(2018-03-14) Burja Live Versus Dead Players

Samo Burja: Live versus Dead Players. A live player is a person or a tightly coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or a group of people that is working off a script (VerySmallShellScript), incapable of doing new things.

Offensively, if you figure out whether a player is alive or dead, you can predict how they will respond to things and what that means you can do. If you find out that a player is dead, then you know that you can attack them in ways that are not known to them, and they will not be able to fight back.

Defensively, paying attention to live players allows you to anticipate and prevent the grabbing of power, for instance.

If you pay attention to the landscape of live versus dead players in a society, you can predict what will happen in that society. Societies with few live players will stagnate; societies with many live players will develop and adapt.

Live Players

Some Necessary Attributes of Live Players

Tight Coordination

A Tradition of Knowledge

a live player must have a living tradition of knowledge. For the tradition of knowledge to be living, it must have at least one theorist, among other things.

Signs of Live Players

One strong sign is a player doing things outside of their domain, which indicates that they can figure things out.

Another sign of a live player is exceptional individuals gravitating towards them.

Concealment

avoid opposition from other live players or otherwise incite attacks.

Note on Classification

Whether a player is alive or dead is always relative to themselves.

A bureaucratized action, even if it is an impressive action, is not a sign that the player is alive

Dead Players

Causes

A player will die if their intellectual tradition dies and they are unable to replace their thinkers or theorists

A player will also die if their tight coordination is replaced by formal structures, which can happen as members of an organization change

Revival

In order to revive a dead player, you have to displace an existing power structure

This is because a dead player, if it is an organization, may contain mechanisms that preclude insiders from gaining enough power to restructure it into a live player.

Example

Apple is a dead player. It became much less interesting and powerful after Steve Jobs’ death.

Detection

It’s much easier to detect live players than it is to detect dead players.