
Golden Thoughts for a New Nuclear Age – from a new biography of René Girard - hoffmannesque
http://churchlife.nd.edu/2018/02/28/golden-thoughts-for-a-new-nuclear-age/
======
OliverJones
Never mind the "new nuclear age" clickbait. It's considerably out of date, of
course. It's said that generals often fight the last war, not the present war.
Theology departments (like this one at Notre Dame University) typically fight
the war before last. The headline writer for this article, well, yeah,
theologian writing for church people. Ignore the silly headline.

But read the article. Our trade is strongly influenced by Rene Girard's
understanding of competitive mimetic desire and its violence. Why? The people
who organize the ad-driven internet know all about Girard. Peter Thiel
invested in FB because he saw its potential for harnessing mimetic desire to
drive engagement. (reference: [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-
lanchester/you-are-the-pr...](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-
lanchester/you-are-the-product)) FB-style social media is addictive precisely
because of the fear of not being as good as "friends." Mimetic desire is the
the human yearning behind the Fear of Missing Out. Driving engagement is most
effective when it exploits that fear. It works very well indeed.

Other attempts at building social media networks (Stack Overflow, Linked In,
Slack, for example) try to avoid that exploitation. They try to use other
motivators than FOMO to drive engagement. Can they be successful without
overusing mimetic desire? It's the key question they must answer to be
successful.

The obligatory panel of customer logos just below the fold on SaaS landing
pages engages mimetic desire in IT buyers. "Wow! Schwab uses this! I want to
be like Schwab!" It's benign in these cases.

Girard offers a good unifying framework for understanding the human nature
behind all sorts of marketing work. Convincing people their hair is ablaze and
offering them ways to put it out is the heart of building new businesses.
Getting people to set each others' hair on fire, then putting it out, is the
holy grail of new businesses.

It's no accident that Silicon Valley employs that framework in lots of ways:
he was a scholar at Stanford's Hoover Institution. It can be a hard slog to
learn about him. But it's worth your trouble.

~~~
mothsonasloth
LinkedIn is going the way of Facebook

StackOverflow uses badges and fake internet points as the mechanism to
encourage usage.

Not sure what Slacks pulling factor is

~~~
OliverJones
Slack's pull factor? My boss told me to use it. And, it's better than email
for workplace communication.

Stack Overflow's? In my case, reciprocal altruism. I get a TON of benefit from
it, so I like to contribute to it.

Y-Combinator's? I'm not sure, but here I am using it.

~~~
lurcio
Y-comb for me is "broadcatch" (Kevin Kelly?) over a range of side-interests
(tech, science)

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david927
Good article! I'm going to hijack this comment section to raise a question: is
memetic desire weakening with the mass personal communication of the internet?

I think that up until the 1990's you would identify more with an entire group.
Are you a rebel? Then style your hair like this and wear these clothes; so
much so that when someone sees you, they know exactly that you're a rebel.

But in the last twenty years, it seems that the internet has allowed us to
pick and choose our memetic desires in a more fine-grained way. Instead of
belonging to one group we are an amalgam of many groups, and you can no longer
as easily look at someone and say, "That person is of the group 'x'."

And if so, doesn't this give us hope that while we are (if you agree with
Girard's premise) not our own desires, we are more and more a unique
collection of desires and that itself is more and more unique?

~~~
streulpita
On the internet, we spend even more time looking at other people, so I’d say
mimetic desire is even more intense.

~~~
freeflight
Tho it hasn't always been like that. Mid-90's Internet feels like utopia
compared to our modern social reality dominated Internet.

When you met somebody online back then, you were just happy to have found
somebody else. They didn't have profiles and pictures allowing you to put
people into boxes before even talking with them.

People actually had to talk to each other to find out more about whom they
were talking to, it required actual back and forth interaction and not just
browsing a half-invented profile page to use that as "ammunition" to put
somebody else down for their listed views/positions.

~~~
ams6110
There were rudimentary profiles. If you "fingered⁕" someone, you could see the
contents of their ~/.plan and ~/.project files, which formed something like a
profile.

⁕ FINGER(1)

NAME

    
    
         finger – user information lookup program

~~~
lscharen
Back in the day John Carmack's .plan file _was_ my social media feed.

[https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-
plan/](https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/)

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DrNuke
Literature, metaphors and social science for mankind and a single, final word
on nuclear warranting the clickbait title? These words show trepidation but
have not aged well, do they?

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ironchief
Girard Startup lessons:

\- the founders set a contagious mission that infects the company

\- competition can be destructive, work hard to be a monopoly

\- the founders take all responsibility and share all success

TLDR; emulate Christ

~~~
tyler109
or as Thiel puts it:

"To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of
a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship – or
jeering – for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become
so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious
danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake
disenchantment for wisdom."

TLDR; Balance madness and wisdom of the crowds - Find the balance between
humility and self-belief

