An Economy of Opinions
It’s not who’s right, it’s who can best find the axis of contradiction
If you’ve ever smoked weed, there’s a good chance you’ve experienced the sensation of your attachment to ideas and intellectual judgments falling away, like someone cut holes in the pockets where you normally keep your opinions. The absurdity of certain contradictions in the people and phenomena around you don’t land on your brain in quite the usual way.
Where you might normally have a value judgment or criticism, there’s instead a mental calculation so fast that it outruns your ordinary logical processes and tickles your humor levers. I don’t think it’s the same as true impartiality, Holy Indifference, Buddhist Non-Attachment or any of the other Spiritual Greatest Hits but it might give a hint or partial glimpse into these purportedly desirable states.
But I’ll pay you…
So what happens when there are exaggerated incentives for having opinions? I would assume that every human has had opinions since the beginning of time, but I can’t think of another time when it’s been so lucrative to have them. By almost every metric there seems to be an upward pressure on having an opinion… and not just for media personalities, politicians or celebs. If you learn to distribute certain of these opinions effectively you can make a lot of money and friends OR enemies (which sometimes pays even MOAR — just ask Hannity and Maddow). It seems there’s nothing better these days than striking the perfect balance of public love and hate. Not only can you grow your bank account, followers and social status, but there are astronomical gainz to be made in the form of psychological doggie treats such as likes, retweets, hearts, emojis, Bitcoin tip jars and perhaps the most coveted of all: So-and-so has blocked you.
A token for your thoughts?
This financialized firehose of liquid inner dis-harmonization already exists in plain sight, but what if these phenomena continue to become more and more explicitly manifested and quantified through a combination of machine learning, social data gathering and the tokenization of all and everything. I’ve got nothing against projects like BAT but this human trajectory is literally showing up in the names like “Basic Attention Token”. With gamified prediction markets like Polkamarkets, sentiment oracles and on-chain social media it’s tempting to take a dystopian view of the future where the “real jobs” are all done by robots and the global GDP is based on a dog-eat-dog world of influencers, open letters, bot farms, ideology armies, thread-tweeters and world champion reply guys. Or maybe people will eat their fill of fashionable viewpoints and penny-stock-outrages, ushering in a much needed and cleansing bear market, where the smart money has been waiting in the wings with chests of gold bullion — never-before-held opinions. I suppose on-chain, more transparent and decentralized versions of this are better than their centralized big tech counterparts, but it does make you think… “what if the bag of opinions that I call myself isn’t economically viable? What if the price of Let’s Go Brandon or Fuck Joe Rogan or Identity is a social construct suddenly drops on the open market? Who will I be then and what will my personality portfolio look like… in red???”
Assets Under Management
AUM is the new Ohm
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the acronym for this hedge-fund-ish term is the same as the sacred Buddhist incantation — the same way that what is highest in man (soul) and what is lowest (sole) are homophones — I think God has a sense of humor and hides it in the silliest contradictions of life.
“Let’s put the doors to heaven and hell next to each other in an up and down duplex. [Snickering] You know what, let’s even paint the doors the same color! LMFAO LOL emojis” -God
