MEOW Ep. 20 - Crashing Institutional Gates with Schrödinger's Cat / Eric Weinstein's DISC

In 2018, mathematician Eric Weinstein coined the term “Gated Institutional Narrative,” defined as a closed exchange of ideas promulgated by “insiders” – sitting politicians, tenured academics, high-prestige journalists, and the like. Insiders who deviate substantially from the party line are either divested of insider status or see their ideas subjected to linguistic processing that renders them compatible with the GIN. This idea was later expanded into that of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC), an all-encompassing system of checks and balances that fortifies “insider” positions by ensuring – in a decentralized, panoptic fashion – the exclusion of disruptive narratives from public conversation. All the DISC needs to do is ensure its increasingly untenable "ideas" are initially delivered with the trappings of officialdom – media institutions and the unsuspecting public do the mass-distribution dirty work.

By early 2020, it was clear how prescient and important Weinstein's concepts were. Throughout MEOW, we have attempted to use the DISC’s tactics against it, deploying official-looking thumbnail images and convoluted shownotes to impute credibility upon a repetitive string of ‘meows,’ urging fans of various authors and high-profile figures to engage in the world of “The Meow Library”, a series of books whose sole contents are hundreds of thousands of repetitions of that word. To date, we have been remarkably successful, and now seek to pay things forward.

With these shownotes, we will attempt to earn Mr. Weinstein’s endorsement, with hopes that his followers will spread our nonsense message far and wide, gauging their own followers’ subsequent response to our Schrödingerian message / non-message. We suspect that, within a few generations of “shares,” many will begin to mistake this episode for an authentic Weinstein product, thereby proving how effortlessly and insidiously the DISC operates, and – hopefully – slipping the DISC ever-so-slightly more as we enter 2023.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

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