μ-minimum

Looking like "Backrooms," a movie based on an Internet meme, will open to $70 million-plus this weekend. Hard to understate what a huge deal that would be for a movie business that's been obsessed with corporate-managed IP as the only reliable way to get butts in seats.

People do this kind of thing when they feel they are experiencing reality at a high frame rate. It does not feel risky to hold a laptop by a corner if you feel like you have an “agency frame” every half second. It feels risky if you have an “agency frame” every 60 seconds. You’d be betting that a hand you do not have control over for 60 seconds will keep gripping. Our conscious frame rate can vary dramatically throughout the day, and it’s hard to perceive the difference because we can only sample ourselves at our conscious frame rate, we can’t oversample ourselves. People drunk drive because they fail to perceive their slower frame rate. Their frame rate feels normal because it matches their sample rate. But we do get a subtle sense of when we’re “switched on”. Everything seems to go easier, everything feels less risky and more easy to correct. A lot of people toward the autistic side of the spectrum are experiencing reality very granularly with a “high agency frame rate”. This is why their social interactions can seem overly forced and awkward, they can be bad at dancing, etc—because they are exerting conscious control over their body and language at very tight intervals—you get a sense that they are extremely “self aware” and not “letting go”. “Letting go” in the social sense is actually about reducing your agency frame rate. That’s why alcohol is good for socializing and bad for driving. With a reduced agency frame rate our speech and body language feels more natural, less forced. More like we are flowing with the social group mind rather than being an island of constant awkward agency.

One of my favorite techno tracks of all time is C.T. Scan’s “Cold Sleep,” one of the most lush, mesmerizing tracks in all of 1990s Japanese dance music. I’m pretty sure I have two copies of the 12-inch—it’s just that good.