I read Dan Neil's columns because I love his writing not because I'm interested in cars. This week's review of the 2024 Dodge Hornet R/T: An Italian Stallion, Made for America (WSJ, 29 Jun 2023) has a lovely passage that suggests that car companies have distinct characters—evidence, perhaps, that they're ogregores.
A recent YouTube video discussed what NATO could learn from Sweden's use of the Saab Gripen fighter. The aircraft was specifically designed for austere and dispersed operations, reflecting Sweden's country-specific military doctrine of highly decentralized defensive operations. However, due to this inherent association with Sweden's doctrine, it is unlikely that the Gripen could be easily adapted for NATO operations. This is an example of an organization developing a character and repertoire that is a synthesis of its individual members, tools, and protocols.
My recent post, Bud Light Blunders: An Ogregore Story, delved into a controversy surrounding personalized cans of beer sent to a transgender influencer. Bud Light's behavior resembled that of an ogregore. But was its antagonist also an ogregore?
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.
My colleague Paul Diduch recently shared the video of a TED Talk by Imran Chaudhri and asked “What Would Socrates Say?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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).
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.
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.
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.
