Nomophobia and The Future of Social Cryptolotteries
White Paper by Pityless Consulting (pityless@tutanota.com)
Nomophobia is the fear of not having your phone; the phobia of no mo(bile.) In this white paper, an investigation of ‘nomophobia’ indicates a major, but unseen social dynamic: the conflict between the self-motivation needed for continued economic development and the attentional impacts of the cell phone. From this invisible but powerful social motor comes a proposal for a hypothetical crypto lottery with powerful, and widely shared prosocial effects.
There’s 4 steps in the investigation, and we’ll take each of them with a friend.
The Phone Is The Nexus to Social Momdad Love (with Hannah Arendt)
The Social Needs More Self Motivation (with McKinsey and Douglas McGregor)
Yet, the phone blocks this self-motivation (With Robert Pogue Harrison)
Therefore: we desire and expect social cryptolotteries built around self-motivation to answer a powerful social need (with Herman Hesse)
This work is part of a larger project, a book called Deep Socks. If you want the background of our argument, you can read the passage beneath, otherwise, skip ahead to the first step in the argument.
Some Background
As mentioned, this a chunk of a book called “Deep Socks.” The point of this book is to help deepen the readers understanding of contemporary political social religious and psychological reality. The book begins in what we call “shallow winter.” - this is our contemporary dystopian situation, a dystopia so dystopian that it cannot realize fullheartedly that it is a dystopia. What is this dystopia? It is Managerworld, a world where everyone manages someone else and is managed by someone else. Last week, we sketched out a history of managerworld: how it began in railroad administration in the 19th century, how the hellfires of the second world war forged a global managerial order, how that global managerial order transformed itself, fusing with a capitalist class and creating a new order based on “fear, digitalization, and cyclical iteration in production.”
This week our perspective on managerworld changes from the diachronic to the synchronic: that is, from last week’s historical perspective to deep dive into the contemporary situation. This started with Monday’s piece “Doom and Boom in the Board Room” which looked at a crisis within the world production machine. To quote ourselves:
The core crisis of today, from the perspective of the world production machine, is the exhaustion of management’s efficacy. Objectively, the world has enough resources currently, though they are distributed inefficiently and suboptimally and without human survival and betterment as the guiding principle. Equally objectively, the current system of world production, guided by management, guided by principles of profit, rationality, and cooperation of teams for higher purposes, is coming up short in terms of human welfare. Developed countries suffer from social crisis and degradation of material conditions. Developing ones suffer from material and social crisis. The managerworld is not meeting KPIs.
Monday’s piece used the metaphor of ‘social tectonic plates’ - and imagined where the earthquakes and potential volcanos in the system were. Today’s chapter addresses one such volcano in managerworld, but does it through the perspective of a white paper proposal for a cryptolottery.
The Phone Is The Nexus to Social Momdad Love (with Hannah Arendt)
The phone is our nexus to the social. What does this mean? Nexus is a very sexy way of describing a binding point; the handcuff is the nexus between two lead characters doomed to fall in love in a generic romantic comedy; the cell phone is our nexus to the managed social world, shortened here to ‘the social’. What is the social? It’s time to meet our first friend: Hannah Arendt. Today Hannah is going to teach us something about what it means to live in a “society.” She will explain to us why society is actually a “gigantische Über-Familie” - a gigantic super-family. And this will really help us understand cell phones.
Perhaps Hannah begins by explaining that not everybody always lived in a “society.”
Classical Athens was organized around the distinction between public and private life. The public was the domain of the political; it was a space where citizens could meet as equal and deliberate over their shared situation. The “shared-ness” of the situation was vital: public space meant a shared space, a space with shared goods, shared goals. It was a realm of visibility, of conversation, of clarity and movement. By contrast, the private was nonpolitical: there, quasi-biological relations of domination held, the man ruled over wife, the parents ruled over children, everyone ruled over slave. This was a space of darkness, of obscurity, of biological functions. This space preserved the outer space.
We have inherited the language from this kind of social order, but it no longer exists. What exists today, Arendt explains, is “Society”. Here is some of Arendt’s German; her own 1960 re-translation of a 1958 book called “The Human Condition” back into German with the appropriately unsexy but deep German title “Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben.”
From Vita activa oder om tätigen Leben: “Was wir heute Gesellschaft nennen ist ein Familienkollective,, ist ein Familienkollektiv, das sich ökonomisch als gigantische Über-Familie versteht und dessen politische Organisationform die Nation bildet.”
To translate: “What we today call society is a family collective, that understands itself economically as a gigantic superfamily and takes the political form of a nation.”
What does this have to do with our addiction to cell phones? We are all members of a large and invisible family. We are children. Society is momdad.
As anyone who can remember what it was like to be a biological child knows, it feels good to be loved by momdad and bad not to be loved by momdad. Over time we discover these gradations in the love: that there are gradations and spectrums of love. To become an adult in “society” is to become a child inside of larger family, Arendt’s “gigantische Über-Familie.”
Here is how Arendt describes the situation:
“The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.”
In the great and invisible superfamily of [modern] Society, how do we receive the “great and incalculable grace of love?” Of course, you guessed it: through our mobile phones. In German they are: “Handi” - a hand, not just our own hand, but the hand of the invisible momdad in the sky letting us know that we exist, that we are ok, that other people are thinking about us, saying our name, responding to us, that we are part of a social body. Other people also like to to laugh at pigs being friends with komodo monsters.
We live inside of a vast superfamily called society. What kind of society is it? There have been many different kinds of societies, but imagine that you are part of a universal fractal social order we have named managerworld.
If you live in Beijing or Boston or Brazzaville or Berlin or Bangkok or Brasilia you might be surprised to discover you live in managerworld. Is someone managing you? Are you managing someone or something? Are you managing yourself? How is your personal brand image going?
Managerworld s a form of social organization, but it is also the closest thing we have to a community. But it is not a community, because it is unbordered, unspecific, and very massive. No matter where you are, what you do, as long as you are in managerworld you are living a mass and social life. Bezos and the Spice addict living on a mattress that Bezos’s customized tankbus rolls past: both live within the fractal of managerworld. Only God manages Bezos, but everyone manages that Spice addict.
Now link it back up to our addiction to phones. Why does it feel bad to be separated from our phones? Because through our phones we get love from the social momdad. Whether the love comes in the form of a funny Tiktok dogcat sea shanty or a photo on WhatsApp from our partner showing how “DDR” a certain area of Berlin is or a message on discord from a collaborator or a new article in the algorithm: no matter face of the puppet, the hand underneath is Social momdad giving us love. That love bonds us to the phone.
Now we will say goodbye, for the moment, to Hannah Arendt, and go meet our friends at McKinsey.
2. The Social Needs More Self Motivation (with McKinsey and Douglas McGregor)
McKinsey are the Navy SEALs of managerworld: these are the elitest of the elite managers. When managerworld senses a problem, they call in McKinsey to solve it.
According to a 2020 McKinsey Global survey on future workforce needs, “nearly nine in ten executives and managers say their organizations either face skill gaps already or expect gaps to develop within the next five years.”
There are plenty of shallow names for this phenomenon: the great resignation, skill gap. But something deeper is happening here. Now we turn to Douglas McGregor, a professor of management born in 1906, who taught at MIT until his death in 1964. The ever-useful German Wikipedia describes McGregor this way: “Er gilt als einer der Gründerväter des zeitgenössischen Managementgedankens.” He’s held as a founding father of contemporary management thought.
McGregor’s remembered for his distinction between “Theory X” and “Theory Y” of motivation. Theory X is based on three key assumptions about human motivations, listed here is from McGregor’s 1960 “The Human Side of Enterprise.”
The average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can.
Because of this human characteristic of dislike of work, most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort toward the achievement of organizational objectives.
The average human being prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility, has relatively little ambition, wants security above all.
Following these assumptions comes a “carrot and stick” style of management: incentivize work through rewards, disincentivize nonwork through punishment. Keep in mind the word “disciplinary” when you think about this kind of management. It is the style of management we associate with armies, with factories, with hospitals, with schools. And according to McGregor, it didn’t work for offices. He writes, on page 41,
“But the “carrot and stick” theory does not work at all once man has reached an adequate subsistence level and is motivated primarily by higher needs. Management cannot provide a man with self-respect, or with the respect, of his fellows, or with the satisfaction of needs for self-fulfillment. We can create conditions such that he is encouraged and enabled to seek such satisfactions for himself, or we can thwart him by failing to create those conditions.”
Attuned readers will not be surprised to learn that McGregor studied with Abraham Maslow. Theory X coordinates, more or less, to the first two levels of the pyramid: “physiological needs” and “safety.”
Workers, soldiers, patients, students are induced to behave at the risk of loss of these very basic requirements. Don’t work? Starve, get shot, sleep on the streets. Why not all three, at least then you won’t be so goddamned lazy. But Theory X doesn’t work once these needs have been met. A different theory of motivation is needed to grasp manage the need for something called “self-fulfillment” This is Theory Y.
McGregor lists the following six assumptions of Theory Y:
The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest.
External control and the threat of punishment are not the only means for bringing about effort toward organizational objectives. Man will exercise self-direction and self control in the service of objectives to which he is committed.
Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with their achievement.
The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but to seek responsibility.
The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.
Under the conditions of modern industrial life, the intellectual potentialities of the average human being are only partially utilized.
Let us now imagine a population of farm animals employed in an office. Whether pig or cow or goat or pony or cat, the animals can be sorted into one of two categories. The X-ers who really want to run around the pastures, not work inside this ridiculous animal office. They need carrot and stick motivation. Y-ers, on the other hand, find the field slightly irritating and enjoy the air conditioning and challenge of the work itself. They want to be good.
Now we can see the depth of the problem hiding beneath the cozy handle “skill gap:” there just aren’t enough Y-ers in the world. We have a world of X-ers, being coerced via fear into unpleasant and stupid work: animal office, animal office, animal office.
Look at it this way: if you dedicated 10,000 hours towards developing “human capital” within a relatively niche and in-demand field of labor, say, database virtualization. You will join the ‘alpha minus’ class. Not Bezos level, but high level. Enough money to vacation with your family anywhere. Transgenerational Ohio wealth money.
So why aren’t more people doing this? It’s time now for step three. Keep in mind that #2 was: “The social needs more self motivation.”
3. Yet, the phone blocks this self-motivation (with Robert Pogue Harrison)
From our journey with Hannah Arendt we have learned that the phone is the nexus to social momdad love, and this love binds us to the phones. But what happens when recognition, love, care, the human touch comes through messages delivered through platforms owned by managers constantly optimizing for engagement, and therefore their enrichment and power? Our next guide can teach us something about phoneland.
The guide is Professor Robert Pogue Harrison, and we can commune with him through the episode of the Entitled Opinions Podcast called “On Depression.” For those visual learners or just impatient people, the gist goes like this. Pogue teaches Italian literature at Stanford. In this podcast episode, he connects the widespread depression and rising suicide rate of students with their immersion inside of what we called “phoneland.”
Pogue teaches literature, romance literature, and notes that many of his students complain that reading the text is boring. What does this mean? Why is reading boring? Because it takes us out of phoneland, which is (once again) our connection to the love of the social momdad. So it hurts.
And why is it that we can’t bear to read Dante for an hour? Because the attentional rhythm of phoneland has been turned up to a very very high beats per minute tempo. The platforms want our fast chopped up attention. When you chop up focused-time into ever smaller pieces you can sell them for ever increasing amounts of money.
It is easy to sell to people whose attention is chopped up into 15 second chunks, but there’s a massive externality involved: collective behavioral degradation. Narrow groups of the population retain the capacity for long term behavioral focus, but more and more find any amount of reading “boring.”
To understand why this is a problem, remember the fifth of McGregor’s assumptions for Theory Y: “The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population. “
Phoneworld, on average, creates conditions which undermined this collective capacity to solve problems. Imagination, ingenuity, and creativity require degrees of patience made more and more difficult by the aforementioned behavioral degradation.
This could get apocalyptic, quick, but instead we will go practical. Because what could appear to be yet another metasystemic externality nightmare can also be taken as a massive entrepreneurial opportunity. This is the core of the fourth, and final step.
4. Therefore: we desire and expect social cryptolotteries built around self-motivation to answer a powerful social need (with Herman Hesse)
Herman Hesse’s last completed novel, published in 1943, has the delightful name: “Das Glasperlenspiel. Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Magister Ludi Josef Knecht samt Knechts hinterlassenen Schriften” or, in English: “The Glass Bead Game, attempt at a biography of the Magister Ludi Josef Knecht including Knecht’s posthumous writings.”
Hesse’s novel is set around the 25th century, and centers around a “pedagogic province” named (in English) Castalia, where monastic life centers around an indescribably strange practice called “the glass bead game.” This game is part music and part math, but also part history, part philosophy, and finally something more than all the parts. It is the playing of culture itself as a game.
The game requires a lifetime of concentrated, autonomous attention. To use previous vocabulary, the monks who play the game are resolute Y-ers: they act from their own motivations. Such a reality is more or less a polar opposite of our contemporary social media system: where our reality today breaks up attention into discrete, arbitrary, surveilled chunks, the glass bead game gathers up all reality into one ever-evolving, autonomous, meaning-laden whole.
Is there any kind of behavioral pattern that could, somehow, fork our reality into Castalia? Could we use the motivational hacks developed at the cutting edges of managerworld to incentivize deep, intensive cultural research and self-education and simultaneously create massive prosocial wealth? Now we are almost ready to introduce the social cryptolottery.
Facebook, quite notoriously, studied the design of slot machines, the so-called “one armed bandits” to create addictive and/or attention-poisoning behavior patterns. But there is a social game even less reputable than slot machines: the lottery. Yes, the scratch and win lottery, a notoriously unjust and crooked scheme operated by state-level governments in America to convert the sad hopes of escape from the perpetual grind of precariat existence into a massive tarball of embezzlement and graft. From these official scams we can take a lesson: lotteries work. People do them. They click.
Right now there’s at least a dozen cryptolotteries on the internet. They have names like “FortuneJack,” “Lucky Block” “Lottoland” and “Bitcasino.io.” One of them, “Quanta” has the very sexy description: “High-Security Crypto Lottery Platform on Ethereum Blockchain.” Even though crypto is down right now, let’s assume alongside all economists that doom is merely a passing affectation, that at some point fear will give way to greed, and the bubble will reflate.
Let’s imagine a different lottery. Call it Castalia. Most lotteries are >99.9% chance, with the remainderbeing the infinitesimal and ever-vanishing point of hopeful luck. Castalia, on the other hand, is 99.88% percent change. That remaining .12% is for skill: specifically, the skill of the glass bead game.
But what is this game, and how do we incentivize a cryptolottery around it? Imagine, first, the body of knowledge that would qualify someone as “world cultured.” That is, take the vast heritages upon heritages of texts, music, ideas, and images and database them. Now run trivia questions on this body of knowledge, and you have a rough idea of how to incentivize for knowledge of world culture. But it’s not enough: we need a social element. We need people to form teams: to learn and work this together.
The pieces of the system are now more or less apparent: (A) a block-chain leveraging way to buy tickets, preferably already protected from obvious ecological arguments (B) a social space to form teams to compete at (c) the glass bead game which distributes (d) a fund.
The exact dimensions of such a fund, and models for the initial cost and most favorable legislative environment are available upon request through the email in the header.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
Please, look forward to: