Bud Light Blunders: An Ogregore Story

I’m trying to understand how ogregores (greater-than-human techno-social entities that affect our lives) behave. The recent controversy involving Bud Light and a transgender Instagram influencer clearly demonstrates a pattern: when companies perform well, their leaders take the credit, but when they falter, blame falls on lower-level employees and the overall corporate structure. Given that successes often garner more media attention than failures, the role of leadership in corporate actions tends to be overstated. To understand the collective roots of corporate action, one must delve deeper.

TED Talks: What would Socrates say?

My colleague Paul Diduch recently shared the video of a TED Talk by Imran Chaudhri and asked “What Would Socrates Say?”

Heptapod Notes

I was adding text to notes I had taken about a podcast recently. I ended up inserting text rather than appending it. I realized that I wanted a note that did not have a beginning and an end. 

Plato, nomadism, and nostalgia

I watched Werner Herzog’s documentary about Bruce Chatwin over the weekend. They shared a passion for nomadism. The contrast between nomadism and settled life reminded me of the contrast between oral and textual learning in Plato’s Phaedrus.  

Facebook’s umwelt

Our CU Boulder tech & mythology group recently discussed Facebook’s umwelt, that is, the aspects of its environment that the company perceives. These are my post-meeting notes on the topic.

Non-human senses: The umwelt of ogregores

Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us describes the many ways creatures perceive their surroundings through their very different sensory apparatus. It made me wonder about the subjective perceptual universe of ogregores.

Rusty promises

As the year comes to an end, it’s time to drop a list I’ve been noodling on for months: high tech dreams that didn’t come true—breathless tech promises that weren’t kept. 

MyGPT

I want to create my own AI chatbots based on text corpora I specify. That will let me to converse with avatars of large bodies of content, like encyclopedias, user groups, and corporations. (Cf. Conversations with ogregores.) I could also set them to debating with each other. And not least, it would let me to create a personalized AI search engine. The “neeva AI answer” becomes the “meeva AI answer.”

Workplace egregores

I learned about Carolyn Chen’s book about how blurring the line between work and religion in an interview with the CS Monitor. It made me wonder if egregores are more likely to arise in workplaces now that they are becoming more like the home turf of those “autonomous psychic entities that are composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people” (Wiktionary, see also Wikipedia).

The ogregore problem

During a discussion about tech & mythology, William Kuskin challenged me to explain what problem I was trying to solve. Here’s an attempt to answer the question. 

Conversations with ogregores

If some organizations have motivations distinguishable from their human constituents (i.e., if they are ogregores), then I would like to talk to them, or at least hear them speak. However, organizations generate so much communication that is hard if not impossible for a single human to grasp. AI chatbots might be one way forward. 

A “mo-cap test” for agency

I mentioned Andrew Pickering’s history of British cybernetics to Clayton Lewis, and he immediately thought of Grey Walter’s tortoises. Clayton pointed me to Valentino Braitenberg’s vehicles. The Wikipedia write-up made me wonder about a Turing Test equivalent for agency: the mo-cap test.

Is crypto an orgregore?

Jill Dupré raised the question of crypto as an orgregore. Exploring the question helped me think about what an orgregore (aka ogregore or materialist's egregore) is. 

Aristotle, agency, aliveness

Paul Diduch alerted me to Aristotle’s idea that natural things have an internal principle of motion, while human-made artefacts don’t. That made me wonder how agency and contemporary technology relate to an Aristotelian approach.

TwitterIn?

 If Musk's Twitter implodes (first quickly, then slowly, in a reversal of the usual procedure?) I expect Microsoft to buy and fold it into LinkedIn. Twitter feels increasingly corporate, which would fit Microsoft's portfolio. It also has a track record of buying trendsetters past their prime (Skype, I'm looking at you).