Lands of Lorecraft

Lorecraft is clearly a strikingly millennial school of management thinking. All the thinkers who belong in this tradition are, as far as I can tell, between about 28-35 or so. They are firmly middle-of-the-pack millennials. Founders of startups who seem to practice a sort of management by lorecraft, such as Conor White-Sullivan of Roam Research, ar... See more

A decade ago, lorecraft was largely limited to edgelords haunting online fora thinking up the next troll for lulz and electoral mayhem. Now lorecraft is being used to manage treasuries worth millions, launch complex commercial projects, and design automation deathstars for fun and profit.

I stumbled across a key insight that may or may not have been spotted before: lorecraft is the evil twin of marketing.

Then it hit me: lorecraft is a natural and adaptive intellectual response to the automation of vast swathes of managerial/leadership functions, and organizational processes. You end up doing more of what the machines don’t.

Marketing is the story insiders tell outsiders to influence them in some wayLore is the story insiders tell themselves to manage their own psyches 

This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a cope. 

An implication that creates the sharp contrast to traditional marketing is that lore cannot be engineered in the same way marketing can be. While you can shape lore as it emerges, it is a matter of subtle gardening and curation. You do not go around trying to invent brand names, logos, and brand-identity postures for emerging lore. You are not pump... See more

If this hypothesis of lorecraft as an emerging managerial capability is correct, any organization — be it a traditional corporation, a DAO, or just a complex money-making coordination pattern passing through Twitter or TikTok like a wave — will thrive and do interesting things to the extent it has both interesting ideas and content — and skilled lo... See more

In a world where most aphorisms are born in on the Hobbesian meme-battlefield of Twitter rather than in books or speeches by already-revered figures, aphorisms with halos are cringe anyway, but aphorisms without halos do actual work. They are tools of thought, not ornamentation.

t is also tempting to dismiss this kind of thing as non-rigorous solipsism, but that would be a bad mistake. Lorecraft does rely on rigorous argumentation and empirical-phenomenological grounding. In fact it is much more grounded and empiricist than traditional management thinking, with its arsenal of unacknowledged myth-and-ceremony cognitive tool... See more