Something i've been thinking about a bit lately is how the increasingly connected world has started to form a more visceral set of schemas with which to understand the world, and, like everything else, the trade-off that comes with it. And, how Bernaysian theory (which is essentially a guide on how to manipulate people) can help guide us in developing apps on BSV that uphold the Spirit of Bitcoin, i.e. that Honesty and Integrity are far more profitable than dishonesty and manipulation.

Schemas

There's a very powerful concept from the field of Cognitive Psychology that eloquently describes the unconscious phenomenon of how human beings process vast amounts of information to guide our decisions in very short periods of time: we cheat.

According to Wikipedia, a schema is a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. In other words, a schema is a short-cut that lumps things together based on commonalities and makes assumptions that they must work the same way.

Ironically enough, schemas also fit quite nicely with the Pareto Rule (which is itself a schema) - 80% of the time, schemas give us a short-cut to rapidly understand, process, learn, and internalize the world around us but the other 20% of the time, they gives us a false sense of confidence in thinking we understand something we actually don't: this may actually be reversed on Crypto Twitter.

Mandala Networks

Dr. Craig Wright has said on numerous occasions that Bitcoin (BSV) is a Mandala network: an ultra-small small-world-network. Without going into any technical details, what makes Mandala networks special is the fact that they're extremely well-connected - to the point that you would have to take down nearly all the nodes in the network to take down the whole network - and the distance for one node to send a message to another node in the network is basically the same for all nodes.

What I find so synchronistically beautiful about this concept is that we can use it as a schema with which to view our own history of Information Technology: from the pyramids of pristine civilizations to the modern day internet, and now Bitcoin and the Metanet which is itself a Mandala network. You're probably sitting there asking yourself "ok... cool... but wtf does that have to do with anything?" - bear with me.

Have you ever gone on a trip to a country on another continent only to unexpectedly run in to a friend from grade school whom you haven't spoken to in years, and when you see each other you both exclaim "what a small world!" (I have first hand experience of this on a busy bridge in Prague). How could this possibly happen? It's not as improbable as you think. And, it's driven by shared schemas: high probability that the two of you still live near where you went to school together; high probability that weather conditions, flight costs, etc. are fairly well aligned between you; the list goes on. But, share schemas are becoming even more similar today. You can now talk to, work with, share with, watch with, transact with, for all intents and purposes live with a person, in real time, that is on the other side of the planet. This has huge implications for how we develop schemas to interact with the world.

Going back to the pristine civilizations. Around 3150 BCE Egypt springs up; they build pyramids. Then around 2600 BCE (500 years later) the Mayans pop up in South America and they build pyramids. But here's the thing, their respective pyramids were very different in terms of style, composition, and purpose. The reason for this is their respective schema libraries were developed independently, in different parts of the World, and were thus vastly different. This is no longer possible today.

We are now so interconnected and will become increasingly so that our schema libraries are going to become less varied and more homogenous. A good example of this is the rise of mobile phones and the interface commonalities that have come with them. You can pick up a smart phone developed in a far away land by an unknown manufacturer in a completely different language and still have a decent idea of how to get it to do the things you want it to do.

This is very powerful in how it can unleash huge potential for us to make leaps forward in understanding as a species, but it also comes with a trade-off, we become vulnerable to group think. There is no better example of this than the face palm witch hunt against Dr. Craig Wright. It's obvious to anyone with a brain that Dr. Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto - without any doubt whatsoever.

Yet, you still have huge swathes of people sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming because they've been programmed through a group think schema of "people whom I think are experts on this subject are saying he's a fraud, so he must be a fraud", and they're extremely overconfident - borderline zealous - about it. None of them take the time to actually read both what both sides have put forth, or verify Dr. Wright's credentials - verify he is who he says he is - or do the math to see if what he says actually checks out; spoiler alert: it does.

But, new people learning about Bitcoin for the fist time don't have this group think schema programming, so it's obvious to them that Dr. Wright is for real. But what happens when our schema libraries become homogenous that 1 bad group think schema like "aussie man bad" can poison the entire library?

If you look at acquired knowledge and learning through Daniel Denette's construct of "applets" , homogenous schema libraries can become vulnerable to a malicious schema in the same way Windows computers, that use the same code libraries, are vulnerable to Windows malware.

Bernays

There's literally an entire field dedicated to this subject; its called "Public Relations" aka propaganda. And the man that started it all was Mr. Edward Bernays , Sigmund Frued's nephew.

In his 1928 book, "Propaganda" , Mr. Bernays lays out how to manipulate masses of people to shape thoughts, values, and citizen response. Another way to put it is Mr. Bernays developed techniques to overwrite people's schema libraries. Just as a little side-note, Edward Bernays' #1 fan was Joseph Goebbles, and we all know how that ended up.

How does this relate to Bitcoin and the Metanet, well, I think it's extremely important to keep these things in mind when developing apps on BSV and the Metanet because the spirit of BSV and the Metanet are essentially their antithesis.

What most if not all of Bernays' techniques are based on is gaps or "fog of war" in terms of understanding and taking advantage of these gaps by providing warped perspectives. But, if you allow BSV and the Metanet to become a true distributed Mandala network that acts as the foundational schema library, then you no longer have those gaps - we can protect our global mind, our global schema library, by strategically building the infrastructure properly, Now, Today, Seminally.

Conclusion

I'm not entirely sure what this was all about or why but I felt like I needed to write it because I was getting anxiety about it. I implore all the app builders, the visionaries, the BSV Metanet Wizards, build responsibly, build in the spirit of what Bitcoin is all about and keep these things in mind while you build because these seminal apps are going to have a profound effect on the health and wellbeing of how we all interact in the very near future and for generations to come.