Posts Tagged ‘opinion’
“We’ve created an entire global generation of people who were raised within a context in which the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation”*…
… and in some cultures, Nathan Gardels observes, that that phenomenon is picking up pace, as the ruling parties of the world’s two largest nations are fusing high-tech tools with old-fashioned patronage and local wardens…
The more we know or learn through connected networks, the more is known and learned about us.
The same apparatus that enables unprecedented connectivity enables unprecedented surveillance.
Such systems are invasive by design, recording and storing every digital transaction from an online purchase to chatbot queries to uploaded photos in giant databases that are searchable, not least by snooping governments, aggressive marketers and the large language models of Big Tech.
The other side of the coin of connectivity is sousveillance, the capacity of citizens and consumers to monitor authorities, professions and businesses from below to expose abuse, corruption, complacency, incompetence, dissembling or outright lies. (One recent example that springs to mind is the fracas over pro-Palestinian encampments on the U.C.L.A. campus where journalists and students correlated online personal data with facial recognition tools to identify violent counter-demonstrators while law enforcement dawdled.)
Information gathered through connective surveillance is also a means for tracking the pressing concerns, discontent or shifting attitudes of publics that out-of-touch private companies disregard at the risk of their consumer appeal and unresponsive governments or ruling parties ignore at the peril of losing popular legitimacy.
Inundated by junk emails and pop-up ads, most of us are all too familiar with how surveillance capitalism works. But something more is going on in China and India, where the state and ruling parties are wiring a new kind of body politic for the digital age by combining connective capacity with the old stalwarts of allegiance and control — local wardens and the spoils system of patronage…
[Gardels explains the all-too-effective efforts of the Chinese and Indian governments and comes to an alarming (at least to your correspondent) conclusion…]
… To the extent that what we may call “autocratic connectivity” remains an adaptive two-way street where feedback from below is heard and heeded, such a system appears politically sustainable without the liberal freedoms so cherished in the West.
If it works in the two largest nations on the planet, others may see it as their future as well…
Eminently worth reading in full: “‘Autocratic Connectivity’ In China and India,” from @NoemaMag.
* Jaron Lanier
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As we muse on manipulation, we might send persuasive birthday greetings to Carl Hovland; he was born on this date in 1912. A psychologist, he was a pioneer in the study of pioneered in the study of social communication and the modification of attitudes and beliefs. Hovland was the first to record the “sleeper effect,” the observation that individuals exposed repeatedly to what they know is propaganda– e.g., a political smear ad, paid for by an opponent), forget over time that the message is propaganda. (Note that, while the effect has been widely acknowledged and studied, it has been notoriously difficult to reproduce, leading to some doubt over its existence.)
Hovland also developed the social judgment theory of attitude change. He thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on his/her degree of belonging to the group. And he collaborated closely with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink.
“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”*…
We live, Taylor Orth reports, in a time in which everything is awful… for everyone else…
Ask Americans about life’s challenges, and you’ll find a common theme: They are, on average, a lot more positive about the state of their own lives than about the lives of everyone else in the country. In a recent experiment, YouGov asked Americans to rate 14 aspects of life on a scale from terrible to excellent. Respondents were divided into three randomly selected groups of equal size. Depending on the group, they were asked either about their own life, the lives of people in their local community, or the lives of people in the country at large.
At least half of Americans rate many aspects of their own life — including their healthcare, educational opportunities, social relationships, and employment situation — as either good or excellent. Positive ratings are somewhat less likely to be given by Americans evaluating people in their local area, and far less likely among those evaluating people in the U.S. as a whole.
The largest gap in ratings of one’s self compared to ratings of Americans overall is on mental health: People are 42 percentage points more likely to say their own mental health is excellent or good than they are to say so about people in the country as a whole. Gaps of 20 points or more are also found for positive ratings of one’s own versus the country’s personal safety (+31), physical health (+28), access to healthcare (+27), housing affordability (+25), and social relationships (+24)…
“More Americans have a positive outlook on their own lives than on their fellow Americans’,” from Taylor Orth at @YouGovAmerica.
Consider with: “Right-wing populist parties have risen. Populism hasn’t.” (“The success of these parties isn’t about a surge in populist sentiments…”)
* Margaret Mead
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As we ponder perspective, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that Lottie Williams became the first (and so far, only) human to be struck by a remnant of a space vehicle (a Delta II rocket, after it’s re-entry of the earth’s atmosphere).
Lottie Williams is strolling through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she sees a flash of light resembling a meteor. A short while later, she is struck on the shoulder by a piece of metal apparently from a disintegrating rocket, making her the only person believed to have been hit by a piece of space debris.
… NASA confirmed that the timing and location of the incident were consistent with the re-entry and breakup of a second-stage Delta rocket that fell to Earth after orbiting for several months. The main wreckage was recovered a couple of hundred miles away in Texas.
Williams was not injured. She was struck a glancing blow, and the debris was relatively light and probably traveling at a low velocity. It was also subject to wind currents, which mitigated the impact even further.
The amazing thing is that, given the amount of space junk that falls to Earth on a regular basis, there have been no other reports of someone being hit. Despite the veritable junkyard raining down on our planet — over a 40-year period roughly 5,400 tons of debris are thought to have survived re-entry into the atmosphere — the odds of actually being struck are infinitesimally small.
“Jan. 22, 1997: Heads Up, Lottie! It’s Space Junk!”
… The rest of the 260-kilogram tank, from which the fragment that hit her had come out, fell in Texas, near a farm. The piece was analyzed by researcher Winton Cornell of the University of Tulsa, who concluded that the material was used by NASA to insulate fuel tanks. The U.S. secretary of defense then sent a letter to Williams, apologizing for what happened…
“Lottie Williams, the Woman Who Was Hit by Space Junk”
“Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself”*…
Ian Leslie on why we need to take control of our influences and what we can learn from artists about how to do so…
We live in age of social influence, and while there is no shortage of advice on how to take advantage of that – how to influence others, how to build a following, how to change minds – there is a dearth of thinking on how to be influenced. Which is odd, because that seems, to me, to be one of the key questions of the age…
Being influenced by others is inevitable and essential. But it’s also true that when we over-conform to influences, we surrender individuality. We get infected by harmful behaviours: smoking, anorexia, even suicide are all subject to social influence. We swallow conspiracy theories and false beliefs. We become mindless creatures of habit unable to imagine new possibilities. Conforming to influence can generate anxiety: we become worried that we’re not conforming well enough. There are externalities to be considered, too. Over-conformity is a kind of free-riding. The over-conformer takes from the shared pot of memes but fails to contribute to it. A society with too much imitation is liable to decay and degenerate, because it stops creating, thinking and innovating.
Each of us, then, has to try and strike a balance. Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy.
But it’s harder than ever to strike this balance, because we live in societies where influence is everywhere, pressing upon us from all sides. We can instantly find out what strangers think, or at least what they say they’re thinking, on any given topic. We can consult with our friends every second of the day. It’s easier to outsource your opinions than ever; it feels good, it feels safe, to side with a crowd. There are higher costs to non-conformity, too: online communities assiduously police the boundaries of acceptable thought and behaviour…
… on the one hand, we have access to a broader range of information and insight than any generation in history, which ought to make us all more interesting. On the other, it’s very difficult, amidst the crossfire hurricane of influence, to think and act for yourself – to be you.
I could leave it there, with the conclusion that we’re all being influenced all the time and we’re not remotely prepared for how to manage these influences, and that maybe we should think about that a little more. But I want to add this: that there is a group of people who have a lot to teach us about how to live in the age of influence, because they have confronted this question with a special intensity for hundreds of years.
Artists (in the broad sense – painters, novelists, composers, etc) are pretty much defined by the struggle to be themselves; to absorb influences without surrendering to them; to be open to others and stubbornly individual. Consequently, artists have a different relationship to influence than the rest of us do. The core difference is this: artists do not absorb their influences passively. They choose their influences, and they choose how to be influenced by them…
Read on for sound advice: “How To Be Influenced,” from @mrianleslie via @TheBrowser.
Apposite: “The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety,” from @chaykak
* Miles Davis
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As we steal like an artist, we might recall that it was on this date in 1790 that the first U.S. patent was issued to Samuel Hopkins for an improvement “in the making of Potash and Pearlash by a new Apparatus and Process.” It was signed by then-President George Washington.
A number of inventors had been clamoring for patents and copyrights (which were, of course, anticipated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution), but the first session of the First Congress in 1789 acted on none of the petitions. On January 8, 1790, President Washington recommended in his State of the Union address that Congress give attention to the encouragement of new and useful inventions; and within the month, the House appointed a committee to draft a patent statute. Even then the process worked slowly: Hopkins’ patent was issued over six months later.
“Curiosity has its own reason for existence”*…
This is, as nearly as I can tell, the 5,000th (Roughly) Daily post (4,505 blog posts, preceded by 495 email-only pieces). On this numerologically-significant occasion, my deep thanks to readers past and present. It seems appropriate to devote this post to the impulse that has powered (Roughly) Daily from the start, curiosity– free-range curiosity…
Recently I read a terrific blog post by CJ Eller where he talks about the value of paying attention to offbeat things.
Eller was joining an online conversation about how people get caught up in the “status and celebrity game” when they’re trying to grow their audience. They become overly obsessed with following — and emulating, and envying— the content of people with massive audiences. The conversation started with this poignant essay by the author Ali Montag; she concludes that rabidly chasing followers endows your writing (and thinking!) with “inescapable mediocrity.” (It also tends to make you miserable, too, she points out)…
Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.
I love the idea of “rewilding your attention”. It puts a name on something I’ve been trying to do for a while now: To stop clicking on the stuff big-tech algorithms push at me… social behavior can influence our attention: What are the high-follower-count folks talking/posting/arguing about today? This isn’t always a bad thing. We’re social animals, so we’re necessarily (and often productively) intrigued by what others are chewing over. But as these three writers note, it’s also crucial to follow your own signal — to cultivate the stuff you’re obsessed with, even if few others are.
On top of the social pressure from people online, there’s technological pressure too — from recommendation systems trying to juke our attention… Medium’s algorithm has deduced that … I’m a nerd. They are correct! I am. The other major social networks, like Twitter or YouTube, offer me the same geek-heavy recommendations when I log in. And hey, they’re not wrong either; I really do like these subjects.
But … I’m also interested in so many other things that are far outside these narrow lanes. I am, for example, a Canadian who’s deeply into Canadian art, and a musician who spends a lot of time thinking about composition and gear and lyric-writing and production and guitar pedals, and a father who thinks a lot about the culture my kids show me, and I have a super-snobby fanboy love of the 18th century poet Alexander Pope.
You’re the same way; you contain your own Whitmanian multitudes, your pockets of woolly-eyed obsession. We all do.
But our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete. This is why I always get a slightly flattened feeling when I behold my feed, robotically unloading boxes of content from the same monotonous conveyor-belt of recommendations, catered to some imaginary marketing version of my identity. It’s like checking my reflection in the mirror and seeing stock-photo imagery.
The other problem with big-tech recommendation systems is they’re designed by people who are convinced that “popularity” and “recency” equal “valuable”. They figure that if they sample the last 15 milliseconds of the global zeitgeist and identify what’s floated to the top of that quantum foam, I’ll care about it. Hey, a thing happened and people are talking about it, here’s the #hashtag!
And again … they’re sometimes right! I am often intrigued to know the big debates of the day, like Oscar Wilde peering into his daily gazette. But I’d also like to stumble over arguments yet more arcane, and material that will never be the subject of a massive online conversation because only a small group of oddballs care about it.
You’re the same way too, I bet. We’re all weird in different ways, but we’re all weird.
Big-tech recommendation systems have been critiqued lately for their manifold sins— i.e. how their remorseless lust for “engagement” leads them to overpromote hotly emotional posts; how they rile people up; how they feed us clicktastic disinfo; how they facilitate “doomscrolling”. All true.
But they pose a subtler challenge, too, for our imaginative lives: their remarkably dull conception of what’s interesting. It’s like intellectual monocropping. You open your algorithmic feed and see rows and rows of neatly planted corn, and nothing else.
That’s why I so enjoy the concept of “rewilding”… For me, it’s meant slowly — over the last few years — building up a big, rangy collection of RSS feeds, that let me check up on hundreds of electic blogs and publications and people. (I use Feedly.) I’ve also started using Fraidycat, a niftily quixotic feed-reader that lets you sort sources into buckets by “how often should I check this source”, which is a cool heuristic; some people/sites you want to check every day, and others, twice a year.
Other times I spend an hour or two simply prospecting — I pick a subject almost at random, then check to see if there’s a hobbyist or interest-group discussion-board devoted to it. (There usually is, running on free warez like phpBB). Then I’ll just trawl through the forum, to find out what does this community care about? It’s like a psychogeographic walk of the mind.
Another awesome technology for rewilding my attention, I’ve found, is the good old-fashioned paper book. I go to a bookstore, pick up something where it’s not immediately obvious why it’d appeal to me, then flip around to see if anything catches my eye. (This works online, too, via the wonderful universe of pre-1923, freely-accessible ebooks and publications at the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, or even Google Books. Pre-WWI material is often super odd and thought-provoking.)…
Step away from algorithmic feeds. In praise of free-range curiosity: “Rewilding your attention,” from Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99).
See also “Before Truth: Curiosity, Negative Capability, Humility, ” from Will Wilkinson (@willwilkinson)
* “Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.” — Albert Einstein, “Old Man’s Advice to Youth: ‘Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'” LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64”
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As we revel in rabbit holes, we might send insightfully-humorous birthday greetings to William Penn Adair Rogers; he was born on this date in 1879. A stage and motion picture actor, vaudeville performer, cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator, he traveled around the world three times, made 71 films (50 silent films and 21 “talkies”), and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns. By the mid-1930s Rogers was hugely popular in the United States, its leading political wit and the highest paid Hollywood film star. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in northern Alaska.
Known as “Oklahoma’s Favorite Son,” Rogers was a Cherokee citizen, born to a Cherokee family in Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma).
“I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat.”- Will Rogers
“The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe”*…
Alternative media outlets of the Left and Right have become a crucial supplement to our knowledge of the world, providing those perspectives usually ignored by our mainstream media...
From the masthead of the aggressively-inclusive site that means to make those views available, The Unz Review.
The collection is sufficiently vast that your correspondent cannot guarantee against any bias in its eclecticism (indeed, he notes that it is the work of Ron Unz). Still, it’s a remarkable aggregation of theory, opinion, and reportage, from what seems a broad array of points-of-view.
Readers are advised to steel themselves, take a deep breath… then dive in.
Pair with Wikipedia’s Fringe Theory page– and perhaps more interestingly still, their explanation in their editorial guidelines of how they identify and classify fringe theories.
[Image above: source]
* “The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.” — Kevin Kelly
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As we iris out, we might recall that it was on this date in 1804 that Corps of Discovery– better known today as the Lewis and Clark Expedition– left Camp Dubois, near Wood River, Illinois, commencing what would be a trek over two years on which they became the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States.
President Thomas Jefferson had commissioned the expedition shortly after the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803) to explore and to map the newly acquired territory, to find a practical route across the western half of the continent– a Northwest Passage– and to establish an American presence in this territory before Britain and other European powers tried to claim it.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
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