There’s a term I’m drawing a blank on just now that refers to one’s tendency/ability to think of things as separable. It’s something like high vs. low segmentation/delineation/compartmentalisation/discretion individuals. For some people, different aspects of a person/concept/etc. can be more readily separated in their consideration. For others, the associations are too strong to be ignored.

Some people have low (word I am having trouble remembering). These are people who cannot or have difficulty in separating different elements of consideration. These are people who say the only way to understand, say, The Lord of the Rings is to understand Tolkien, or that one cannot separate the mysogyny of Tomas from the music of Nightwish. They are also the kind of person who, if they met Ted Bundy in the office, would then have great difficulty reconciling that friendly experience with new information saying he was a murderer.

Some people are high (word). They split concepts frequently and easily. These are people who can look at things which are connected by being parts of the same whole but consider each part separately, like say, looking at the beliefs of Ted Kaczynski and saying he was right about this one technology but wrong about bombing as the optimal solution, or that it’s wrong to murder but eating the dead is fine. These are also the kind of people who are more capable of meeting someone, being their friend for years, trusting them, but still having the cognitive distance to see the evidence in front of them and realise their friend is abusing his daughter, even if that doesn’t comport with how they have previously seen that friend.

Each way of thinking is as alien to the opposing end of the spectrum as introverts vs extroverts or the religious vs materialists.

Only fans model?

I used to work for a manager who treated employees as worse than expendable. He was known for picking someone every year or so to fire on BS pretenses just to remind everyone else they could be fired. It didn’t matter if you were the one who licked his boots clean after his trip to the latrine yesterday. He’d fire you just to create fear. No one stuck around.

Dan Olson made one of his fun documentaries about this exact subject. If you have the time, watch it.

If you want my cheap boil-down of the idea:

NFTs are representations of ownership of a digital asset stored on a blockchain. However, as with any digital thing, the represented object can usually just be duplicated, making ownership essentially lacking in the aspect of ‘control’ one usually associates with other forms of ownership, and as with many fad purchases, the value of such things was massively distorted. There was and probably still is no legal structure for that ‘ownership,’ so it’s a bit like ‘owning’ your Lemmy account. As long as you have the password and no one else does, you can control it, if anyone gets the credentials, they can take control and there is little to no legal recourse. So, if you can’t stop other people using duplicates and you can have it taken as easily as any other account, it’s hard to really call it ownership. It’s just a mark in a ledger that says your account is associated with some entry, which is also what registering a title/deed does but with the legal force of the government reinforcing it.

Well, you see…