Everyone wants you to engage. Engagement is the traffic of and goal of the internet. Engagement produces currency. Either social currency or literal currency. So that’s why everyone wants it from you; it’s what the internet is designed to mine. At any cost, by any means, your engagement. Engagement is success, success is value, value is currency, currency is power, power is flourishing.

    It doesn’t make much difference if it’s literal or social currency that you are seeking. You aren’t better or worse because you’re after one or the other. Money is just a marker for value. I pay it to you or you earn it because someone says, “I value what you did. How much? In relation to what I have and what value I earn and possess? This much.” We exchange it for something else because we value that thing.

   Money is just an incremental token for human valuation. We’re trading in psychological judgements. Money is a proxy, but in the end social currency, the value of something to some people, for some purpose, to some valued end, is all there is. You can go for it directly, or you can go for it by proxies.

    Some people are better at going for it directly. Some people need the proxies, especially when they aren’t as good at playing the direct, interactive social game of getting people to do what they want and give them what they want and value what they want and impugn what they want.

    Men seem to be a bit better at the indirect game, at playing with proxies, the abstraction and localization and taskification and objectification and simplification of value in some tangible object or action or proximate goal. They’re better in the sense that they’re less good at the artistic, holistic, undecomposed, unspecialized, unabstracted, unlocalized, unobjectified, direct social game. In general. Some minority are very, very good at it. But a lot of men seem to need something smaller and more defined and less personal to focus on. 

     Women, I think, are better at playing the direct value game. If they were sides of the brain, men would be the left brain and women would be right brain. The left looks for tangible, actionable, single points of focus, while the right takes in a more prismatic, decentralized view of the landscape. You really need both to have a properly functioning human mind, so we’re not here to pick winners. They have complementary functions.

    We all share in and benefit from that interrelationship in our individual minds, just as we do in our collective social mind. The structure at the base of individual human function scales up through the whole social structure. And differences in personality become avatars in the social mind for the sub-personalities that express and wrangle and conflict and demand within our own individual persons.

    You aren’t just one singular value or valuer even within yourself, you contain a community of sub-valuees in a dynamic environment; some rising, some falling, some dominant, some resistant, some influential, some covert. They all demand engagement. Engagement is their lifeblood, their currency. The more you engage with them, the stronger and more developed and realized they become, the more their values are expressed, the more their goals are pursued and realized. 

    Social media and the internet are a forum, a platform, for the social mind and its function, this same interplay of value and currency. But it’s a means for the expression of the social mind that is radically different from the most fundamental assumptions and parameters that the social mind was originally designed around. It’s an artificial version of the social mind, a technological simulation of community, the means by which the social mind exists and exchanges, the body which the community inhabits. It’s a cybernetic body we have uploaded ourselves to, not an organic body like that we were born into. 

   So the rules, the way the system works, the currency of value, and the material, the things that compose it, human personalities and sub-personalities, remain the same; but the platform, the world in which they exist and interact, has been radically changed. It may not be immediately obvious because the first two haven’t. The questions to be asked are, how different is this new platform, and how much do the changes it imposes matter? And, as a followup, what are the consequences?