Masonic lodges as a form of participatory theatre / entertainment particularly aimed at men, who pay a yearly subscription to band together under a guild system role-playing heroes from an ancient world struggling against evil, where the reward for completing scripted interactive sequences is both accumulating ever-more elaborate costumes, and progression through a series of "levels".
hmm. where have I heard that before.
https://dspace.ucuenca.edu.ec/bitstream/123456789/2085/1/tli284.pdf
I feel like everyone in the 17th through 19th centuries must have been hugely more trusting than we are now? It's just bizarre to understand the mindset.
I mean what part of "Imma sign me up to a secret society run by a bunch of guys in hoods who I don't know telling me what to do, I am sure absolutely nothing will go wrong" ever sounded like a good idea?"
Probably it was the health and life insurance and social climbing opportunities in a time when there simply wasn't any welfare, I guess.
But still.
You're practically putting a sign on your back saying "lol kick me I'm a disposable pawn"
and for all I know that might be exactly an actual initiation ritual from a dozen different secret societies, and not just the ones on university campuses.
I feel the same way about militaries, but stronger.
Thesis:
"Fandom" is monetized, low-entry-cost fraternalism for the 21st century, for a generation that likes cosplay but not hierarchy, and where the secrets are extremely time-limited.
More seriously: the actual transmission vector between the Golden Age of Fraternalism (1870-1920) and the age of Internet Fandom is the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1920-195x?)
and then I guess Rock 'n' Roll fandom took over where Science Fiction left off, and paralleled it at least through the 1980s.
But the early SF scene was, as I understand it, very much organized like fraternal societies and with the same dreams of reshaping the world via a technocratic brotherhood.
Like the Futurians, who basically *were* the Second Foundation, or wanted to be.
Literally "end level content" for those who'd got bored maxing out their characters
I particularly enjoy learning that the "Scottish Rite" (the top 29 of the infamous 33 degrees - the original "degree inflation") is French in origin, and then completely rewritten in the American South.
I wonder how you could recreate the ideas of mutual aid societies using decentralised Internet technology, without recreating the darker aspects of secrecy and hierarchy.
"Fraternities" of any kind just really don't have a good name at the moment, and secret ones much less.
But we need *some* kind of way of organising mutual aid. Living as little atoms all in economic competition with each other seems to just make us fearful, angry and tense.
@natecull
Biology has a lot of analogies to offer for organisations. One way, perhaps, is to keep the organising ideas well-defined and public, open to an unbiased examination by members of in/out group. The day-to-day procedures derived from those could be semi-exposed - allowing for smaller cliques but, discouraging hierarchy. What counts as day-to-day could depend on the impact it has, i.e. an idea that impacts people outside of the group ought to be public, etc.
@natecull
Interactions b/w individuals and communities could be:
𝑁*(TFT) => FTFT
[Begin with a cycle of tit-for-tat, repeated 'n' times, where 𝑁 corresponds to various levels of assurances, in a Trust Formation Phase. Once the trust in the communication crosses a certain threshold, move to a Forgiving-tit-for-tat strategy to allow for noise]
This is to limit the influence of rogue communities that don't do what they say on their public charter.
He's referring to the game theory studies in Robert Axelrod's 1984 "The Evolution of Cooperation".
@Shamar @natecull
TFT and FTFT are game theory strategies. They are widely used in bio-organisms to form societies and such. Idea is simple but not trivial and might need some terminology to be defined first. I'll spend some time on it in the evening and try to explain more clearly what I mean (I realise this is too cryptic).