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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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).

> 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.

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"...

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