€2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP
For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious&#x2F;spiritual&#x2F;cultural variety.<p>Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a while, it seemed like the direction of travel was towards a global system of thought based on a widely distributed factual, rational approach.<p>But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.<p>Cryptoscams are the perfect (but not only) example of a self-sustaining shared consensual delusion. They don’t talk to the outside world. So much so that something like this happens. They are living inside a pre-rational info-bubble which has budded off from reality and floated away on its own wind.<p>We are not just dealing with scams and fools here. There is an intense current of reality-defiance and cult behaviour. Some people get sucked into the crypto-attractor, but other hallucinations are available.