On May 7, 2020, I discussed on Twitter how, once Covid collective hysteria got going, along with a new narrative, it was going to be very difficult to ever get rid of it.
For more details, see my new book, EXPRESSLY HUMAN.
The COVID19 hysteria will not go away easily. A mistaken narrative got created. Once that happens, it is very difficult to correct.
In this thread I explain why. I give an analogy between social narratives and blockchains, the latter which are designed to resist correction.
Both cryptocurrency (e.g., Bitcoin) and social reputation are currencies.
Both have
- non-physical tokens,
- no central authority recording interactions,
and thus they both have to worry about “double spending,” where A pays B some amount of currency, but because it isn’t recorded appropriately, A can spend it again.
E.g., for reputation, if I lose reputation in a social interaction with you, that “payment” of some of my social capital to you needs to be veridically recorded by the social network’s collective memory.
But how? What if me and my buddies spread gossip -- a storyline -- that it is *you* who got humiliated in the argument, rather than me? Which gossip gets validated?
There are two key ways this is handled in social networks:
A. Favoring the gossip of higher reputation people. (Proof of Stake.) Higher rep people have truer gossip, and care more about the integrity of the reputation currency. This is analogous to “Proof of Stake” for cryptocurrency, where a new transaction is validated by someone owning a lot of that coin.
B. Favoring gossip parsimoniously fitting the existing narrative of the social network. (Proof of Work.) Gossip that most parsimoniously fits the tribe’s existing storyline (the “tribal blockchain”) is chosen, in some part because it is easier for people to remember…
Finding a highly parsimonious “gossip fit” to the existing storyline is not easy, but it’s easy for others to see whether it’s a parsimonious add.
The winning gossiper’s storyline gains some social currency for this service. This is analogous to Proof of Work. (Gossipers are miners.)
In cryptocurrency, these mechanisms lead to a blockchain that is practically impossible to displace. And, it is for very similar sorts of reasons that storylines amongst a social community are very difficult to displace.
These are observations I made a couple years back, working on a new book on the origins of emotions, which connects tightly to social capital.
https://2ailabs.tumblr.com/post/170664288310/cryptocurrency-and-tribes
In summary, in regards to today’s COVID19, many of those that have “swallowed the doom pill” may *never* come around.
Efforts need to be made to study the conditions that led to hysteria of this kind, something I pointed out a couple months ago.

The dangers are clear. With the world connected as one network more tightly than ever, hysteria can spread faster than ever, leading to consensus on unprecedented and disastrous and civil-rights-quashing emergency decrees.

Here’s a link to the Twitter thread itself…
Good thoughts, Mark.
Gonna have to mine this analogy for insights. We do know that hysteria is based in emotional state matching. How signal is preserved and not corrupted is an interesting question.
Nice presentation of concept.
Very difficult to ever get rid of? Or impossible? And what counternarrative strategies exist? Necessarily guerilla at this point. Or maybe only a much larger force taking over control of the cognitive infrastructure, as an Allied army liberating a death camp that takes the townsfolk living nearby into the camp who denied the horrors done there by their friends, family and neighbors being forced to bury the bodies, a counternarrative that impossible to look away from can reverse?
What bury the bodies moment is out there? How high must the piles of bodies be stacked? Is there an off-ramp to that outcome? Or is that the inevitable result of indulging a hysteria that only burns out when the social-societal fuel of a bloodletting is all gone? The pandemic hysteria did not burn up all the fuel.