On Lorecraft - HackMD

--- ###### tags: `Universe Guide` --- # On Lorecraft *Prompted by the recent article [Lands of Lorecraft](https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/lands-of-lorecraft?s=r), although not really a response or retort to that author's ideas.* *Lands of Lorecraft* describes the role of a Lorecrafter as occupying a unique position within an organizational marketing mechanism. I identify with the role, but not with the utility prescribed to it, nor the indebtedness to organization management architecture outlined there. As a DAOist uniquely positioned as a dedicated crafter of multifarious lore for a handful of organizations, I feel a responsibility to respond to these statements as a call to collectively recalibrate the responsbilities of lore crafters as an appendage of the decentralized mythological substrate of the wider community. Lorecrafters might reserve the right to remain illegible, glossololiac soothsayers mumbling incoherent prognostications of impractical archetypes without diminishing their importance to the human experience or their significance as meaningful contributors to our organizations. Here is a defense of the Lorecrafter as artist-visionary, heroic idiot, mumbling mystic, and clairvoyant oracle. Here is an attempt to re-contextualize the Lorecrafter as a mythological storyteller that will forever stay beyond the grasp of organizational strategy. Perhaps this is the greatest value they might add. ### Initial Questions - What is the correlation between marketing, lorecrafting, and culture building? - Is lore constituted by a manifesto, a constitution, a sci-fi-fantasy graphic novel, an origin story dialogue, or a UX research report focused on organization management schemas? Is it confined to the medium? - Is lore *art*? - Does lore offer utility for aligning our internal group dynamics, extending a tether to the peripheral community, or through the distillation of dynamic forms into coherent taxonomies? - Is there a need to defend lorecraft in relation to practical and utilitarian needs - or key performance indicators - in order to justify the value that is generated for a particular group of people? - In prioritizing the practical outputs and concrete deliverables of our narrative crafting, might we be overlooking other potential values or unspeakable meanings that lore instills within our perspectives? - Is lore an analog of divergent cycles of design thinking? - Is lore crafting a supplement to the ongoing appropriation of diverse cultural forms into our hegemonic mental modalities? - How might our organizations (especially DAOs) foster a kind of collective lorecrafting and become pillars of a cultural standard greater than their own membership? ### Lore is a meme; there is no meme - Lore refers to something that is known through tradition and knowledge, although the colloquial use of the term might be differentiated from the evidenced and justified beliefs of an epistomological method. On the contrary, lore is more gnosis than knowledge, an orientation to mysterious and ineffable uncertainty that is passed more often through dynamic oral tradition while evading concrete codification in written language. - Allowing lore to be captured is equivalent to appropriation of *the soul.* Always-already a taboo in the tech community, perhaps. - An extension of [the modernist god-king legibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State), to render the world visible so that humans might exercise control over it, to dominate and manipulate its inhabitants. - As a DAO, we should resist this momentum and reclaim control of the narrative, towards a definition of lore as a tethered relation between the org and the mythological (allegorical) weavings of the feral world (let's not call it nature!). - Lore is not reducible to strategic stories comprising narrative content for internal organizational cohesion. We might consider this definition as a bastardization of the concept's and role's more profound potential. - So how might we consider it differently? What is this potential? ### Storytelling - Synonyms for lorecrafter as storyteller: - *narrator, griot, raconteur, bard, chronicler, fabulist, soothsayer, minstrel, troubadour, jongleur, trouvère, minnesinger, skald, scop, skaziteli, seanachie, jeli, talebearer* - Evokes and provokes a realm of imagination, of indeterminate possibilities. Imaginative activation allows the storyteller to play with mental modalities in tandem with the listeners as an active (and activating) performative engagement, a creative and expressive experience. Stories are immersive, diffuse, aromatic mists of being-in-and-of-the-world we are swimming in. - Stories are delicious and horrifying, representing the full gamut of sensuous experience rendered into a procession of artifacts that allow us to maintain an aesthetic distance with the world we are immersed in. This distance allows us to iterate and craft upon the world; as a tool, an edifice, an artifact. These materially instantiated components of collective memory are the crux of culture. - We must resist the appropriation/capture of [the sacred by the profane](https://monoskop.org/images/b/b1/Eliade_Mircea_The_Sacred_and_The_profane_1963.pdf) and ["remember to remember"](https://www.ndbooks.com/book/remember-to-remember/) the tools of our [alchemical civilization](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3643675.html) without confusing the means for the ends. The protocol should be in service to the users; the culture should be in service to the memories of the civilization - not the other way around. Mimesis is not synonymous with the mnemonic. - Storytelling is a medium that allows us to render a sensual experience into sense and sensisibilities, logic and habits of mind. The crafting of the story facillitates the collective remembering of mental models through the media. Oration is the primordial [discourse network](https://monoskop.org/images/1/1f/Kittler_Friedrich_Discourse_Networks_1800_1900.pdf); [changing media irreparably changes the contents of the discourse](https://monoskop.org/images/7/73/Kittler_Friedrich_Gramophone_Film_Typewriter.pdf), but the media is not synonymous with the message. - Lorecrafting as storytelling must maintain a keen awareness of these subtle shifts to avoid the narrative becoming adulturated to perverse, degenerate, malicious, and/or manipulative ends. [The gesture of writing](https://jpgenrgb.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/338252667-flusser-gestures.pdf) is about bringing material to a surface, a concatenation of novel meanings, an incantation (magical) that brings fresh epiphanies into this world (not merely iterating on what already exists). Lorecrafting as storytelling is literally birthing life into the world. - Lorecraft ventures into the void - [the white of the page](https://monoskop.org/images/9/94/Blanchot_Maurice_The_Space_of_Literature.pdf) - and is more about soaking up the delicious uncertainty than formalizing rigid monuments to abstraction. Wittgenstein famously wrote: "Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Must Be Silent." ### Mythologizing - A grandiose superimposition of our sensuous experience into the realm of cosmically scaled allegory. - A pantheon of deities (for example) allows us to achieve an aesthetic distance from our own existence, a few steps towards a neutered/neutral POV. This distance on ourselves does not interfere with our ongoing self-design, indeed exacerbates and supplements it deeply. We are mythological beings by our own designs. - Myth facillitates an alignment with the meta-scale, collectively rendered image as it evolves through the perspectives of the contributors, whom are also actively performing and believing in the mythic dimension. This should not be reduced to a mere interface between the conscious and sub/un-conscious, or the individual and the collective, but received as a chimera between the **real** and the supra-real (the reality we are always referencing while remaining always to come). - Myth is additive, not subtractive. Mobilizing it for pragmatic ends renders a violence to the substrate (crucible) of imagination, where all tools, edifice, and artifice (ie: culture) is assembled. - This is a realm which shapes our relation to ourselves, to each other, and to the world (as entity, object, or otherwise). Myth amounts to a *world image* that *in-forms, con-forms, and re-forms* our human habits of mind and patterns of behavior. - This is especially evident in the technological edifice we are continuously constructing. As our reflexive self-representation changes, we can count on the technological imagery necessarily changing (to the extent that it remains coherent, comprehendible, and relevant to our contemporary condition, which it necessarily must do, by design, because antiquated technology is rendered inert by cultural archiving). - We might consider lore crafting to be a direct sensual engagement with the phenomenological aspects of the tragic-comic, rather than the organization edifice that results. We might avoid putting lore in service to an empirical epistemological (and ultimately imperial) enterprise of rendering the world legible to the machinic/synthetic gaze. > How does this idea interface with the notion of Ethereum as a world computer, a globally accessible persistence/security layer? Or with NFTs as an extension of the universal addressing, identification, and archiving of the world of objects? ref: BanklessDAO's definition of NFTs (paraphrase) = *We have stuff, we hang out on the internet, so of course we want to have our stuff with us while we hang out on the internet.* - Mythology is a disposition, an orientation, to the unknown and the unknowable. Myth is the mirror-portal through which we gain a deeper understanding of who we are, what we produce, and how we craft. - Myth might be considered a kind of coordination of the subjective towards the supernatural, an *eye-hand-heart coordination.* - The thrownness of being into the unknown and unknowable supersedes pure choice or agency, implying a humility before the fatefulness, predestination, and other forces that impose upon our human ineptitude to understand everything and mortal ineffectuality of changing this fate rendered by our own hand. This is definitively *absurd, tragic-comic, and unpractical*, but that does not negate the profundity of the learnings inherent within the mythological weaving. - We must resist mythology becoming appropriated into a pragmatic org architecture, an industrial complex of legibility. **This resistance represents the universal and cosmological war against evil, a resistance to our core lore/story/myth being used against us for subjugation and domination by another.** Let's agonize together on this potential capture, to retain a pluriversal/multiversal perspectivalism - ecclectically decentered in appreciation that *the story owns us more than we own ourselves.* - The shift from the Greek to the Roman is one of humility to domination = rewritting the Greek myths into latin by Virgil signals the shift to a profoundly anthropocentric storytelling. [All straight roads lead to Rome.](https://youtu.be/MLcQH8xqibI) ### Towards an alternative definition of Lore and Lorecrafting - As we utilize lore within technology (very generally) as a bridge between tool-being - the material edifice that must not be confused for reality itself - it remains a method of pure abstraction in fabricating mental modalities that we (users) becoming reliant upon. Yet, lore might be considered more than a prosthesis of our severed supernatural propensity, rather an active orientation to a world we are actively co-imagining while simultaneously performing. - How might we practice applying restraints, constraints, and deliberate limitations upon the tools we are building to limit the growth of our egoic orgs? Put quite differently, how might we wield our lore as a tool for [actively de-membering](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_----_a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_....pdf) and [deliberately re-membering](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374237219/aprimerforforgetting) differently? - How might we put lore in relation to the proliferation of memes in our contemporary culture? Memes colloquially refer to the distribution of ideas, to mimetic signifiers and the media-instantiated technology of collectively remembering (what often amounts to banal and highly reduced) ideas. Genes, memes, and temes (tech-infused mimetic ideas) are often conceptually interchangeble, as a vehicular transport for essential content distributed as a weapon upon the innocent fertile substrate of the minds/materials of the host. - Memes are generated consciously and unconsciously. This understanding should give us great pause and shift towards a careful, slow, nuanced, subtle distribution of our ideas, especially when they concern topics of mythological weight/magnitude in their crafting. > How are we using memes of biomimicry, hyperobjects, technological utopias, and other anthropocentric delusions manifesting at every scale? How might we leverage lore crafting to reimagine collective hallucinations, to decenter our perspectives and recalibrate a disposition to others? Ref = Elinor Ostrom (on the definition of resources) + Ursula LeGuin (on the importance of taking sci-fi seriously) + Donna Haraway (on the reorientation to the inanimate) - Lore might be considered a deliberately evoked metaphorical tension upon the substrate of our technology, not so easily assimilated by it. Lorecrafting (when succesful) might be considered a careful and deliberate wielding of language that allows the recipient to reorient in their convictions, to destabilize their assumptions, to engage in a (dare I say) therapeutic disorientation to their knowledge of a subject. We must remind ourselves to remain weary of lore that is brandished to convince, to sway opinion, to present calculated personas. How might we craft mimetic lore that invites others into a scenario of reciprocal and pluriversal co-imagining? > As a side note, what is the role of *trust* in lorecrafting? What is the lore of trust itself? What are the implications of evoking trust as something earned, built, discovered, manufactured, crafted, strategized? *How might we entertain a reciprocal trust based on mutual sacrifice, trust that is given freely, trust based on collective surrender?* - If lore is used solely to create internal community cohesion, as a marketing appendage leveraged towards swaying the perception of an audience, this might be considered the crafting of an **ontological weapon**. > Reference the lore of Moloch and the Web3-DAO tooling that serves as the sword that will slay the beast. How might we reconsider this mythology and craft it more deliberately? This is a sensitive critique since the meme is so near and dear to the heart of the community. It often amounts to a call to arms leading to a description of a holy crusade based on strength and efficiency, speed and (masculine) virility, and *more more more* industrial and puritanical moral codes of conduct. (All quite ironic for a thoroughly agnostic community.) - How might we craft a lore that decenters and deconstructs its own hubris, to provide openings within its own substrate, to riddle itself full of (w)holes, to adovcate for vulnerability and candor as the most heroic qualities? It begins with the careful crafting of the question to elucidate what we are really striving to achieve. - Conceived as an embodied mythological storytelling, Lorecrafting allows us to re-member forgotten cultures, to rebuild ourselves in a different image, to re-orient our subjective coorindations, to re-position our own perspectivalism and ontolgoical disposition in relation to an imaginative edifice of interconnected, matristic, reciprocal exchange. - Lore is the software of imagination that allows us to compose ourselves differently, beyond the synthetic constraints of money. Lorecrafters are weavers upon the mythological loom that craft tapestries of potency and possibility. Lorekeepers are not mere custodians of a [Library of Babel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel), but [sacred technicians](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520290723/technicians-of-the-sacred-third-edition) of transitional designs for transcending the walls of human-centered organizational complexes. ### Next: Three Body Problems of DAO Management *This section will be elaborated later from another transcription.* 1. Biomimicry metaphors: the DAO as a body. 2. Evolutionary metaphor: the DAO as a progression/procession. 3. Archive fever and phylogenetic patterns: the DAO as a material manifestation of a [morphogenetic field.](https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introduction)