Boss called me 30 minutes after work on a friday before the long weekend???
Yo Adri!
@aydree
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TIL about "anarchist bees", a genetic mutation in some worker bees where, instead of being infertile, they can lay eggs that will become male bees. Apparently, this is bad for the colony since it can only sustain so many male bees, so these anarchist bees are attacked on sight.
Most of his writing is sterile, which also feels like an affectation to sound academic from someone who probably doesn't have a background in academia.
I think it's tainted in rationalism, and a need to sound "rational" and "scientific" when the goal is to cause chaos by manipulating esoteric forces.
Some criticisms now that I'm giving up on the book with a few pages left:
The author, apparently, was a popular youtuber who did "christianity debunked" type content. His involvement with 4chan's pro-Trump movement is pretty apparent. He brags in the book at some point about using his "large vocabulary" to win online arguments, and it deffo feels like an affectation when he says "that most smug of frogs [pepe] and his equally irreducible counterpart, wojak"
He talks about his pet theory that the egyptian god kek was interfering with the 2016 election, which I'm nearly certain I saw floating around the internet at that time.
He speaks of Pepe the Frog as an Egregore, a spirit created by a group's thought about it.
At around page 27/35, the author starts to speak about "synchronicity" which is a fancy way of saying "treating patterns in separated things as meaningful". The book starts to become tedious around here, but there's still some interesting shit.
The time period and slice of the internet (early 2010s armchair philosophy forums) that this book is inadvertently cataloguing is fascinating. Most of this book is actually about the internet, and this guy's attempts to manipulate a substance that seemed, even to me as a kid, to be dark magick; the sentiment of strangers online.
One of the pitfalls with people who are 1) not rich or powerful 2) believe they're enlightened or especially clever is it often contains very simplistic anti-establishment thinking.
This author tips his hand a bit towards this (a disdain for "globalism" and state/corporate sockpuppet accounts on social media without any specific references made). He's also got disdain for "anarcho-anything" though he concedes that decentralization is good for media distribution.
An important caveat: Richard dawkins's idea of memetics, that a meme is a unit of culture, is more of a metaphor than science. Dual inheritance theory is similar, and more scientifically studied. The author seems to have deference to dawkins's ideas.