The fabric of Hyperstitions

The fabric of

HYPERSTITIONS

Working on an ultra-innovative ecosystem like crypto exposes you to lots of ideas. For tons of peoples - me included - crypto can be labeled as a religion or a political party. And comparable to those, ideas are a wide-ranging spectrum.

Is privacy more important than user experience ? Should I give a fuck about decentralization as long as it is useful to people in South America ? Every opinion is valid. What matters is understanding why people value an opinion more than the other.

Like I said, Crypto is a new religion. And like religions, nothing is quite new. It’s just piles added on top of each other. Give me some Cypherpunk ideas. Add 1tbsp of capitalism.

FUCKKK IVE SPILLED THE WHOLE CUP IN IT.

I’m not teaching you anything if I say a lot of people joined crypto to earn money, not for idealistic reasons. And that’s totally valid.

Because my point is : money is useless.

Look around you. What are rich people doing with money ? What’s the point of this hustle ?

Investing. Buying stuff that will go up in value.

Or even creating companies.

And what's everything about, loser ? Ideas.

Money is a spiritual technology. Money is a shortcut to give ideas wings. That’s why medias, religions, TikTok, politics and even movies exist. To manifest ideas, at scale. Idea is capitalism twin. You can bet on everything, meaning ideas are worth every penny available in the world.

Choose your game : either try to articulate new ideas / remix them, or push ideas to the masses. Everything is a byproduct of this.

The only difference between both is growth.

When the world is expanding, you are rewarded by articulating new ideas. When it's stagnant, you are trying to push and influence those. And it’s also valid for an individual : when you are growing, you are creating & experimenting. As an adult, you just try to push your existing ideas and become a bildungsphilister.

* “A bildungsphilister is someone who reads newspapers and reviews and imagines themselves to be cultured and educated but lacks genuine, introspective erudition.

Bildungsphilisters are prone to dogmatic, cliched, and unsubtle responses to events and things.”

Be careful around the fabric of reality, Garfield.

Ideas owns you. Ideas are alien life forms with an agency and intelligence independent of any mind or substrate which they inhabit.

Most value is created by marginalized people, able to think without being owned by ideas. Or hyper-elastic peoples who mix a lot of them to create new recipes, like a chemist. Ideas medium are always changing. But one thing consistent : they travel faster than ever, and it won't change. We globally accelerate entropy until the heat death of the Universe.

Look at the history : no one ever created something truly new. Bible is just an aggregator of ancient texts & myths. Adam & Eve is a reworked Pandora's box story. Artists during the renaissance recreated burned or lost artworks, when they weren’t stealing from old Greeks folks.

Everything is a Remix.

What's the game plan ?

Either expose yourself to as fewer ideas as possible - or as much as you can. Choose your gameplay. Optimize for idea propagation - or live as monk.

If you are reading this, my bet is the second option is more suited.

The hardest part is being able to get a fresh look at everything. Never get owned by an idea. Every idea is valid and every idea sucks. Always. Of course, it’s really hard to apply in the real world. Especially when interacting with other humans.

Just learn to be fluid, curious and never stop to learn. Optimize for idea seeking : privacy is a great tool to expose ideas. And to get new idea flows.

I’m just a vessel bro

What we should seek for is building an Hyperstition : hard to understand ideas creating feedback loops & changing society forever.

The difference between an Hyperstition and other types of ideas is the degree of autonomy and virality.

Crypto is an Hyperstition. Pushing Overton window is important, but very different.

We live in a new world. A world where ideas are permisionless and free floating. But we don't have the means to capture it at scale. Ideas are constrained : owned by corporations, who leverage it to build a business model with it. It's a vicious cycle, one that harm our world.

Let's free ideas. Open-source everything.

Make it permisionless. Share it everywhere.

But don't downgrade it. Fuck you.

Ideas are important. Ideas are everything.

The fabric of Hyperstitions | Leo Simon