By @LukeWeinhagen, Sr Fellow, The Natural Law Institute

Innovation Signaling is no different from any other form of extractive signaling. It’s an attempt to capture the benefits of inclusion in a category without meeting the burden of meeting the standards for inclusion in the category.

Signaling vs Demonstrating

We keep trying to push back against a signal and it doesn’t work to stop the spread of degradation and degeneracy, because the signal is a trick.

Virtue Signal vs Demonstrated Virtue

Competence Signal vs Demonstrated Competence

Investment Signal vs Demonstrated Investment

Ownership Signaling vs Demonstrated Ownership

Power Signal vs Demonstrated Power

All of these tricks depend on, and literally can not exist without, leveraging the demonstrated behavior of the signal’s recipient for the benefit of the signaler. The signal does not produce the effect. Instead, the signal triggers the demonstrator’s compliance to produce the effect.

Put another way – the signals are only effective to the degree the signaled population complies with the signal.

We’re conflating compliance with cooperation.

Because the institutions of the West are institutions of cooperation, our conflation of compliance as cooperation in the West provides all of these signals their strength.

Not recognizing the distinction between compliance and cooperation makes the choke point strategy effective.

Because “Plan. Organize. Fight. Win.” are all expressions of cooperation in the conflict of culture, and we believe we are already cooperating (when instead we’re complying), these coordinated actions will suffer until we can clearly recognize compliance and cooperation.

Category Theft & Linguistic Parasitism via Extractive Signaling
Detach the label used to identify a category then abuse the common understanding and/or misunderstanding of the label to strip-mine any benefit of inclusion with the category without the burden of meeting the standards or measures that define the category.

Clarifying cooperation is essential to disrupting signal compliance. We do the science of cooperation at the @NatLawInstitute

-Luke Weinhagen