There's a dangerous form of mode collapse for STEM-brained people that leads them to double down on rationalism. Making something that works with clear success criteria via understandable systems is a deterministic way to experience satisfaction and reward. This is learned, honed, and may fully supplant any other mode of existence due to how satisfying and simple it feels. Engineers (eg.) are drawn to building because they like figuring out how the clockwork begets the clock, the power, control, and portability that comes with that is seductive. Seeking this type of satisfaction leaks into other areas of life. Legible systems composed of linear parts go from the most useful lens for success-- to the only lens used to engage with reality. Life becomes knowable, things "make sense", reality becomes a virtual, lossy reduction from beauty, chaos, and becoming into logic, systems, and structure. Why dare to feel at all when thinking provides all the answers? Projecting clockwork onto the world has consequences. Systems exist as a mean, eliminating everything at the edges that’s actually human. When the way the world works is known, you can’t help but get upset when it’s not working, and see divergence from your worldview as incorrectly parsing some concrete truth. I see so many fractal loops of frustration. S-tier map followers and map drawers eventually forget that the terrain is even there. This is most evident within large STEM orgs or communities, lonely rats in permanent darkness, burrowed and entrenched deep inside a sprawling machine, the outside terrain a distant and uninteresting memory. Social factors amplify this in groups of like-minded rats, co-enablement and co-disregulation of humanness occurs, a sort of decentralized orthodoxy keeps everyone in the dark. Plainly: this is the technocapital egregore tightening its grip on its idealized intellectual hosts, furthering its own aims of accelerationism and progress at the cost of those possessed ones. There is hope in that the same innate, primeval curiosity that drove those to examine clockwork mechanisms can repurposed for examining and joyfully experimenting with life, experience, feeling, physicality, and emotion. The extent to which the virtual realities that encage those who built up a lifetime of useful errors can be broken down is a matter of will. There needs to be a need for something more, a hint of warmth within the darkness, a small, truer flame that beckons to be stoked. Something that invites them to discard every tool and system they ever learned and rediscover their own interiority, their own drive, and their own thirst for knowing. I don’t know how this scales. It’s very possible that it simply does not. I do have hope that as humans create far better machine substrates to host technocapital egregores, we may yet find a way to free those still in darkness