The animations I’m making for courseware right now have led to a couple of major insights that are now influencing my thinking about other matters. Old rule: teaching is the best way to learn.
One insight gives clarity about MLMs and similar phenomena.
Substack is full of people who write about writing. This strikes me as a symptom of MLM/pyramid setups. The usual MLM is selling about selling. Real business makes things or provides services. Real business optionally sells the things or services. Often the products are good enough to sell themselves.
An MLM sometimes has a real product but always focuses on selling the sell. The more abstract MLMs like bitcoin don’t have a product at all. The “product” is imaginary and symbolic (an array in C++ code), and has no existence or utility outside the structure of the pyramid.
Is this convolution possible in other realms? No, because other realms are NOT SYMBOLIC. You can’t run laundry about running laundry. You can’t cut hair about cutting hair. You can’t build a house about building houses.
The exceptions are always symbolic. You CAN paint a picture about painting a picture. Example 1. Example 2. Painting is a physical activity, but it’s intrinsically symbolic.
Polistra's Mill 