Welcome.
Pocket Observatory is not-for-profit project offered to you for free through a Creative Commons license. The continuation of this work depends on support from people like you.
Become a Fellow ObserverA little while ago, I wrote about discovering I lived in a mixed reality. My virtual world was formed by my religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It mapped neatly onto my other world, a reality shaped by the 1990s economic boom and suburban cul-de-sacs. Both realities promised that authority could bind me to heaven.
As I picked them apart, I discovered how the network effect creates artificial scarcity and can be used as a control mechanism. This piece exists in conversation with that piece. If you like to read the first piece, it’s right here. But that’s not completely necessary. I've made the end of the piece our starting point.
I’ve accepted I will always live in a mixed reality of some sort or other. I know I will not always recognize the constructions framing my reality. But I did think my experience with Mormonism made me less vulnerable to world-building schemes promising networked salvation.
So imagine my incredible dismay when realized that by writing on Substack, I was participating in another worldbuilding scheme promising networked salvation. What was the scheme? And how do I think Substack is involved? The answer includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, the Creator Economy, Cryptocurrency, JD Forking Vance, and an apocalyptic cult. (Not the one you think!)
I wanted to show you what I’d found but I wasn’t sure which route I should take to get us there. Then Ballerina Farm helped me get my bearings.
Related Reading
Meg Conley
Ballerina Farm
On July 20th, The Times published a profile about Mormon social media star Hannah Neeleman and her family,
Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)
Hannah Neeleman, known to her nine million followers as Ballerina Farm, milks cows, gives birth without pain relief and breastfeeds at beauty pageants. Is this an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism? - The Times
The piece was a study in collision detection. It outlined the bounding volumes of American religion, the myth of the separate spheres, white feminism, the politics of a public life, reproductive healthcare, influence, patriarchal authority, the commodification of the representation of a certain kind of care work.
As I read the article, I thought I understood the force it would exert on the discourse. Neeleman is experiencing the Traditional Mormon Homestead version of the Separate Spheres LARP imposed on the entire country. I braced for impact, expecting it would take two or three days for the internet to absorb the energy. This was a very long time on the internet time scale!
I was very wrong! TEN days later, the Trad Wives and the Trad Wife Experts were still posting takes. And I was still being served those takes on my social media feeds, even though I didn’t follow any of them. And sure, it’s possible my algorithms have been trained to weight Mormonism, care work and gender issues. But I was not the only one having this experience. It was happening to a lot of people.
I spoke to a friend who said her grandma texted her to ask what she thought “about the whole thing with the dancing farm impactor* with a weird husband.” Her grandma learned about the dancing farm impactor on Facebook.
*she meant influencer, but both work tbh
When my friend told me about the interaction, she sounded mystified, “There is no reason for my grandma to know or care about this. Nothing in her background, politics, social life. I don’t know. This just feels different than going viral or whatever. What the hell is going on?”
I am so glad she asked. Because as I answered her question, I found the routeI'd been looking for. Let's call it Fury Road, shall we?
Here we go, girls!
And now pretend I am showing you some of the landmarks we will pass on our way. Maybe I hold out my arm so you can see the map I inked there, or I’ve embroidered it into a bit of silk.
We'll start with information and creation
Information is entropy. And entropy is all the possibilities contained within a system. The more complex a system, the more entropy. You are a system. So is a grain. So is a star. Entropy is order becoming disordered. So we think entropy is chaos, but it’s not. Entropy simply encrypts information.
If we had the key, we could reverse the disorder. (We do not have the key.) But we do have information about information. Like! Just like energy, information must be conserved. Even in a black hole. Did you know black holes evaporate? When they do, they information they swallowed up is released.
Information is as abundant and generative and inevitable and potential as energy. This is bad news for people who want to hoard information to accumulate power.
So they try to use false axioms to manufacture a system where information can be consumed and be all-consuming. They often refer to Herbert A Simon when explaining their system. He said,
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Of course this isn’t true. As we just learned, information doesn’t consume, it is conserved. A wealth of information is a wealth of potentiality. And attention cannot be impoverished by potentiality. Attention and information come together to create new realities. Which is why techlords and Christian Nationalists want limit our access to information while also extracting value from our attention.
And listen, this desire to use information to constrict reality instead of expand it is not limited to the men I’ve named. What do you think is driving the enshittification of the internet? The book banning? Manufactured information-scarcity is designed to restrict creation.
Why? It’s simple! Creation is a regenerative information management system - it re-orders and re-represents information. There is a world where a true Creation Economy gets to exist. That world is abundant. I feel like it’s got a better hold on quantum mechanics than ours. Either way, that world is not our world.
The Edenic Allure of Ballerina Farm
"It’s no wonder that many LDS women have taken to Momfluencing and Homefluencing (and now Farmfluencing) like fish who finally found water."
And then we'll go to The Creator Economy
Our world’s Creator Economy was engineered to manufacture engagement scarcity. Engagement is not attention. It is clicks and views and scrolls and shares. Engagement is the value extraction hub of the Creator Economy. So all creators - no matter what they create! - compete for that same scarce resource. Which leads to the Ballerina Farm of it all.
When I wrote about the Neelemans years ago, I dug into their farm’s business model. It didn’t seem to make much sense from the perspective a direct-to-consumer farm operation. They had too much overhead and too little capacity. But it did make sense within the context of the Creator Economy. In this context, the Neelemans aren’t in the business of producing butcher boxes. They are in the business of producing butcher box content to capture engagement. And the Trad Wife experts dunking on the butcher boxes aren’t producing analysis, they’re producing analysis content to capture engagement.
So, the Trad Wife and the Trad Wife Experts both use the Trad Wife lifestyle to capture engagement. This means their incentives are aligned! Social media algorithms favor recency, engagement and homogeneity. This means it is better for the Trad Wife and the Trad Wife expert if the market is dominated by homogenous representations of care work and homogenous commentary on the homogenous representations of care work. And so they’ve engaged in a kind of conscious parallelism, each adjusting their conduct to maintain market dominance. They are just building what the framework will let them build - a Creator oligopoly. Okay, simple and depressing enough.
But why did last week feel so different?
The latest Ballerina Farm thing felt different because it was different! We’re experiencing a disruption in the Creator Economy. Ballerina Farm is being blitzscaled by incentive mechanisms funded, developed and leveraged by men in an apocalyptic cult. They want to use the network effect to homogenize our information environment and tip us into an Age of Apocalypse.
I am not kidding.
Related Reading
Meg Conley
From there we must go into the apocalyptic worldbuilding cult. (I am sorry.)
René Girard was a philosopher. He developed Mimetic Theory, an apocalyptic model of human behavior. When Girard was Peter Thiel’s teacher at Stanford, he shared the model with him. (Stanford...WHAT is going on over there, for real.) Peter Thiel was really, really into it.
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because imitate their desires.’ - René Girard, who thinks envy is the unifying theory of human existence.
Girard’s Mimetic Theory has two parts, Mimetic Desire and The Scapegoat Mechanism
Mimetic Desire Like Hobbes, Girard said that humans were mechanistic creatures with a total lack of free will. Girard said that what we call free will is just desire. And what we call desire is just imitation. Every desire is an imitation of someone else’s desire.
In his model, the person imitating is the ‘subject.’ The person being imitated is the ‘model.’ And the object of desire is the ‘object.’ (That one is easy.) The model, subject and object are three points in a triangle.
Those three points do not exist in isolation. They exist in a community. Imagine every person in that community is a point. The model can be a subject, and the subject can be a model. Every person imitates, everybody is imitated. A network of imitation forms. Everybody wants the same thing. Everybody becomes the same kind of person.
Girard said that as the network grows, models and subjects will fight for the same scarce objects. This violence will spread because of imitation and object scarcity. Eventually, the very existence of the community will be threatened.
This is where Girard’s scapegoat mechanism comes in.
Scapegoat Mechanism When communal violence reaches a tipping point, the scapegoat mechanism (somehow) kicks in. This mechanism redirects community-wide violence to a single person or group. The subjects and models join to eradicate the new object of their violence.
Girard said the chosen scapegoat must be innocent. (Why? Because!) And he said that the scapegoating mechanism had to be deployed unconsciously. This means that the community had to believe the scapegoat was guilty and deserved its fate. Once the ultimate act of violence is committed, peace returns to the network.
Well, until the next time.
This man claimed culture itself was a product of the scapegoat mechanism. He said that culture sprang up to shroud the violence, prevent it, and ritually repeat it. (Again, why? Because!)
If you think this all sounds like Christianity fanfiction (featuring a Freud crossover) written by an apophenic Hobbesian with unresolved trauma from WWII? You’re not wrong! That is exactly what it is! Anyways.
Girard thought society had reached a point beyond the scapegoat mechanism’s management. He thought the mechanism would experience a catastrophic failure, plunging the 21st century into an Age of Apocalypse. What could be done? His answer: only a complete alignment with an Absolute Christian Sovereign could save the world. People would have to give up their will to a leviathan to survive.
But this could only happen if a mimetic network of desire could be globally scaled.
But like…how?
Well! What if you had social media? And the ‘model’ was like…an influencer? And the subject was called like…I don’t know…'a follower.’ And the object was engagement? As one random example?
Now, it is time to encounter The Meme Men
Thiel was particularly taken with Girard’s concept of mimetic desire. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,” Girard wrote. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” Mimetic desire involves a surrender of agency—it means allowing others to dictate one’s wants—and, the theory goes, can foster envy, rivalry, infighting, and resentment. It also, Girard wrote, leads to acts of violent scapegoating, which serve to preclude further mass conflicts by unifying persecutors against a group or an individual. Thiel would later use this framework to develop his own theories about politics, tech investing, and culture. - The New Yorker
Thiel was Facebooks first public investor. Many people thought the platform could be used to scale a network of mimetic desire. It can’t. Because Girard was wrong.
People are not automata. Mimetic Desire is just pick up artist bullshit dressed up as philosophy. And like, no surprise really! As Girard stumbled upon his theory of mimetic desire when he realized he only wanted a woman when other men wanted her first.
To the extent that Girard’s definition of mimesis appears to occur on Meta platforms, it’s being simulated by privacy invasion, misinformation and algorithms.
Marc Andreessen is also a Girard disciple. He sits on Facebook’s board. He is considered one of the leading lights of the tech industry, by…the people he funds. Which is a lot of people! People have built and are building a lot of the infrastructure that connects our lives. He also just endorsed Trump. Because of course he did.
Mark Zuckerberg believes in the Mimetic Desire. He seems to think he is going to destroy the world and then saved the world with...Meta. This is part of the reason he kept trying to make the Metaverse happen.
Christian Nationalists love Girard too! Thiel, who funded JD Vance’s political rise, introduced JD Vance to Girard. And Vance just can’t get enough of the mimetic rivalry and scapegoating! Which…you know…tracks.
In The Gatekeepers, an excellent podcast, one of Zuckerberg’s early mentors recalled an unsettling conversation he’d had with Ol’ Zuck,
Early in 2009, I'll never forget this, Facebook was it maybe already a couple of hundred million users. Users, not just English-speaking. They'd begun to diversify. And Mark's explaining to me he's going for a billion users. I'm going, Mark, hang on just a second. There are only seven billion people in the world. And he goes, Hey, a billion is not the limit. I think we can go two, three, four, five billion. I think essentially everyone in the world should use this product. And I'm going, For what? I'm sorry, what is it you're going to do?
It’s honestly not a hard question to answer. Because these guys all write books and give interviews telling people exactly what it is they want to do. They think that the fact that memes exist is evidence that Mimetic Desire is real. And they want to use Mimetic Desire to gain direct control of the entire world. If that sounds stupid right now, wait till I tell you how they’ve been trying to do it.
Then we must look upon The Meme Men's plans
They plan to use mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism to destabilize the nation-state. And then they want to break national bodies of people down into individuals tethered to online mimetic networks. Those networks would be transitioned into digital-states called Network States. Marc Andreessen, who once said a dictator would run network states, often cites Balaji Srinivasan as the go-to expert on the network state idea.
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. - Balaji Srinivasan, who is very, very into network states and bitcoin
These men have replaced Girard’s “model” with “community founder.” And instead of “subject” they use words like “subscriber.” Then they want to onboard those “subscriber citizens” onto a blockchain based Network State, “the sequel to the nation state.” Here, I’ll let Balaji Srinivasan explain it….
One of the concepts here is, we start actually funding, not simply company founders, but community founders. A community founder is somebody who is essentially the manager of a piece of real estate, who governs who can come in, who educates disputes, who does the culture formation, and so on, and so forth. And all those community founders fold into the CEO of the network state. - Balaji Srinivasan, in a a Q+A where he also said Network State subscribers with high community karma could use their points to get cloned.
I left Andreessen-funded Substack last December when I began to suspect I was participating in a lo-fidelity prototype of the network state. Once I really understood Girard, Thiel and the rest of it, Substack's claim to be a “New Economic Engine for Culture” felt …incredibly dark. And like...almost too on the nose?
I just didn’t feel like couldn’t write about this while remaining on the platform. I still feel so embarrassed that I didn't understand the context of the platform's development. I feel so embarrassed I was part of their networked salvation.
BUT! This is not a call for others to leave Substack. I mean, leaving Substack didn't mean I left all the infrastructure being built by the Meme Men! Like when I publish this piece, I’ll post it to Instagram! Because that is one of the places people find information! And Meta has done far more harm than Substack! (At least so far.)
Not all network-states would be influencer founded. Balaji Srinivasan, who literally wrote the book on network states, suggested there could be an entire online country centered around keto. Like…the diet. A diplomatically recognized state, with its own citizens, defense systems, currency, laws, healthcare, birth and burial rites, and everything else organized around...keto.
The extremism of the network state people is even more striking when you consider how much power a network state would have over its subscriber-citizens.
In a network state, alignment is achieved through the authority of the blockchain. The meme men claim authority is distributed through the blockchain across the subscriber-citizens. But that’s bullshit. Subscriber-citizens behavior is controlled by incentive mechanisms, data extraction at every point of their existence and public nature of the blockchain.
For example: subscriber-citizens perform every transaction on the blockchain and use blockchain specific cryptocurrency. If a woman is married to an abusive man in a network-state, there is no way for her to secretly put away money so she can leave him. He can see every transaction she makes. So, can everyone else?
Like Hobbes' Leviathan, the network state doesn’t exist to protect, it exists to secure through force and coercion. And like, OF COURSE, JD Vance loves this! He does not want women to have any privacy or autonomy. Just one example: Do you know how easy it would be track abortions on a healthcare system tethered to the blockchain?!
And of course, American Christian Nationalists are aligning themselves with the Network State Reactionaries! They want to create a Far-Right Christian Network State. The infrastructure of the network state actively harms women while also allowing them to turn Christianity into a memecoin! Which is a little like turning wine into piss. And also, that’s all they’ve ever wanted.
Srinivasan and others claim it would be easy to leave one network state for another. But that is also nonsense. Do you know how hard it is to leave a system that contains all the information of your past, present, future? I do! It’s almost impossible.
Once the networks are formed, the tech guys want them to compete for citizens. Which sounds like it would get very war-ish very quickly! Ask anyone who’s done network marketing – like, I don’t know…selling Lululemon leggings - how quickly you run out of customers.
And like…that’s the point! Because a paroxysm of violence is exactly what these meme men are trying induce. When the violence recedes, they think those of us who are left will be too weak to withstand the memetic theory of it all. And so, as we blink away the ashes of our potential futures, these men will make us an offer we cannot refuse.
They imagine a world where our survival becomes comprehensively, cryptographically, algorithmically aligned to the will of an Absolute Sovereign, a Single Source of Truth, a Leviathan topped with Andreessen’s head.
I suggest we pull over and watch the opening scene of Mad Meg: Fury Road
Please read all the Mad Meg lines in Tom Hardy's Mad Max voice, but if he were playing me.
A camera films a woman from a high angle. She is standing in the Santa Monica Mountains, looking over a once-wooded canyon.
Mad Meg: My name is Meg. My world is fire and blood.
(Fragmented audio from Reels, TikToks play in Meg played by Mad Max Tom Hardy’s memory.)
Man 1: Why are you hurting these people?
Man 2: It’s the data, stupid. We are killing for the data
Woman 1: The Community Founders rose
Woman 2: The world is running out of engagement.
Man 3: Now there’s the Engagement Wars
Mad Meg: Once, I was a newsletter writer. A sovereign creator trying to grow a subscriber community.
Man 4: - to the terminal adoption point
Woman 2: Currency is worthless
Man 3: Mankind has gone rogue, terrorizing itself
Man 5: Thermonuclear cancelations
Woman 4: The earth is sour
Woman 5: The network effect
Woman 4: We have become half-life
Mad Meg: As the world fell…each of us, in our own way, was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy. Me…or everyone else.
I am the one…who runs from the aligned and the disentangled. Hunted by social network-states. Haunted by those I could not keep. So I exist in this wasteland.
(Pen clicks)
A woman reduced to a single instinct:
Observe.
She reaches into her baggu crossbody bag. Pulls out a pair of binoculars ripped from the corpse of a Travelcore TikToker. Holds them up to her eyes. The camera follows her gaze, pushing into the canyon and into a wideshot of a collection of clapboard cottages. The are women carrying fresh milk from from a dairy, one or two pirouette. Children in pinafores pick wild flowers. Men stride across the middleground, pointing at ditches and fence posts.
It is the 508th outpost of BallrinaFrm, the Network State created and maintained by an algorithm that mimics the engagement of an influencer from an earlier time. Its cryptocurrency, AGA, has a market cap of $120 billion. BallrinaFrm is a subsidiary of tech conglomerate Product/Fit.
Mad Meg’s voice plays over the scene: That green place was once red. The Battle of the Trad Wives was fought here.
A child wanders into the shot, she bends down and pulls at a flower. It won’t come up. She yanks again, falling backward onto her bum when the flower comes up. A phalanx tangled up in its long roots.
The image pixelates as the child walks away, swinging the roots beside her. The recordings shrink and shift and grow, pixels painting the arc with images from The Great and Terrible Alignment. Gasps and cheers come from The Engaged in the stands. The shot returns to the triumphal arc just as everything goes dark and quiet.
A spotlight falls on a man walking across the arena. It is The Meme Man. Standing before the arch, he begins the Techno-Optimist call and response. The responds reverently.
The Meme Man: We had a problem of starvation,
The Engaged: so you invented the Green Revolution.
The Meme Man: We had a problem of darkness,
The Engaged: so you invented electric lighting.
The Meme Man: We had a problem of cold,
The Engaged: so you invented indoor heating.
The Meme Man: We had a problem of heat,
The Engaged: so you invented air conditioning.
The Meme Man: We had a problem of isolation,
The Engaged: so you invented the Internet.
The Meme Man: We have a problem of poverty,
The Engaged: so you invented technology to create abundance.
The Meme Man: When there was abundance, you starved for direction.
The Engaged: And so in your grace you invented technology to show us the way.
As the crowd shouts its last response, the pulvinar is illuminated by drones. Seven men sit in the light.
Immortan Thiel, Flamen Thielis Johnson, Marc Nero Andreessen Technologus, Zuck Domitian Teengirlicus, Imperator Trumpis Vance, Augur Sam Gaius Marius Altman.
The Meme Man: Behold. The men who burned the world so that we might have fire.
The ground underneath the triumphal arch bursts into flames. The Meme Man turns around and throws himself into the flames.
And then we circle back to information and creation
The Meme Men are not going to succeed, of course. Their plan only works if humans are machines. And humans are not machines! I think some of them know that their final alignment can never occur. And all the incentive mechanisms and network state bullshit are just a way to pump their crypto investments before they dump them.
But they are still causing real harm in the real world.
So, what do we do?
I used to imagine walking off across the salted distance. I thought maybe I’d find a new green place just beyond the horizon. But there isn’t one.
Did you know if you’re in a black hole, you cannot ever move beyond its horizon? And that a black hole’s horizon contains the same information as its interior? Which is all to say. Wherever we go, there we are.
The Meme Men control the information routes. They extract information from our shared existence and call it data. Because they own the routes and the algorithms and data sets, they think they already control of us. I think they’re wrong. I think we should turn back and pay attention to these fuckers. Use their infrastructure to release information about exactly what these people are doing and how. I think we should take our potential futures back.
Mad Meg: Look. It’ll be a hard day. But I guarantee you that a 160 days’ ride that way…there’s nothing but salt. At least this way, you know, we might be able to…together…come across some kind of redemption