Notes on the Green Pill

--- ###### tags: `Gitcoin` --- # Notes on the Green Pill ### Green Pill in the Abstract - I'm not completely sure I understand what the green pill is. - In the Matrix films, Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. The dark, dytopian, virtual reality delusion is associated with choosing the blue pill, ie: staying in the matrix. The red pill represents emancipation from the illusion, but does that entail enlightenment and utopia? Which world is reality? Which world is the harmful simulation? - The film intertwines theories espoused in Jean Baudrillard's *Simulations and Simulacra* (SS) and Lewis Carrol's *Alice in Wonderland* (AIW) into a convoluted tapestry. **Where does fantasy/reality begin/end?** - In the crypto community, *pilling* someone means leading them *down the rabbithole* of the concepts and mechanics. - In relation to AIW, Alice falls into a dreamworld of her own imagination, a world of wonder and fantasy, ie: delusion, juxtaposed with the "real world" of boring adult responsibilities. This metaphor might have socio-political undertones, of Wonderland offering an alternative to the oppressive world outside, but likely alludes to a **rite of passage** of young Alice transitioning from child to adult. - Is the green pill associated with going deeper down a rabbithole of imagination, fantasy, or fiction? Opposed to a black pill of dry nihilistic boredom? What worldview does the black pill represent? - In The Matrix, choosing the red pill is synonymous with choosing to *see how deep the rabbithole goes*. This rabbithole is associated with the "real world," a cold dark meatspace reality where humans awaken from their slavery and sacrifice their physical comfort to choose suffering in the pursuit of higher ideals of freedom and autonomy. Red pilling escapes the dream of the virtual space, opposed to the blue pill choice of staying inside the simulation, essentially choosing ignorance, illusion, dissociation, the unreality or non-reality. - **The pill is a vehicle.** It represents a choice of reality and transports the taker to that space. - **The green pill is a vehichle to the quadratic lands.** It represents the seed of hopefullness, the solarpunk insistence on speculative hope as the true/only reality: a vision of a better world that we *choose* to inhabit/manifest, to overcome our own human nature. - The danger here is in the idealism: that *consuming* something will unlock, transcend, or surpass our own nature. *It's never that easy.* We don't literally believe this is possible, so **the green pill becomes a pledge in the face of this impossibility, that we will not be nihilistic. It's a symbolic pledge of the hopeful to continue being hopeful.** - How do we disentangle this from ignorance and naivete? **It's a deliberately calculated hope, built upon reason to dispell superstitious catastrophic doomism.** Hope provides clarity: the opposite of ignorance. - **The green pill represents a process of maturation**, a rite of passage (ala the journey of the hero), towards a state of self-awareness. - How do the newly self-aware return to their tribe to disseminate this learning witout being torn apart by their peers? Reference: Plato's Allegory of the Cave - How do we combat selfishness? ie: Moloch - Is this more or less real than the alternative black pill? - **The black pill is akin to choosing death.** More aligned with the blue pill, a choice based on FUD, cynicism, untempered skepticism, nihilism, choosing to suffer. Everyone is faced with the same choice, but choosing the black pill amounts to remaining firmly embedded within architecture of oppression, to choose slavery. **Would anyone consciously make this choice?** - How do we understand this choice in terms of Alice in AIW? Alice going down the rabbithole is the choice of fantasy, to fall into her own delusions. It's more complex than that... - Reference [Gilles Deleuze's *The Logic of Sense*](http://www.elimeyerhoff.com/books/Deleuze/Deleuze%20-%20Logic%20of%20sense.pdf): - *According to Gilles Deleuze, the underground world of Alice in Wonderland has been strongly associated with animality and embodiment. Thus the need for Alice's eventual climb to the surface and her discovery that everything linguistic happens at that border. Yet, strangely, in spite of the claim that Alice disavows false depth and returns to the surface, it seems that it is precisely in the depths that she finally wakes from her sleepy, stupified surface state and investigates the deep structures, the rules of logic. In this investigation, Alice questions many formal structures, such as causality, identity, reference and the rules of replacement. She discovers that Wonderland does not generate consequential conduct; in fact, it generates no conduct whatsoever! In other words, when it comes to consequences, Wonderland may not be all that wonderful. Yet, we do not live in Wonderland and therefore, our actions have consequences. The question this poses is, why organise language so as to escape causal relations and why choose the little girl as emblematic of this organisation?* - Dorothea Olkowski - *As each “nonsense” happens to her, Alice takes them in stride in a very calm and relatively logical manner. As each new thing occurs, the more sense the next nonsense makes in context of this new underground world. For example, Carroll explains that “so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” (Carroll 13) As the diverse nonsense events build upon each other, it seems less odd and somehow makes more sense that the next completely different nonsense event occurs. In fact, it seems almost expected of Wonderland. In this way, Deleuze’s point about Carroll giving an entire account of his universe through nonsenses makes perfect sense. Wonderland is characterized by these events and therefore the reader finds themselves making sense of the place without the use of sense at all.* - Christine Slobogin - How does the green pill metaphor disseminate as a meme throughout the community? **It's a meme injected into a meme injected into a meme**: AIW > The Matrix > Gitcoin's Quadratic Lands. There are other associations as well, ie: Baudrillard's *Simulations*. Does this obfuscate it's meaning beyond the threshold of utility? - **The green pill has utility! It serves as an emblem/signal of committment to a larger project: to dedicate a certain amount of one's own resources to support public goods** - Yearly income? A percentage of a project budget? A percentage of a purchase of an item from The Greatest Larp campaign?. Is this a single txn or cumulative of all an individual's txns? Is this committment public or private? Is the green pill a reward, a POAP, a pledge? What constitutes a successful dedication to public goods? - Would be good to have a solid reference of the definition of public goods in this context (certainly this already exists within Gitcoin literature and other orgs). Are public goods curated by Gitcoin - is there a list? Does it go to a fund for The Greatest Larp project? **Maybe understanding these mechanics isn't necessary to consider the potency of the green pill meme.** ### Injecting the Green Pill into Comic #3 - **Our intention is to introduce an artifact into the story to allow the characters to understand their own latent potential** to... change their own minds + encourage that change in each other + recognize that they can't be effectual alone/siloed + summon the courage to adjust their behavior towards hopeful ends. - The characters have everything they need already, but don't realize it. (Does this mesh with Gitcoin lore?) - **The artifact provokes a realization, a synthesis of their Now-Me self-preoccupation to coordinate/align with the extrinsic Future-We.** - This constitutes a **bridging of dimensions between the virtual and physical.** - **The green pill is a portal that opens between these dimensions.** - How does the green pill (as artifact) work? - The pill is taken into the body to unlock the potential of the mind. - A drug, or more accurately a [pharmakon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)): **the poison that is also a cure/remedy.** - But with the green pill this is not literal in the same way it is in The Matrix and AIW. With the green M&Ms and Tic Tacs there is another compounding of the meaning/symbolism. Why is it candy and not LSD (kidding not kidding)? Why is it sugar and not nootropics or vitamins? - **The *utility* of the green pill is indebted to magic.** - Aleister Crowley's definition of magic: the projection of an individual's will upon another from afar. Is this manipulation? Is this deception/illusion that is being cast? *How do we cast spells upon each other without succombing to our own delusions? Or perhaps in this case we must become delusional ourselves first?* - Is The Matrix a collective hallucination or a subjective delusion? Is it the choice of the individual or collective to leave the Matrix? Is the AIW world confined to Alice's mind? Did Alice simply eat some toxic mushrooms and fall asleep under a tree? - **The green pill is an invitation to get radical.** - To enter into a land that is no more clear, simple, or straightforward as the world we already inhabit, simply an alternate (and equally convoluted) reality. - The main difference is that **the green pill choice is an empowered position. It's a choice for hope that we might change ourselves, shift the parameters, to contribute to an optimistic narrative, to engage in life (digital, meatspace, or otherwise) with a proactive agency to instill positive change.** - An invitation to attempt a subjective ontological pivot, to change our own mind, more than a change in the mind of the collective. The most radical political performance occurs on the level of the individual, disseminates through influence via culture outlets, and amounts to shifts in political and economic power dynamics through time. - Reference: the progression of the 20th century avant-garde in Western art history. - Should comic #3 illustrate a literal green pill? **Can this idea be adapted into another artifact (in the comic) while maintaining the primary concept?** Will this create even more confusion with The Greatest Larp campaign and Metaverse Coordinators' agenda? ### Audience and Process - Reference: [Borges' *Labyrinths*](https://www.derechopenalenlared.com/libros/labyrinths-borges.pdf) and [Calvino's *Invisible Cities*](https://irenebrination.typepad.com/files/calvino_italo_invisible_cities.pdf). - Imaginary territories that reference themselves or an imaginary other. How does this correlate to the GCMC's working definition of the metaverse and Gitcoin's vision for the quadratic lands? - **Who is the intended audience (to be green pilled)?** How are they green pilled (effectively, by tapping into their sensibilities, plucking their heart strings)? - On the notion of this being a *transmedia* endeavor, what is the difference between branding, marketing, propaganda? What is the ultimate goal? - The ultimate goal seems pretty explicit: increase public goods funding, investing in the Future-We. - All of this is pointing towards the need for a *Glossary* in the Universe Guide with both technical and philosophical terminology. - Clear definition of green pill, public goods, etc. - **Moloch lives in language, inhabit misunderstanding and miscommunication, loves misfired ideas and quick assumptions.** - **The assumption is that the audience is degen, inherently ill-willed/rivalrous (at worst) or self-motivated on the Now-Me (at best).** Who are these people? Isn't this everyone, including us here and now articulating these ideas? - Green pilling begins on the territory of the self. **How do we (or did we) green pill ourselves?** - What is the mechanism that extends this subjective transformation out to others? - What does a green pilled person sound like? An erudite, articulate (well-spoken), logical (with clear understanding of cause and effect), no longer tormented by their own FUD even in the face of the impossible task, of the unknowable, to unfuck our own imagination. - **The green pill symbolizes a sacrifice.** - Of the Now-Me for the greater good Future-We? - Kinda? It symbolizes that **we don't need to sacrifice ourselves (completely) to support the greater good.** Now-Me and Future-We coexisting? - **Moloch never actually goes away for good.** - This is the paradox of the demonic image: it lives within us. We build monuments to Moloch. There is no escape (except through false choices like suicide, total self-abnegation). - **This is the *truth of reality* that our heros of the comic must come to confront head on.** The courage to persevere involves coming face to face with our own existential conundrum. The paradox of existence is to not self-obliterate, to deconstruct all that we think we know in order to rebuild from the bottom up. First you need to find the bottom, and it's desperate! - **Gives new importance to the *post-apocalyptic* genre context**: apocalypse = uncover, disclose, reveal, to peer beyond the veil. - **The green pill is the portal between dimensions.** - It is the veil that we peer beyond to witness the truth of reality. - It's a potential that we always-already have with us (again - is this aligned?), but might not be able to recognize. We need others to support and coordinate, to unlock each other's potential. - To form a living bond, living community, with a living language reinforced by dynamic tools. - Sedentary/stillness leads to the desire to fortify walls, defend territories, consolidate identities under the machinic gaze. - **The hopeful are magicians that are actively spelling (manifesting) a new reality, one that is based on dynamic change and agile movement.** - **They are dedicated to uncovering the core problems (pathologies) rather than focusing on the symptoms.** - The characters of comic #3 reach an inflection point where they realize they need to actively change their own minds. - They aren't green pilled from an external source. **It has to be an authentic choice.** - How is the green pill visually depicted in the comic? - Instead of *legos* that combine to form a meta power/tool, **perhaps it's reframed as a sacrifice of a piece of the individual.** - **The sacrifice opens up the (green) portal.** - **The individual is marked, visually transformed.** - Before/after characters, before/after being green pilled: just double our transmedia potential LOL - Opening the portal doesn't mean that we immediately pass through it! **There's one choice to *take the pill* and another choice *to act upon the learnings* and integrate them into daily life, ie: to change behavior.** - **This is a gradual process.** - The mission of each future comic installment is to raise the sanity water line just a little bit higher. - **Each issue might attend to a different aspect of human nature, with a unique artifact that is sacrificed to open the portal, a different dream that changes in passing through the portal, a unique way of representing the shift of the characters in relation to the intended audience of that issue.** - **The quadratic lands are a true utopia we are trying to collectively realize.** - Utopia = *no place*. Quadratic lands are literally *no place.* Not a soverign land; *no land.* Not protecting the supreme freedom of the individual; *relinquishing that choice, individualism as a false choice.* - So... who is the audience? - How important is it to prepare this comic for an audience of children? Perhaps parents must lead their children through these rites of passage themselves, but how? Coordination is a choice, but **children can't choose. It's the parents that must choose.** - **It's not for teens! They are already experts in defying their elders to blaze their own path.** Adults censor their exposure to inhibit/dampen their imagination, to keep them thinking "realistically." Inherited from puritanical values. Teen culture is reactionary sub-culture: defiance, punk, radicality, avant-garde. The fuel that feeds political revolutions against the tyrannical dominance of a stagnating cultural imaginary. Teens don't need to be convinced that there are alternative ways of living or of the potency of transmedia; they live it! - **If the primary purpose is education, to demonstrate how to change our own minds, then *the audience is the adults (parents).* The target audience is those that have already made up their minds that they know with certainty how the world works.** "The world is a rivalrous economic game," etc. The green pill is a seed for the imagination to imbibe adults to manifest their narrative differently. - **How?** - Begins with how we dream/imagine - Extends into how we speak, how we *spell* (casting our manifestations through words) - Disseminates through a community (the effects of the meme as magic). We must be careful that we are casting the right message! - Leads to a dissipation of the first illusion, reorientation towards goals, and the identification of an alternative vision to reconfigure our performance of roles in the present.