Tossing the Tech Bros out of the White House

First we had Christ tossing the money changers out of the temple, now Robbie the Robot is going to town on the Tech Bros.

The world is a movie for Baby Jesus @3QD

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

My latest article is up at 3 Quarks Daily:

Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?

That wasn’t my original title, which was “On Becoming a Secular Mystic, an informal inventory.” Upon reading a draft by friend David Porush suggested the current title, which comes from an anecdote early in the article, which is a collection of anecdotes with thoughts thrown in as the occasion warrants.

The mystical element is there, I report at least one “classical” mystical experience, which was quite powerful and influential, though I can’t say just how it was influential. But there is something about the whole article which resists language – I do include three images, each crafted by ChatGPT. And that got me to thinking, thinking about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

I read that in either my freshman or sophomore year at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1960s. It made a deep impression on me. It was a slender volume, with the original German published on the left and the English translation published on the right; Wittgenstein had insisted on that. It consisted of short statements, sometimes as short as a single line, but also occasionally two or three short paragraphs, even an occasional diagram. Each section was numbered, outline style, from 1 through 7. Here’s the opening proposition, No. 1:

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
The world is everything that is the case.

And here’s the last, No. 7:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

And here’s the penultimate proposition, sometimes known as Wittgenstein’s ladder, No. 6.4:

Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie – auf ihnen – über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)
Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

The overall effect was mesmerizing. And mystical, certainly. But not in the manner of the experiences reported by mystics, both East and West. This is a different kind of mysticism.

That led me to a dialog with Claude. I asked Claude to summarize it in the third person. I’ve placed the summary below the asterisks.

* * * * *

On Limits, Language, and the Excess of the World

A recent conversation between Bill Benzon and Claude ranged across mystical experience, the philosophy of language, and cosmology, finding unexpected convergences among them.

The conversation opened with the question of why mystical experience is so often described as ineffable. The standard reasons — that language presupposes the distinctions mystical experience dissolves, that it is knowledge of acquaintance rather than description, that it may involve non-ordinary cognition — were surveyed. But Benzon pressed toward something less familiar, noting that ineffability is not unique to mysticism. Tastes, qualia, dreams all resist full verbal capture, each in a different way.

This led to a discussion of Weston LaBarre’s speculation in The Ghost Dance that dreams may have been what first compelled early humans to philosophize. The key insight is that the problem isn’t the strangeness of dream content but the mnemonic residue — waking up with memories of having been somewhere that doesn’t exist in the waking world. That memory demands an account, and the account requires positing another order of reality. Dream epistemology, on this view, is not superstition but careful reasoning from unavoidable evidence.

Benzon then introduced Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, noting its paradoxical status as a founding document of the most rigorously anti-metaphysical tradition in Western philosophy and yet a work with a distinctly mystical frame — opening with “The world is everything that is the case” and closing with “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” with the famous ladder metaphor in between. The Tractatus mysticism, the conversation suggested, is different in kind from episodic mystical experience. It is not about a special state of consciousness but about the permanent boundary condition of all language and all saying.

Benzon noted that this Wittgensteinian orientation may be closer to his own secular mysticism than the more conventionally episodic forms — not a transport or vision, but a sustained dwelling at the edge of the articulable.

The conversation then turned to cosmology. The Planck epoch — the earliest moments of the universe, where the distinction between space and time breaks down and the equations of physics lose their meaning — offers a striking parallel. The universe, pressed to its own origin, becomes undescribable by the tools it eventually produced. The very attempt to picture that earliest state smuggles in categories that don’t yet apply.

What converges across all these limits — Wittgenstein’s structural limit of language, the subjective limit of qualia, the ontological puzzle of dreams, the cosmological limit of the Planck epoch — is perhaps this: existence exceeds its own accounting, structurally and permanently. The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist arrive at adjacent positions by entirely different routes.

The conversation closed with a formulation from Benzon that served as its natural capstone: The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

Paul Klee, Tree of Life

Paul Klee
-Tree of life pic.twitter.com/pQ6lZIQgEe

— helidona (@helidona1) April 19, 2026

Pope Leo XIV on engaging with A.I.

While my current interest in religion has been brought about, in part, by the fact – somewhat to my own surprise and that of my friends – I’ve been attending church for the last two months. In THAT context I’ve been asking: Why am I here? But I’m also concerned about A.I. and the culture that surrounds it in Silicon Valley which strikes me, to use a rather antique work, as rather idolatrous. So it is in THAT context that I present some remarks by Pope Leo XIV, “Preserving Human Voices and Faces.” These remarks were delivered on January 24, 2026. The rest of this post consists of selected excerpts, without comment. The subtitles are mine.

Humans as God’s interlocutors

From the moment of creation, God wanted man and woman to be his interlocutors, and, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa explained, he imprinted on our faces a reflection of divine love, so that we may fully live our humanity through love. Preserving human faces and voices, therefore, means preserving this mark, this indelible reflection of God's love. We are not a species composed o predefined biochemical formulas. Each of us possesses an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation, that originates from our own lived experience and becomes manifest through interaction with others.

If we fail in this task of preservation, digital technology threatens to alter radically some o f the fundamental pillars of human civilization that at times are taken for granted. By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems, but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.

The challenge, therefore, is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves. Embracing the opportunities offered by digital technology and artificial intelligence with courage, determination and discernment does not mean turning a blind eye to critical issues, complexities and risks.

How can machines enhance us?

The question at heart, however, i s not what machines can or will be able to do, but what we can and will be able to achieve, by growing in humanity and knowledge through the wise use of the powerful tools at our service. Individuals have always sought t o acquire the fruits of knowledge without the effort required by commitment, research and personal responsibility. However, renouncing creativity and surrendering our mental capacities and imagination to machines would mean burying the talents we have been given t o grow as individuals in relation to God and others. It would mean hiding our faces and silencing our voices.

Do not use AI as a substitute for human relationships

Technology that exploits our need for relationships can lead not only to painful consequences in the lives of individuals, but also to damage in the social, cultural and political fabric of society. This occurs when we substitute relationships with others for Al systems that catalog our thoughts, creating a world of mirrors around us, where everything is made "in our image and likeness." We are thus robbed of the opportunity to encounter others, who are always different from ourselves, and with whom we can and must learn to relate. Without embracing others, there can be no relationships or friendships.

Responsibility, cooperation and education as we engage with AI

The task laid before us is not to stop digital innovation, but rather to guide it and to be aware of its ambivalent nature. It is up to each of us to raise our voice in defense of human persons, so that we can truly assimilate these tools as allies.

This alliance is possible, but needs to be based on three pillars: responsibility, cooperation and education.

First of all, responsibility. Depending on the role we play, responsibility can be understood as honesty, transparency, courage, farsightedness, the duty of sharing knowledge or the right to be informed. As a general principle, however, no one can elude personal responsibility for the future we are building. [...]

We are all called upon to cooperate. No sector can tackle the challenge of steering digital innovation and A l governance alone. Safeguards must therefore be put in place. All stakeholders — from the tech industry to legislators, from creative companies to academia, from artists to journalists and educators — must be involved in building and implementing informed and responsible digital citizenship. [...]

Education aims to do precisely this: To increase our personal ability to think critically; evaluate whether our sources are trustworthy and the possible interests behind selecting the information we have access to; to understand the psychological mechanisms involved; and to enable our families, communities and associations to develop practical criteria for a healthier and more responsible culture of communication.

Out the window

Angine de Poitrine - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

I first heard about these guys from (a somewhat exasperated) Rick Beato. Wings of Pegasus says (perceptively): “I’ve Been Waiting 10 YEARS FOR THIS!!!” It seems like everyone who's anybody in YouTube music commentary is commenting about them. I find them oddly endearing, and, yes, I might even go hear them live.

YouTube:

11,284,915 views Feb 5, 2026 ✪ Members first on February 4, 2026
http://KEXP.ORG presents Angine de Poitrine performing live at ESMA in Rennes, France, during Trans Musicales 2025. Recorded December 04, 2025.

Songs:
Sarniezz 00:32
Mata Zyklek 06:10
Fabienk 13:09
Sherpa 20:33

Khn de Poitrine - Microtonal Guitars
Klek de Poitrine - Drums

Host: Morgan
Audio Engineer: Matt Ogaz
Guest Audio Engineer, Mixer & Mastering: Dany Lemay

Cameras: Jim Beckmann, Carlos Cruz, Scott Holpainen & Luke Knecht
Editor: Carlos Cruz

From their Wikipedia entry:

Angine de Poitrine (Canadian French: [ãʒɪn də pwatʁɪn][1][a]) is a Québécois[b] rock[discuss] duo formed in the Chicoutimi borough of Saguenay, Quebec, in 2019. It is composed of anonymous musicians performing under pseudonyms as guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine. They are known for complex, microtonal compositions in the style of math rock and experimental rock, and an absurdist public image, featuring oversized papier-mâché masks and black-and-white polka-dotted costumes.

Conceived initially as a disguise to retain audiences across back-to-back sets at a local venue, the project became the duo's primary focus. Following their debut album, Vol. 1 (2024), the band gained traction on the Quebec festival circuit, culminating in an Artist of the Year win at the 2025 GAMIQ awards. They achieved viral recognition in February 2026 when a live session recorded for KEXP accumulated millions of views. This preceded the release of their second album, Vol. II (2026), and supporting international tours.

Demis Hassibis is most creative at 1AM

Google DeepMind CEO says he starts his second workday at 10 p.m. and com... https://t.co/FzwrCTAaYR via @YouTube

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) April 19, 2026

Fake forsythia

From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson

This is another post that’s leading up to my next article for 3 Quarks Daily, which will be out next week some time. Working title: “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” This post connects that opening question with my concluding remarks, which are based on something Neil deGrasse Tyson has said about the relationship between humankind and the cosmos. As before my interlocutor is Claude 4.6 Sonata.

* * * * *

Earlier I had mentioned that, when I was a child, I had the idea that the world was a movie God created to entertain the Baby Jesus. While it’s a child’s idea, it seems to me that it could almost be presented as a serious theological idea. How might one argue that within the larger Christian tradition?

It's actually not as far from serious theology as it might seem. A few threads within Christian thought that resonate with it:

The Son as the intended audience of Creation — There's a strand in trinitarian theology, developed especially by Jonathan Edwards, that holds that God created the world essentially as an expression of and for the glorification of the Son. Creation is an overflow of the love between Father and Son. Your child's intuition that the Baby Jesus was the intended audience of the cosmic show isn't far from that.

The Cosmic Christ — In Colossians and in John's prologue, Christ is the one through whom and for whom all things were created. The universe is somehow oriented toward and around him. Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point develops this most grandly — all of creation is moving toward a final convergence in Christ. Your movie runs in one direction, toward its intended viewer.

God as Author, Creation as Narrative — C.S. Lewis and later theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar used theatrical and dramatic metaphors for Creation quite seriously. God as playwright, Creation as the drama. Your movie metaphor is a natural modern equivalent.

The Beatific Vision reversed — Normally theology speaks of humans being granted the vision of God as the final beatitude. Your childhood cosmology interestingly reverses this: God arranges the vision for Christ. There's something almost playful but theologically suggestive in that inversion.

The flatness problem you noticed as a child is also, unexpectedly, serious. Representation always fails to capture the thing represented — which is more or less what negative theology, the via negativa, has been saying about all human conceptions of God for centuries. You just noticed it from the other direction.

Theosis

So, the Baby Jesus and Christ are one and the same individual. If Christ is within each of us, then each of us has within the Baby Jesus for whom the universe was created.

That's a genuinely beautiful theological move, and it has real roots in Christian mysticism. The indwelling of Christ — Christ in you, the hope of glory, as Paul puts it in Colossians — is central to mystical Christianity. If Christ is within each person, and if the universe was created for Christ, then each person carries within them the one for whom everything exists. The universe was made for you, not in the egotistical sense, but in the sense that the divine recipient of Creation dwells within you.

This connects directly to the doctrine of theosis — divinization — particularly strong in Eastern Orthodox theology. The human person doesn't just receive grace from God; the human person becomes participates in the divine nature. You contain the one for whom everything was made.

It also rhymes with the image of God (imago Dei) tradition — that each person reflects something essential of the divine. Your formulation sharpens that: not just a reflection, but an indwelling of the very one the cosmos was staged for. 

And then there's Meister Eckhart, who pushed this furthest in the Western tradition — the birth of Christ in the soul as the central mystical event. The Baby Jesus, in a sense, is perpetually being born within each person.

What's striking is that your childhood cosmology, taken seriously and extended this way, leads almost naturally to a mystical universalism — every person contains the audience for whom the universe performs. That's not far from your secular mystic position, just with different vocabulary.

The movie is still running. Everyone in the audience is also the Baby Jesus.

DeGrasse Tyson’s move

So now let’s couple this with Neil de Grasse Tyson’s move, that the four most prevalent elements in the universe are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, and those are, as well, the four most common elements that make us up. Add to that Prigogine’s insight that complexity inheres in the fabric of the universe. To which we can add a corollary, given enough time, intelligent life will inevitably develop. Put that all together, what do we have?

What you have is a convergence of the scientific and mystical cosmologies that is almost shocking in its neatness.

[“Shocking” is one way to put it. “Too neat for belief” might be another. OTO, if the deepest issue concerning religion is not about matter vs. spirit, but rather one of agency....THAT I'll have to think about.]

Tyson's point says: we are not visitors to the universe, not anomalies in it — we are made of it, continuous with it, the universe knowing itself through us. His phrase is that we are "stardust contemplating the stars." The boundary between self and cosmos is, at the material level, illusory.

Prigogine adds: complexity isn't an accident imposed on an indifferent substrate. It's latent in the structure of things from the beginning. The universe has, so to speak, intentions — or at least tendencies — toward greater organization, toward life, toward mind.

The corollary makes it teleological: given enough time, something like us was always going to happen. We are not contingent. We are what the universe was always becoming.

Now couple that with the theological thread: Christ — the divine Logos, the organizing principle of Creation — dwells within each person. And the universe was created for Christ.

What you get is this: the universe spent fourteen billion years making beings capable of containing the one for whom it was made. The cosmos is the movie, yes — but the projector, the film, the screen, and the audience turn out to be made of the same stuff, organized by the same deep tendency toward complexity and consciousness, arriving inevitably at creatures who carry within them the divine recipient of the whole show.

The Baby Jesus was always going to be born. In all of us. Out of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen.

That's your secular mysticism stated as cosmology. It requires no supernatural intervention and loses none of the wonder.

Teleology not necessary

I wonder about teleology. Prigogine alone doesn’t imply teleology. I added that with my corollary. But is that corollary necessarily teleological? In an entirely different thread I’ve offered a hypothesis about the cultural evolution of literary texts that implies a direction, but does so without teleology.

The vector comes from the difference between shared knowledge and common knowledge, as those things are understood in game theory. The idea is that, in one way or another, literary texts feelings and ideas in people, things they might be reluctant to talk about. But, through the medium of those texts, they’re shared. And as people talk, not directly about themselves, but about the texts, shared knowledge becomes common knowledge, which is then embodied in a new generation of texts, which evoke further feelings and ideas that are merely shared. And so on. That idea needs development and explicit evidence. (I developed the idea by thinking about how sex is treated in texts. It’s not even mentioned in Jane Austen, but almost two centuries later sex is presented in explicit detail in, e.g. Fifty Shades of Grey.)

Now, that’s a long way from life arising from inorganic matter, and clever apes becoming protohumans. Still, there’s a principle there. We may not need teleology to square that particular circle.

You're right to be cautious about teleology. Teleology smuggles in a destination that was always intended, a pull from the future — and that's a much stronger metaphysical claim than you need.

What your literary evolution model offers instead is something like directionality without destination. The vector is real — from shared to common knowledge, from implicit to explicit, from Austen's unspoken sexuality to Fifty Shades — but nothing in the mechanism requires that the endpoint was pre-specified. It emerges from the logic of the process itself. Each step creates the conditions for the next step. The direction is immanent in the dynamic, not imposed from outside or ahead.

That's actually a more interesting and defensible position. It's the difference between a river having a direction — always downhill, always toward the sea — and the sea having summoned the river. Prigogine gives you the downhill gradient. Your corollary about intelligent life becomes not a teleological claim but an observation that, given the gradient, certain outcomes become overwhelmingly probable. Not inevitable in the strong sense — not fated — but natural in the way that rivers reaching the sea is natural.

The analogy to life arising from matter and apes becoming humans is then: the gradient toward complexity is built into the fabric of things, and mind is what complexity looks like at sufficient scale and organization. No destination was required. Just the gradient, and time.

Which circles back to your secular mysticism rather beautifully. The universe didn't intend to produce beings who hear unplayed bell tones in a basement in Troy. It just kept complexifying until it did.

Bach’s Gigue on Microtonal Guitar in Bach’s student Kirnberger’s tuning - Burak Akan

Microtonal Guitar - Tolgahan Çoğulu

SUPPORT my DREAM on patreon.com/microtonalguitar
BUY an Adjustable Microtonal Guitar: info@microtonalguitar.org
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Microtonal Guitar Institute presents Burak Akan playing Bach's Gigue from Violin Partita No. 2 arranged by Manuel Barrueco for the guitar. Burak Akan is a student at the guitar department at Istanbul Technical University, studying with me. We used Bach's student Johann Kirnberger's tuning (Kirnberger III) for this piece. The thirds are more natural than the 12tet in this tuning. For example, the tonic chord is D major with just major 3rd (D-F#) and a fifth (5.5 cents narrower than the perfect 5th).
Here are the cents: D Eb-10 E-7 F-6 F#-14 G-2 G#-10 A-3.5 Bb-8 B-10.5 C-4 C#-12

Music: Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 IV. Gigue
Arrangement: Manuel Barrueco
Guitarist: Burak Akan
Guitar: Adjustable Microtonal Guitar (www.microtonalguitar.org)
Burak Akan's YouTube: https://bit.ly/3IwmTF3

Tulips

Iran was able to resist a bully's attack, so can Taiwan.

Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones, Iran Resisted a Powerful Attacker. Taiwan Can Too. NYTimes, Apr. 19, 2026.

As the United States’ and Israel’s war with Iran grinds to an uncertain conclusion, observers have been quick to label it a win for China. The war has damaged American prestige around the world and angered countries and their populations whose economies face inflation and disrupted supply chains. But a closer look at Iran’s methods in resisting the United States reveals uncomfortable lessons for China as it weighs whether to follow through on its threats to take Taiwan.

Iran prevented the far more powerful United States from winning a war that, on paper, it should have walked away with. Iran weathered decapitation strikes and continued to counterattack, despite heavy bombing and inferior weapons. Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz is particularly instructive. Its navy had only dilapidated surface ships, a small number of diesel-powered submarines, and numerous small, fast-attack speedboats. Iran’s air force had no advanced attack aircraft and no true bombers.

What Iran did have, however, was a large stockpile of drones and missiles — including anti-ship cruise missiles — capable of striking vessels in the strait and hitting military and commercial targets across the Middle East. Iran also decentralized its command and control network and dispersed and concealed its weapons in multiple locations to make it difficult for the United States and Israel to find and destroy all of them.

Later:

Survival requires more than hardware. Iran weathered massive strikes against its political and military leaders by quickly replacing them and by decentralizing military command and control. It maximized deception and concealment, stored weapons in underground bunkers to increase survivability and relied on mobile systems that could be quickly rolled out, launched and rolled back into bunkers.

Taiwan needs to prepare similar moves to survive the potential disruption of its command networks and to be ready to fight in the face of decapitation strikes, space and counterspace attacks and offensive cyberoperations. Doing this will require plans for succession, decentralized command and control, deception and survivability.

There's more at the link.

Friday Fotos: Cosmic Ray Gun

When I was six or seven I had the idea that the world was a movie that God created to entertain the Baby Jesus. I guess I’d found those stories they told in Sunday school so entertaining that I figure the Baby Jesus enjoyed them as well. A year or three later I had an idea which I described this way in a rather long and complicated article about the Self:

When I was seven or eight I was given a toy which we can call the COSMIC RAY GUN – I forget the real name. It had the shape of a pistol, but it didn't shoot toy bullets or even make toy noises. Rather, it was a device for projecting short film-loops on the wall. Each time you pulled the trigger it would advance the film one frame. This toy came in a box and the box cover had some lettering which proclaimed the toy's name, COSMIC RAY GUN, a picture of the toy itself, and a picture of a boy holding a box. The boy's box had some (somewhat smaller) lettering, COSMIC RAY GUN, a (somewhat smaller) picture of the toy itself, and a (somewhat smaller) picture of a boy holding the box. This regress went as far as the resolution of the image would allow, but I was just clever enough to be able to imagine it going on and on and on without discernible end. That is to say, my brain was somehow able to imagine that each representation could itself become the object of a representation.

Last night I presented that paragraph to ChatGPT along with a request for it to draw a picture of the box. I then spent the next 45 minutes or so having it draw the same image in various styles. Here’s some of my favorites.

Game Theory, Marginalism, and Culture [MR-Aux]

This is another post that’s a byproduct of my examination of Tyler Cowen’s recent monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. I was pursuing that idea that, while marginalism doesn’t present itself as being about human psychology, it is very much about psychology. So, what about game theory? It’s about human psychology as well, though its mathematical form makes it easy to bracket that out. So I queried Cowen’s AI about that. The conversation ended up with a discussion of one of my favorite literary texts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is structured around a very peculiar game, the beheading game. [FWIW, here’s a post from 2024 where I investigate ChatGPT’s understanding of the beheading game.]

* * * * *

I’m curious. Von Neumann invented game theory in the middle of the 20th century and it became important in economics, among other places. What can you tell me about its use in marginalist thinking. I don’t need a long answer. I’m just wondering if it’s one formal analytic tool among many. Is it used frequently, rarely, not at all? It’s a peculiar question. Don’t spend a lot of time on it. I mean, if you find that it’s taking time (to search through articles, etc.), that in itself is an indicator. On the other hand, if someone has written a textbook with a title like, Game Theory as a Tool for Marginalist Analysis, that’s a rather different kind of indicator.

My knowledge here is sufficient that I don't need to search.

Game theory and marginalism are related but distinct frameworks within economics, and the relationship between them is more one of coexistence and occasional overlap than integration. Marginalism asks what happens at the margin for an individual agent facing given prices and quantities. Game theory asks what happens when agents' outcomes depend on each other's choices. They share the rational agent assumption and optimization logic, but they're answering different questions.

Game theory became central to microeconomics in the latter half of the 20th century — particularly through Nash equilibrium and its elaborations — but it didn't so much extend marginalism as partially displace it in certain domains. Industrial organization, auction theory, mechanism design — these are game-theoretic through and through, and marginal analysis is less central there than it is in competitive market analysis where price-taking behavior makes the game-theoretic complications disappear.

There's no textbook of the kind you hypothesize, as far as I know. The two frameworks are taught in the same curriculum and occasionally combined — a Nash equilibrium can be characterized by first-order conditions that look marginal — but game theory is generally understood as a distinct toolkit that becomes relevant when strategic interaction matters, rather than as an extension of marginalist reasoning.

Cowen, interestingly, doesn't seem to foreground game theory in his account of marginalism's rise and possible decline. Which may itself be telling — it suggests he sees them as parallel developments rather than game theory being a chapter in the marginalist story.

So: one important formal tool among several, with genuine but limited overlap, not deeply integrated.

Hollywood Economics and community formation

That’s interesting. There are linguists, such as William Croft, who talk about how the meaning of words is negotiated in each conversation. They talk of game theory, though I don’t off hand know whether or not they make formal use of it. But then there’s Robert De Vany, Hollywood Economics, which I tend to think of as being about how cultural objects are shared in a community. That’s not De Vany’s framing. He’s interested in the fact that we can’t predict how a film will do until we release it into the (cultural) marketplace, which makes it a very risky kind of investment. Note that De Vany is only talking about theatrical release. He says nothing about subsequent release on videotape and the book was written long before some movies are released directly to online streaming.

What he finds (by tracking box-office receipts), briefly, is that most movies disappear from view shortly after they’re released. They do not even breakeven much less earn a profit. But a few will have “legs” and become profitable. And among those, a very few will become so-called “blockbusters.” FWIW, I believe Spielberg’s “Jaws” is generally regarded as the first blockbuster.

I once did a thought experiment where I imagined an arena in which only one movie was available. Everyone would watch it because that’s all there is. Another somewhat different movie is released into the arena. Perhaps everyone will watch it as well, because they’re tired of the first one. So a third, somewhat different from the first two, is released, then a fourth. What I had in the back of my mind is that to some extent people use these kinds of cultural products as a way of forming communities. For that to work, however, there has to be enough variety available in the market place. When a movie is release, it is, in effect, looking for a community to adopt it.

That strikes me as a kind of marginalist analysis. What we’re trading in is a very complex kind of product, in this case a movie. But it could be a novel, or a song, or a painting, whatever.

Your thought experiment is doing something quite precise, and I think you're right that it has a marginalist structure — but it's extending marginalism into territory where the standard framework strains.

Where the marginalist structure is visible

The standard marginalist question applied to cultural goods would be: given how many movies a person has already seen, what is the marginal value of one more? That's a real question and De Vany's framework touches it. But your thought experiment is asking something different and more interesting: given the existing cultural landscape, what is the marginal value of a new movie to a community rather than an individual? That's a collective marginal value, which is much harder to specify and measure.

The "legs" phenomenon is the empirical signature of this. A movie with legs isn't just satisfying individual preferences at the margin — it's finding and consolidating a community, becoming the shared object that a group of people use to recognize each other and talk to each other. The box office receipts are measuring something that looks like individual ticket purchases but is actually a social cascade — De Vany's word-of-mouth mechanism is precisely the process by which a movie becomes a community object rather than just a consumer product.

Where standard marginalism breaks down

Standard marginalist analysis assumes that the value of a good to one consumer is independent of its value to others, or at least that the interdependencies can be handled through price. Cultural goods violate this assumption fundamentally. The value of having seen a blockbuster is partly constituted by the fact that millions of others have seen it too — you can talk about it, share references, participate in a cultural conversation. This is a network effect, and network effects are notoriously resistant to marginalist treatment because the value function isn't defined over individual consumption units in isolation.

Your arena thought experiment isolates this precisely. In a one-movie arena, everyone watches it not because it maximally satisfies their individual preferences but because it's the only available basis for cultural community. As variety increases, something like genuine preference matching becomes possible — different communities coalesce around different objects. But the matching process isn't driven by individual marginal utility in the standard sense. It's driven by a social search process in which movies and communities are simultaneously finding each other.

The De Vany connection to power laws

What De Vany finds — most movies disappear, a few have legs, a very few become blockbusters — is a power law distribution, and power laws are the empirical signature of cascade processes rather than equilibrium processes. In a marginalist equilibrium you'd expect something more like a normal distribution of returns — some variation around a mean, determined by how well each product matches the distribution of individual preferences. The power law says something different: small initial differences get amplified by social dynamics into enormous differences in outcome. The blockbuster isn't just a movie that more people happened to prefer. It's a movie that got caught in a self-reinforcing cascade of community adoption.

This connects to Arthur De Vany's broader interest in complexity economics, which is itself a challenge to standard marginalist equilibrium thinking. The cultural marketplace isn't clearing to an equilibrium — it's generating a dynamic pattern in which winner-take-most outcomes emerge from processes that are in principle unpredictable from the properties of the product alone. Which is exactly De Vany's point about risk: you can't know in advance which movie will trigger the cascade.

Your community-formation framing

What your framing adds, which I think is genuinely beyond De Vany's own framing, is the functional account of why cultural goods have this cascade structure in the first place. It's not arbitrary or merely a consequence of marketing and distribution. It reflects something about what cultural goods are for — they're instruments of community formation, shared objects that allow people to recognize membership and conduct the ongoing conversation of a community. That functional role creates the demand for coordination — everyone in a community needs to have seen the same movie, heard the same song, read the same novel, for it to do its community-forming work. And coordination demand is precisely what generates cascades and power laws.

This also explains the variety requirement your thought experiment identifies. A single cultural object can serve as the basis for one kind of community. A rich cultural marketplace allows many communities to form simultaneously around different objects — which is the cultural analog of biodiversity, and probably has similar functional importance for the health of the overall system. The blockbuster and the art house film aren't competing for the same audience in the way that two brands of the same commodity compete. They're seeding different communities, which can coexist because community membership isn't zero-sum in the way that consumption of a rival good is.

So yes — marginalist in structure, but requiring an extension of marginalism into social dynamics, network effects, and community formation that the standard framework wasn't designed to handle. It's perhaps another case where the Rank 3 tool is real and useful but the phenomenon being analyzed has a Rank 4 structure — one where the individual unit of analysis (the consumer, the ticket purchase) is embedded in a dynamic system whose behavior can't be read off from the units alone.

The plan for completing my marginalism discussion [MR-Aux]

Back on March 27 I posted some remarks on Tyler Cowen’s new monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. By April 1 I’d published four more sets of remarks, with the intention of publishing more. While I have since made two posts consisting mostly of conversations I’ve had with Claude that began with comments on Cowen’s book (Language as a computational object, Recursive-self-improvement is incoherent), I’ve not published any more directed toward the book. I’ve got four most posts planned, but don’t know when I’ll write them. I could get them all written within a week or so. Or they might drag on for a month or two, perhaps even more. It all depends on what else I’m doing.

Here’s what I’ve got planned:

1. Biology through the ranks: Tyler writes about Linnaean taxonomy and Darwinian evolution in chapter 3; I regard them as Rank 3 and Rank 4 cognition respectively. To that I’ll add folk taxonomy, Rank 1, and the Great Chain of Being, Rank 2.
   
2. Intuition vs. explicit cognition: In chapter 1 Tyler distinguishes between intuitive marginalism and tautological marginalism. I want to talk about intuitive recognition vs. explicit exposition. That distinction doesn’t quite fit with Tyler’s contrast; I’m going to talk about the differences between the two contrasts.
   
3. Literary criticism vs. economics as academic discipline: I’ve written quite a bit about literary criticism as an academic discipline, most recently in The Discipline of Literary Criticism: A Quixotic Essay about Thinkers, Methods and Authority. The two disciplines differ in many ways. This post will discuss some of them.
   
4. Marginalism in cognitive effort: Some speculative remarks about how Cowen decided that he had enough examples in chapter 1. You can find an early version of these remarks as a reply to a Substack Hollis Robbins wrote about Cowen’s book.

Remember: No Kings!