Party ogregores: Biden and the Democratic Party elite

There has been non-stop coverage of President Biden’s frailties since the debate fiasco, examining the motives, actions, and opinions of Biden, people in his inner circle, party operatives, and donors. I’ve started trying to understand, instead, what the Democratic Party elite is up to. Collective agents are largely ignored in our obsession with individuals.

Koinospace: Where the Org Things Are

In Demons: Mediators between gods and humans, Egyptian mythology inspired me to think about entities that liaised between people and ogregores. But where do ogregores live? 

Polymorphic Myths

There are often several versions of the same myth or legend. Although the characters are the same, their attributes and motives can vary. Sometimes a character is a hero, other times a villain. The plots can differ, too. It’s a reminder that stories, and perhaps the reality they reflect, depends on who’s telling the story.

Demons: Mediators between gods and humans

The demons of ancient Egypt, I learned today, were liminal figures that mediated between gods and humans. It got me wondering about entities that liaised between people and ogregores.

Ogregore taxonomy and ethology

A question from Matt Nesselrodt got me thinking again about the natural history of ogregores. Assuming that the central goal of the Big Five tech companies is profit, Matt wondered what their secondary goals might be. And are such goals unique to each company? 

Tiny touches, collectively colossal

I've long puzzled over why powerful organizations aren’t more salient to me as threats or blessings (e.g., Significant but hard to discern). In part it’s because their impact is individually light, but collectively vast; being conduits for content may also play a role.

Myth’s anthropomorphic heel

My post Heroes not ogregores lamented that a top-tier newspaper’s coverage of Detroit focused on celebrities rather than systems—aka individuals not ogregores. However, a mythological approach also veers perilously close to personalization.

Heroes not ogregores: WSJ coverage of Detroit Beats the Doom Loop

I had hoped that Ben Cohen’s recent WSJ story on the revitalization of Detroit would help me think about whether a city is an ogregore. Instead, as usual, it focused on people rather than institutions, and one person in particular. I imagine it’s easier to write a newspaper piece on deadline if you only have to interview a couple of people rather than digging into the subtle dynamics and complicated history of a complex system.

Not seeing gods

My inability to perceive big tech companies (and other ogregores) as potent presences worries me. They have godlike powers, and yet I don’t experience them as such. To understand the consequences, I asked GPT-4 and Gemini-1.5 Pro for examples from mythology and folklore of people who didn't see supernatural beings, to their detriment. The pickings were rather slim.

Evangelion mechaphors

I watched the first Evangelion movie over the weekend. It tells of humans using giant robots (aka mechas; they’re called Evangelions, or Evas for short) to battle mysterious giant alien entities called Angels. Teenage children are needed to pilot the mechas. This symbiosis reminded me of being old, and corporations.

Ogregore vs. organization

Paul Diduch has asked why I use the term ogregore rather than just calling a corporation a corporation, or an organization. He may be right. Most, though perhaps not all, things I call ogregores are organizations. I’ll argue that the categories of ogregore and organization overlap but are not the same. Paul suggested that an ogregore might be an organization with an eerie agent-like effect; it might also distinguished by being more powerful than run-of-the-mill organizations.

A goal

 Thinking about what I might want to see in a tech & myth conference/workshop has led me to a goal formulation that also speaks to what I'm looking for personally.

Ogregore fairy tales

Our dreams are different every night, but there are patterns (cf. Marie-Louise von Franz, endnote [1]). Similarly, while corporate PR spin—and other ogregore stories—is slightly different every time, there are perhaps patterns that reveal their deep motivations. In other words, PR could be a way to access an ogregore’s “psyche,” if it has one.

Memoranda of the Boulder Ogregore Observatory

When the University of Colorado Boulder’s quantum computer came online recently, a diagnostic core dump revealed unexpected data. It seems to be fragments from the 2028 annual report of the so-called Boulder Ogregore Observatory (BOO), an institution that does not (yet?) exist.

Parts of the corpus are unintelligible and reconstruction is ongoing. Physicists speculate that the Observatory stored its data on a successor to the recently inaugurated Boulder quantum computer. Time-entangled qubits allowed the archives to worm their way back to the present. 

Social Media and Martians

The Martians in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) resemble ad-funded social media companies in some ways.