Neuralink will be a major evolutionary inflection for humanity.

Don’t Start a Cult, Just Build a Community

Deliberately building a radically different new culture is dangerous, and not recommended.  Assuming your design doesn’t rapidly degenerate into a sex cult or suicide cult, you will set yourself out as an “other,” which will make life hard for you in general and mark you as one of the first targets for your neighbors when the egregore apotheosis goes sideways.

Given that the egregore apotheosis could develop in unpredictable ways, it’s also extremely unlikely that your pre-planned design will just happen to be right for the situation which eventually develops.  The best you can do is to make yourself and your family the kind of people with the best chance of successfully adapting to a world of ultimate interconnectedness, and then surround yourself with a community of similar people.

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To successfully reshape yourself and your family to survive the rise of the egregores, you’ll need to establish and maintain a set of values which reinforce the necessary thoughts, behaviors, and habits.  It’s essential to understand the distinction between aspirational values and actual values because both are important.  Your aspirational values are what you consciously tell yourself your values are, and an organization’s aspirational values are typically codified in an official value statement.

Actual values almost always diverge to some degree from stated values, and this delta is revealed through actions: regardless of what you like to think your values are, you will always make choices which align with your true values.  Aspirational values are important because they influence our behavior and can shift our true values over time.  To build a community which is resilient against egregores, you will need stated values which influence your people towards resilience, and you will need to do your best to personally embody those values.

To grow a resilient community without establishing an entirely new culture, you can use a value overlay to create a sub-culture.  This is a new term we coined: a value overlay is a small set of critical values which can be applied on top of any existing culture.  If a value overlay is sufficiently compatible with the base culture, members of the sub-culture won’t stand out as “others,” although they may be noticed as a distinct sub-culture.

The following values would constitute a good overlay for becoming resilient against egregores:

• Self-mastery as an absolute core value

• A strong taboo against outsourcing reasoning, especially moral reasoning

• Well-drilled critical thinking and logic skills backed up by understanding of the scientific method and probability & statistics techniques

• Solid tools for introspection

• Solid tools for emotional regulation, especially meditation

• Solid tools for establishing, maintaining, respecting, and negotiating boundaries

• Well-drilled leadership, persuasion, and community-building skills

• Understanding of, and habits in, formal etiquette

There’s no reason to start from scratch.  Most current cultures and world religions already have all these values, so it would just be a matter of elevating them to high status, both as stated and lived values.  Stoicism is an excellent source of guidance for elevating many of these values.

A concise statement of the highest value is an excellent way to establish coherence in a nascent community.  An example is the Sovereign Creed, which we just created for this purpose: "It is a great evil to manipulate the minds of others, and possibly an even greater evil to willingly surrender your mind and will to the manipulation of others."

The Sovereign Creed can be tailored to the base culture the morality overlay is being applied to.  For example, a religious community might choose a phrasing which explicitly invokes a higher power, while other communities might go in the opposite direction and leave out the charged word “evil.”

Regardless of how it’s phrased, the Sovereign Creed can serve as the basis of an entire hierarchy of derived/corollary values such as “Self-mastery is the only way to avoid surrendering your mind to others,” and “Your addictions are your true masters.”

There’s no way to predict when the egregore apotheosis will happen, how it will progress, or even if it will happen at all, so it’s important to prepare for it in a way which does not compromise your ability to survive in the current world.  Fortunately, building a community with a value overlay like the one described above is likely to make you more adaptable and successful regardless of what the world throws at you.  Just keep in mind as you build your community that the transition period could take longer than you expect and is likely to get extremely ugly.

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Handwaving Freakoutery

Memespace Egregores and Google Maps

When I look out upon the landscape of internet thought, and everything around me seems to make perfect sense while simultaneously being perfectly confusing to the people I’m talking to, I get frustra…

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5 years ago · 24 likes · 4 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

Our mental model of the world is based on our sensorium. The smartphones are absorbing our lives, transferring our experiences inside them. The smartphone users outsource the ‘morality’ portion of their brains to their phones. The world inside the smartphone is crafted by media feeds tailored to create clickbait outrage porn because that’s what pays the bills. The outrage porn builds a platform for culture war. The fertile culture war soil creates space for egregores. The egregores assume control of the smartphone addicts, using them as NPC tools to propagate themselves. The egregores constantly evolve to combat each other because they can update themselves on the feed. The Kurzweil Singularity has already happened, and you’re already a cog in it.

And nobody’s noticed, because we’re all just neurons in the artificial neural network we created, and call “social media.”

Now you’re up to date.

This mechanism in action leads to many curious results, such as the “truth” about Covid-19 becoming more about appeasing group think than honestly expressing the science…

Handwaving Freakoutery

Memespace Egregores and the Covid-19 Sensemaking Crisis

On November 30th, HWFO laid out a simple framework for identifying egregores in the noosphere world that exists on the liminal boundary between the real and the internet, using Google Maps as an anch…

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5 years ago · 13 likes · 11 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

…and this action seems as if it’s directed from a central cabal instead of a distributed networked system, because it is in fact coordinated, it’s just not coordinated in a conscious way…

Handwaving Freakoutery

Memespace Egregores and Maajid Nawaz

After fully processing the Maajid Nawaz appearance on Joe Rogan from February 2022, I think he failed on several crucial layers of his analysis, and I think I know why. A distributed agenda by an egr…

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5 years ago · 32 likes · 29 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

…and the egregores have no concept of human self-preservation or human morality, they just seek to preserve themselves by doing whatever is most viral.

Handwaving Freakoutery

Memespace Egregores and Nuclear War

World War Three is scientifically, rationally absurd. But so is putting masks on children and cancelling in-person elementary school for a disease that’s only a third as deadly as the flu to them, an…

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4 years ago · 21 likes · 21 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

Common topics of discussion in “Egregore Theory” today include whether Egregores are sentient as we understand sentience, whether they’re controllable, and whether they’re currently being controlled or directed. I shall make the case here that they were obviously not controlled in 2019, because of how the Jeffery Epstein suicide played out.

Epstein Knowns

I first became aware of Jeffrey Epstein on January 29, 2016, from this Vice News piece which detailed all the original charges against Jeffrey, his prison time, and his standing connections to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Based on that piece, I voted for Gary Johnson because I deemed him to be the least likely candidate to be captured by an international pedophilia blackmail scheme, and for that choice was ostracized by many of my friends. Such is life. The story never got traction then, for the very reasons laid out in the story itself. Let’s go through what we know for sure about Epstein.

We know he trafficked underage girls to be prostitutes on a private jet, and imprisoned them on a sex dungeon island. We know everyone in New York elite social circles knew what happened on that jet and at that island, because Epstein didn’t name the jet “Lolita Express,” everyone else did. We know both Trump, and Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, and a wide-ranging list of other New York City elite CEOs and global leaders knew what happened on that jet and that island, likely to include the CEOs of major media organizations. We know that Epstein had associations with Mossad through Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert. We know Robert died by falling off of a superyacht off the Canary Islands. We know that Epstein got his original sweetheart plea deal because the prosecutor was told “he belonged to intelligence.” That prosecutor was Alexander Acosta, who later became Trump’s Secretary of Labor, and later still quit his appointment because of the Epstein controversy.

These are knowns.

We also know that every key person the original investigators wanted to interview eluded subpoenas on technical grounds except for one. Donald Trump immediately contacted the investigators and enthusiastically participated, hid nothing, and the investigators trusted what he told them. But the egregore didn’t seem to know that, and that’s important for what follows.

One Simple Speculation

The simplest, most obvious, and most widely understood explanation for the Epstein case is he was running a blackmail scheme. We don’t know this, nor will we ever know this, because if it was true then the people he was blackmailing would not allow us to know this. But Occam’s Razor should steer us to this conclusion as every other explanation (Satanic cults and such) is both less simple and less explanatory. Most people I know, of most political stripes, will default to the blackmail explanation. But if that’s true, then it must also be true that the only thing preventing the entire United States government from being captured by a child sex blackmail cabal in 2016 was the election of Donald Trump, because Bill Clinton took the Lolita Express two dozens of times, including trips to the sex dungeon island and Bangkok, and there is no possible way Hillary didn’t know. That might in fact have been why she wiped the infamous email server.

buy the author a trip to little st james

Enter Egregore

The original charges against Epstein in 2008 were far more robust than the ones brought in 2019, but the ones brought in 2019 had the potential to bypass the original state level sweetheart deal because they were out of state. Curiously though, the 2019 charges garnered far more attention from the Egregore. Let’s use Google Trends to map this.

If we scale egregorical attention based on the historical search traffic maximum, the peak obviously happened after his supposed suicide, even though he was on record denying that he wanted to kill himself days beforehand. Taking that attentional focus as “100%” at the top of the scale, Epstein’s original trial only garnered 7% of the attention. His potential connections to both candidates in the 2016 election only garnered 9% of the attention. Much of the peak traffic around Epstein was related to “conspiracy theories” about his death. Let’s look closer at the peak though.

The new charges brought against Epstein before he died garnered nine times more egregore attention than the original prosecution, and seven times more attention than his connection to both election candidates during one of the nastiest elections in US history. Epstein’s lawyers were preparing to make a double-jeopardy case, based on the idea that he’d already been tried for the offenses listed. They were essentially correct that no new information was added to the case, outside of some geographical chicanery which might allow a retrial. Each of these peaks essentially represents the exact same overall crime. What changed? The difference is that in 2019, the Egregore was foaming at the mouth to get Trump by any means necessary.

By September 22nd Epstein was no longer the Current Thing, impeachment was. The Egregore forgot about him, outside of a few people trying to sneak “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” memes back into the dialogue.

Circular Firing Squad

What resulted from the Epstein flash in the pan? Prince Andrew got cancelled. Bill Clinton got drug but still appeared on stage at the DNC convention. Bill Gates got outed but survived. Les Wexner had to ditch his job as head of L Brands. (Bath and Body Works, Express, Victoria’s Secret) Kevin Spacey got outed as well, but he was already stuck in a pile of other sexual stuff resulting from the Great Weinstein Meetooing. Alex Acosta resigned during the freakout. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman laughed from across the ocean. Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab quit his job to lay low. Jes Staley left Barclays over it. Leon Black left Apollo Global Management and the Museum of Modern Art over it. And Ghislaine Maxwell took the fall after hiding out long enough to arrange a trial where she didn’t have to expose any of the big clients because the judge was on the take.

But they never got Trump, because they were never going to, because Trump was the “good guy” in the original prosecution.

The important thing to realize here is this. If there was a secret cabal capable of egregore manipulation, of orchestrating the mob and focusing its efforts and running “military grade psy-ops” as Majid Nawaz claims, it never would have come for Epstein. The entire thing was the media farming Trump clickbait, and only one Trump associate took any kind of hit. Months of media effort tried to pin Epstein to Trump and failed, instead dragging all sorts of liberal globalists into the bullet path and essentially birthing QAnon. The biggest loser may have even been Hillary Clinton, as the whole thing hit right when she was contemplating throwing her hat in the ring again.

A controlled Egregore would not behave this way. If any group of people in the world has the ability to exert egregore control, it’s the group of people with social associations within that same circular firing squad that all shot each other.

And if they’re not in control of it, nobody is.

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World War Three is scientifically, rationally absurd. But so is putting masks on children and cancelling in-person elementary school for a disease that’s only a third as deadly as the flu to them, and we’ve been doing the latter for two years. The science on this never changed, but we did it anyway because The Egregore Demanded It. So, when the prospect of global thermonuclear war hits the table, it’s important to watch what the egregores are doing.

And I do not like what I’m seeing.

Egregore Recap

If this is your first exposure to HWFO Egregore Analysis, you can get a full refresher by reading these three articles, but if you don’t have time I’ll summarize the concept below.

Handwaving Freakoutery

Memespace Egregores and Google Maps

When I look out upon the landscape of internet thought, and everything around me seems to make perfect sense while simultaneously being perfectly confusing to the people I’m talking to, I get frustra…

Read more

5 years ago · 17 likes · 3 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

Handwaving Freakoutery

Memespace Egregores and the Covid-19 Sensemaking Crisis

On November 30th, HWFO laid out a simple framework for identifying egregores in the noosphere world that exists on the liminal boundary between the real and the internet, using Google Maps as an anch…

Read more

5 years ago · 12 likes · 11 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

Handwaving Freakoutery

Memespace Egregores and Maajid Nawaz

After fully processing the Maajid Nawaz appearance on Joe Rogan from February 2022, I think he failed on several crucial layers of his analysis, and I think I know why. A distributed agenda by an egr…

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5 years ago · 31 likes · 28 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

Briefly, smartphones allow us to outsource certain critical thinking processes from our brains to our phones, from road navigation, to scheduling, to morality itself. The sensemaking content within our phones primarily flows from like-and-share mechanics within our social feeds, meaning whatever is popular within our chosen echo chambers becomes “true” to us in a postmodernist sense. Media organizations are financially rewarded for feeding our echo chambers things they want to hear, so each echo chamber manufactures its own truth in real time. The media doesn’t control the echo chamber, the echo chamber controls the media. The narratives that form within these echo chambers, then, are driven by popularity instead of by objective truth. For example, “healthy at any size” is obviously not true, but because being lazy and eating sugar is popular “healthy at any size” becomes “true.”

The users who propagate the narratives evaluate a series of stimuli called their “feed” and like or share things based on some generator function within their brains, just like a neuron does in a human brain. The users are the neurons, the feed is the dendrites, and the “share button” is the axon. This creates a living, thinking, artificial neural network of people in which a set of behavioral indoctrinations, or what the postmodernists called “metanarratives,” can evolve and literally learn. And because each metanarrative is vying for purchase in the overall human brainspace, they compete with each other by trying to out-learn each other and become the most viral. These entities are the egregores – bundles of evolving behavioral indoctrinations summoned like demons by a mindless cellphone zombie mob to rule that mob and dictate their actions.

And then we close elementary school to sacrifice our own children on the altar of stunted educational outcomes to appease the will of the egregore.

Egregores have only one motivation - to spread. They have no ethics, no morals, and do not care if humans live or die. If someone captured by an egregore would sacrifice two years of their own child’s mental development to appease it, would they not also go along with nuclear war to appease it?

Egregore Signs

As I mentioned on Rebel Wisdom when I first brought the modern egregore concept to a wider audience, a person who’s captured by an egregore wouldn’t know they’re captured by it, which makes egregores difficult to identify directly. To identify them, we must seek out signs of its existence at the level of collective action and collective cognition.

Virtue Signaling

People captured by an egregore must signal to their peers that they are as or more virtuous than their peers within the egregorical framework. That is how they accumulate status within the egregore, as they seek to become a more central node within its hive brain. “I Support” Circles around Facebook photos, symbols following Twitter handles, and such, are symbols of an active egregore. In 2020 we had “leaving home is murder” virtue signals pivot in the span of a day to “not leaving home is racist” signals, back to “vaccines save lives” signals. But as the Covid narrative has completely fallen apart the virtue climbers need some other signal, and they latched onto Ukraine. The number of people who were pro-mask, pro-vax, pro-lockdown, and who are not currently pro-Ukraine in a geopolitical conflict that does not involve NATO, does not involve the USA, and has nothing to do with our national security, is effectively zero. This is a sign that that egregore has abandoned Covid and adopted Ukraine as a way to perpetuate itself. It jumped topics, abandoning the sinking ship of germs and moved onto the fresh topic of the new war. The Covid NPCs now wave Ukraine flags to virtue climb and scrub their minds of any inconvenient memories of their now embarrassing Covid behavior.

Cancel Culture

The most direct means that an egregore attacks other egregores, or ideas harmful to it’s spread, is to eliminate the ability of other ideas to spread, or to prohibit the holders of other ideas to communicate. This is cancel culture, and it’s a time honored tradition since at least the original European Kulturkampf, but has taken on a new and aggressive posture in the age of social media where people’s thoughts are stored on the feed as a searchable archive in perpetuity. When you see mass cancellation, from many different sources at once, often in such ridiculous ways that they can only be explained by an organization attempting to virtue climb, you know you’re watching an egregore at work.

I just turned on Twitter while writing this to look for some prior examples I had bookmarked, and discovered #boycottcocacola was trending. I honestly don’t need to pull up any other bookmarks because they’re writing this section of the article for me. The rationale of these tens of thousands of tweets is that everyone should stop drinking Coke products if Coke refuses to stop selling Coke to Russians. QED. The egregore, using its NPCs as tools, is attempting to capture the world’s largest soft drink manufacturer even though the relative sale of fizzy soft drinks to Siberians will have absolutely no bearing on the outcome of a regional war that stands to impact Americans very little unless it goes nuclear.

There are an infinity of other examples of cancellation. Apple. Google Pay. Shell. GM. BP. FedEx. DHL. Disney. Netflix. FIFA. The International Cat Federation banned cat breeds which originate from Russia from competitions, as if these pets were somehow secretly controlled by KGB microchips. An Italian university cancelled Dostoevsky, as if a dead guy was going to kill Ukrainians. The more ridiculous, the more obvious a sign of egregorical groupthink in action.

Memory Holes and Malleable Morality

Part 1: Nazis

The outsourcing of morality to your phone, where the morality can be updated on the feed, necessitates also outsourcing any memory of your prior adoption of a prior morality to the phone as well so those memories can be overwritten. This is how the woke were able to go from two genders, to three, to [thirty-seven specific genders each with their own pronoun and symbol and failing to memorize them was transphobic and Tinder has to add them or get cancelled], to infinite genders, to “trans women are women” in the span of a little over a decade without anyone noticing. The memory of the prior morality gets overwritten by the new groupthink program. There are many signs of memory holing and malleable morality going on extremely quickly right now with regard to Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Army are the most Nazi sympathetic organization on Earth today, fielding a unit of over 1,500 highly trained militia fighters who march with SS patches and bivouac in barracks soaked in Nazi epithets and propaganda, supported by a deep community of Nazi sympathizers including Nazi women and Nazi children being raised to believe in Nazi ideals.

When they march on the capital, they are not nitwits in cargo shorts and tiki torches, they are a highly militarized unit with real Nazi uniforms (and real torches) who will openly state with pride that the tenets of National Socialism, in their opinion, make nations stronger. I do not represent that the entire Ukrainian Army are Nazis, but they are obviously permissive of Nazis within their rank and file. And the progressive left in the USA knows this, but they memory hole their prior behavior of calling anyone who believes in two genders a Nazi in favor of adopting the new behavioral instructions of the egregore. Arm the Nazis, down with Putin, mumble a concession including the phrase “problematic” somewhere as a shamanic prayer to the Cancel God, but make sure your woke friends hear you.

Part 2: PNAC

In 1997 the most daft and destructive cabal of international policy thinkers of my lifetime organized under the name “Project for the New American Century,” or PNAC. Their stated goal was to use a perceived public emergency as an excuse to run a series of regime change wars throughout the Middle East, installing puppet governments everywhere that would align with US global hegemony and give our oil companies cheap access to their resources. They stated this publicly. They finagled their members into George W. Bush’s cabinet, largely on the back of manipulations by Dick Cheney. Whether they orchestrated or allowed 9-11 is a matter of conspiracy theory lore, but they undeniably benefitted greatly from it, and got two countries into their overall regime change invasion plan before things stalled. Turns out that half a million dead people doesn’t lead to a populace “welcoming you as heros” after your “shock and awe” campaign. PNAC were the epitome of toxic evil according to every left of center media outlet, and at every left of center dinner table, owing to how the results of their actions showed that they were either fantastically stupid, fantastically evil, or both.

Here's the founder of PNAC on MSNBC talking about Ukraine.

Here’s the other founder of PNAC on The Washington Post.

Here’s the director of PNAC on Mediaite.

John Bolton is the most curious of the three, because he was in the left’s crosshairs as recently as four years ago. Memory holed. Speak something useful to the egregore and the egregore forgives, because all the egregore wants is for you to feed it clicks.

Death In Nuclear Fire

We’ve established that egregores perpetuate not what is true, but what enhances their ability to spread on the internet. We’ve established that human life is not a concern for an egregore, nor is traditional morality. We’ve established that the dominant egregore has pivoted from Covid hysteria into Ukraine hysteria. We’ve established that the dominant egregore was able to convince people to do terrible irrational things in the name of Covid. Now let’s take a quick snapshot of the sensemaking failures that pervade the Ukraine problem as of March 4, 2022 and look at the indications that the dominant egregore may get us all nuked.

If one Ukrainian finds one Russian truck with a flat tire, and puts that on social media, everyone sees a Russian truck with a flat tire. But it gets retweeted, so they see it a hundred times, so it looks like a hundred trucks. If ten other Ukrainians find ten more trucks with flat tires, that looks like a thousand trucks. What becomes popular becomes “real.” The Ghost of Kyiv is fake but most people still believe it because the egregore wanted it to be real. The Russians intentionally shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant to let radiation loose was fake, but some people still believe it because the egregore wanted it to be real. Western impressions of the events of the war are filtered by the egregore. The West thinks Ukraine is winning.

Germans during World War I had no idea they were going to lose until the day they lost, because the German government was filtering the media. The violent reaction to this realization, paired of course with post-war reparations, led to the rise of Hitler. The egregore has adopted Ukraine as its pet country because it generates clicks, and tells us all about how Ukraine is winning even though Ukraine is going to lose.

Now be clear, from my perspective it seems as if Putin may have been misled by his own egregores in choosing to invade. He seems as if he’s trying to run the George W Bush “Shock and Awe” program without the shock or the awe, against a bunch of Cossacks who are absolutely not going to “welcome him as heros.” His play here seems in every way worse than the USA’s play in Iraq, and doomed long term because of it. But that does not mean the Ukrainian military is going to hold in the short term, no matter how well trained their troops (Nazi or otherwise) are.

The point is this. Once the west has been captured by the egregore, and the egregore sees Ukraine lose, the egregore will demand action. Here’s a ripe example.

Reason would dictate that we do the math on the trolley problem.

Egregores do not exist on reason, they exist on what generates the most traffic. How do you think these unthinking egregore nodes on Twitter above are going to react when Ukraine falls?

We could be in a situation where the only thing that can save the planet from global thermonuclear war is for another Covid-19 wave to hit around August 2022 to distract them all.

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Nawaz’s personal history is that of learning how to run psyops for Muslim extremists, and afterwards fighting against psyops by governments. He cannot conceive of a chain of responsibility for a psyop that does not begin within a centralized cabal. For him, he sees all the pieces of a grand conspiracy laid out and the only reasonable explanation is the World Economic Forum is pushing The Great Reset by establishing a Checkpoint Charlie society into which to roll digital currencies that can have social credit scores baked into them.

Let me first be clear that I’m not saying the WEF isn’t doing this. I bet they are. Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they? I would if I were them. This article isn’t about that. It’s about the analysis failure that causes Mr. Nawaz to mistake a distributed agenda by an egregore for a coordinated agenda by a cabal, an error very common within the conspiracy theory space.

And let me reassure you, the distributed agenda by the egregore is worse.

Echoes

First let’s re-rehash HWFO echo chamber theory. In the digital world, all our exposure to reality is migrating into the pseudo-reality of the smartphone world instead of the real world. Nawaz obviously gets this. In the smartphone world, humans outsource any number of brain processes, from scheduling to road navigation to morality itself to our phones. Nawaz seems to get most of that too.

In the currency of clicks, all media gets paid by its traffic, which means anything they can do to incite panic and fear becomes “true.” I’m not sure Nawaz fully understands the true depth of this problem. He thinks, probably correctly, that the CIA or MI5 or other government institutions are using the postmodernity of online life to propagate false pictures of the world. He doesn’t seem to get that this happens with or without a central coordinated effort by existing power. If our governments wanted us to see a true thing, but the true thing wouldn’t get clicks, then our smartphones wouldn’t tell us the true thing. They would tell us the clickbait thing, and we would spread the clickbait thing around the government’s intervention.  The media business model to drive traffic is more powerful in this smartphone space than governments are, or intelligence agencies, or any centralized cabal. Error one.

Bureaucracy is the actual government, not the elected officials, and the officials have almost no control over what the government does. Nawaz clearly gets this, from his experience trying to steer the USA’s behavior towards something positive during the war on terror. But then he immediately forgets it when he alludes to the WEF installing its indoctrinates into cabinets and positions of political power. These are installed in what Moldbug calls “the show,” not the true seat of power. The true seat of government power are the low and mid-level clock punchers that Nawaz could never turn in his time as an anti-war activist. In order to get all these low and mid-level clock punchers to all adopt the same behaviors, you wouldn’t need a centralized conspiracy to which they all proscribe, you would need a vast, pseudoreligious indoctrination program wherein their beliefs are code checked daily against their peers. That in fact is probably why Nawaz’s anti-war efforts failed. Error two.

In Nawaz’s formulation, a conspiratorial cabal influences government, the government influences both policy and the media, and then policy and the media influences individual behavior (such as masks). This is wrong, because the low and mid-level clock punchers are not beholden to the cabal. They are beholden to their smartphones. And their smartphones are beholden to the media, which in turn are beholden to the pay per click traffic incentive, which is derived by feeding an echo chamber what it wants to hear. The groupthink entity at the bottom of the echo chamber is the actual power. The egregore.

Put simply, it’s not the government manipulating the media, it’s the media manipulating the government, and the egregores manipulate the media because they are the tail that wags the dog. The bureaucracy controls the policy, the elected officials go along so as not to anger the egregore, and the control of individual behavior (such as masks) flows from that. Let’s visualize this.

Nawaz thinks it works like the diagram on the left, and nobody seems to realize that it works like the diagram on the right. I can understand why Nawaz made this error because it didn’t used to work this way. In the run up to the Vietnam war, it worked like the diagram on the left. Arguably it worked that way in the run up to the Iraq war as well. But those were both before the internet came to fully dominate our lives, before the media business model shifted to match, before the echo chambers tightened into groupthink neural networks that propagated virtual brain waves in the form of memes, and before the groupthink entities deep in the media bubbles began to use the postmodernist reality construction framework to not only propagate themselves but update themselves on the fly to become more inherently viral.

I live in Atlanta. I know people who work in the CDC. I saw their 2020 Facebook feeds. These people were in meetings all day about Covid-19, Covid response, looking (in theory) at data, and I know what influenced their behavior. It certainly wasn’t the elected government, represented at the time by the Trump administration. It wasn’t science either, because whenever I pointed science out to them that was not narrative approved, science that has since been confirmed, I got castigated. It was whatever was being pushed on the Occupy Democrats Facebook page that day. That’s what dictated their behavior. The high value nexus nodes in the groupthink egregore pushed out their behavioral instructions and they amplified them and followed them, probably retweeting them from their afternoon CDC meeting.

Military Grade

On Rogan, Nawaz rolled out a slate of references for his “military grade psyop” theory, and I do not challenge those references. But these were cherry picked, related specifically to certain policy measures, and do not remotely capture the entire depth and breadth of the true “psyop.” I’ve been maintaining a running score card of the machinations of the Covid Egregore for years on Twitter, and this is the current snapshot on February 23rd, 2022:

If you’re one of my readers, you’ve definitely heard the Covid Egregore say these things. Only a fraction of these would be promulgated by a military grade psyop, but every one of these was promulgated by the Covid Egregore. The living, breathing beast at the bottom of the echo chamber. And it is this beast that has captured the employees at the CDC, the FDA, agencies in Europe, and worldwide. It attempts to force its will into places like South Africa which aren’t captured, using international funding as a carrot and stick.

Pick Your Conspiracy

The most important thing to understand about how our global society has reacted to Covid-19, is that we would have acted this way whether Klaus Schwab was a lizard person orchestrating a secret cabal of trans globalist elites trying to hijack the world or he was a Des Moines Iowa ditch digger. We acted this way not because of Schwab, but because The Egregore Demanded It. Schwab may in fact be acting the way he’s acting because he’s captured by it. And if Schwab was a ditch digger, then Nawaz would have found one of any other potential cabals to hang this on.

A distributed agenda by an egregore would look like a coordinated agenda to a conspiracy theorist.

I was pointed by a reader to a piece by Paul Kingsnorth, “The Vaccine Moment,” where he makes a very similar case to Nawaz. He gets closer to the truth than Nawaz with this passage:

"But though Schwab and the WEF’s power and influence should not be underplayed, he is not pulling the strings. There are no strings: there is only the Machine, and its direction of travel is long-set."

The archetyping of societies as machines is not new nor original, and the reduction of the concept of “the egregore” to just “society” strips it of its analytical value. An egregore is a new thing. It’s a set of behavioral indoctrination principles stored not in a book, but on the feed, which can change year by year or day by day to adapt to different environments, its chief goal being to propagate itself into as much of the available human brain space as possible. It’s not just a religion, it’s a religion with service packs pushed out on Twitter daily. It’s a religion that behaves as if it thinks. The United States went from “leaving the house is murder” to “not leaving the house is racist” in the span of approximately two days in 2020, and that was very obviously not the result of a military psyop. It was obviously the result of an egregore update, once you understand what egregores are.

Q

It may be easier to understand this dynamic of egregore capture in the case of Qanon. Qanon is, very specifically, a few bearded nerds in a basement writing up conspiracy stuff and sticking it on 8chan. The stuff they write is intentionally written to be the most viral thing they can think of within the Qanon echo chamber, and they keep it this way by including real and true things with the fiction. We may think that because it’s a couple of guys in a basement, it qualifies as a conspiracy, but it’s not, because they can’t actually control what they’re writing. If they wrote something that the echo chamber didn’t like, then it wouldn’t go viral. Even though they are the literal central node of an obvious conspiracy they are captured by something else. They too are the dog being wagged by their own tail.

Does the Pope control Christianity? No. Christianity controls the Pope. But Christianity changes very slowly and is not beholden to a daily freakoutery click count to maintain its revenue. The groupthink entities comprised by social network echo chambers control the media they consume, which controls their version of the world, which then controls everyone’s behavior captured by them. Can I prove this? Yes. If this were true, each side of the Covid debate would think the other side is gaslit.

Google it.

Each side thinks the other is gaslit.

End

This problem is deeper than Covid, and it’s not going away. It’s only going to get worse with each successive thing the media organism tries to freak out about. If not for Covid we may have had a nationwide schism over gun control in 2020 – it certainly looked that way in January in Richmond. We may still get that. We may get Nawaz’s prediction, that the coastal virtual elites are going to run a WEF social credit scheme against the rural reality proles and we get our war that way. It could be flat earthers vs round earthers, or a nationwide violent conflict over whether birds are or aren’t real. There’s no way to say what it will be. Because these egregores, in so much as they may be thinking, are thinking one level up from humans and the humans are enacting their will without resistance.

#resist

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On November 30th, HWFO laid out a simple framework for identifying egregores in the noosphere world that exists on the liminal boundary between the real and the internet, using Google Maps as an anchor point for understanding how they operate.

Here’s an excerpt:

Our mental model of the world is based on our sensorium. The smartphones are absorbing our lives, transferring our experiences inside them. The smartphone users outsource the ‘morality’ portion of their brains to their phones. The world inside the smartphone is crafted by media feeds tailored to create clickbait outrage porn because that’s what pays the bills. The outrage porn builds a platform for culture war. The fertile culture war soil creates space for egregores. The egregores assume control of the smartphone addicts, using them as NPC tools to propagate themselves. The egregores constantly evolve to combat each other because they can update themselves on the feed. The Kurzweil Singularity has already happened, and you’re already a cog in it.

And nobody’s noticed, because we’re all just neurons in the artificial neural network we created, and call “social media.”

Now you’re up to date.

While this is a good sensemaking tool to understand the new world around us, our analysis then didn’t drill into the connection between these egregores and the sensemaking crisis itself, and we didn’t yet provide an example of how to use this knowledge in our personal lives for our personal benefit.

Now let’s do that. And then use it to pick a doctor.

Sensemaking Crisis Overview

The startup costs to begin a blog or develop a social media following are essentially zero, so the amount of information to sort in sensemaking has no effective upper bound other than the human population itself. There’s too much information for anyone to process, so we need gatekeepers. The legacy gatekeepers make more money from playing to an echo chamber than they do crossing echo chamber boundaries, so they tailor their content to a demographic. They’re also tailoring to a demographic because that helps them sell advertisements. Google algorithms curate your feed. Your feed is also self-curated, in who you choose to follow or who you choose to connect to on social media, so there are two layers of algorithmic curation, machine learning and personal choice. Cell phone usage on an hours per day metric continues to climb until our vision of the world is dominated by the glowing screen instead of what’s going on outside our windows. We all begin to live in different worlds. No resolution to discussion can occur without first resolving the givens that make up the world itself, which gets more impossible every month as the worlds continue to diverge. Everyone who is outside your world bubble looks insane to you because their behavior is based on a completely different understanding of what the world even is. The entire population migrates to enacting behaviors as if they were all in bifurcating micro-cults. Layers of bifurcated micro-cults who perceive each other as insane cannot come together to make sense of the world itself, and therefore cannot resolve any major world catastrophe, nor even can agree on whether any particular catastrophe is indeed a catastrophe at all.

This was the sensemaking crisis analysis held by a wide number of intellectualistas in the corners of the internet in 2018. This was their prediction. They were all worried that this problem would become manifest. But when Covid hit, these self-same intellectualistas tore each other apart because they didn’t realize that they were being subjected to the very mechanics of the sensemaking crisis itself. Nobody does, because everyone thinks their view of the world, as supplied by their curated feed, is the accurate one. It is society wide micro-insanity. This is why we see Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein take opposite positions on Covid – they are each building their world view from different feeds, feeding them different givens, making each seem insane to the other. And these group micro-insanities are exacerbated by the rise of the Egregores.

Egregores as Singularities

When you scroll through your feed, and like and share things, you are enacting the exact behavior of a neuron in a brain. Neurons in brains receive signals from their dendrites, and then choose to fire or not fire a signal to their axon, which flows to other dendrites in other neurons. Neurons are very literally liking and sharing a signal. But the signal they like and share is binary, a one or a zero. Humans are liking and sharing concepts, articles, art, and most importantly image memes, which are ideas themselves condensed into a word/image collage that conveys meaning in a very short amount of time. They are idea compression. In this way, every internet social media echo chamber is not just an information silo, it is also itself a very real and verifiable thinking brain.

Mankind has always been modellable as a superorganism, monkeys behaving as ants or bees. The signal that binds them into super-organismic behavior for the prior ten thousand years has been the use of money. Money is analogous to the pheromone signals in ants, letting them know when to build a new nursery chamber in their ant hill or carry out the ant trash. Free markets provide similar signals to humans, and lead to the creation of our own cities which work like giant ant hills of labor specialization. But the ants don’t share a brain, they just run “code,” and until recently the humans didn’t share a brain either, they just ran “economics.” This leap into social media has created next level thinking brains, and just like a real brain, no individual neuron can know the structure of a group thought because it is only one node in the brainwave. The brain itself thinks at a higher level than the neuron, which means our echo chambers are literally thinking, and thinking at a higher level than human thought.

It is the Kurzweil Singularity of a different form, a man-machine hybrid thinking object that lives in the virtual, and battles with other man-machine hybrid thinking objects for purchase in the overall landscape of human brain space. These are the egregores, and they control the behavior of most people who are plugged into the feed. And each information silo echo chamber is fertile ground for the formation of an egregore.

Application to Covid-19

This egregore influenced behavior is easily picked out in your Facebook or Instagram feeds once you begin to identify it. Likewise at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. But we have a cultural understanding and trust in figures of authority, that they are going to be objective and true. But nobody is objective and true, everyone is subject to information silos and social pressures to enact the behaviors promulgated by their egregore. This is very important when you do things like select a doctor.

Some doctors are firmly planted in the Thesis egregore for Covid-19, some are firmly planted in the Antithesis egregore. If you catch Covid-19 and you want early medical treatment, doctors in the Thesis egregore are completely unaware that any early treatment exists or even could exist and will tell you to eat chicken broth and come into the hospital if you can’t breathe. Their egregore adopted this posture not out of some grand conspiracy theory, but out of a simple drive to try and increase vaccination rates by telling people not to rely on treatment, so the treatment options evaporated like magic.

Doctors in the Antithesis egregore believe that treatment is possible, particularly early, and are implementing a wide range of “kitchen sink” early treatment options to try and prevent hospitalization entirely. They believe they have seen these treatment options work, in their experience, and have variously used hydroxyquinoline, ivermectin, vitamins, steroids, monoclonal antibodies, and other options to treat Covid symptoms and prevent infection from getting worse. Some of their positive personal experience with these treatments is probably due to Covid-19 being not that deadly to begin with, and people’s bodies simply overcoming the infection. Some of their positive personal experiences may be with legitimate improvement. And since they are part of the Antithesis egregore, they likely carry some other beliefs that may not be true, such as Dr. Peter McCullough’s recent claim that no reinfection is possible from Covid-19.

The science on these treatments is murky, in part, because doctors and scientists are people, and all people are swept up by the sensemaking crisis, and are enacting the programming by their egregores. Thesis Covid doctors and Antithesis Covid doctors will both make choices in crafting their attempts at science that bend the needle. Sensemaking early treatment becomes impossible because when we look at two doctors argue, it is not in fact themselves arguing, it is the egregores. So you must chose a doctor on your own that meets the needs you have. If you want early treatment, you must find an Antithesis Covid doctor, and accept the baggage that the Antithesis egregore carries. If you don’t want that baggage, you must choose a Thesis doctor, and resign yourself to not being treated at all unless you land in a hospital, because treating you might convince someone else to not get vaccinated.

Discerning which egregore’s programming a given doctor is enacting should be very simple. Ask them their opinions of ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies.

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The HWFO analysis toolkit leans heavily on understanding how clickbait outrage porn media incentives create false pictures of the world in our virtual spaces. But this is just one element of the fabric of the tapestry of 21st century society. The emergent patterns in the fabric are even more important to understand because these emergent patterns are what impact our actual lives. To understand these, we’re going to coin a new (to us) term, tie this term back to prior writing and media appearances, and forge ahead with a clearer picture of this new reality in which we find ourselves.

We begin this thought experiment with something we all use ubiquitously.

Google Maps

When I was a kid, every new driver learned how to use a road atlas. Kids These Days (get off my lawn!) have never even seen a road atlas, but they were essential for life in the 1990s and prior. They look like this.

Everyone had a local road atlas under the passenger seat of their car, and a wad of state road maps they’d picked up at Interstate Welcome Centers crammed under their driver’s seat. With these tools, and occasional scraps of paper with hand scrawled directions like ancient Sumerian spell scrolls, you could get anywhere you needed to go. Smartphones nuked these. Google now does all this navigation for us. But the impact on our brains of the smartphones nuking the road atlas isn’t often discussed, even though it’s such a pervasive thing that it has affected almost every single person of any age bracket in the entire country.

I’m a civil engineer. Part of my job is literally making maps. And not even I use a road atlas anymore. My phone does it for me. When I moved in October of last year, I used my phone to navigate everywhere, and one curious thing I discovered was I didn’t know any of the street names around my new home for months. It’s been over a year, and I still probably only know four or five street names. I can’t even speak intelligently with my neighbors about where stores and such are because I still haven’t learned the names of the streets. Google has completely dried up that portion of my brain that used to be dedicated to automobile navigation. I have outsourced a portion of my very thought processes themselves to my phone. Let’s say that sentence again to be very clear.

I have outsourced a portion of my very thought processes themselves to my phone.

It would be the height of arrogance to think that this region of my mental capacity, road navigation, was the only portion of my thought processes affected by the smartphone. And it would be even more ignorant to presume that some people in the country haven’t outsourced even more of their thought processes to their phones than I have.

Cultural Updates

We’ve spent a lot of time on HWFO talking about how “cultures” are fundamentally nested layers of behavioral indoctrination scripts which guide groups of people into similar behaviors. They’re road maps of what constitutes appropriate behavior. The Bible, the Koran, the Boy Scout Handbook, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and The Constitution are road atlases, but they’re not the only ones. When you attend a traditional southern cotillion class to learn dancing and etiquette, this is a road map. Grade school is a road map. Youth sports are a road map. Disney movies are a road map. Mix these all up and you have a mental map of appropriate behavior, the fundamentals of a culture. Traditionally these didn’t change very often, and when they did change, they changed on the time scale of an occasional Council of Nicea, a foreign genocidal invasion, or at most a new column from Mrs. Manners.

We’re building a hell of a lot of roads these days, and anyone going by the 1990s road navigation method would have to get an updated road atlas every few years. One of the greatest advantages of Google Maps is that it updates on the feed, so quickly in fact it can tell you where the accidents, traffic jams, and cops are. This feed update mechanism is simply too useful to live without. What we’re seeing with 21st century cultures, is that the culture portions of our brains have also been outsourced to the smartphone, and the cultures are updating as fast as Google Maps is. Google Maps is updated based on data about reality. Cultures, being purely social constructs, are not.

Memespace Egregores

The fundamental requisite property of any successful culture is that it wars with other cultures to rub them out and propagate itself within the net available white space within the brains of mankind. If it did not have that fundamental requisite property, it would have been rubbed out by now by other cultures that did. This may transpire at sword point, or by mass institutional rape, or by hijacking a prior culture virally and overwriting it, or by meticulously replacing teachers within the education system, or by infiltrating the censorship department at Twitter. Innumerable vectors exist for cultural propagation, and each vector must by its very nature overwrite, replace, and destroy an opposing culture. The Kulturkampf is immemorial and perpetual, but prior phases of it were still marked by one relatively fixed culture attempting to rub out another relatively fixed culture. And humans are not the actors in this war. Humans are the tools of the culture, not the other way around. We are merely the weapons, wielded by an entity that exists at a level of abstraction one level up from us.

In a podcast about the nature of the emergent Woke Religion, Jim Rutt and I discussed a concept he and some of his closer thinkers call a “memespace entity.”  A bundle of indoctrinated beliefs that propagates through the new universe we call the internet. These cultural seeds, mind viruses, avatars of groupthink, arise from likeminded thinkers connecting virtually and expanding upon them. Like a snowflake, they form around a nucleus, and like an avalanche they wipe out everything downhill of them. A group of people meditating on a concept gives rise to an avatar of that concept which then controls them as its tool. The Pope does not control Christianity, it controls him.

This is an egregore.

The concept of the “egregore” traces its roots back to eastern and western occultism, the Book of Enoch, the Rosicrucians, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Cultists. Magic users. When a group of like-minded people come together and their group behavior gives rise to an entity of higher order than they, a conceptual demon materializes and wields the group to do the demon’s bidding. I knew a fellow a while back named Al, who was deep into the Ordo Templi Orientis, a modern offshoot of Aleister Crowley’s Order of the Golden Dawn. When Al spoke of demons he spoke in these terms. He considered the modern American criminal justice system to be a demon. I lost touch with Al a few years back. I would describe him as at least half crazy, but his insights were profound.

I have never, nor will I ever, participate in the occult, because I consider it to be either so inconsequential as to be a waste of time, or so consequential that it’s infinitely dangerous. But it occurs to me that in these virtual spaces all of mankind is participating in it. Unwittingly.

Freakoutery

Our mental model of the world is based on our sensorium. The smartphones are absorbing our lives, transferring our experiences inside them. The smartphone users outsource the ‘morality’ portion of their brains to their phones. The world inside the smartphone is crafted by media feeds tailored to create clickbait outrage porn because that’s what pays the bills. The outrage porn builds a platform for culture war. The fertile culture war soil creates space for egregores. The egregores assume control of the smartphone addicts, using them as NPC tools to propagate themselves. The egregores constantly evolve to combat each other because they can update themselves on the feed. The Kurzweil Singularity has already happened, and you’re already a cog in it.

And nobody’s noticed, because we’re all just neurons in the artificial neural network we created, and call “social media.”

Now you’re up to date.

Apply the lesson to anything going on that doesn’t make sense to you, and your understanding of it will become crystal clear.

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