NETWORKED REALISM: Whoever Controls the Infrastructure, Controls Reality
It's feeling like we're living in a very strange moment in time where liberal norms of openness have been shattered by the same class of tech industry titans who expressed these values just a decade ago. In this episode I spoke to Nick Houde and Severin Matusek from co-matter, a research and strategy studio based in Berlin, who recently published an incredible memo that is chock full of incredible analysis and insight into our current moment. "New World Order: The Return of Hard Power and Sof...
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Transcript
You need to understand the logic of the network first. Reality lag is this perception that increasingly the reality that we perceive
by being online, by being inside our filter bubbles and feeds doesn't correspond or lags behind the material reality. But at the same time, like, we live and breathe on the Internet, and just about every aspect of our lives is some sort of online ramification. And the people who are surviving or thriving or even getting by are the ones that are learning to game it. And they have the sense of network realism. You know? To me, this is network realism also. This is the acknowledgment that this is the reality we are in, and all we can do is create some sort of solidarity
form where we're all going to help each other out and make do with what's here. It's just like this frustration with the material world that is not moving as fast as, like, the Internet moves or as fast as when I, like, send an email or, like, when I engage with the Internet. But in this aggregation
era, it doesn't matter if someone likes your content or is hate watching it or is you or is it sharing it as an example of something that's gone wrong or whatever. You're still engaging.
Right. And it still bumps the numbers, and it's still, like, participating in that economy of attention. It doesn't matter whether the content is fake or the food is bad or ugly. Yeah. What works, works.
This episode is sponsored by NIM, the world's most private VPN that protects your Internet traffic and metadata. Unlike traditional VPNs, NIM uses a decentralized mix net to scramble your Internet data, hiding who you're talking to, when, and how often. You can switch between full mixed up mode for maximum anonymity or a faster VPN mode for everyday use. Pay in crypto or fiat, and even your payment stays anonymous thanks to z k powered anonymous credentials. Take back control of your online life at nim.com. Sign up today using the code blockchain socialist and get an extra month for free. Hello, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist podcast. I'm Josh, and I'm here today with Nick Hood and Severn Matusek from Comatter. Comatter is a research and strategy studio, and they recently published a really fantastic memo, which they're having a release party in Berlin, which I'll be going to, I think, tomorrow at the time of recording. It's titled Hard Beliefs no. Hard Power and Soft Beliefs.
New word order, the return of hard power and soft beliefs. Hard power and soft yes. Exactly.
And it's a really fantastic memo. I I read it myself. It helps explain explain a lot of what I think we're dealing with that has come with the contradictions that have become increasingly more apparent as the Internet or digital technologies have increasingly influenced our lives in which it feels that there is a lot of change maybe technologically, but in some ways, there hasn't been a whole lot of change. And so to kinda maybe, contextualize this whole conversation and the memo, I'll read I'll read out a little quote because I think it's it's, I think it helps encapsulate what the, memo is about. So it says, the feed keeps refreshing, but the packages don't arrive. Your meme coin just moonshot, but the factory you work at just closed. The news gives bad vibes, but the morning routine is strong. There's a gap between the fiction of our digital lives and the increasing friction of the material world, a shift in the architecture of power that impacts not just geopolitics, macroeconomics, and infrastructure, but reprograms the entire stack our brains are wired to. This is a memo for anyone trying to make sense of the present. It contains ideas, context, and language to participate in shaping the world that emerge in front of our eyes. So, yeah, I thought that was a a really nice introduction to the memo, but maybe, Nick and Severin, if you want to introduce yourselves, what is Comatter, and what got you to, write the book?
Yeah. Nick, do you wanna go first?
You you go first. Okay.
Yeah. So I'm Severin. I'm the founder of CoreMatter. I started CoreMatter about eight years ago in 2017, as a research and strategy studio based in Berlin, and, basically, a vehicle for pursuing my passion and interest in analyzing culture and media and its impact on on society, basically. So, yeah, we've been working with different kinds of brands and organizations over the last eight years, mostly from a perspective of network culture, understanding that, basically, media is everything else that we do, which is that the online media and the digital screens and the feeds that our that we basically consume kind of, like, has taken over more and more of creative and cultural production, and that in order to understand how to position yourselves and how to create stuff today and break through, you need to understand the logic of the network first. So that's kind of, like, our point of view that we mostly tackle. And, along the way, when we work with brands and organizations, we publish these memos, newsletters, podcasts to basically share our thoughts along the way. And New World Order is the latest iteration of that, which we launched, last week and which is the result of a six month research process that we started with a monthly newsletter on Substack, and that finally ultimately culminated in this 35 page memo that's, yeah, downloadable for $5 on MetaLabel.
Yeah. And, yeah, I started working with Severin at Comatter last year. And, yeah, I guess maybe there was a little bit of my bad influence for some of the new world order in that my I tend to do research about politics and economics and their influence on society and and, technology. So this seemed like this, interesting moment to really tackle these issues that were streaming across the news, but a lot of people, especially maybe brands and organizations, didn't really have a strong language or even, like, any sort of scaffolding in order to understand these things. So we thought it was really helpful to kind of work with it along the way as the news kept coming in to just, you know, work step by step and try to make sense of it all in a more systematic way and bring these topics like macroeconomics, geopolitics, etcetera, to a different audience who maybe isn't used to thinking about cultural change on those terms.
Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. Speaking of the news, I I think later in the interview, I really, just just to plant the seed, I really wanna talk about the the recent shooting that was yesterday. I think, like, after reading the memo and then after kind of seeing how that story is developing, I think that was just really, really fascinating. But before we get there, I really want to talk about this phrase, hard power and soft beliefs, since it's also I believe the subtitle or title, I forget of no. Subtitle of, Alex Karp's book, the CEO of Palantir, Palantir being this giant surveillance tech company in The United States. Alex Karp, the CEO, has, like, made this incredibly, like, hard right turn or explicitly kind of nationalist turn within The United States. They already get a ton of government contracts, but I guess they they want more. They probably are trying to take away from the government contracts of Google and everyone else. But yeah. But I guess what what do you mean by by this term hard power and soft beliefs? And, also, you you guys said the return of hard power and soft beliefs. So it's just something that is not the first time. And this the fact that Alex Karp is also saying it, are you guys agreeing with him in in some way?
I think I I could start with a metaphor that's more that's personal, I think, to me living in Berlin. I feel like what we experienced in Berlin, in the last two years, I think, since October 7 happened and, you know, Germany took this very, like, pro Israel stance, and a lot of, like, our friends, you know, and more left headed persons, like, you know, supported Palestine, and we're going to the streets. I feel like Berlin, especially, like, the international community in Berlin that has been, you know, settling here for the last fifteen, twenty years, had in the last two years this kind of hard power awakening. That's very similar to the hard power soft beliefs, friction that we describe where Yeah. We were able to live in Berlin for, like, ten years, fifteen years without much interacting maybe with the German state or with the hard power of the German state. At least I did. Mhmm. And, you know, kind of, like, living in this fantasy world of, like, Berlin being a cheap and affordable place and, you know, being able to do our creative work here. And suddenly, I think everyone saw, you know, by extremely brutal, police interventions at demonstrations where people basically just, like, yeah, demonstrate peacefully for their opinions, there was this hard power of the German state coming to force, which I think disillusionized a lot of people. We were like, wow. Am I living in this place, really? Like, what's happening? And so I think this is a metaphor, a personal story for me of, like, what I what we believe is happening on a global stage now where, you know, I think we all kind of, like, you know, had our little cute adventures online and, like, everyone's on TikTok and analyze and it just also there's research and so, like like, sociologists and, like, semioticians, you know, analyzing the digital space and trying to make sense of what's happening on TikTok and this trend and this trend. And it's kind of, like, very innocent and, like, harmless and, like, nonpolitical. But what we realize, I think, more and more is that this hard power of politics, geopolitical interests, economics is taking over more and more control of this cyberspace that we all exist in and, that's heavily influencing our ways of acting and thinking. So that's, in a nutshell, my definition of the hard powers of beliefs, friction that we are describing in the memo.
Yeah. And I think as far as our relationship to Alexander Karp's book, is a little bit of a troll to call it that. But at the same time, it's interesting because why is this very powerful, you know, Silicon Valley tycoon positioning himself in that way? It's clear that positioning yourself as this nationalist, as this, as someone who really cares about hard power and sees this as a unique selling point, really speaks volumes about the current state of the business world, of the tech industry, of all those things. I mean, right now, the defense, vertical, you could even say, is perhaps the most thriving sector in tech at the moment. And that speaks volumes, I think, about where we are geopolitically and, where all these technologies are headed and where I think people's mindsets are. And I think that that's something that's changed. I think that it had been brewing for a long time, obviously, especially with the rise of China, even since the Obama era where I think, you know, powers that be in, you know, NATO, United States, and Europe started to get nervous that they were no longer the unipolar power in the world. And I think this notion of multipolarity became really frightening to these powers to be. And that started, you know, early on, even in the early two thousands on a technological level with some of the great firewall policies where, China was saying, no. Actually, you can't launch this platform here because it doesn't conform to our moral or business standards. And, I you know, there was those big fights with Google a while back. You know? And I think this frustrated this notion of kind of liberal, capitalist first, commerce first perspective that The US and the West took for granted. And I think it became this this moment of, oh, wait. Actually, like, politics is back. The idea that you have a principle, that you have a political position that you're negotiating on the world stage is back. It's not just about money. And I think that through the years, you know, that started building. You know, there was the the clean network initiative too, launched by The United States in 2020 and adopted by the EU and UK where that's where you stopped being able to use Huawei products, and Huawei was banned from building out five g infrastructure in Europe. And you couldn't use Google on your Huawei phone, etcetera, etcetera. And you start to see this, like, building momentum. And I think it all came to a head where maybe it's not Trump per se. But the minute Trump started with his Liberation Day rhetoric, with his hard power discussions about, not the bottom line about commerce and trade, but using trade as a geopolitical bargaining trip and talking about annexing Greenland and annexing Canada. And suddenly, I think it just became immediately apparent to everybody that we're in a different world now. And, the terms in which people understand the world, their position in it, and even even for things like technology and the tech sector, tech businesses are now repositioning themselves in this new world within that broader strategic outlook.
Yeah. Lots of interesting threads in what you guys said. It's hard hard for me to know where to where to pick from that. But, yeah, like, I think there is one one of the things that I think is kind of uncomfortable maybe to for a lot of people, at least, like, for me, it feels like maybe a hard truth for someone who, like, has, you know, liberal Western values or something like that, that the the the Great Firewall Of China was kind of a it was a good geopolitical move on China's parts in in many ways. It it feels to me it was an expression of hard power that was successful, whereas I think previously I mean, I think there's a lot of exceptions like the Iraq war or something like that, but expressions of hard power were kind of not really, taken on so much. And, yeah, I guess the I guess the maybe it's, like, explicit forms of expression of hard power where, I mean, Obama, like, never really did it so much. I mean, he kind of kowtowed economically to, a lot of financial interest. But, Trump being very explicitly, you know, we're gonna tariff you. We're gonna tariff that and, like, throwing numbers all around and then seeing I think it's, like, the effect on markets that that had. Whereas before, I think there was this either pressure or assumption of the political class that, like, you know, don't express hard power because that's going to, like, we we didn't experience how that affected markets perhaps, and that's what, is what's bringing it to attention now, this, like, use of hard power maybe. But I think it's so I guess you guys what I was gonna ask is, like, this hard power and soft beliefs, is it simply something that has come from Trump, or was it something that already existed, it was already happening, and Trump just accelerated it?
Yeah. I think I mean, I think, Nick, you have a lot more context on that, but I would say, of course, it has happened before. I think it's exactly this metaphor of Alex Karp and other, like, new rights, activists in a way that are like, this is a wake up call for America. We need to, like, arm up, and we need to, like, compete on a global stage and not have Silicon Valley, you know, develop useless solutions just for fun, but actually develop defense solutions and, you know, stand in for our values. So this has been happening for a long time, and I feel like I think when we published the first newsletter, because, yeah, New World Order is the result of, like, this six part newsletter series that was started in January 2025, we published the first one, I think, a few days after the Trump inauguration. And so the Trump inauguration, you know, this picture of Trump in the middle and all the tech CEOs around him, I think that sparked a lot of discussion, became kind of like this iconic picture where it's yeah. A lot of people realized, oh, wow. This is new. We haven't seen it that way. And yeah. And it has been kind of, like, preceded by, you know, the DI policy changes of Meta. Jeff Bezos not really positioning The Washington Post in any political way as it was previously. So we've kind of, like, seen these scary things happening where suddenly you realize, yeah, these platforms are not neutral. They are bowing to political to your political powers, and that became so obvious with that picture. So when we published the first newsletter, we called it Good is Out, Evil is In. Yeah. I read that, and that one is really Yeah. And that and the headline really resonated, and it got a lot of traction. And, you know, I think Nick wrote this one phrase of, like, masks are off in 2025. So, yeah, to answer your question, I feel like it has been brewing under the surface, and it has been clear to lots of analysts and, like, you know, really nerdy people into these topics for a long time. But Trump's presidency just made it so obvious and unapologetic that this is happening, you know, and it was just, like, so clear. So masks were off in 2025, and that was kind of, like, one of the leading mantras of us writing these newsletters to analyze what's happening now above the surface and their impacts on on everything else.
Yeah. And I think there's also like, there's one aspect where it's, like, hard power is reasserting itself from these traditional vectors. But I think that there's also this historical moment where the promise of liberalism is really collapsing. Yeah. And so, you know, it's funny where you see someone like Alexander Karp. I I think what I do agree with in his book, though I disagree with almost all of it, is, is that focusing on consumer technologies like Silicon Valley has done has prevented us from real innovations that would actually make society better. And I think this analysis that he has is very important. And I think this also speaks to the crisis of liberalism. It's so fascinating right now. You know, it was this week that the new, anti pornography laws went into effect in The UK. And, basically, they're they're just trying to create some sort of guardrails to prevent children from viewing that content. And they're also trying to, you know, manage different, like, child pornography problems and things like this, you know, access to violent imagery online, things like this. And they're bumbling. They don't know how to do it. They're trying to regulate, but it's this cat and mouse game. And now they just saw, I think, a thousand folds, increase in VPN use from NordVPN.
Yeah. I mean, it's outrageous.
Meanwhile, you have a country like China, which is making some of these things impossible to access. I mean, yes, you there is always still VPNs, but it's harder and harder. And, basically, they've created a lot of these guardrails because they didn't have this liberal conception that everything should be open. Mhmm. And so this promise of liberalism is everything being open. We're now kind of, like, you know, eating our words. Because that also opened a lot of floodgates, especially with the Internet, where there's access to a lot of, like, violent, terrible material, hate speech, things like this. And it's unpleasant, but it's the reality. If you want liberalism, if you want that level of populism and democracy, you kind of need to have that affordance. So my feeling is that a lot of hard power is also emerging with things like the new right, but also, with someone like Karp or people like that is that maybe people want a moral compass again. Yeah. And that's something that I think has been lost through the neoliberal period, you know, since the end of the Cold War where they didn't have kind of any sort of North Star. It was just like, yeah, number go up, efficiency, etcetera. And, we're all just gonna be, like, liberal technocrats, to infinity. But I think people lost the plot at some point. And now everyone from left to right are asking themselves, what do we care about? And so a lot of this return of hard power soft beliefs is is that. And a lot of, you know, even Trump coming by I think a lot of people are just just frustrated with, you know, whatever systems are in play, and they see him as a malt of cocktail to those systems. And I think they they're correct. It's not necessarily the malt of cocktail I would throw, but I understand the sentiment.
Yeah. I think that's interesting because I you know, some of the feedback that we've received for our memo was that, like, people found find it sometimes overly bleak or, you know, not hopeful enough, not positive enough, not focusing on the good stuff. And I I think we we are trying to be as neutral as possible to just describe how we see things and how how things basically go down. And I I would say, you know, with this losing the plot and losing for looking for a new plot, yeah, I think we're definitely in that moment. The the problem, you know, we see when it comes to digital infrastructure that nobody has really found a good solution. Like, every other year, there's, like, this movement of, like, let's go off the platforms and, you know, you shouldn't Meta has changed its terms and conditions. Let's not be there. Let's all go to Blue Sky. And it just never works. You know, like, people are kind of, like, so dependent on these platforms, that there's not just this simple, you know, pre Internet, like, let's say, anti consumerism. Oh, I don't like Procter and Gamble. I'm not buying their products. That feels, like, overly simple nowadays because we simply depend so much on this infrastructure that we can't find a way out. So I think that's part of the problem of having lost the plot, that we don't know how to establish a new plot and how to act again and for it because the alternative infrastructures that people have trying to build for the last twenty years just doesn't cut it in the same way yet. So, you know, and crypto has been, I think, the the the light at the end of the tunnel for for a few years, at least. You know? But also, like, yeah, we've kind of, like, lost the plot there maybe as well because we see crypto going more and more right and these systemic forces taking over, basically, eating up everything that's inside the system. And that's also where I think we come to that later, the the network realism concept that, that we coined at the end of the memo, I think, comes from that perspective.
Yeah. I mean, just to, you know, comment on I think what Alex Karp is kind of bringing is just, like, a sense of purpose for a lot of people who just, like, worked in like, kind of you know, I've worked I've been a developer my entire life, and all I've made is, like, you know, things to get people more to to clicking on this and that or whatever. It gives them something like, nationalism is just another different, type of, you know, light that people can can move towards and to say, like, I'm working on defending my country or whatever else. You know, I was I saw I now have seen at least two people I know from college. One joined Anduril, and the other joined the, you know, VC arm of The US, defense department. I was just kind of, like, flabbergasted. These are not people I, like, ever expected to have joined this company. I mean, they were, never talked about really politics, in college with these guys, but, I was just really astounded that they chose to to work for them. But I guess it's because, you know, people who want a sense of purpose and whatever else.
No. That's true. I mean, we we we coined this term in our memo at the end. Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, like, we call them MIMS, like megalomaniacs in midlife crisis. You know, like people in, like, their early late forties that have worked in tech their whole lives and suddenly are like, woah. What what's my legacy? How I did I actually change the world? And that probably relates to a lot of, like, you know, millennials that are, like, you know, have been kind of thinking they worked on something with purpose, then realize Yeah. Actually not. And now Yeah. Wanna have an impact and jump on the wrong ship eventually just because the right ship isn't really there yet. Mhmm. Mhmm.
So one of, the ways you guys started talking about hard power being expressed is through the control of infrastructure. And you talk about I mean, you I thought it was interesting. You guys are kind of saying that, like, the the questions around the ownership of infrastructure are kind of more interesting and engaging than the ones necessarily that the cultural institutions are are producing, which I find, really interesting just because there's, like, generally this kind of, like, I feel, you know, head to head kind of, opposition it feels sometimes with people who are involved in culture versus people who are involved in, like, maybe, the building of infrastructure or, like, kind of STEMI type of stuff. But what are some of the less acknowledged ways that this has been manifesting? Because I feel like for a lot of people, I think they're still kind of waking up to how this is happening. And you how does this relate to to capital and attention? Is there, like, two other kind of things you guys talk about a lot in the memo?
Yeah. This is the capital intent inattention aspect is a bit more challenging. But just from the infrastructure level, you know, I was describing the clean network initiative earlier, but there's also Yep. Other examples, you know, how LAMA four is not accessible in the EU because of the, because of the AI act. And it's interesting because it's like, the EU wants to assert itself and say we have these really specific ideas of what the public good is, and we're going to make legislation or regulation around that. But because they don't have any homegrown AI companies, that means that more and more companies are just gonna not, you know, provide access to those services here. So you start to see that Europe have not having any kind of foot in the infrastructural door ends up losing out. And this is where it gets really interesting to see the strategic positioning and how powerful it is. You know? The same happens with, with the Trump administration sanctioning the ICC through their use of Microsoft Azure, where they you know, because Microsoft is an American company and a lot of their servers for their clouds are on US soil, they were able to kind of clap back against the ICC for, condemning Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal. Crazy, by the way. You start yeah. Right? And it and it becomes pretty apparent that where your server is located, which services you're using has demonstrable political effects. And, you know, now the ICC is scrambling. They have to redo their back end. They have to reintegrate into a new cloud system. And, yeah, these questions are becoming pertinent again. So I think there's, like, those big levels, but then there's also I guess, with the attention aspect, it's tricky. Right? But in a somewhat slippery way, it's like you can write an eviscerating op ed piece, on the New York Times, or maybe the New York Times is a bad, example. Maybe, like, The Wall Street Journal. But the person that is, but then, like, Rupert Murdoch is profiting from that attention and the ads that are being sold. And so it's a very funny world we operate in. And so it's like, even though you might have this cultural cloud that you're using online and trying to make your eviscerating points and your critiques, the person who's actually the people who are benefiting from that are the people who own the infrastructure. And so we need to rethink that conversation entirely about how power works, how critique works, and how you galvanize attention in that certain way? Because they can also, as we're seeing now on a lot of these apps, like, you know, shadow ban you. You know, if you if you're talking about Gaza or something like that, maybe in certain regions, you're getting, you know, you're getting out of the feed, your post. So what happens with that? What's going on with that? Who who contains that infrastructure? You can't even galvanize attention. They're the ones that are able to produce attention by having the levers in the back end. And so I think that's a big part of what we're talking about.
Yeah. And I think, you know, to your first point of, like, our point of departure of taking geopolitics and macroeconomics as, you know, the playing field from which we analyze digital infrastructure versus saying, well, we think that more interesting ideas coming out of those fields than of, like, traditional culture. Of course, that's also a provocative statement because, of course, there is interesting stuff coming out of culture. We just thought, you know, as part of this research process, we realized even ourselves, you know, we are definitely deep arts and culture people and have seen that in the last, you know, ten years, we took a lot of inspiration from different arts and culture, producers and context. But that would actually interest us now in a way of understanding this world we live in today. We flock a lot more to economic theories, like, for example, Kyle Scanlon, which you know, who has very similar perspectives on things as we do. And we found you know, who's basically an Instagram and TikTok influencer slash economist slash educator that's blowing up right now by being on the Ezra Klein show and on late night TV and stuff. But we find there's a reason to that because her lens of explaining the world from an economics perspective just resonates so much more and is so much deeper than a purely cultural analysis, for example. So that's where this argument comes from, that we believe, yeah, we have to listen, you know, we have to go deep into the theories and the history of those theories in order to understand everything today, not just economics and politics.
Yeah. And I think argue what we argue at one point in the memo as well about aggregation and these types of things is that even the way that these, media environments are formed, the infrastructure underneath them, and how ideas travel because of the way the network infrastructure, the algorithms, the feeds are. It's changing the way culture is packaged and what wins out. So that's a really, you know, important thing. I I had I had this thought. It's a little bit of a tangent the other day, but I was walking down the street, and they were they're building a skyscraper near my house. And they had, you know, a crane that was carrying this enormous, like, window pane or something. It was really large, and it was hovering above all of these cars going underneath. And, you know, there's moments like that that you have this per perverse desire to see it fall. You know? Not because you actually want that, but because it would be really exciting. And I had to think about so many times when you're online where actually, like, we want that exciting thing. So you say the crazy thing. There's the outlandish post. There's the outlandish cultural material. Because our media environment will only allow something to spread if it gives you that hit. So already, the entire culture that we're consuming, whether it's good or bad, it is subordinate to that infrastructure that demands our attention in a certain way. And so I think this is also a big aspect of that.
Yeah. So my last question on the the hard power section of the memo, but you have this framework, the three powers. I think you're kind of describing the little bit the in one frame, the kind of multipolarity that we're kind of seeing of, I think it was regulatory power, monopoly power, and people power. I'm wondering if you can just explain, who those, three players are and also kind of like a side question of where does maybe crypto play in that? Because I was trying to it to me, it seems like a a sleeping thing in the middle of them in different ways, but, yeah, curious to hear your thoughts.
Yeah. You go ahead.
Yeah. I guess, so the three powers is a way to get out of the log jam of, I think, like usually, arguments are about, like, maybe tech innovation and regulation. Right? There there's some sort of, like, dichotomy or something like that. Mhmm. And I feel like that really doesn't capture the dynamics of what's happening because there's all this, like, third order effects happening all the time. So any technology and and let me use crypto as an example because you brought that up. I would say that crypto doesn't lie in any of those three, but it's pulled by all three. So maybe the initial impetus around crypto infrastructure or crypto projects, especially a lot of the people who are really building infrastructure, like like, the Ethereum community and things like this. Maybe that had a more, like, populist people power initiative. Like, we're we wanna do things on our own. We want democratic infrastructure that we, you know, control. But in the meantime, you get pulled by the the monopoly aspects because you also need to have, like, a certain degree of market share. You need an a certain amount of people using Ethereum so that it actually functions appropriately. You want more coins to build on your system. You know, you want that type of dominance. Other otherwise, you don't get the scale effects and the aggregation effects that make it successful. At the same time, you have other you have this kind of democratic effect where, once again, this people power is pulling the other direction again where they maybe wanna do really outlandish things. They wanna do things you know, that's when people are, you know, buying stuff on the black market, and this gets maybe dangerous. Maybe it is kind of dubious. And then then you have ask yourself, okay. We're building a democratic infrastructure, but is it just used for things that I don't agree with? Yeah. And then you have the regulatory power where somehow now states are saying, hey. Wait. Hold on a minute. We don't like that you are trading these, assets in these certain ways that they are actually securities. And because of that, they need to be regulated and taxed in a certain way, and there needs to be some sort of fiduciary responsibility when it comes to, the buying and selling of these sorts of things. And then there's a whole issue of liability law. And so then you just see this crypto infrastructure, and it's amazing over the last ten years, constantly bending to all three of these that are just pulling it to pieces and shaping it and forming it over this period. And so we like to use this triangle as a way to describe how things are getting shaped and pushed through by these powers that are pulling at one another because that helps us get out of this, like, us versus them dichotomy. It's a it's it's more nuanced and weirder and more interesting this way. By the way, happy ten year anniversary to Ethereum. Oh, yeah. It's today. Oh, yeah.
Today is the tenth of yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I I think part of what this framework what what got to me was kind of like it felt like there kind of a little bit of a contradiction of at the same time, I guess I mean, I think part of it has been I've been reading a lot of, like, libertarian, like, books and stuff. So I've been, unfortunately, learning a lot about that type of stuff, whether I want to or not, and just being in the crypto space. But one of the things that libertarians love to talk about is that, like, they're they're kind of anti democratic that they believe that democratic states are, like, untenable, are are in fact undemocratic themselves because they don't allow freedom of capital. And they believe, like, their world like, genuinely believe a lot of them that their world is coming. And in some ways, like, I can see the dots that they're making in the world right now as to prove why their world is coming into fruition. But at the same time, you know, what you guys are noting is kind of like the increase of hard power to me sounds like a very, like, anti liberal thing that's kind of happening or at least the ways that people generally conceive of liberalism themselves as being like this, you know, stay away, don't touch it thing as, and libertarians just kind of being, like, in a more extreme version of that. But I guess for you guys, I guess one of the things that I kinda got from me, like, do you think the libertarians have a point that nondemocratic states kind of prove the downsides of democracy if you're sitting here looking at China and their success and their use of hard power, regulatory power for their own national interests, and then kind of like the tech sector responding by, writing crazy books like, Alex Karp's, but also by, like, explicitly asking for the use of hard power by The United States. Like, I don't know. What how do you guys think about this this contradiction that I feel like is happening?
On the first question, I personally disagree. I I still heavily believe in democracy and and believe that our systems, you know, are fairly okay so far. I think what you touch upon is, you know, what we have in the last chapter of the hard power book is this term world building on infrastructure. So what we observe with, you know, Alex Karp, but also, like, Peter Thiel and a sixteen c and Marc Andreessen and, you know, these kind of, like, new right megalomaniacs that shift their focus on hard power and infrastructure because they see it as a way to dominate the world in some way, where I think everyone has realized by now that if you, as we say, if you control the infrastructure, if you control the logics and the dynamics of the way digital infrastructure works in the same way as material infrastructure works, you can influence people's hearts and minds in a profound way that, you know, wasn't possible in the same way before. I mean, we have tons of examples of, like, how populists and dictators, you know, use the media and propaganda for their interests. So this is kind of like a more extreme version of that by, yeah, trying to influence and own the media and infrastructure. So we think, yeah, what's happening right now in theory, but will probably swap over into, like, very practical realities very soon when it comes to network states, for example, that, like, people have been trained and educated in a way of building tech products, and it's very specific logic of doing that, of, you know, efficiency and capital and consumerism, etcetera, are now applying these theories to, like, basically ruling the world and redefining democracy or whatever governing system they wish to have. And that's very dangerous, I would say, for, you know, more democracy minded people because, again, we see leftist approaches to that, but they don't seem to resonate as much, and they don't seem to have as much capital as the others. So that we think, yeah, there's a danger that these more right wing, libertarian forces take over, you know, and come with proposals and ideas that a lot of people flock to simply because the alternatives aren't really there. So that's my my personal view on, I think, that that world building element that we describe as, you know, world building has been a thing for many decades. It comes from science fiction and then took over movies, etcetera, and was purely storytelling and fictional for a long time. And now it takes away infrastructure to, like, you know, we take we build actual products that people use, and we imbue our ideologies and worldviews into that so that they basically enter people's brains and minds. That's how I would describe it.
Yeah. I mean, it's funny that you bring up this, like, libertarian aspect because so many of these people that were libertarians at some point are now, like, nationalists Mhmm. Which is very funny because they've been rallying against the state and have been state mandates for so long. So I think the right is a bit confused at the moment, but it's shaking out in a bizarre way. And I think that actually a hard statist, right wing is much more likely with, you know, the new right and then embracing industrial policy and people like JD Vance and Marco Rubio and, you know, the American Compass and people like that. And even, like, these, like, civilizational, warfare type people. But as far as, like, the libertarians and democracy, I mean, I don't know. Democracy I think it's it's an empty word if you just have democracy for democracy's sake, and I think that liberalism poison people's brains in that way. I think that's, like, a little bit kumbaya. Like, yeah, just let everybody do whatever. And I think we're just seeing the the downstream consequences of that sort of, like, overly capacious notion is a bit idiotic. So now, yeah, you see the rise of something like you know, you see the successes of some place like China. And, yeah, maybe people who are a bit, reductive see nothing but, you know, economic successes, and they say, look. You know, democracy doesn't work. Well, it was a trade off. There were certain degrees of democratic, met there were certain democratic mechanisms that weren't allowed, and it maybe did enable a lot of economic growth. And maybe the long term outcomes of that were better for a lot of people. But there was a lot of suffering. And it is very challenging and hard for people. That doesn't mean also, you know, in the liberal like, you know, in the The United States where similarly, you could say the same about the car the carceral system. You know? Mhmm. Mass incarceration has operated in a very similar way as a bulwark, against democracy. Mhmm. And so you start to see these, like, broader logics, and maybe nobody was very democratic ever. Right. And maybe that's also the the failure of liberalism. And I think that I think I hope that now that hard power has become a little bit more clear, and we see that, like, illiberalism exit coexists with liberalism in this strange world that we live in. Mhmm. We can start to see democracy as one mechanism within a design space that is Mhmm. Whatever political economy we decide to have at a given point, that these are choices about who makes decisions about what, why, and when. Instead of just this carte blanche thing, but to really be serious about it. You know, I don't when when I think about, you know, this is happening in in Europe as much as it is in The United States where, there's huge outbreaks of measles. And it's because in of individuals deciding that they know better than public health officials about vaccines and their dangers and about the public risks to children for measles. I mean, many, many children die of measles. So we have to ask ourselves, is that an individual choice, or is that, you know, a a collective choice, a societal choice? And I think those types of questions are a lot richer than talking about democracy. And I just hope that now we have more affordance to talk about that instead of just, like, these stupid platitudes about democracy. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess one of one of the kind of, like, my general retort to people who, who say who point at democracy and how it has failed is more so that, like, we hardly have a democracy. Like, it's not like, this is the least democratic democracy. I feel like, you know, we kinda live in if you just vote for the president every four or five years or whatever, prime minister. But yeah. But what you're saying kind of made me think of maybe we need to kind of, like, to think about what, an illiberal democracy looks like or something like that.
Yeah. Or maybe to even acknowledge how much illiberalism is already here. I mean, you know, I I also live in Berlin, and I do not have a German citizenship. And I am one of 30% of this city that cannot vote. So I can't help make the municipal decisions. I pay my taxes here. And I I find it fascinating. We wanna talk so much about democracy, but we have a lot of weird gray area like that. That's a sizable percentage. That would change an election. Definitely. Percent. Mhmm.
I don't know that was true of Berlin. I know in in Brussels, you can you can vote if you're a, if you live in the city. But okay. So that was, all my questions on the on the hard power half of of the memo. I would love to move on to soft beliefs. I think this is a, also super interesting and kind of fascinating section of the book. So two of the concepts you guys have kinda, like, already talked about that I would love for you guys to explain a bit more are networked realism and reality lag. I think that one really, like, helped me. I mean, I was like, yes. That is totally happening. But I guess the I'll first, maybe I'll I will read this quote from from the book because I thought it was really good and helped, contextualize it a bit as well. It says navigating between the seamless user experience online, what we call soft beliefs in this memo, and increased friction of our transitioning material environment, what we described as hard power, we came to the clue conclusion that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the network. Clearly a a reference to, capitalist realism. But, yeah, I guess, how how would you guys explain, these concepts?
I think, like, maybe I'd explain by the the trajectory of how we got to this concept. Like Mhmm. We started writing these newsletters and basically set ourselves the challenge every month to come up with a new newsletter where we share observations, ideas about what's happening in those fields. And I think by the fifth newsletter, somehow, this concept of network realism emerged. It was kind of like coincidental with both, I think, Carlos Scanlon in a blog post talking about difference between fiction and friction of our lives and then us finding this term by Schumann Bazar that he already coined in 2024 called reality lag, which was really fitting. So reality the definition in Bazaars where I think of reality lag is this perception that increasingly the reality that we perceive by being online, by being inside our filter bubbles and feeds doesn't correspond or lags behind the material reality. So we're kind of, like, surprised when the train is late or the the the flight doesn't come, you know, all of these realities that we actually increasingly face because our minds are elsewhere. You know? So that we found interesting. I think network realism then is, yeah, coming from, you know, inspired by Marc Fisher, that basically his famous quote says, well, capitalism as a system is so all persuasive and intrusive that we can't really imagine a world without it anymore, the same goes for the network, a. K. A. The Internet in many ways, that it's so pervasive and intrusive in the way of influencing our lives that we can't imagine a world without it anymore, but also kind of live with this realist approach of, like, it is what it is. We you know, I think core matters, as I said, started in 2017 and, in in the beginning was very much influenced by this tech clash that existed in 2016 in the wake of the first Trump election of, like, oh, tech is not neutral. You know, we have to fight against it. And, again, yeah, there was some sort of idealism coming up, and I don't think that really exists anymore. People are more like, it is what it is, and we find strategies to cope with it and deal with it, but we're not really trying to change it. That's kind of, I think, the realism that that is part of this network realism concept.
Mhmm. Yeah. And maybe that the only way out is through is a little bit that, you know, and and maybe the other part of that too, well, another, like, platitude, but, like, you know, to not hate the player, hate the game. I think that it's, like, a shift in attitude from a way a way of understanding these situations, not in the terms of, like, the purity politics of maybe this era you're talking about where it was just like, oh my god. Tech's not neutral, but, like, exit. Or or do you know, you have to do only the goody two shoes stuff. But at the same time, like, we live and breathe on the Internet, and just about every aspect of our lives is some sort of online ramification. And the people who are surviving or thriving or even getting by are the ones that are learning to game it, and they have the sense of network realism. You know, I I remember, meeting, like, a a friend of mine, Morgan Biluard, who just wrote a a couple books now, about media culture. And one of her first research projects she she was telling me about was following these communities on Skillshare, which is, you know, this website where you can upload videos and give workshops and things like this. And she had discovered that there was all these Discord communities where people were talking about their Skillshare accounts and then deciding to watch each other's Skillshare accounts so they could pump their numbers. Right? And to me, this is this is networked realism also. This is the acknowledgment that this is the reality we are in, and all we can do is create some sort of solidarity form where we're all going to help each other out and make do with what's here. And, that doesn't mean it's you know, that change is not possible. I don't wanna be entirely nihilistic. But there is something to be said about the people who are learning how to be these clever operators and learn how to work the system for what it is. And I think that it is from those experiments, from that sense of network realism, that there is some optimism, that something if something is to change in a way that we want to see, it will change from that locus.
Mhmm. Mhmm. And I think, to me, it also goes back to that democracy discussion we had of, like, people, I think majority of people is not really interested in democracy because they have accepted inequality as the status quo. So the game is either you win or you lose, but there's no in between. There's no fair distribution of goods anymore. That idea is just not relevant anymore. It's about how do I game the system as much as I can to my advantage so I end up on the winning side and become this tech person living in the woods with two monitors and doing my remote work and, you know, fantasizing about network stays on Twitter and basically avoid and escape the friction of the material world that the people on the lower end have to deal with. So I think that's the that's the status quo we're dealing with. It's either this or that, but the in between or the, you know, the more fair distribution angle, not a lot of people seem to be interested in that right now.
I think that exit narrative is really important that you're bringing up too because with the fiction friction, it's like the people who are able to game the system or get above above ground a bit. Yeah, they're going off the Bali and having their remote job and, like, kind of not there's not a sense or an urgency for change or something like that. It's just the idea of making your life more and more frictionless. Mhmm. You know? And the the most extreme example may be being a network state where you even eradicate, like, that friction that is the pores or Right. Right. Or, like, anything unseemly or ungainly about what it takes to actually build and maintain a city.
Right. Right. Yeah. There I mean, there's, I think, a lot to say about the whole network states. I mean, part of it, I think, a lot of libertarian like, cyber libertarianism, I feel like, came out of maybe the experience of reality lag within them being, like, devs. Like, they experience reality lag, I think, earlier than a lot of other people and more intensely toward, like it's just, like, this frustration with the material world that is not moving as fast as, like, the Internet moves or as fast as when I, like, send an email or, like, when I engage with the Internet. And so, like, this discrepancy or difference that I have to experience the world both in this hyper frictionless information economy and in a material economy where things just take time. I think, like, can I think this is the the clash for for a lot of people? Can they can become significantly more frustrated, some people, by experiencing both. And just more and more people be with the Internet proliferating, therefore, are experiencing that and that frustration, I guess. And there's no way there's no democracy on the Internet. You know? So and that's working way better than the material world. So why do we need democracy?
I mean, it's part of it. I don't know. Yeah. I think there's also just, like, the revenge of the real on that a little bit too where, you know, no one wants to talk about the emissions that are created by, you know, whatever technology or, you know, the emissions created by streaming Greta Thunberg, videos on YouTube. You know? Or, like, all of the, you know, workers and people in mines and transportation workers and janitors and stuff that it takes to maintain your, you know, SAS, business, you know, b to b business. You know? Like, there's just, like, the I think it's, like, the people who have been able to extricate themselves from these situations don't see that every move they're making for for frictionlessness creates friction in the real world, and they're making it an externality. And at some point, those pile up over time. And I think that's what we're seeing right now. It's like all that wealth extraction into, like, overcapitalizing the tech industry in a number of industries and hollowing out the industrial base of, Europe and The United States. Well, eventually, that means that people are going to be very frustrated. They're going to be without work. They're not going to have access to capital or even, even just a basic mode of life. And all these small towns and rural areas are going to decay, and people are going to be lonely, and they're gonna lose a sense of purpose. And it's like people don't see that this is a yin and yang. This is the other side of the coin of being other people getting that frictionless experience. Mhmm. And I think that this is really frightening to people because they don't want to think about how they're two sides of the same coin. Mhmm.
So continuing on on soft beliefs, another couple of, concepts you guys have already mentioned, at least one of them is aggregation versus mass appeal as kind of, like, two two different ways that information has kind of, where things have kinda gone, I guess, viral in in in people's consciousness. Mass appeal, as as far as I understood reading the book, as being what kind of used to be how marketing firms or whoever tried to, advertise products and aggregation becoming more dominant now, which is a slightly more complex mechanism, I think. But would you guys like to explain the differences in in those, concepts and how ideas proliferate with them? Mhmm.
Yeah. So our thinking, we have this graph in a book, you know, aggregation theory, that basically builds on this long tail theory by Chris Anderson, you know, ex wired editor, wrote this book in 2006 about the long tail in the, you know, theory of the Internet, you know, which was a very viable theory for a long time and still holds up in some way, where he basically argued with the Internet and with, you know, the accessibility that the Internet opens up, there's an equal opportunity for people to go or, like, for businesses, for brands, for products to go into an extreme niche and proliferate there and basically carve out that niche from a million niches Mhmm. And run a successful business there and don't have to go into the mainstream wholesale, and compete with everyone else. And so we kind of, like, took that on and and tried to put a lens on, you know, analyzing the present and felt like the mainstream, of course, still exists in some way. There's still when we look at viral phenomenons and stuff, there's still stuff that goes viral that resonates with a lot of people. And but it's kind of like the end of the anonymous mass audience that the broadcasting era and the broadcasting logic of mainstream media operated on. So for a while, you know, I think the Internet era and the broadcasting era kind of, like, coexisted and both worked in some way. But what we see now that in order to actually have breakthrough success on a global level, you need to utilize aggregation theory, which means you're not speaking to you're not trying to please a mass anonymous audience with something that a lot of people can agree on, but rather, you're stacking up different niche communities on top of each other and find something that all of them can interpret in some way, almost in, like, in a mimetic way. Looking at, for example, Brad Summer last year, you know, it's been heavily analyzed and theorized, you know, what Charli XCX team and herself achieved with Brad. But, ultimately, it used the same logic of creating something that's so, open and up to interpretation by anyone, just like a word on a green background and amplifying that and knowing how to fuel it, that it aggregated and became the thing of last summer. And we see the same thing, you know, with, I think, the reason why a lot of people were excited about the Zora and Mandami campaign a month ago. And the success of it was that finally, you know, like, a democratic candidate mastered the art of doing this, of kind of being everywhere, going on every podcast, being in every TikTok format, being charming, having well produced narratives, creating something that really works online as a way to aggregate and stack up these audiences that, like, these mini shows have aggregated over the last few years, like the subway takes or, you know, all these so that's kind of, like, what aggregation theory builds on. Like, it doesn't the old logic of, like, let's say, you know, the Democratic Party of, like, oh, we choose very well which podcast we go on, you know, that reaches the right audience and this or that, that doesn't really work anymore. You just gotta be everywhere. Yeah. And, ultimately, flooding the zone is a term coined by Steve Bannon, I think. You know? Because, again, the right has understood this a little bit earlier, and and now we see it being applied to more in different contexts.
Yeah. Because all I think maybe in broadcast media era, there's this idea that you want people to like what you do. But in this aggregation era, it doesn't matter if someone likes your content or is hate watching it, or is you or is it sharing it as an example of something that's gone wrong or whatever, you're still engaging. Right. And it still bumps the numbers, and it's still, like, participating in that, economy of attention. So the whole game gets flipped as a result of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of, like,
like, I I mean, you see this a lot on these kind of short video content, feeds, I feel. Like, at one point, I just, like, I was hate watching, you know, people making, like, really shitty food. Like, were they just and were they just, like, pretend you know, there's, like, this whole show where they pretend like, oh, wow. Look at this I put donuts on top of the Cheetos and then put those covered it in chocolate sauce and put it in the oven. Well, and then just, like, people pretending like, this is really I just I hate it so much. And then it just I just I realized I was like and I keep getting this, on on the feed, and I keep watching it, and I I it makes my life worse watching it, but I keep watching it because it's so awful. Like, I've my eyes can't look away. And they probably make a ton of money off of people like me or hate watching them. It's like it it felt like eventually, it was like this is such an obvious like, like, trolling is becoming much more profitable.
Yeah. And I think that's a that's a great example of of what soft beliefs is about, that people find strategies. They don't try to change anything. They just find strategies that work. And it doesn't matter whether the content is fake or the food is bad or ugly. Yeah. What works works. You know? So Yeah. That's kind of like, yeah, where we see soft beliefs coming up of, like, these absurd new combinations of identities and behaviors and rituals that that emerge online as a reaction to the hard power and the infrastructure laws changing and and constantly adapting. So yeah.
Yeah. I guess, if you're a creator and all you want are views because that's how you're getting paid, you don't have to believe anything that you're doing. You just need to get views. So if you know that you can get views by believing this one thing and then also saying you believe in this other thing because they both have niche communities, then you can believe both. And then someone who maybe followed you because they, you know, saw one video, all of a sudden get exposed to another set of beliefs because that person is just making money no matter what you believe in, but because you're watching.
Yeah. And I think that takes us back to the lack of the moral compass and the the losing the plot and also this term that Nick brought in of strategic ambiguity, which is a term originally coined by NATO, but which we think applies a lot to the behavior of people online that everything is so fluid, and you constantly have to adapt your personality and your identity to whatever performs next. They don't don't really set you know, when it comes to subcultures, we give this example of, like, yeah, there used to be subcultures like punk that had a very strong code of ethics, and you were being called out when you didn't, you know, apply it or were acting acting against it. And does that doesn't really work anymore. Like, people are just constantly reacting and adapting. And, yeah, you you came up with this beautiful quote, like, yesterday's moral stance is tomorrow's liability. That's very much a reality. Everyone is so afraid of getting canceled of, like, you know, being for something that you rather place yourself strategically ambiguous and place your cards on multiple tractions and identities and ways of thinking and that, you know, very much a dynamic that also comes from financial markets and ultimately crypto markets. Like, you invest in 10 meme coins, you know, and you shield all of them until one takes off, then you dump the rest, then you go on one until that dumps and, you know, you go hop on to the next. It's not really about believing in anything any of it. It's rather just like where do you place your bets, how long do you stay in, and when do you hop off to the next thing.
Absolutely. And I mean, you know, he's, of course, the man of the hour, which is unfortunate, but there's a reason why Trump has our mind share internationally even. We don't even live in The United States. But it's, his ability to say whatever he wants in whatever context to get more views and to get more attention, even if that's controversy, or to speak to people about the things they care about and never deliver. I mean, it's just the hyperextension of what politicians have been doing for decades where they promise big and they don't deliver. But nobody expects him to deliver, but he speaks to it. And I think that's all people care about. And what's interesting is that he can say one thing in a certain media environment and and another thing in another media environment. It doesn't even matter. You know, I I I remember speaking with my parents who do live in The United States about Trump, and I would verbatim quote one of his speeches because they would say that my interpretation of what he said he wants to do in his platform was incorrect. I was like, well, he verbatim said x y z. And they were like, where where? I don't know about that. And it's the interesting thing. We have entirely different media environments. So it didn't matter that he said that on my and that it was captured in my media environment because, I you know, the the these other people whose attention he was trying to capture are hearing an entirely different message. And so that's part of this aggregation reality, these moving between these fragmented modes and staying strategically ambiguous.
Right. I mean okay. Now I I have I have, like, two now I have two big things I wanted to definitely talk about because, I mean, at least just because we're on Trump. I mean, I think this kind of like, one of the things that's kind of fascinating to me is with the Epstein stuff, nobody like, the all of these pictures with him in Epstein, they're so old. Like, I I saw these, like, four or five years ago, but only now is it becoming a thing on the right where there, like, plenty of people who were supporters of him the entire time are now all of a sudden this is a big deal. I mean, part of it but I think part of it is, like, the priming. It's like mental priming, for a lot of people. Like, I think that's what he's really good at, like, getting people prepared on the right to get outraged about something in the future, like the speculative speculative outrage, I guess. And because I mean, maybe the it it it it has to do with, you know, they just fumbled the bag and just, like, were so focused on releasing the Epstein list. And then by not delivering on it, everyone was so mentally primed to see the Epstein list even though, like, people were talking about the Epstein list, like, five years ago at least.
Yeah. Well, it's just that, you know, I think it's maybe the Democrats and a lot of other people who want to usurp power coming to terms with the fact that the only way you can sack a US politician is on moral grounds. It's the same reason why Clinton was impeached for, for the Monica Lewinsky scandal and why they approached Biden, not on policy terms, but on the Hunter Biden stuff. In The United States, you've almost never had an opportunity to take down an official because of actual corruption that usually gets pushed aside or an actual, like, pitfall of policy, but it's always on these moral, issues. So it seems like that was maybe the the the nuclear option for for Democrats and other people trying to rattle the cage.
Yeah. Do you think it's I mean, I guess my read on the situation is it seems to be coming from within the right is the reason why people are caring about it
in some way. Yeah. But I think that that's why because, like, it will shake up his base, and it's so fascinating. And he it was Trump himself who, you know, drummed up so much outrage on this, you know, pedophile, Epstein thing in the first place that he's just like, yeah. He's succumbing to his the monster that he created. And I find that kind of poetic and beautiful, but I have my popular idea. Situation.
And the other thing I wanted to make sure I mentioned just because I I have to mention it because I mentioned it in the beginning is the the shooting that happened yesterday. And in that, I think it kind of illustrated aggregation kind of happening in real time or probably is still going on right now as we speak. But at first, you know, what I was hearing is well, just like the the many frames that this shooting is, like, being presented. Like, for some people, it's being presented as, like, an extension of Luigi Mignoni, where we've been killing CEOs now. Every once in a while, other people are just, like, framing it in, like, different ways, and it seems to have, like, a new story and kind of part of its virality has been that multiple people can look at it from different points of view. Like, people are saying it, no. He meant to go to the NFL because he has CTE, so it's about that, and he made that mistake. Or it was like, there isn't there's another framing I'm now forgetting that happened before those, but, like, yeah. I don't know if you were keeping up with that with the story that happened yesterday. So I I have to say, I I don't know anything about it. I was offline until this talk. Yeah. Figures out.
I haven't been following it super closely, but I know the story. Basically, someone went into the skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan that houses the NFL Okay. And shot up a number of people. Wow. And, yeah, there's, some indication because of a note, if I understand correctly, that he was either an aspiring football player or he did suffer from a concussion and, like, traumatic brain injuries. And as a result, he's maybe seeing himself as an advocate for the people who are the many people in the NFL and post NFL who have, you know, are living with, like, severe, brain damage. Yeah. And, yeah. I mean, I think this is exactly this moment of, aggregation. And I think what it speaks to is from, like, a political perspective also is that there isn't a consensus take, You know, period. They know, like, in in the past, maybe maybe there were, like, some kind of fringe beliefs. Like, you know, I remember when September 11 happened. I was still in high school and living in The United States. And, you know, for the most like, people maybe were less patriotic or more patriotic, and there were some fringe conspiracy groups. But I would say it's fair to it would be fair to say that a a large amount of people kind of agreed that was a terrible terrorist act that happened because of this. All these people died, etcetera. And I just think of, like, a an event like that happening today, and it would just turn into this crazy mess. And you see this on, you know, smaller scales. I mean, even with what's happening in Gaza right now. I mean, the media narratives are insane Yeah. Because everyone like, so many people have these very different perspectives on it, and they're just fighting for narrative dominance. But it just proves that you can't have like, it it can be an event happening. And even with, like, objective facts, it gets construed in an entirely different way. It's not even about objectivity or nonobjectivity. It's about the about what a narrative object, how it operates in a larger context of other things happening in the world and what it means for people. And I think that's just we're in these entirely fragmented worlds with different sense of purposes, different politics, and that's that hard politics really coming down on the soft beliefs. You know, those narrative those narrative constructions are the product of having
entirely different world views even if we don't want to admit that point yet. Mhmm. I think that's a great exam. Like, this fight for public opinion that we see with examples like, you know, the Middle East conflict. I think we talk also a lot about the fact that the fragmented world we see is part of digital infrastructure, but also part of the legacy institutions that used to make sense of the world and that used to provide consensus in large parts of society by, yeah, by basically owning the signal or having the signal through media and so on, they have lost their signal, mostly. They don't know how to cut through on the Internet nowadays. And so those who own the signal, which is, like, these million micro communities and belief systems, they emerge in the example, I think, of the shooting that you described. Like, suddenly something happens, and the swarm takes off. Right? And the swarm, which we describe also as this egregore concept of a swarm of millions of different perspectives and micro perspectives on something that is frantically going from one direction and one lead to another, and then where yeah, all these different entities are fighting for who owns and influences people and has public opinion, and then eventually it dies out again and the thing settles until the next thing happens. So that, yeah, we chose egregores and this warm intelligence metaphor as a way to describe the fragmented space we operate in right now, where no single institution or medium really provides consensus amongst large parts of society, but it's all of these, like, millions of micro communities fighting for dominance over who influences people's minds.
Yeah. I feel like everyone is, like, kind of I feel we can we're kinda, like, watching, you know, mini egregores pop up from these different communities who feel strongly about this particular frame of of an event or something like that. And then sometimes they fuse together. I feel like that but fusing together in some way is also kinda brings up, some more staying power, I guess, for a particular story or a particular view and MAGA and, even like this, in I think, Nick, you know their name, like the, diagonal thinking in Germany, the this group, Cuerdenka. Like, I think they were like, I think you see this as well and this, how they were, like, just many disparate beliefs somehow fused together into into one thing to create this, like, larger, entity that then looks like stupid. Yeah. Yeah.
And I I mean, I think we also we use this example of the the new right in some way, you know, where, you know, a lot of a lot has been written about Curtis Yarvin in the last few months. But basically, these ideologies that really existed on the fringes of society, far away from any type of consensus, where really, like, the weirdos and the nerds met in, like, weird discourse and stuff to discuss these ideas. Suddenly, this takes traction and is transported into mainstream from the fringes through, yeah, JD Vance or, you know, the the the the White House right now. And that's that's response to, like, this how ideas travel. They don't emerge from the middle and and, you know, attract attention by larger amounts of people. Like, they emerge from the very outskirts of things until something happens to to to transports it into the mainstream and then makes it become big. So yeah. Mhmm.
Yeah. I mean, I think yeah. This, I like how you said at one point, you know, I think it was, like, you lost the plot, but there is none anyways. Like, I think that that, like, this is a, strategic ambiguity is like a a strategy in order to deal with the fact that there is no plot or that the plot is kind of either random or just kind of, like, very difficult as a single person to kind of to be able to predict which egregores are going to come up all the way. You kind of have to placate many of them and then see which how they move and then respond accordingly. And so, like, you know, one, what you were saying earlier at the yeah. I also think that was really good. You know, you know, it could become a liability afterwards if you take too strong of a stance. So you always have to be speculating as to, like, maybe I am into it. Maybe I'm not. But if I if if it works out, then I was always into it. If it doesn't work out, I was always skeptical. I told you. I told you it wasn't going to work. You know? And that's how you, like, keep your your particular positioning in the, on the news feed and in the, I guess, sociotechnical hierarchy, of the feed. And I think so this has somehow been exacerbated, I think, with, not just crypto communities via meme coins and NFTs where people are constantly financial speculation, but you also have and you guys kind of led to this, like, ideological speculation as well, for a lot of people. And to me, it seems to me that prediction markets are kind of like a next it's a next level of it. I mean, now now you can you can kinda do both at the same time, and I think it's really fascinating that, what is it futarchy, I think it is, where it's like you could, like, bet on bet on beliefs, but vote or vote on beliefs, whatever it was. You can, like, vote on the things that you would like to happen, but then bet on the things that you think will happen. Mhmm. These type of ideas already came from libertarian thinking and, like, is very popular in rationalist circles, for example. You know, I've read well, I think I would love if you guys have any thoughts on this, but, like, you know, in rational circles, it's really popular, I think as a synthesis of this ambiguity is to place bets on what you think is going to happen and that for for a rationalist, it's sort of like, well, if you really believe in anything, then you should make money off of it. Like, it's kind of like this assumption implied in all of this. Yeah. I don't know. What what I I kind of just, like, puked a bunch of stuff, but I don't know if you guys have thoughts.
Yeah. No. I think it's it's definitely something we're very interested in and which we also hint at at the memo and which we're currently researching in another memo, actually. It's like, yeah. What's happening with meme coins and crypto and with Polymarket and with, like, these new kind of things that speculation the act of speculation becomes almost like the predominant social behavior of people, where I think my theory is, like, I personally have never been an overly rational person or, like, a financial person. I've never been really interested in trading and stuff like that. But I feel like that in especially in younger generations, you know, because we are in this, like, either you're on the winning side or on the losing side era Mhmm. Like, financial speculation and trading is almost like is is a very normal behavior that people talk about, that people learn, that people do in order to survive and win. So, yeah, what we're currently interested in or I'm personally interested in is, like, how do these logics that stem from financial markets and prediction markets take over other parts of culture where, you know, we see that, you know, of course, similar thing that we described with, like, you know, egregores and TikTok trends or whatever, that, yeah, albums are being dropped on Spotify not because of an artist believes in it, but it's because they think it, you know, it it cracks the algorithm in some way. So I think by and large, it's a very, like, macro perspective on it, but that's what I'm currently curious about is, like, how do these behaviors that come from more financial markets swap over into culture and creativity and influence that space? Yeah. That's kind of, like, how I relate to the question.
Yeah. I think also, I mean, there is something very earnest about that rationalist approach. Not so much that, oh, I think people should make money off having good bets, but rather that, if you play if you put some some degree of risk into your belief, into your critique, into anything, you're probably going to take a a bit more seriously. I find it interesting. I read the the Polymarket blog, on Substack. And the reason being is, like, you hear all of these stories because, you know, I think that some people think the people on Polymarket is just, like, very gambling heavy, very chaotic. But, actually, the people who seem to be winning really a lot are people who see that that actually take the time to do the research. They try to understand a phenomena on every level and take it absolutely seriously because they have a lot of money riding on it. And, I think that there is certainly an interesting incentive there. And, you know, a lot of these prediction markets are better than polling right now. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they're performing quite well when it comes to that. So what, you know, what's going on there? You know? I don't wanna believe that that's the only mechanism Yeah. For how to make those beliefs work. But I do think, yeah, I think they're quite accurate. The only issue that I think we're not talking about in terms of that, which is super native to crypto Yeah. Is this level of hyperstition.
Yeah. So,
you know, in a in a market like that, let's say it's something that could could happen. It's a decision to be made or a possibility less than like a natural disaster or something like that. But something that actually can be influenced by a poll or a prediction market. And you have someone who's very wealthy and even losing, you know, a million dollars is not very impactful for them. Let's say they put all that money into that prediction market and just as a whale entirely skew the graph. Yeah. And there's no one who can really, you know, put enough capital in to do you know, to push it the other direction. Will that will it into existence? It's actually a fascinating problem to deal with. And, actually, so much of crypto operates on this level of Ponzinomics, this level of speculation. Like so, you know, the same with this the pylon effect that happens in crypto with whales where you don't really know that there's whales involved, but somehow you see this huge momentum on price because, yeah, a few big institutional whales just popped in a ton of money, and it seems like it's blowing up. But that's actually part of their exit strategy. Mhmm. So I think that there's a degree of that going on also with speculation and soft beliefs where there's some people who have a vested interest in a certain outcome, and they have the power or the infrastructure or the capital to game that system. That's also, I think, an element of networked realism, and it's one of the most dangerous aspects of it because, yeah, you see that this is, like, pure informational war, actually.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not to mention as well, there are I mean, there there there have been, like, some controversial things with Polymarket and the I think the token that they use for settling bets, you know, is available on the on the market. So if you have a lot of money, you can sway what what the, prediction market kind of lands on by just buying a bunch of the token and voting that actually, no. This didn't happen even though it did. Precisely. And that's kind of just like, then you just gotta hope that there's people who want the truth to happen have enough money to, like, make the right outcome, but that doesn't always pan out, I guess. I mean, we're playing with fire, and it's not just there, but it's in really every aspect. This is this is post truth in its most,
mechanized. Capital truth. Because Maybe. Not just capital truth, but this also happens on just about every level. There's no even with, like, normal stocks, there's no correspondence between, for instance, revenue and the stock price Sure. Yeah. Or an actual utility or something like that. And when there's absolutely no cost correspondence, that means it's an entirely it's entirely animal spirits, as Keynes would say. Right? It's entirely based on people's emotional evaluations, their psychological dependencies, etcetera. And if we're it's the same with all these narratives with the shooter and what have you and all of these things where you you start just, like, pumping certain narratives and, actually, facts don't matter. There's no correspondence to something that's actually happened. It all that matters is the story and the speculation and the hyperstition. And we we're playing with fire if our entire world is based on that, and whole societies, economic systems, and political systems are based on that. Because, yeah, it once again, it's pure informational war, but it's like pure informational Hobbesian war of all against all. Yeah. And I don't know I don't think that has a good outcome.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I've made I'd place my bet on that wager. We made many, I've made many jokes with my friends about the the the coming of assassination markets where, you know, it would happen only because the market exists, like, for it. You know? Oh, yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. But okay. Last question. Because one of the things that, like, I'm trying to get out with the, as a response to strategic ambiguity or as a response to this, like, trying to traverse the current context that we live in, strategic ambiguity is one strategy to kind of take it on. But then I think another strategy seems to me kind of like the, I mean, it's kinda like taking on a a type of modernism, I guess. I don't know if that's the right word for it, but, like, you see kind of, like, left and right versions of dealing with the deluge of information that kind of is being produced by the Internet. On one side, I think on the right, you see it with, like, like, trad like, trad wives or, like, trad living, and this type of thing. And then, on the left, you have like, you could I think it's a bit of a caricature, but you can, like, say that, like, you know, woke culture or, like, cancel culture was also part of this, like, trying to find an absolute truth within the deluge of information. And I think you also see it in, like, maybe even accelerationism versus degrowth, as, like, trying to point at, like, one thing that we need to all be doing as an answer to society's ills in this deluge of of information. Do you guys see, like, people producing these types of strategies, to make sense of it? And is it an actual solution, or is it simply just adding to the deluge, I guess?
I mean, I I think I would call it, like, yeah, it's different coping strategies. I mean, in another report, we went deep into, like, you know, the new wellness space where, you know, around the world or in, like, in Western societies, we see these new sauna spaces pop up, people doing cold lunches. I go to sound baths sometimes, you know, in Berlin to switch off. So I think these kind of, like, trends or the way we look at these trends are definitely that they're coping mechanisms to cope with the reality that we have in our digital lives, which feels often, yeah, very hard to deal with with the overflow info information. So there are definitely, I think, trends that come and go. And, you know, and yeah. I think we're also living in the right man environment where, yeah, then the tradewives come up, and everyone is, like, looking at the tradewives and why is this happening, and suddenly they disappear and, like, something else comes up. So it's very fast paced, and it's very much symptoms of a larger picture, which, again, I think brings me back to, like, why we created that memo because we were also a little bit tired of analyzing one trend after another. And the moment you have finished analyzing it, it's already the next taking over. And, you know, when you're in the brand consulting space, which you're actually not that deep into but sometimes do, brands obviously wanna know where and how can we position ourselves in order to still be relevant. So they try to hop on to these trends early enough, but it's kind of like a losing game because it goes faster and faster, and you can't really keep up. And also the trends mean less and less. They're merely reactions to, like, a bigger environment rather than real trends that have roots and come from, like, deeper, you know, cultural movements. So I'd say, yeah, trends are trends. They pop up. Like egregores, they go down again. But I can't really tell what the future holds, but the direction we chose with this memo was to at least try to understand the bigger tectonic shifts and try to find language and concepts for normal everyday people that are not into macroeconomics and geopolitics to explain them because we believe that's helpful to understand the bigger picture and maybe navigate that world more effectively rather than hopping on the next trend or analyzing the next trend. That's kind of, like, was our point of departure.
Yeah. I think and also, like, to speak to your point specifically about this, like, the Trad wife or the, like, really intensive, like, woke or whatever and accelerationism, degrowth, all these things. They are the commodity form of everything that's happening online. This is clearly, like, you need a signal. You need a legible signal. So instead of, like you know, if you you talk to, like, someone who actually has to build policies and talk to them about accelerationism or or degrowth, they'll ask you, like, okay. Like, what do you want? You know? And it's this reality that, like, I think all these people who are online who think they're experts because they read, like, a book and, don't have to deal with the messy realities of actually, like, finding the mechanics of a policy or understanding how economics works and how, like, something is manufactured. The same goes for even, like, this, like, trad wife thing or even, like, DEI or or a certain form of, like, identity politics. A lot of it's just that you need like, the HR, department needed something that they can say they're, you know, doing their due diligence. So they did the DEI. You don't actually even know what that means. They're just, like, trying to cover their ass, and they're trying to maybe maybe, you know, they actually care even. Maybe they're just, like, we wanna be better at this. Like, oh, we do the DEI thing then. It's just these, like, this world where all our information is coming at us so fast, and we need these, like, legible containers, these little commodities that we can grab and utilize and do something with. And I think it's just it it demonstrates that the where people are getting their information from. And it's always gonna be these isms and be these, like, really neat containers. But the problem with that is, yeah, you're getting in a situation where it's just a number of neat containers, and everybody's screaming at each other even though half the time, they're not even mutually exclusive containers. And if you actually have some sort of larger sense of purpose or something you're trying to accomplish, you don't really care about the container unless you get unless you want some sort of outcome. And if you can agree on a certain outcome, I'm sure you can find a way to get there. Or if you have, like I don't know. If you wanna, like, have some kids and, like, live on a farm and make yogurt all day or something, like, cool. Like, I don't care. But the but you need that legibility to pass it on, to make a brand, to sell yourself. And or even if you just like those things and you're trying to communicate it to someone, you give it a container. And I think this is this progressive just, like, doming down of everything into really neat containers. And it's shows that maybe we all just need to, like, talk to other people more. I know it sounds like so No. This sounds so boomer, but, like, I don't know. Just, like, meet people and find out how people do things and talk to people who maybe you don't know and get get offline for a minute, and maybe you'll actually learn a thing or two about how people are just trying to make things work. And they're much more complex and strange and probably curious than you're giving credit.
Mhmm. So, the the moral of the story is go touch grass, Go outside and talk to people in real life. Stay offline. It's not good for your health.
I I mean, I don't I mean, I think it's interesting that this is happening or that it is this is a Gen z trend, you know, to touch grass thing. Who knows if it's persistent or not? I think I'm more interested in, like, how do we bring those two worlds together again. I think, you know, I remember Nick and I back in January, we were at this conference, organized by Radical Exchange, which is, like, you know, policy, hard power, soft power, think tank in a way. And it was an interesting discussion because they brought together, basically, people from the policy world and people from, you know, more online world. And it just became so obvious to me that these are completely different worlds, and they speak different language, and it didn't meet. Like, when, you know, seasoned twenty years EU politician tried to come up with, like, some answers to people's question, it felt so off because she operates in such a different world in logic. And that's fine because I you know? Or it's fine. I understand in a way because it is a reality that these things are slow and very complex and have wide reaching effects when it comes to policymaking, but you also have to address that people's minds are in a different reality. And, again, this is where institutions like the European Union lose the signal because they can't connect with people anymore. So I'm interested in, like, where is the solution of bringing those two worlds together? The fast paced, soft belief, crazy, hyperreality of the world we live or most of us live in today, with the hard power material infrastructure that still owns our bodies and the land in a way? How do we marry these? Because what we see is they're drifting further and further apart, and because of comfort and convenience, people rather choose the digital soft belief, frictionless world, and engage less with the friction of the material world. And I think it's interesting how you bring those two together again.
Yeah. That's a nice Yeah. Well, I think that was that was a great way to end it. Maybe just last, if you guys want to share the your plugs and where people can find your work, you guys have a a really nice Substack where I think it's also called Comatter, with a lot of different, interesting pieces in there as well.
Yeah. So, yeah, it's our Substack. It's our Instagram. We publish once a month. We just finished this six month series now in Substack that culminated in this memo that's available on MetaLabel. We're hosting a launch party in Berlin tomorrow, and we're also hosting a roundtable on new world order on September 10, which you can still sign up for via MetaLabel. So that's why we discuss these ideas in even more detail. And, yeah, we're dropping a new memo probably by mid end September. We can't really talk about the details yet, but it's gonna be a deep dive into a specific crypto ecosystem and what it means, you know, the larger context and impact of that on a lot of the things that we discussed here. So Yeah. We're deep in the wheels of, like, writing and researching that right now, and that's gonna be the next public drop that we do.
Nice. Well, you might come on,
again soon enough then. That'd be that'd be lovely. Yeah. I can talk really dive deep into, like, the crypto story then. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, cool. Thanks so much for coming on, and Thank you. I'll catch you guys next time. I'll see you at the release party.
Absolutely. See you tomorrow. Alright.