DADA Paper 1

Don't call it a manifesto. Maybe a mission statement.

I’ve been following General Grizwald Gaius Grim of the First LARP Ingression Protocol for about a year now. Pretty soon after I started that journey, I started meeting regularly with two of his other regulars, UpCycleClub and Chance Mills. Griz had talked quite a bit about exapting the concept of “Defense Against the Dark Arts” (DADA for short) from the Harry Potter universe, and the three of us decided we wanted to make an effort to explore the concept and see what we could come up with. The idea is to take concepts from that world (spells, artifacts, etc.) and use them as memetic markers for resisting advertisements, telling when someone is lying, immunizing yourself against manipulation tactics, etc.

Lately, Griz has been a little frustrated at the lack of visible progress and has been trying to jumpstart things. He asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok to each give a shot at writing a manifesto for this little project (inspired by Mills trying to write a manifesto based on what ought to be held sacred, and a subsequent effort by Ups to start a handbook). The community voted that Claude’s was best, but I suspect that the intended effect was to generate conversation around DADA, which unfortunately petered out after about a day. Griz was going to follow this up with a troll ballet, but that seems to have fallen through (at least for now).

That lack of visible progress has also been a little bit frustrating for Ups, Mills, and me. We’ve tried a few times to do more public sessions with other people, but we struggled with presenting the material from our private discussions in a way that was salient to other people. Those sessions also frequently turned into me trying to explain things rather than the generative conversations the three / four of us had been enjoying (Griz attended infrequently). We’d given up on public sharing for a while, but Griz has been trying to push us into the spotlight again. My thought in response to that was that we probably should try to start making a more deliberate effort to communicate our “findings” with others. We’d been reporting the fruits of our discussions on Griz’s Discord (Mills graciously acted as the scribe), but the thought I had was to perhaps try and write something akin to The Federalist Papers, where the three (four?) of us take turns writing our thoughts and ideas about DADA as essays to one another.

The contribution I’m trying to make with this essay is to give a brief history and summary of where we are and where I’d like us to go. There’s a lot of material from our private sessions that I won’t go into here (that’s for later), but I do want to touch on my own experiment from last year. How do we best summarize DADA? From my Lupin stand-in:

Know the danger, master the response, and face it with courage.

I think this works really well for a few reasons. It’s short, sweet, and to the point (rule of three doesn’t hurt either). It acknowledges the danger in the world without getting bogged down in the weeds about the specific nature of that danger. Most importantly (for me), it emphasizes taking propositional knowledge and leveraging that into procedural / participatory action, while not forgetting the perspectival influence on the shape and flavor of that action. (How’d this shoehorn get in here?)

That’s how I’ll try to break things up for future entries. I’ll articulate a particular danger, how to effectively respond to that danger as a novice, how to cultivate that response into something more sophisticated, and how to reframe things to push back fear and enable courage. If we can manage that, I think we’ll have a decent shot at helping people learn to defend themselves from the dark arts.