Lands of Lorecraft | Hacker News Reader

Lands of Lorecraft

studio.ribbonfarm.com

43 pointszdw15 comments

> Lore is the story insiders tell themselves to manage their own psyches

Might I humbly suggest an alternative term for "lore"? Kool-Aid.

This is awful, truly terrible, toxic bullshit. Please give it a read, as far as you can get, because as many people as possible need to see what dreck is frothing around us, spoken by folks who've absolutely lost their collective gourd.

The gist, if I understand correctly, is that "lore" is basically the doublethink an organization crafts to hoodwink acolytes into subservience to the greedy causes of their leaders.

Apparently this is happening a lot in Web3? What a great way to kill a potentially promising new step in technology.

Truly, unreal.

Marketing is also the evil twin. They're both collections of lies told by people looking to manipulate or coerce.

This isn't new, it's just a formalization of cult mechanics contrasted against the memes familiar to modern culture sieved through social science and psychology.

Refining this part of science, with the tools, compute, and and data freely available online, feels like one of Bostrom's black marbles.

I think it's more like how humans have handled and weaponized too-complex-to-fully-understand information since the beginning of time. Old-shool religion kind of lost its power and usefulness, classical political ideologies are too diluted to work as intended, and now we're (re)inventing the next-gen "religions" on top of capitalism and science...

Every time humans try to "make some sense on what they can't fully make sense" a subgroup of them uses it as a tool to concentrate power... all old is new again...

Then again, the previous version of this, political ideologies, almost (or is still trying to get us) killed via full nuclear war, so this shiny new thing can very well be a "black marble"...

> Apparently this is happening a lot in Web3? What a great way to kill a potentially promising new step in technology.

My pet conspiracy theory is that "the smoking people in dark rooms" wishing to kill any hopes of truly autonomous (eg. self-financing) decentralizes systems invented the "Web3" term and associated cocktail of host-killing ultra-aggresive virulent memetic weapons and stealthly gifted it to the unsuspecting community of people trying to combine "de-centralized autonomous oraganizations and platforms + de-centralized financial infrastructure"... now the fools have took the poisoned candy and are killing themselves and others with it while attracting all the vultures there are (con artists etc.)!

...then again, the internet was also awash with weird cult-like ideas at the beginning then it normalized to something that's at least clearly useful to everyone.

A less emotive term is perhaps Culture.

I was kinda annoyed by the article claiming that Lore is a new thing, when it's something that is already widely known as culture, or vision, or a shared story (which is what culture really is).

My best at a summary: as the world becomes more connected, more online, and more seemingly absurd, it takes on a surreal feeling that people like to dive into. Fundamentally, people like to tell Stories, and to be a part of them, and to build them up. Some people would probably call that, given a community of participants, a communities "culture". As remote work takes off, as people increasingly interact with automated systems, as the amount of passive social interaction decreases, people turn more and more to these cultures.

Viewing this through a managerial lens gives us "lorecraft", but I'd probably call it something more akin to "organically created culture".

> Cope or Capability? I would argue that it probably started as a cope, and upon people realizing that "this is a thing that's happening", started to treat it more and morph it into a capability.

I just turned 30, and this is the first time I've felt too old for the Internet. I can't even pretend to make sense of this, but it recalls a "how to work with your new gen Z colleagues" sketch I saw. I was astounded that the author is GenX - that was also one of the few coherent points I could pull from this.

The first paragraphs are fine - sure, redefine the founding myth and culture as lore, go for it - but around "memeing normcore into existence" my eyes glazed over.

You're not too old for the internet, just for that patch of it. I'm somewhere around 56 - never can remember my actual age and I don't feel like calculating it - so I've seen the 'net grow from that alternative to FIDOnet I could get through an account on the university VAXen through the eternal September through the dot.com boom through all that followed and I feel just as much at home on it as I did once I found out it was a lot cheaper to mess around there than it was to ring around random BBSs. The 'net is the road system connecting places, many of which I never enter. I'll leave this advanced formulation of snake oil to whomever feels attracted to such, just like I did with its predecessors. You can, too...

This basically goes back to the conflict between idealism and materialism. The article is putting forward an idealist position - that ideas (lore, memes, culture) matter, and in some cases matter more than material facts. In this view, there are many potential cultural niches, and entrepreneurs are engaged in finding them. Production is downstream of ideals: certain products can only be made, or made well, by cultures with the necessary ideals, so the formation of ideals is an important part of innovation and entrepreneurship.

This would be contrasted with the materialist view, which says that culture is downstream of material reality and modes of production. In this view, "company culture" is just an emergent phenomenon that arises from the material activities of the firm, and its rules and policies, which emerge out of material conflicts over resources.

Far from being a new thing, this debate is as old as modern capitalism itself, and is prefigured by religious and philosophical debates going back many centuries before that.

Maybe there is something to this, but the lack of examples makes it hard to tell. (Real-world examples, not just tarot cards taken out of context.)

Isn't this the same bs that has been around for decades under the guise of 'company culture and values'?

The fuzzies that are needed to distract the underlings while we focus on maximizing profits and 'rightsizing' the worker bees?

I read this right after reading about Tony Hsieh’s last few days - https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-ma....

The author of this needs to seriously think about where this “new management philosophy” might take them and them clients, should they be successful. Better if they weren’t.

The author of this is also the author of The Gervais Principle [0], in my opinion the finest analysis of organisations ever, so I think he understands the implications.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

By the way, any suggested literature about corporate Kool-Aid?

Moral Mazes.

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