This topic has 22 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 8 months ago by 
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I posted this as an update but realize how dumb that is if I’m trying to elicit stimulating conversation. Copied and pasted:
OP ED: What if they are trying to assess our personalities? It has been established that they are mining our data so that they can further manipulate us. It ALSO seems to be that people that get chosen usually have one… (a personality). The people that try to stay neutral (lookin’ at you Switzerland) won’t get fucked with as much because they aren’t offering their selves up to “the system” (by way of giving them something/one to fuck with). This isn’t really a theory, rather than a speculative point.
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@hazelverse Your opinion sounds quite a bit like that often repeated phrase: “Only the active move forward.” There were some glitches (for example: press) to the contrary, but generally speaking those who were engaged most the first time around were those with the most noticeable or opinionated personalities. This time we are seeing a twist on this in the form of some school yard pick ’em.
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@hazelverse – Nicely pointed out! It’s interesting, the idea of “personality,” and it’s a phrase we use casually without much exploration… but what does it really mean? A related term, and one which we seem more often to encounter, is “persona.” What is the difference between these two, though? I’m tempted to go with something like “authenticity,” but again… what does it mean to be authentic?
We don’t even know Noah Sinclair. He is a collection of tropes, a MacBethian prototype, a self-proclaimed “brand” manufactured and patterned as a cross between Tony Robbins and a boilerplate PUA. He is a persona.
Yet, in light of recent events, we must give pause to where that got him: he broke his mold. Maybe it wasn’t even him that broke it, but the hidden hands of power constantly pushing and putty-forming him into configurations that strained him beyond capacity.
If placed in the same circumstances, we must ask ourselves: would we have fared any better?
Watching a person shatter before us provides a simple moment of schadenfreude, a dangerous point upon which we are tempted to focus and judge ourselves better somehow: stronger, more capable of withstanding pressure by comparison – but we presume too much by thinking we can understand the kind of pressure from our position outside the system (no pun intended) that created it.
I come not to praise Noah, nor to bury him: but perhaps in the wake of his collapse, we will bear witness to an apotheosis… Perhaps we should all stop and inspect where our “personality” begins outside of the personas we adopt to cope with this world. Who are we, really? Where does our “self” step outside of the collection of tropes and memes from which we are constructed by others? When we live in a house of mirrors, where do we look to find ourselves?
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@hazelverse, this is a topic I’ve been mulling over and over for about a week now, trying to form a bunch of personal speculation into some kind of (reasonably) articulate post. This thread is nudging me closer to figuring out what I mean to say. So, look out! I might be about to get “active”! 🙂
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I love the engagement!
My postulation was based on my own quandry.
In science, the term observer effect means that the act of observing will influence the phenomenon being observed. For example, for us to “see” an electron, a photon must first interact with it, and this interaction will change the path of that electron.
How does this fit in with out involvement and how is it impacting our current state?
Put another way:
In physics, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner.
I remember we had discussed Schrodinger’s Cat… In my mind the theories are relevant.
Merely observing something changes it. What does this do to our own personal narrative “path.”
This dilemma pervades my mind through every post I make. I want to be sincere, but the very nature of our “game” is anything but.
TYING THAT BACK IN –
I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think the fact that there are so many people trying to stay neutral proves the intimidation. However, if we don’t make bold character choices, the story will be flat.
(I know this is kind of convoluted)
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(In case my last post made zero sense to you)
Think of it this way… You see a kid dancing around having a grand old time being silly. The kid notices you watching. They were about to stop, they are exhausted, but sees you’re likin their moves. They keep dancing until you stop smiling/laughing along.
The observer has directly influenced the “actor.”
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We do know that audience interest in characters or directions in the story can alter the narrative. I can’t cite the sources off the top of my head, but I don’t believe Addison was supposed to be the focus of the story last year. But people cared about her and while we may not know the original plan, the changes made the story and people’s connections to it stronger. We also know that the people behind this have a story they do want to tell, so it probably won’t be changed unless the whole community shows interest/disinterest in something. Ultimately, we probably won’t really know either, ha.
On a more individual level, I think altering your own narrative through the story by seeing something and commenting on it isn’t the worst thing. The best comparison may be going to back to old books, movies, and art and finding a different emotional thread. With different life experiences, you may realize that the character you connected with is actually kind of awful or the character you hated actually has a point. So while there might be a path you miss out on because of your narrative interest, let the story pull where you need to go at this point in your life. If that pull influences your own story choices or that of the creators, it might not be what you want to happen or think might happen, but could be something that you didn’t realize you needed.
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It’s a super interesting trade off here – “only the active move forward” meaning only those that provide enough information for whoever is calling the shots gets to have the opportunity to provide even MORE information, to where we’re tripping over ourselves in a race to open up and get action early.
“Never Silent” seems to tie into this, too. More words and more interaction = more data for whoever’s doing this to flip on us.
It’s kind of a weird semi-parallel to addiction (though tbf we’re obviously addicted here). We’re willingly self-destructing by handing over pieces of ourselves, showing core tenants of our personalities, giving insight into raw emotions to a force we KNOW will eventually hurt us, just to chase that odd rush of a no-caller-ID phone call, or maybe someday a unique meeting (that seemingly always happens to turn against us in some form), hoping to become a part of this thing.
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Lust, like Tension before it, has set itself up to be the most interesting of social experiments: interesting in that we do this willingly, though it’s no more confusing than someone deciding to freefall, hang-glide, etc. We’re all adrenaline junkies at the end of the day. But of course, we know this already.
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Also – this is seemingly relevant to this conversation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One,_No_One_and_One_Hundred_Thousand
This is a book about someone who realizes that everyone that “knows” him only has an image of him (and everyone else) based on their own interactions with him and others, and thereby who he sees himself to be is different than how others perceive him, to where there are thousands of him that exist in the minds of others. It follows him down the path to find his “true self” at the foundation of all these masks.
Considering the idea of shadows as two dimensional beings, they’re nothing but personas that have been constructed by the people pulling the strings, based on how we have been perceived. Who we are to them is based only on our own interactions with them, and can only be based upon those interactions.
Even each of us have an internal persona of ourselves, as we must reflect ourselves to observe ourselves, but as @hazelverse mentions, the act observing will cause a change in the state of what we are observing.
Sooooooo (now I’m very much reaching but) what if that’s what the end goal of The System is? A system that can burn down these personas and expose our foundations, our true selves.
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Sooooooo (now I’m very much reaching but) what if that’s what the end goal of The System is? A system that can burn down these personas and expose our foundations, our true selves.
I don’t think that’s a reach at all! (at least partly because I’ve been thinking around the same thing). The man at the book release party said, “This fire destroys not what we are, but simply burns away all that we are not.” While that’s not directly connected to The System, I do think it ties into what they’re trying to get us to think about right now, in a meta sense. That quote fits in well with what you were talking about too. We don’t know who Noah truly is yet, but we’ve seen some of the veneer start to be stripped away in recent days.
More directly tied into The System, we have the quote from Bryan’s encounter, “The fear was only in your head.” If it’s only in your head, you can get past it or burn it away to realize what you’re really looking for. We don’t really know how The System works yet, but could be that there’s something to it beneath the mile of bullshit the site projects. If he’s got people thinking about what they want in life and how to take it, there’s some chance to learn something about themselves.
The more I thought about that quote while writing this up, the more I kept coming back to The Litany Against Fear (which Noah’s quote sort of draws from) from Dune, which tied nicely into being stripped to your core. Quoted below for those that don’t know it.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
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Scientists at SONY CSL Research Lab have created the first-ever entire songs composed by Artificial Intelligence: “Daddy’s Car” and “Mister Shadow”.
The researchers have developed FlowMachines, a system that learns music styles from a huge database of songs. Exploiting unique combinations of style transfer, optimization and interaction techniques, FlowMachines composes novel songs in many styles.
“Daddy’s Car” is composed in the style of The Beatles. French composer Benoît Carré arranged and produced the songs, and wrote the lyrics.
The two songs are excerpts of albums composed by Artificial Intelligence to be released in 2017.
The research behind Daddy’s Car is financed by the ERC grant “Flow Machines”, Flow Machines is a project leaded by François Pachet and hosted by the Parisian University Pierre and Marie Curie.
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Think we can tie that into the discussion in this topic! And just to offer an alternative to the AI theory.
A lot of human interpersonal reactions and interaction techniques are learned. We go through life and pick up bits and pieces from the people we interact with, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Some of those things will help to form a person’s personality, especially at a young age, but also in how you deal with other people.
The book @addisonborn referenced earlier talked about how we present so many different faces to the world. You may deal with one person one way and a different person in a totally different way. That’s especially true today with social media. Your Twitter face can be different from your Instagram face can be different from your Periscope face and so on. Now your core doesn’t really change in those interactions, but some things you present to the world and other people might.
So who are you when you cut away all of the interaction techniques you’ve picked up along the way?
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@hazelverse @maddyxxx I have Daddy’s Car stuck in my head now, they did something right I guess.
I looked into Luigi Pirandello, mostly due to wanting to read “One, None, One Hundred Thousand”, and found a play he wrote – “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” which seems like it might also tie into the powers that be turning against DLB, and the now far behind us idea of a mutiny against the creators by the characters they developed.
The blurb being:
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Italian: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore) is a 1921 Italian play by Luigi Pirandello, first performed in that year. An absurdist metatheatrical play about the relationship between authors, their characters, and theatre practitioners, it premiered at the Teatro Valle in Rome to a mixed reception, with shouts from the audience of “Manicomio!” (“Madhouse!”) and “Incommensurabile!” (“Incommensurable!”), a reference to the play’s illogical progression.
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