Consumption

Consumption is about cyclic uselessness. If you find something useful today, and start a pattern of consumption that has an unceasing chain of consumption of that entity, its transactional power will change.

Transactional power has a relationship with the quantum of production as well as the pattern of consumption.

Cycles of symbolic value are rotating all the time. The rotation constitutes a game. When the carousel stops, which symbol will be at the counter, that is the question.

To model consumption into a setting that is not inherently complex is very difficult because the shifting cycles of symbolic value pass the buck onto different entities with the passing of time.

So the game is to consume the entity that is most worth consuming at any given time. To be able to do this consistently is a hard job.

Besides research and a constant scanning of the material produced by cultural flux, there is also a kind of constant filtering activity that one has to perform. This activity is draining and tiring to perform. What if this could be outsourced?

Research, scanning and filtering cannot be outsourced as processes because it is in the noise produced by the processes playing out individually that they function so well. Everyone who performs these processes ends up with unique outcomes that are suited to the configuration of their personalities. Outsourcing these processes would make the outcomes generic and not have anything to do with individually calibrated world-views.

There is another way of doing this.

This way will require the development of a static variable for individuals. This static variable will vary every bit of information that is incident on it. This variation will happen in a range that is specific for the individual. So if the functions of research, scanning and filtering are outsourced and they produce generic outputs, on being incident on the individuals, they will produce variation.

This will enable us to a world where we have both strategic consumption and individual flavour at the same time.

The growth of the world is constrained by the intensity of consumption patterns that develop.

To let the world grow with infinitely scoped leaps and bounds, its meta infrastructure needs to be delinked from individuals. Otherwise the population of the individuals who clutter the globe will become like anchors on the soaring spirit of the world - a dead weight.

This de-linking of the production process of the meta-process of scanning and filtering and the individualistic process of producing variation is a frugal process for the production of a world-system with natural qualities of having individual variation at the personal scale.

Few other strategies work as well as this to populate a realistic world with realistic characteristics.

Consumption is a very key parameter in this because in all kinds of ways, what you intake is who you are for the system. Choices reveal you. Private individuals should roam the world like naked, generic individuals.

Narrative spaces influence the nature of consumption only obliquely. If you are blowing bubbles and someone is constantly asking you to enact a dying gorilla, the noise that will be produced will closely emulate the influence that narratives have on consumption.

Producing noise only to overwhelm subjects and force them to make a hasty choice is not a fair game to play. When you are stuck in a lopsidedly programmed unfair game-world, anything you do to swim against the tide will be held against you. The most natural thing to do in that situation is to role-play the pushed-into-the-corner actor, the actor who has to suffer the brunt of injustice. There is no reason why that role should be painful to play.