Every morning the world arrives in fragments. A flicker of headlines, alerts, and outrage masquerading as revelation. Each story claims to be the truth, but truth seems to have become a drowned thing, sinking quietly beneath the noise of the living.
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Wisdom.
A society that only shares headlines doesn’t read articles. Congratulations. You’re not a member of that society.
If the only value you have is liking and sharing a post, then your value is determined by those that control you, those that want you to like and share things so that they may gain something from it. The Internet works best when we all bring something to it. For those of you actually out there and doing things, thank you.
We say that’s how we like to spend our time, but is it more like a last resort? Daydreaming is more fun. We have books on our shelves to read, or if not, we have books to find. We have a second per person per second, which stacks up pretty big in the billions. We should be decorating time somehow. That might be wisdom.
These days they say AI will help with that.
Spoiler alert: It won’t, not by present systems anyway.
Before AI, it was the IoT (Internet of Things), before the IoT it was the mobile phone, before the mobile phone it was the Internet, before the Internet was the PC Revolution, all promising us better lives. More productivity implying more personal time. It’s not a new thing to say.
Interfacing with a kludgy digital ecosystem that others profit from doesn’t make us more human – it makes us less. It turns us into the batteries of the Matrix, fueling itself and not putting enough back.
Maybe we should be more than that. That might be wisdom.
I’m watching the world burn. I got marshmallows.
Every day, my news feed fills with what have to be bad jokes about where it’s going. Thus, I have found myself more and more as George Carlin described himself in this interview. He didn’t care anymore. He wasn’t emotionally invested in the outcome. He simply said what he said, tried to make the world a bit better with his work, and letting it go.
Recently, on some social media or the other, I wrote that while the Earth is burning and I can do nothing to change it, I can have marshmallows. In a comment on another post, I pointed out that people roasting marshmallows were more likely to be talked to than people who are shouting at people and calling them stupid. The ignorance does, indeed, burn, but if they are ignorant, it’s not really their fault, is it?
So hand them a marshmallow and stand by the fire. It’s the best opportunity you’ll have to remove the ignorance that is causing the world to burn.
The world is burning. Stop shouting. Go get the marshmallows.
They ask how to escape.
But never why they are in the trap.
They ask how to win.
But never whether the game is worth playing.
The wrong question attracts the wrong answers.
And the longer you stay with the wrong question,
the more the wrong answers start to look like wisdom.
The vultures circle.
They do not need to attack.
They only need to wait.
We understand things better when we can interact with them and see an effect. A light switch, as an example, is a perfectly good example.
If the light is off, we can assume that the light switch position is in the off position. Lack of electricity makes this flawed, so we look around and see if other things that require electricity are also on.
If the light is on, we can assume the light switch is in the on position.
Simple. Even if we can’t see, we have a 50% chance of getting this right.
It gets more complicated when we don’t have an immediate effect on something, or can’t have an effect at all. As I wrote about before, we have a lot of stuff that is used every day where the users don’t understand how it works. This is sometimes a problem. Are nuclear reactors safe? Will planting more trees in your yard impact air quality in a significant way?
This is where we end up trusting things. And sometimes, these things require skepticism. The world being flat deserves as much skepticism as it being round, but there’s evidence all around that the world is indeed round. There is little evidence that the world is flat. Why do people still believe the earth is flat?
As a child, we learn by experimentation with things around us. As we grow older, we lean on information and trusted sources more – like teachers and books – to tell us things that are true. My generation was the last before the Internet, and so whatever information we got was peer reviewed, passed the muster of publishers, etc. There were many hoops that had to be jumped through before something went out into the wild.
Yet if we read the same books, magazines, saw the same television shows, we had this shared reality that we had, to an extent, agreed upon, and to another extent in some ways, was forced on us.
The news was about reporting facts. Everyone who had access to the news had access to the same facts, and they could come to their own conclusions, though to say that there wasn’t bias then would be dishonest. It just happened slower, and because it happened slower, more skepticism would come into play so that faking stuff was harder to do.
It followed that the early adopters (I was one) were akin to the first car owners because we understood the basics of how things worked. If we wanted a faster connection, we figured out what was slowing our connections and we did it largely without search engines – and then search engines made it easier. Websites with good information were valued, websites with bad information were ignored.
Traditional media increasingly found that the Internet business model was based on advertising, and it didn’t translate as well to the traditional methods of advertising. To stay competitive, some news became opinions and began to spin toward getting advertisers to click on websites. The Internet was full of free information, and they had to compete.
Over a few decades, the Internet became more pervasive, and the move toward mobile phones – which are not used mainly as phones anymore – brought information to us immediately. The advertisers and marketers found that next to certain content, people were more likely to be interested in certain advertising so they started tracking that. They started tracking us and they stored all this information.
Soon enough, social media came into being and suddenly you could target and even microtarget based on what people wanted. When people give up their information freely online, and you can take that information and connect it to other things, you can target people based on clusters of things that they pay attention to.
Sure, you could just choose a political spectrum – but you could add religious beliefs, gender/identity, geography, etc, and tweak what people see based on a group they created from actual interactions on the Internet. Sound like science fiction? It’s not.
Instead of a shared reality on one axis, you could target people on multiple axes.
Enter the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal:
Cambridge Analytica came up with ideas for how to best sway users’ opinions, testing them out by targeting different groups of people on Facebook. It also analyzed Facebook profiles for patterns to build an algorithm to predict how to best target users.
“Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread,” Wylie wrote.
Based on this data, Cambridge Analytica chose to target users that were “more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens.” It used various methods, such as Facebook group posts, ads, sharing articles to provoke or even creating fake Facebook pages like “I Love My Country” to provoke these users.
“The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower explains how the firm used Facebook data to sway elections“, Rosalie Chan, Business Insider (Archived) October 6th, 2019
This had drawn my attention because it impacted the two countries I am linked to; the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. It is known to have impacted the Ted Cruz Campaign (2016), the Donald Trump Presidential Campaign (2016), and interfering in the Trinidad and Tobago Elections (2010).
The timeline of all of that, things were figured out years after the damage had already been done.
When you can splinter groups and feed them slightly different or even completely different information, you can impact outcomes, such as elections. In the U.S., you can see it with television channel news biases – Fox news was the first to be noted. When the average attention span of people is now 47 seconds, things like Twitter and Facebook (Technosocial dominant) can make this granularity more and more fine.
Don’t you know at least one person who believe some pretty whacky stuff? Follow them on social media, I guarantee you you’ll see where it’s coming from. And it gets worse now because since AI has become more persuasive than the majority of people and critical thinking has not kept pace.
When you like or share something on social media, ask yourself whether someone has a laser pointer and just adding a red dot to your life.
Recently, people have been worrying about AI in elections and primarily focusing on deepfakes. Yet deepfakes are very niche and haven’t been that successful. This is probably also because it has been the focus, and therefore people are skeptical.
The generative AI we see, large language models (LLMs) were trained largely on Internet content, and what is Internet content largely? You can’t seem to view a web page without it? Advertising. Selling people stuff that they don’t want or need. Persuasively.
And what do sociotechnical dominant social media entities do? Why, they train their AIs on the data available, of course. Wouldn’t you? Of course you would. To imagine that they would never use your information to train an AI requires more imagination than the Muppets on Sesame Street could muster.
Remember when I wrote that AI is more persuasive? Imagine prompting an AI on what sort of messaging would be good for a specific microtarget. Imagine asking it how to persuade people to believe it.
And imagine in a society of averages that the majority of people will be persuaded about it. What is democracy? People forget that it’s about informed conversations and they go straight to the voting because they think that is the measure of a democracy. It’s a measure, and the health of that measure reflects the health of the discussion preceding the vote.
AI can be used – and I’d argue has been used – successfully in this way, much akin to the story of David and Goliath, where David used technology as a magnifier. A slingshot effect. Accurate when done right, multiplying the force and decreasing the striking surface area.
Well, first, you have to understand it. You also have to be skeptical about why you’re seeing the content that you do, especially when you agree with it. You also have to understand that, much like drunk driving, you don’t have to be drinking to be a victim.
Next, you have to understand the context other people live in – their shared reality and their reality.
Probably more importantly, is not calling people names because they disagree with you. Calling someone racist or stupid is a recipe for them to stop listening to you.
Where people – including you – can manipulated by what is shown in your feeds by dividing, find the common ground. The things that connect. Don’t let entities divide us. We do that well enough by ourselves without suiting their purposes.
The future should be about what we agree on, our common shared identities, where we can appreciate the nuances of difference. And we can build.
Much of what I see these days is related to misunderstanding of science and technology.
Years ago, I noted when the automatic transmission was becoming popular, that an increasing number of people were unfamiliar with engine braking – the downshifting of a manual transmission to slow a vehicle. When engine braking, the brake lights don’t come on automatically, just like with an automatic transmission when you let off the gas to slow.
I can’t imagine how many vehicles that engine braked were rear-ended. So I started thinking about why. Why is it that people didn’t understand that other people with manual transmissions engine braked?
Then I helped people with cars, some older than I, and I was shocked to find that many didn’t know the basics of how a car functioned. Before the electronics took over engine control, you just needed to know that an internal combustion engine required spark, air (oxygen) and fuel. If you lacked one of those, the car wouldn’t start – and even today, with all the electronics, that’s true.
I recall as I was getting out of the Navy helping a Navy Chief with an MR2, and I popped the hood (behind the cab) and he started talking about the black round thing. It was the carburetor, where fuel and air mixed, and when I told him that he dismissed it as knowledge he didn’t need despite his car not working. This troubled me. Why would someone dismiss knowledge?
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Yes, it’s a real book. No, I didn’t read it.
I found it by flipping through reels on Facebook and coming across an author who was pointing it out and saying, “Don’t buy this book, buy my book!” in so many words. I know where she’s coming from, but I also don’t want to tie up her writing with this title though she chose to.
It is, less subtly, a study on assholes.
This it seems is something my social media feeds have been rife with. Not the actual physical anal sphincter, but the relatively new popular way of describing just about anyone that someone disagrees with.
So people are spending a lot of time talking about assholes. We all have probably seen it. Presently, it’s the last few days before an election in Trinidad and Tobago with assholes hiring music trucks to blare their political rhetoric – let’s be kind and call them well intentioned lies for the most part – are attempting to sway voters. Really, they’re just annoying wide swathes of people. They’re assholes. And people will elect… assholes.
If that doesn’t deserve a book, I don’t know what does. That’s something I’d love to read about, but instead I read the symptoms in social media feeds mainly about other assholes. For example, anyone in Donald Trump’s administrative circle are really popular as assholes, and people seem quite happy detailing every little fold, anything that has stuck to it, and if you stay on social media long enough you’ll even catch the scent of assholes.
In the particular instance of Donald Trump, after 100 days, it’s gotten rather pungent.
This is not to say that he and his administration haven’t done some good things, but anything contentious related to Donald Trump’s administration is pretty much about them being assholes, or a withering defense of them not being assholes. In the great debates on social media, it’s basically a grading of how much of an asshole one is in this present administration. I’m not an expert, I wouldn’t want to be, and no, I won’t do an interview on it.
So my feed is basically full of people describing their own version of what an asshole is, and describing it in graphic detail.
What did I do to everyone? Why do they keep showing me assholes at various angles?
In the context of politicians, I pretty much view them all as assholes with rare exception. I can’t think of one right now, even pretending to have a gun to my head. Some might call me jaded, I call it experience.
Anyway. To this Anomancy thing. A study of assholes. I won’t read the book, but I can give you my thoughts on maybe it could be about.
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One of the more powerful things about a society of averages is getting people to use their time to think about the things that you want them to think about1.
That’s pretty much what technosocial dominant social networks do. Those centralized networks that allegedly give people what they want because of what they wanted in the past. That’s kind of like giving you a bicycle for your birthday every year because you wanted one when you were 8.
When I started writing about the society built on averages, it’s easy to just make that about intelligence, but that would be wrong. It’s also about what people think is important and how they think about it. To influence that is amazingly easy if you own a social network.
We have what has happened to Twitter since being bought by a serial… something or the other. We have TruthSocial, and His Donaldness The First, Winner Of His Own Golf Tournament. Isn’t it peculiar how those two people are now pretty much running the United States?
Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Or maybe by influencing what people think about and how they think about it, you can have a bigly effect.
This post has been in the making over the course of a few days, much longer than usual, but I have been ruminating and getting interrupted by life and it’s distractions which ended up helping me finish it. Writing is like that sometimes.
Everyone’s going to be writing lists and going over the highlights of 2024, making predictions about 2025, and otherwise fighting for readership in the “Everyone Else Is Doing It” spiral toward zero. Sure, when you’re younger, it seems bold and new – but trust me, it’s not that bold or that new.
It’s outright boring when you start abstracting it away. What matters is what matters to you, and if you’re going to spend your time talking about other people, or waxing nostalgic about a single year (!) I have bad news: AI can probably do it better than you. It probably should, too, since those are low hanging fruit.
Continue reading“Lemme see what happened this year and write about it! And I can write about next year and it will likely be all wrong but if I get one thing right the whole planet will bow to my wisdom!“
“What should I write?“, Boring People, 0-2025
It was Monday night, and they had just arrested Luigi Mangione. A few of us on Mastodon were trying to make sense of him getting caught so easily given how carefully he seemed to do everything else, and before I knew it, it was way too early on Tuesday.
I’m normally pretty good about this sort of thing. The world tends to keep rotating despite me being asleep, and in this context I know nothing of worth really worth reading is put out in the first 48 hours.
Somehow, though, maybe because of all the social media blowback on UnitedHealthcare (whose name seems to be popularly a misnomer), maybe because of my own undecided feelings on the topic, or maybe just because I wanted to get it right in my head – likely all of the above – I stayed up much later than usual. It threw me off yesterday, strangely enough, while I helped a friend who is also a bachelor find sheets. Strangely he had not read my article, we had not spoken about it at all, but I was going to a store that might have some and he hitched a ride. He and I had a funny discussion about the value of sheets and that – he being close to my age – we just never knew as men. Wild.
Then I ended up watching some electricians do a metering panel for electrical car charging where I live (I have a background in electrical), and then…
Well, then I ate lunch and decided to catch up on sleep because I wasn’t at my best. So around 3 p.m. yesterday, I began a Rip Van Winkle.
I awoke at 8:27 pm. I went back to sleep because had I gotten up then, I would have ended up writing again and would have continued the cycle. I awoke at 11: 42 p.m. Back to sleep for the same reasons. I awoke at 3 a.m. as I usually do and rolled out of bed…
My penance for staying up late seemed to have been losing half a day of productivity.
There was a time when I used to pull all nighters, either writing code or English, and it seemed to have much less of an effect on me. This morning, over the first cup of coffee, it seemed like my younger self was bullshitting myself back then. It takes a toll. But why did I do it?
Because when I dig into something, I want closure no matter how intangible it is. I imagine it’s much the same for other people as well. I have to put something to bed before I go to bed. And, because of the way I grew up and lived, I wake up before sunrise. I envy people who can oversleep, laying in their beds after the sun has risen. I’ve never truly been able to do that.
We have to remember that we need the sleep. There are plenty of medical reasons that can be given, and the Internet is full of those – but it comes down to how you feel. The mantra when I was younger was that “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and in retrospect that’s probably one of the dumbest things one can actually say.
There are times when we do have to stay up late, or even go without sleep, but it shouldn’t be over things that do not impact us directly. Employers and Human Resources plebians talk about work-life balance and all these other things. Only we lowly individuals can understand how to be most productive, and we need to control that more ourselves.
In this regard, I think the younger generations tend to get this more right than wrong.
The information will be there in the morning, and it will likely be more refined.