Cause-and-Adjacency: a new techno-occultic social logic
"Cause-and-Adjacency" means that association is cause.
Cause-and-Adjacency is the dominant logic of this part of the 21st century, with a "latent space" aspect to it.
Cause-and-Effect: Things happen because of causative agents and are downstream of sequences of causative agents. Analytical people using C&E logic understand that things can have multiple causative agents and multiple types of outcomes, but relatively less analytical or informed people might think "something has only one causative agent, and if that statement is wrong, then ALL cause and effect logic is wrong."
Many things are stuck with Cause-and-Effect as their dominant framework. Cause-and-Adjacency logic doesn't apply when you have to deal with the physical world and its laws. Adjacency is primarily a social logic, and the physical world often isn't governed by social logic.
Cause-and-Adjacency: Things happen because of their adjacency to other things or because they share a latent space.
Cause-and-Adjacency is actually the logic of algorithmic sorting, prompt engineering, etc.
For example, in Cause-and-Effect, something being associated does not mean that thing is responsible.
A simple example of Cause-and-Effect: I'll use a dumb example.
Let's say that Neo-Victorians like trains, train engineers like trains, New Urbanists like trains, WWII Nazis liked trains, and many autistic kids like trains. In standard Cause-and-Effect logic - and in more 20th century social logic, but NOT modern social logic - this does not mean that train engineers, Neo-Victorians, New Urbanists, Nazis, and autistic kids are part of the same social subgroup. They're just five different groups that are non-causally associated with trains. If you are examining this via Cause-and-Effect, you don’t equate “liking trains” to “is a train engineer, Neo-Victorian, New Urbanist, Nazi, or autistic.” Sharing an intersection doesn’t mean sharing probable cause. These things are not synonymous with each other.
But if you’re applying Cause-and-Adjacency:
In Cause-and-Adjacency logic, adjacency is causation even if the two things have nothing to do with each other. Guilt by sharing a common latent space.
You avoid anything that shares an intersection. This may actually be necessary online, in terms of SEO stuff. If you’re a particularly Twitterbrained [1] Firstian who doesn’t “know how the sausage is made” and your social experience – including your education in social logic - is dominantly shaped by your interactions with a post-Web 2 social media space, then all you know is that whenever you activate a particular intersection, all of the fellow travelers come along for the ride. Here's why: Post about trains, and you’ll get stuff from or related to train engineers AND WWII Nazis (ok, probably not) AND New Urbanists AND autistic kids. Providing more context won't help because you're still going to be optimizing your posts to all of those groups or topics. You may need to actually use much more specified language - or avoid the topic altogether. If you’re on Twitter, then your posting about trains made you hypervisible to ALL of them. Interacting with ANYONE posting about trains made you hypervisible as well.
In Cause-and-Adjacency Logic, the entire cloud of associations is held as a causative agent, especially since the people using this logic often are completely mystified as to how trains, Nazis, Victorians, and autistic kids are all connected.
According to the social logic of Web 2 and onward, you would avoid the entire “thing cloud” if you want to avoid even one of the things in that cloud. Firstians move through clouds of association.
Another strategy:
You invent a secret code word for "trains" to confine the context you are referring to (such as when tech people overly use the term "qualia" when they mean "soul") and avoid the Victorians, Nazis, and autists. This is social media algorithm and SEO logic. Marketers understand this better than many programmers do.
If you’re part of particular tech subcultures – like Rationalists/EA – you might make up your own term for “train” in order to throttle your engagement specifically to other people within your circle. This is what they are doing with the very subculture-specific language they use.
This is why I NEVER say "tr*gg*r" and ALWAYS say “the Vapors” when referring to the overzealous use of the word "tr*gg*r." It’s also why I am asterisking out that word for that matter! It’s algospeak.
I’m saying “the Vapors” because – in the context I’m using this – I don’t actually want to engage with either the people who overzealously use the term or those who attack them. “The Vapors” gives me a way to talk about this within the specific context in which I'm using it, while lowering engagement from the people not involved in that context.
In many ways, this kind of algospeak is like reverse prompt engineering. Instead of building a big LLM prompt or doing SEO tagging that strengthens the signal to a broader group, you’re throttling engagement down to what is only understood by your in-group, or even to a frame you control (which is the beauty of always using your own language and framing for things wherever possible; it filters out the people who don’t actually want to engage).
All of this may point out, very much, to how Firstian society is evolving downstream of its foundational technologies.
[1] Being Twitterbrained may actually be a functional mode of operation if you’re on Twitter.