Heat Death of the Infoverse
The internet enabled infinite information, and free self-organization.
In an environment where our freedom is this infinite, the only limitations are human desires.
However, human desires are often in conflict with each other.
Therefore, when we're in an environment of infinite freedom, we naturally end up in conflict.
Conflicts can be solved in two ways: by understanding each other and reaching an agreement — or by forking off into a separate group.
Understanding each other is hard, and in an environment of infinite freedom, forking is easy.
Therefore, on the internet, forking will be a lot more common than understanding. It's the path of least resistance.
This pattern of "more forking than understanding" creates a trajectory toward what The Heat Death of the Info-verse — total narrative isolation.
Each person will disagree with literally everyone else, themselves understood by no one, comforted only by fully-customized delusions that hang there and mock them like Christmas baubles on a dead tree — a constant reminder that they got everything they wanted… and it was nothing.
This is what the path of fully-customized delusion does to you if you don't voluntarily face truth and let it change you.
We can already see it happening:
Prizing “having the facts” — about climate change, for example — is a new form of epistemic slacktivism. It results in everyone dying anyway, consoled only by the thought that “it was some other idiot’s fault for not listening to me.”
The internet has brought humanity to a fork in the road:
- Do we want to be right, or do we want to matter?
To counteract the heat death of the info-verse, we need a supermassive black hole — something desired so powerfully, and so universally, that it draws everyone back toward a common reality.
Something like this may already exist: money.
The more closely we can align money with truth, the stronger the moderating force exerted on all social groups simultaneously, drawing them toward a common reality.
That’s what Ideamarket is about.
Last modified 6mo ago