“What’s in a name?”

Everything.

Historical precedent holds that good things arise on the third day. This makes today the right day to clarify the theme of this blog.

For the rest of the month we’ll be investigating the—for lack of a better word—strange relationship between words and reality, especially in multiplayer contexts.

Now, I’d give my life (well, if I knew I’d have a second one too) to be able to give you a very precise map of what’s ahead of us.

Sadly, I can’t do that. To the best of my knowledge, no one can. And no one can because no such map exists. The area we’re investigating is unexplored: there is no map—this is an area of inquiry that is coming into existence as your eyes read these very words.

And exactly what is this area of inquiry, you ask? Well, I’m glad I made you ask:

In yesterday’s post we discussed how naming something can kill it. How the moment you successfully name something whose survival relies on remaining nameless you wound it. Mortally so.

That—the fact that giving something a name can start to unwind it—is a strange relationship between words and reality. But it’s far from the only one.

You also have the opposite phenomenon where a name conjures something into existence. In the olden days this was captured through the word “Abracadabra”—literally: I create as I speak. Nowadays we just call it “meme magic”.

Ok, so names can both destroy and create. That’s not that weird, though. Oh, alright then. Challenge accepted—Here’s something else of what names can do:

Names can change how people feel, think, and act towards things. And by this I mean: different names can change how people feel, think, and act towards the same thing(!)

Shakespeare, famously, didn’t think so. He wrote that “a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet”. Would it though? Imagine people calling roses “vomitoriums”. Do you feel like smelling one right now?

A silly example, sure, but the effect is still real: do you feel the same about the same set of people if I describe them as a “group” as you feel if I described them as a “clique”? How about if I describe them as a “mob”?

Again, silly. Or is it? Donald Trump—of “Crooked Hillary”, “Pocahontas”, and “Sleepy Joe” fame—certainly seems to think it’s serious business.

The fact is: Different names trigger different reactions. But it’s not just that names modify somatic reactions. No. Different names make certain thoughts harder to think. “Is OpenAI closed?” sounds like a contradiction, while being an extremely pertinent question.

Different names change our emotional reactions and what we can and can’t easily think. Those are two kinds of strange relationships. But, even more strangely, different names make certain actions easier, and harder, to take. Can anyone really be against the “Bill To Make Everyone Happy”? Again, it sounds like a joke, but what is the “Big Beautiful Bill” if not “Build Back Better” by any other name? Except changing the name changes everything.

Shakespeare was wrong, and his was an enduring mistake. So enduring, in fact, that every example first sounds like a joke. And yet they’re as serious as can be: culture war, politicking, AI. This contrast—between the massive impact of names and how lightly we treat them—creates an opportunity for arbitrage. And wherever that springs up, soon after, so do players aiming to take advantage of it. Once they do, you get adversarial dynamics that unfold over time and, with them, a whole new level of weirdness.

And this, my dear friend, is the area we’ll be charting in the coming days.