Note on Sources Say Bay Area House Party via Scott Alexander

“Nishin, you know what Twitter does to people! The journos can use it because they’re all nepo babies who come from long lines of other journos that developed genetic resistance over dozens of generations. Your ancestors were subsistence farmers! The worst discourse they had to deal with was people accusing their rye crop of having ergot! You’ll be eaten alive!”

“I’m making an impact!” Nishin insists, a little too loudly. “I’m influencing the national conversation!”

“Nishin,” says Vinaya. “You read speculative fiction, right? Maybe you fantasize about isekai - the idea of being dropped into some fantasy world and having to survive by your wits alone? Imagine writing our own world as an isekai. ‘In my setting, there’s this computerized gathering-place hive mind thing. Nice, normal people go there and get addicted to it. Then it uses advanced AI to serve them content specifically tailored to polarize and enrage them. The world’s top public intellectuals start out as really thoughtful decent people, then get spit out as seething balls of rage suitable only as objects of public hilarity and terrible warnings. Once there was a psychology professor widely admired as one of the leading proponents of self-cultivation, the Western canon, and Biblical wisdom, and he spent a few years on there and ended up screaming about how pandemics were fake news dreamed up by mediocrity-worshipping blue-haired death cultists.’ If this was the book you were going to be isekaied into, wouldn’t you develop some kind of plan other than entering the Torment Nexus and hoping this doesn’t happen to you? If you used the Torment Nexus and it did happen to you, wouldn’t you at least consider the possibility that you were suffering some kind of Torment-Nexus-related-brain-damage as opposed to really being a vital front-line soldier against the death cultists?”

“Yeah, well”, says Nishin. He seems to have calmed down a little. “Imagine you’re reading a fantasy book. There’s a war going on between the forces of good and evil, but the physical world has been in a stalemate for decades. All the interesting fighting happens on the astral plane, where your power is determined by your wits alone. The smartest and most charismatic people have hundreds of thousands of lesser lights flock to their banner, supercharging their spiritual power. A perfectly-placed barb at the right time can puncture even the strongest warrior of the other side, draining their status-mana into your own coffers. Nobody can be truly hurt on the astral plane, not really, but the ebb and flow of astral combat leaks into the physical world, and whoever wins its spiritual wars finds their businesses succeeding, their candidates getting elected, their romantic overtures getting accepted - sex, money, status - it can all be yours. And of course it slowly drives you insane - all power-granting magic does that. But could you really live in a world like this, have the potential to be a wizard, and swear off astral combat entirely? To grow crops or something?”

“Nishin,” you say. “Nobody is accepting your romantic overtures because of Twitter. Nobody is granting you power.

FROM:

Scott Alexander

Sources Say Bay Area House Party

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