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To stay in lorecraft terminology: this post is "magic" > thanks for this brainmelt, Venkat!

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There is definitely a magic (or magick) revival going on in society.

For a very Venkat-like theory of what is happening with this, I recommend Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking.

https://www.amazon.com/Years-Magical-Thinking-Lionel-Snell-ebook/dp/B01NB0H2FZ/

The core belief of the old order was that there was an obvious objective world that could be manipulated by well-understood objective techniques.

The new belief is that subjectivity is central, and the challenge is to build shared subjectivities using well-understood but wooly techniques.

Both have always existed, but the former, as the only allowed business modality for the last several decades, has burned itself out by over-application.

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DAOs and Cabin specifically reminds me a lot of Neal Stephenson's REAMDE and the video game T'rain. Richard Forthrast aka Dodge is the CEO of the video game's parent company and one of the most powerful characters in the video game. In online organizations where faces are sometimes just NFTs, we see founders as more than humans: they are ideas and part of the story.

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I know this is tangential to the point you're making here—but having been part of three "millennial" startups (all somehow touching Web3), I can say from firsthand experience that organizations today haven't superseded HR departments through automation. Yes, we use Gusto, and Trello, and Slack, and Notion, and various chat bots... But we still have full-time staff engaging with HR issues (and if your startup doesn't, you should hire one now before things get messy).

Why is this the case? I would go with David Grauber's "Utopia of Rules" theory of bureaucratic sprawl here, or what we might call the Jevon's Paradox of automation: automation doesn't result in less work, it just creates new kinds of work (Graeber's technical term being "bullshit").

Now, if you're talking exclusively about DAOs, then yes, I agree that you're generally not going to have to interface with an HR department, but I would say this is a small minority of people in Web3 (and that there's a lot of lorecraft happening in the Web3 startup space, not just in DAOs).

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Why do you classify lore as a management theory? I'd like to cite Carol Sanford's "Levels of Ordering," framework: 1) Epistemology, 2) Cosmology, 3) Ontology, 4) Technology, 5) Technique. Management theories are down at the level of Technology or Technique—important, but not particularly nodal (the "tip of the iceberg," if you will). Aren't the more noteworthy, and more visionary facets of lorecraft up at the levels of ontology, cosmology, and epistemology? What does lorecraft tell us about our way of being? What does lorecraft tell us about how we see the world? And what does lorecraft tell us about how we can know things? I guess I'll have to keep reading to see if you get into these juicer aspects of the subject in future posts!

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I do this in my head (I'm at the zoomer-millenial boundary). Especially since fully remote work, it's become an indispensible tool to motivate me through my job given the absence of social cues

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Example of "complex commercial project" using lorecraft?

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