Shiri’s Margin Attractor

In the mathematical field of dynamic systems, an “attractor” is a state or set of states towards which a system tends to evolve. I posit I’ve found one.

Fans of Slate Star Codex will recall some seminal articles by Scott Alexander discussing culture war and media behavior, from which we can build the Shiri’s Margin Attractor theory directly by blending them with some HWFO material. In December of 2014, Scott published The Toxoplasma of Rage, a long look at his own blog’s traffic concerning what went viral and what didn’t.

Scott on the Rolling Stone UVA fake rape story debacle:

Only controversial things get spread. A rape allegation will only be spread if it’s dubious enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics. An obviously true rape allegation will only be spread if the response is controversial enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics – which is why so much coverage focuses on the proposal that all accused rapists should be treated as guilty until proven innocent.

And on Michael Brown:

I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.

And on his own blog:

Compare this to the three most viewed category of post. Politics is self-explanatory. Race and gender are a type of politics even more controversial and outrage-inducing than regular politics. And that “regret” all the way on the right is my “things i will regret writing” tag, for posts that I know are going to start huge fights and probably get me in lots of trouble. They’re usually race and gender as well, but digging deep into the really really controversial race and gender related issues.

The less useful, and more controversial, a post here is, the more likely it is to get me lots of page views.

By 2014 the cat was out of the bag to Slate Star readers that publishing controversial opinions gets you the most clicks, but I wasn’t a Slate Star reader at the time. HWFO started in 2018 talking about why nobody seems to understand the truth about gun policy mathematics, and landed on exactly the same conclusion in this post, which led to the very name of the blog you’re reading now:

From analysis of my own numbers, I determined that I was earning about a third of a penny per click, and so was Vox, and their organization is massive while mine’s not purely because of traffic. Which explained why Vox was lying in their gun graphs. They were doing it for traffic. I later confirmed the “third of a penny per click” number with Ken LeCorte, the former director of Fox News’s web division, in a podcast that appears to have been banned from Youtube. Censors really don’t like Ken LeCorte.

Later in 2018, Scott drove the point home with a fictional account of a tech company who trained an artificial neural network against Reddit posts to create the most controversial statement possible, a statement so controversial it could tear families, friendships, and societies apart. The story is Sort By Controversial, and the fictional software in it was called Shiri’s Scissor, which they inadvertently released upon themselves leading to a dust-up that caused half the software company to quit.

At no time in our five hours of arguing did this occur to us. We were too focused on the issue at hand, the Scissor statement itself. We didn’t have the perspective to step back and think about how all this controversy came from a statement designed to be maximally controversial. But at 8:01, when the argument was over and we had won, we stepped back and thought – holy shit.

We were too tired to think much about it that evening, but the next day we – Brad and the two remaining members of the coding team – had a meeting. We talked about what we had. Blake gave it its name: Shiri’s Scissor. In some dead language, scissor shares a root with schism. A scissor is a schism-er, a schism-creator. And that was what we had. We were going to pivot from online advertising to superweapons. We would call the Pentagon.

And so forth. It’s a good yarn, and what we drag from this yarn is the idea that modern media companies are not calibrated for truth in any way, they are calibrated to find things that are maximally controversial to generate the most thirds-of-a-penny possible. This is a repeated[1] theme[2] on HWFO, and foundational to our sensemaking approach[3].

This drive to create the most controversial content exists at the media layer, and the sharing layer, and the social media argument layer, and the three layers connect in three phases of the evolution of media itself.

Concocting controversy occasionally sold in the old era of traditional media with one newspaper and a hand full of broadcast TV channels, but it also turned people off because the media wasn’t targeted. One newspaper for the same town went to Republicans and Democrats and Socialists and Libertarians and People Named Steve on a subscription basis, and every car dealer published their ads in the same paper. The first step in Shiri’s Attractor was when 24 hour cable news factionalized with the founding of Fox News. Before, CNN advertised for Subaru station wagons and Dodge Ram pickup trucks equally, so they were beholden to provide content that each of those consumer demographics might watch. After Fox News started, Dodge bought Fox ads, Subaru doubled down on CNN, and such. This marked the first phase of demographic targeting of news, what we’ll call the Partisan News era, beginning in 1996.

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The second phase was the creation of the internet, which democratized and decentralized news. Anyone could be a news agency, anyone could seek out a news agency that confirmed their biases, and the fertile ground was laid for nigh infinite A-B testing for controversy. The Internet Era started in 2000, concurrent with the Partisan News Era, and our modern echo chambers begin to form, but the overall media consumer organism hasn’t maximally evolved for controversy.

The third phase, social media, allows consumers to more easily use the internet to share things with like minded people, and argue with opposite minded people, and the arguments carry references to more media, and the most controversial things get shared. This is is the actual A-B controversy testing function that the second phase lacked, and is what led Scott Alexander to notice the trends in his traffic, and I in mine, and Vox in theirs. The Social Media Era begins in 2008.

Shiri’s Attractor then comes together in the ballot box. If people vote based on their world, and their world is slowly being absorbed by attention whoring smartphones, and the attention whoring smartphones are full of media, and the media is seeking to make the most thirds of a penny out of maximum controversy, and the users of the smartphones are constantly A-B testing for controversy in their sharing behavior, then the world views of the public are going to divide along lines of controversy. That’s Shiri’s Attractor. If this dynamic mathematical system were indeed transpiring, we should be able to track it with data. The ballot box should be trending towards 50/50 splits. Or in other words, the gap between the winner and loser should be shrinking since 1996, and then generally flattening out.

Is it?

Testing the Attractor

If you take the presidential election popular vote totals for every year since 1900, isolate the two major parties, and chart the percent difference between the winner and loser, the results are noisy and look like this:

You can see a wide variation in results, with frequent 20%+ blowouts mixed into some races which were so close they might have been influenced by Guidos, but the wide variation all transpires in the pre-internet days. It’s difficult to make too much sense of this because of the variation, but with widely varying trend data we often do a rolling average to smoothing it and pick out the real trend. If we instead start our graph at 1908 and calculate a three-election rolling average from then on, we begin to see the real trend emerge:

Here I’ve colored the eras mentioned above, where Shiri’s Attractor should start to come into play. Before 2000 the eight year rolling average of the popular vote gap never goes below 7.3%. After 2000 it never goes above 5.1%. Even the individual year data after 2000 without any rolling averages never gets higher than 7.2%, during Obama’s “blowout” win. It’s clear from the data that something is suppressing the gap, meaning something is attracting the popular vote results towards the 50/50 boundary.

If you point this trend out to a partisan of either flavor they will disagree and blame the “other news” for being fake and increasingly misleading an ever larger number of people away from the truth - the “truth” that their news is telling them. While that’s possible, Shiri’s Attractor theory predicts that they’d both say that.

This is only one test because I’m not Nate Silver and don’t have a bunch of interns working for me, so I don’t consider this test to be conclusive proof of the theory. If Nate wants to run with it I welcome him and hope he’ll credit me or offer me a job. But presuming it’s true, we can take a look at how to use it.

Application: Guns

I’m agnostic to almost all political issues other than guns, but I do think quite a bit about gun activism in my spare time, and HWFO has mentioned before that Guns have effectively won the culture war:

Post 2020 “Guns” has the entertainment media, the courts, half the federal government, somewhere between 47% and 53% household ownership rate, more semi auto rifle owners than the entire Asian American population, around as many 10+ capacity mag owners as the entire Black population, Second Amendment sanctuary counties and states, and is making huge inroads in the gay community, the Asian community, the Black community, and the Jewish community. Half the states in the union have no permit to carry. The kids all want to buy the thing they used in Fortnite when they turn 18. This is what winning looks like. Shiri’s Attractor theory can show the gun rights community how to seal the deal.

Shiri’s Attractor puts a dynamic bound on elections at somewhere around 6%. The Republican contingent is so all-in on gun rights that they’re performatively wearing AR-15 pins in congress, so that puts the floor of gun rights at 50%. If Shiri’s Attractor establishes the election bound at 8% delta, that’s 54/46, exceeding even the delta on the 2008 Obama win. If one in ten regular Democrat voters began to value guns more than other issues, then the Democrat establishment must choose to permanently drop gun control from their platform or else lose forever. Either is a permanent win for guns.

This sort of analysis works for other issues too. The Democrats could easily apply this sort of analysis to abortion rights, for instance, and might make inroads into the Republican base by softening their ask and going for something more like what most of Europe has. The value in the Shiri’s Attractor analysis is it establishes the bound over which your issue wins, and while those bounds used to be very large, they’re now sucked in to the margin.

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I state now I unequivocally have one. It’s so easy it’s hard to believe nobody thought of it before, and all it will take is one good conversation with Zuckerberg to pull it off.

Just ban news from Facebook entirely.

“Things going viral on social media” isn’t inherently a problem in and of itself. “News makes money from clicks” isn’t inherently a problem in and of itself. “Human beings share their outrage” isn’t a problem in and of itself. The problem arises when those three things get mixed together, like a three reactant synthesis chemical reaction. Deprive this chemical reaction of one of the three reactants and the problem goes away.

Facebook was never supposed to be a free speech platform. It was never supposed to be the town square everyone made it into. It was never Mark Zuckerberg’s idea to host the great conversations of the world. Mark doesn’t like being drug in front of congress to defend his censorship policies, doesn’t like having to justify himself in front of a bunch of people who think the internet is made of pipes, and doesn’t like how he has to spend a shitpile of money implementing censorship policies to prevent people from using his platform to enact terrorism or stage coups. When congress asked how his platform even makes money, Zuck gave a three word response that summarizes the entire deal.

“We run ads.”

Facebook is an engagement platform where people self-publish and then Facebook uses the information they self-publish to target them with advertising. That’s all Facebook is. And if banning politics and the news entirely from Facebook didn’t interfere with their ability to create engagement, and therefore sell advertising, then Facebook not only has no incentive to keep political and news content on its platform, it actually has a significant financial incentive to get rid of all of it. Banning it all reduces “bad engagement” that might drive people off the platform, and also reduces the moderation burden.

And we now know, thanks to Canada getting froggy, that banning it all wouldn’t cost Facebook a dime anyway.

On December 14, 2022, Canada passed the “Online News Act,” mandating that any social media platform on which news was shared must share its profits with the news agencies. This would have created a large tracking burden for Facebook, to tag each share of a link as either “Canadian news” or “not Canadian news,” figure out how much ad money was generated by the share of each of those Canadian news specific links, and generate a payout for each, including tracking, international taxation, and all sorts of other garbage that Facebook doesn’t ordinarily do, given how none of its other creators or sharers or influencers receive a payout from Facebook. So instead of re-engineering their entire back-end infrastructure to appease the whims of Justin Trudeau, they decided instead to ban all Canadians from reading news on Facebook reducing their payout obligation under the law to zero.

Facebook began the Canada news ban in August of last year, Trudeau got all ragemad about it, Canadian news publishers had their traffic plunge as a result of the ban with some outlets attributing a drop of as much as 30% to it, and Google decided in November to negotiate what amounts to an extortion payoff instead of bothering with any of the law’s actual rules. But the important part is this - once the Facebook engagement numbers came in, they discovered their traffic didn’t change after the news ban.

Facebook had been working some deals with news agencies in Europe, but in September they began the process of divesting entirely from them, basically threatening to roll the Canada Plan out to the EU if the EU tried to “Canada” them. Australia tried a similar law but in the end basically used it as extortion in the same way the EU did.

But based on the numbers, Facebook doesn’t have to pay the extortion fees. They can literally just stop, thumb their nose at both the governments and the news, and still retain all of their revenue purely by letting people share cat videos and advertise for apps which give people more cat videos. And since a disproportionally large portion of their moderation burden is related to politics, the net amount of moderation they’d have to do will go down instead of up once the political shitposters move over to Twitter/X, where Elon is desperately trying to create a culture war shitfest anyway.

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Crystal Ball

If Zuck were to ban news from Facebook entirely, I expect we’d see the following effects:

• People would care less about news and politics,

• News agencies would be forced to pivot from per-click business models,

• News agencies would have reduced incentive for outrage-porn pieces,

• Facebook users would have a more pleasant experience, because most of the reason people quit Facebook over the last five years has been political in nature,

• Facebook’s engagement would grow, not shrink, because of a reduced toxicity level,

• Facebook’s ad revenue would rise as a result of its engagement growing,

• Twitter/X could act as a culture war containment zone, which will assuredly be taken over by ChatGPT or other LLM-AI driven bots anyway in the next three years,

• With the reduced incentive to go viral and feed echo chambers for profit, the news media might revert, ever so slightly, to producing news that’s a little less fake.

And the most curious thing about this idea, is it doesn’t take a committee or a government or an election or a consortium to achieve. The entire thing could be pulled off at the whim of one guy.

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On January 7th 2023, the online publication Quillette hosted a social event in New Orleans, for the readers to meet the writers. They charged a pretty penny to attend. As a former writer, I got a discount, and figured I’d check it out and do some people watching.

In retrospect I had the perfect date for this thing. Cute, smart, and completely uninitiated in culture war topics. Preparing her for the event and explaining what was going on at it sharpened my pencil. In most ways it was precisely what I predicted, but several aspects of the event surprised me, and a conversational theme unfolded leading me to believe that a path out of the modern media clickbait outrage porn hellscape may be forming.

That path began to materialize early in the evening when I met Quillette’s senior editor.

The Editor

I didn’t spend any time talking to Quillette’s CEO Claire Lehmann, other than to thank her for hosting the event, but early in the evening I had the opportunity to corner Quillette senior editor Jamie Palmer, by tactically blowing out a really awkward statement in a courtyard and watching the interlocutors cringe. One of the readers asked Jamie what impact the rise of Substack has had on Quillette’s traffic and whether they were seeing a dip because of the diversification of heterodox (read: “antiwoke”) publications. I said loudly into space from the corner of the conversation circle “well that’s what I did because I can make more money that way,” which prompted an awkward silence followed by an intriguing discussion. Jamie and I talked about the history of Quillette, specifically how it rose as the only true locus available in 2018 for what would later be understood as “antiwoke thought” in the emerging culture war axis spoken of extensively here on HWFO. We talked about how Quillette effectively acted as the tip of the spear, taking the brunt of the culture war heat and creating the space for Greenwald, Bari Weiss, and similar authors to breathe and launch their own publications. We spoke about the future of Quillette. His current vision seems to be to morph the thing into a heterodox version of the New Yorker. More long form material, more high brow events. This social seemed to be part of that overall plan - a way to create the air of a new “aristocracy of free thought,” and the people who attended seemed to have a deep desire to be part of that aristocracy.

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But I don’t think he sees the entire picture. I think he and Claire may have accidentally stumbled into what I’ve been calling “the new model,” and when they check their bank account today after assuredly netting five figures selling $150 tickets to a three hour cocktail party they’re going to start to get it. Jamie still thinks he’s the editor of a magazine. What he actually is, is a social nexus. Quillette made a shitpile of money this past weekend doing basically what I’m doing with HWFO. To understand how, we need to talk about the attendees.

They Came From Afar

My date and I drove the eight hours from Atlanta and stayed the night at the Ace Hotel, a fabulous stay spot when the hot water isn’t broken. (it was) I didn’t expect the event itself to be as well attended as it was - certainly over a hundred attendees. The venue was outstanding, the “Historic Swoop-Duggins House,” a restored home that probably sees a lot of action hosting weddings and corporate events. I spent exactly zero time trying to talk to writers, and spent as much time as possible trying to figure out who comes to these things.

An elderly couple drove down from Michigan and stopped for the party on their way to Florida. We met people from Indiana, Wales, New Zealand, Australia, Texas, and the east and west coast of the USA. Mostly intellectuals. A theoretical physicist who’s also an ordained minister apparently married two of the attendees on the street at the after party. In one of the slickest bar tricks I’ve ever seen, one attendee went straight for my date and said, “You’re Cantonese aren’t you?” “Why yes, how did you know?” “I’m a geneticist.” What a fantastic pickup line. I bet he gets a lot of tail with it. Only a day later did I come to realize I literally already follow him on Twitter. Bravo sir.

More than once I heard someone self-describe as an “avid reader.” Some flew but many drove. They all seemed to have similar stories that brought them there. Everyone I met had been burned in some way by the rise of Woke ideology, and was desperate to share. One of the most vicious burns was shared to me by Shannon Thrace, who went by “Shay” at the party.

She’d been a guest on the Quillette podcast talking about how her husband fell into transgender ideology and it eroded and destroyed their marriage, and subsequently wrote a book about it, curiously ending with her finding love again, but with a woman.

I spoke with my date about this curious connection all the readers seemed to have. Each of them seemed to need a shared social space where they could breathe freely and discuss “heterodox” topics, but it was clear the topics were almost entirely about wokeness related grievances. They drove a long way and paid a significant amount of money to participate in this social space. Meet the writers. Meet each other. Share their stories. Get married by physicists on sidewalks. These are people ostracized by their tribe, even perhaps their own spouse, seeking a new one.

And that’s when I realized that Quillette’s doing the same thing I’ve been doing since January 2021, just doing it differently.

The Substack business model says to write a bunch of free articles, get everyone hooked, and then roll out a paid subscription granting access to the rare super-duper-totally-better article that only the fanboi-est of the the fanbois get to read. I’m making about ten grand a year on this publication with a 4% free:paid conversion rate without ever releasing a single paid article. I give my stuff away for free and still get paid for it, because I give the paid subscribers something unique and different: a virtual social space equivalent to Quillette’s physical one from this past weekend.

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My subscribers aren’t paying for the content at all, because I give that away for free. They might not even have paid me if I was only selling content. They’re paying for the social group. The new tribe.

Throwing Parties

I got pretty salty last year when Quillette moved my only article for them, a treatise on how my wife’s and my own stoicism differed during her cancer and eventual death, behind a subscriber only pay wall without my permission. So I reposted it here.

Handwaving Freakoutery

She Did Not Go Gently

In August 2017, my wife Buffy was diagnosed with early onset colon cancer. She was 41 years old. In April 2019, she passed away. Our five-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son lost their mother. I…

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4 years ago · 89 likes · 14 comments · Handwaving Freakoutery

In my imagination, I suspect they probably did it because they started to lose money from the Great Substack Migration Palmer and I discussed in the early evening. In my imagination, I envision that these Quillette Socials are Quillette exploring new revenue models, to not only build their brand in a different direction but perhaps also build something entirely new, a cultural revenue model that breaks the chains of clickbait.

In my imagination, I see myself doing the same thing. In fact, I plan on hosting the first of many similar events at my own home this spring or summer, a weekend pool party of readers so the paid subscribers who engage with each other on HWFO Slack can finally put faces to names.

In my imagination, I foresee other outlets pursuing similar models, encouraging subscription or donation by fostering community instead of peddling freakoutery, and I see the consumers of media devoting their time and attention to outlets who follow this new model.

In my imagination, I fancy that these new micro societies will become ways to build community in online spaces the way churches build micro societies in physical spaces, knitting the societal fabric together for money, instead of pulling it apart for money.

In my imagination, I see the world pulling ourselves out of the morass of outrage porn by throwing parties.

But I’ve been known to be overly fanciful at times, so maybe I’m just full of shit.

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Ken LaCorte is a former Fox News Executive and used to be somewhat or largely responsible for their web content arm. He left them, started his own media thing, and got in deep with the New York Times for some of the things he was doing on social media, got cancelled and his Facebook page nuked, and now he’s running podcasts and doing some other stuff. This was a fun discussion, light on the deeper HWFO material. No yammering about “egregores” or similar. What I liked about it was I was able to get his perspective from inside a media giant on how they work, as I tried to flip the thing into less of an interview and more of a discussion.

It’s also significantly shorter than many of my other appearances, so it should be easier to digest. Have fun with it.

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As David Smith points out here, the reason people watch Joe Rogan is not because they trust that he’s always true, but rather that they trust he’s not intentionally and willfully lying to them:

I believe the Joe Rogan listeners would be okay with Joe Rogan’s cancellation if they had assurances that the alternatives were going to stop intentionally and willfully lying to them. To that end, I have crafted a set of terms that I think would be acceptable by both sides. Here are the terms.

• Every journalist who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction is cancelled.

• Every journalist who claims there is a bivariate correlation between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate is cancelled.

• Every journalist who said the lab leak theory of Covid-19 origin was racist or conspiracy theory is cancelled.

• Every journalist who calls a bi-yearly medical treatment with a 30% or less chance of preventing disease transmission “a vaccine” is cancelled.

• Every journalist who said Russia meaningfully influenced the results of the 2016 US election is cancelled.

• Every journalist who promulgated the “MAGA Hat Kids” story is cancelled.

• Every journalist who refused to even be remotely skeptical about Epstein killing himself is cancelled.

• Every journalist who’s ever published anything about IQ is cancelled.

• Every journalist, corporate entity, or government entity who has ever said the phrase “HORSE DEWORMER” is cancelled.

• Every journalist who has ever said the phrase “healthy at any size” is cancelled.

• Every journalist who misrepresented known facts about Kyle Rittenhouse is cancelled.

• Every journalist who called a year long protest which did approximately as much property damage as a Category 2 hurricane “mostly peaceful” is cancelled.

There are a tremendous number of other potential entries to this list, but this list is comprehensive enough that if we cancel all journalists who said any one of them, it’s very likely they’re also guilty of saying most of the rest, and probably guilty of promulgating any number of additional list entries so this list should suffice.

Take all these journalists and put all their heads on pikes, and I promise to deliver you Joe’s as a willful sacrifice.

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This article isn’t about that.

This article is about one of the curious bounce backs from the podcast, as the internet grabbed it, churned it, and made new things out of it. This article is about the music of the new. The synthesis of knowledge by referential means. The ways in which neural connections are made in the global netbrain.

In a former life I was a DJ at WREK Atlanta, and founded The Mobius, which remains to this day the longest running electronic music specialty show in the southeastern United States. At the time, in the 1990s, electronic music was still in an emergent growth phase, and the people involved in its production spent a lot of time talking about high concepts that have since leaked out into all aspects of our modern internet zeitgeist. One of them was Aural Hypertext.

Aural Hypertext

I don’t recall exactly where I first heard this term, but I believe it was in an NPR interview with DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.

The interview fades from my mind, and is not readily Googlable given the time and place it happened, so perhaps I’m imagining all of it or misconstruing it through the fog of memory detached from the shared memory bank that is the web. But I recall the gist of it being something like this. When an electronic musician samples an older song to mix that sample into a new work, they create a mental link back to that prior work, and all of the memory and embodiment of that prior work becomes embedded in the new song. Then when another musician samples that song, the memory of both works becomes embodied in the new work. And so forth until, at the pinnacle of the Great Tree of Remixes, you have the Uber Song, a collective work which is entirely referential and yet entirely a synthesis of all prior works.

This was the kind of crap we used to talk about, back then.

Electronic music has now fully matured and captured almost all elements of all other genres. Very few musicians of any genre perform without someone in the back running a sample bank in Ableton Live. Some musicians, such as myself, perform entirely out of this sample bank, with clips and instrumentation performed previously, and focus all our performance on creating a unique-to-the-moment live mix of prior instrumentation. Like this benefit show I did for RAINN:

Click here for the audio of that show

Some musicians don’t even bother to do this. A controversial tumblr post a decade ago by Deadmau5 exposed the most prominent EDM acts of the time when he said, “we all just hit play,” meaning the complicated Ableton project in the background was not merely the only thing running, but it was running itself and the famous EDM acts behind the decks were basically dancing around and faking the whole thing. Millie Vanilli for the modern age. Maui Threv, a fellow of mine at WREK who took up the Mobius mantle after I retired, once famously did an entire “two laptop set” by pressing play on one laptop and installing Windows on the other laptop, on stage.

The Medium is The Message

Marshall McLuhan stated in his 1964 opus on emergent media of the day, “The Medium Is The Message.” We at the radio show used to apply his theories to our arguments about electronic music. At the time in the 90s, there was a great schism among club DJs about whether or not to pivot from spinning vinyl to CDs, and to understand the schism, which I assure you was very deep, we have to talk a bit about the evolution of electronic music.

Modern electronic music traces one of its roots to travelling Jamaican “sound systems” which would set up and throw parties for villages. They would blend live instrumentation with delay effects boxes and tape loops, overdubbing a recording onto a mobius loop of magnetic tape while playing it at the same time, to create unique repetitions that formed the backbone for “Dub Music.” Lee Scratch Perry was a notable artist, and heavily influential on more modern electronic acts such as The Orb.

Hip hop began using turntables as an instrument themselves in the late 1970s and early 1980s. House music emerged in the late 1980s in Chicago and other US urban centers, and built itself around a concept known as the “continuous beat matched set,” where a DJ would play music for a party from a host of records which all had approximately the same tempo and beat signature, and the DJ would mix the audio from two records together on the fly by adjusting the pitch settings so the tempos matched, beats matched, crossfading between the two records so the music never stopped. They took twelve songs and made one giant song from them and the dancing continued.

Circle to the 1990s. The first step to becoming a talented club DJ in the 90s was learning to beat match vinyl. The second step was buying a whole ass ton of vinyl, and the third was figuring out what to do creatively with the first two steps. This took practice and skill and investment. The emergence of CDJ rigs, which played compact disks instead of vinyl, automated these steps, removing the need for beatmatching skills and lowering the bar for vinyl collection. And there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth at the time among the vinyl DJs that using these tools was not being a “real musician.”

But the punk bands looked at the vinyl DJs and said they weren’t real musicians. And the jazz ensembles looked at the punk bands and said they weren’t real musicians. And the dude playing third violin in the Atlanta symphony making crap wages with his Juilliard diploma looked at the whole mess and groaned while he ate ramen.

We went meta. If Mr. Julliard was a musician, and so was the punk band, and so was the vinyl DJ, then obviously the CDJ DJ was a musician, and as the tools scaled every link in the chain was a musician. We at The Mobius were doing radio sets by blending vinyl, CDs, stuff from these new Apple portable hard drives (“iPods”), old 8 track carts, 1970s reel to reel recordings from Vietnam, and even playing transistor radio signals from police scanners into the station microphone, mixing it all up. Our instrument wasn’t even the CDJ, our instrument extended all the way to the 40-kilowatt antenna near 10th Street, and by extension, the speakers in people’s cars. And now the internet is itself the tool. Youtube is an instrument. The medium is the message.

Rebel Wisdom and The Meta Egregore

This thing from the 1990s continues with new technology, and it happened to me, without my permission or knowledge, but the results of it are really weird and worth sharing. This is the Rebel Wisdom podcast with David Fuller:

This is the first-tier abstraction of the podcast, a blend of commentary and reaction video by Paul VanderKlay, a Christian minister, Jordan Peterson fan, and IDW critic who uses elements of this corner of internet thought in his theological arguments:

I’ve skimmed most of it, and I would characterize it as generally in the form of “dunking on materialist atheists for discovering theological concepts without realizing it.” This dunk may or may not be applicable to David, but I got a chuckle out of it because Paul isn’t plugged in (yet) to the religious analysis layer of HWFO.

This is the second-tier abstraction:

It was put together by Chris Petkau, a member of the internet community Paul fosters who does these sorts of musical video remixes of Paul’s material for fun on his small Youtube channel. I loved it.

And in this chain of Youtubes, we can see DJ Spooky’s Aural Hypertext manifest in full. A reference of a reference of a source, the source of which is also deeply referential. These are the threads the internet is building to bind all knowledge in the memory of man.

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In the past half-decade, the social media space has pivoted heavily away from people sharing articles, and towards people sharing memes. Memes, for our purposes in this article, shall refer not to overall memetic ideas spreading through the evolutionary intellectual space as Richard Dawkins outlined in The Selfish Gene, but rather funny photos with captions that folks post to Facebook, Reddit, or 4chan.

This shift has been pronounced, and oft maligned, but I think it makes a lot of sense mathematically if you understand what’s going on in the social media superorganism. And I have a very good example of this from the last two weeks, which we can use to compare mathematically.

Case Background

When the HWFO publication isn’t dwelling on media criticism or societal analysis or bemoaning the financial incentives that drive the culture war, we talk about guns. Quite honestly, most of our traffic is about guns. But we do so in an apolitical, numbers driven way, without calling anyone a libtard or a Trumpkin or a snowflake or a teabagger. That approach has found purchase in the online liberal gun owning community, because they have few modern outlets focusing on gun rights that aren’t trying to actively insult them.

In particular, our gun material gets a lot of traffic on a subreddit called r/liberalgunowners, and I unabashedly admit to self-promotion there.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2020, 22,000 citizens showed up in Richmond armed to the teeth and staged one of the most peaceful, clean, and orderly protests of that type and magnitude in American history. The anti-gun media, both before and after the protest, painted the entire thing as a racist, white nationalist rally. The online liberal and centrist gun owning community were starved for shareable examples to contradict that narrative, so they tweeted out pictures of this lady:

…and these guys:

…and such.

SHOT Show began the following day in Las Vegas, an industry only gun convention in Las Vegas put on by the NSSF. I attended with the Open Source Defense (OSD) group, to make media connections.

On Thursday, OSD recorded a podcast with Guns Guide to Liberals and Douglas Jefferson, the vice president of the National African American Gun Association. I stuck Jon’s selfie up on reddit. It got 634 upvotes.

I also did a far more exhaustive summary of my experiences at SHOT, put it into an article, and stuck that article up on reddit. I even included the same photo. It got 145 upvotes.

Why did a picture get 634 upvotes, and a much more detailed informational piece about not only that podcast but the entire week only get 145? I think the answer partly goes back to the concept of memes as data compression.

Case Study

The point of media is to convey an idea. Facts are only necessary to buttress the idea, and vacant facts lacking a raison de tere are of no value. The net, the media, and such, are a sea of ideas, so the idea density within a media piece is the important factor when we look at data compression. Let’s look at the 146 upvote article link first. It points to here:

Handwaving Freakoutery at SHOT Show 2020 - The Open Source Defense group goes to Vegas, to meet an interesting and diverse cast of characters.

When I skim this article, I count somewhere around twenty-four general ideas, some relatively brief, some elaborated fairly explicitly. Here’s an example of one idea from the article:

The gun community commonly holds that gun ownership is to protect yourself or your family when an armed authority is unable to respond in a timely manner to a violent situation, or is unwilling to do so, or both. The anti-gun community commonly dismisses this as a minor problem, or sheer paranoia. But the historical experiences of the black community are a direct counterexample to this dismissal.

We might summarize this idea by saying, “the history of black people in the United States supports the case for private gun ownership.”

Here’s another, simpler idea:

The following day, we met one of [F.A.B Defense’s] Instagram models that Chuck also helped get back online, after a Turkish hacker had stolen her account. She was very friendly.

We might summarize this idea by saying “gun bunnies are alluring.” You be the judge.

(You can tell they haven’t been firing the PCC she’s carrying recently because her fingers are on the suppressor. They get hot.)

Twenty-four ideas conveyed in an approximate ten minute read. This is a 2.4 idea per minute compression rate.

Now let’s look at the photo.

Out of context, this photo conveys no ideas. In the context explained above, it only conveys two:

Liberals like guns too.

Black people like guns too.

That’s it. But those ideas are conveyed in around one second. That’s a compression rate of 120 ideas per minute. The photo in context conveys ideas at a rate fifty times faster than the article. We have this understanding that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and by my guess that estimate isn’t too far off, but the important thing about pictures is they convey those words quickly.

Application to the Attention Economy

The “attention economy” is a concept that’s been bandied about by future thinking media organizations quite a bit, and has been touched on several times here.

Can Fortnite Rescue Humanity from the Attention Economy War?

The Social Media Catastrophe

If you don’t feel like reading back, we might summarize this idea by saying the following. People’s attention spans are a fixed quantity, and in order for media entities to extract the most of that fixed resource, in a Tragedy of the Commons scenario, they pivot to several different strategies. Outrage porn headlines put them in front of the line when extracting clicks from the smartphone addicted public, but shortened articles mean they can convey their (perhaps more poorly supported) idea in a faster time, necessitating less of the shared resource to convey the idea. Hit pieces capitalize on our data compression paradigm.

Internet memes capitalize on it further. This one is my favorite example.

This is admittedly a very libertarian meme, and libertarian thought triggers some people. My point here is not to say the meme is correct or right in an objective sense, but rather purely to critique the meme from the standpoint of idea compression rate.

First off, it’s got cats. Every good internet meme has a cat. Idea 1: Cats are cute and cool and everybody who isn’t a monster likes cats. Idea 2: Government is wasteful. They spent all this money to paint a stripe on the curb and painted a cat. Idea 3: Government is heartless. What monster would paint a cat? Idea 4: It invokes the well-known “But muh roads!” rebuttal to libertarian thought, wherein libertarians say we don’t need government, and anti-libertarians say “but without government, there wouldn’t be any roads,” which is a deep and long argument that plays out thousands of times daily in our culture war, chocked full of hundreds more ideas. The opening two words “without government” are not merely an idea, they’re a mental hyperlink to a bundle of hundreds or more other ideas.

This meme takes three seconds to process. Conservatively that’s an 80 ideas per minute compression rate, presuming the embedded memetic hyperlink only counts as one idea, when in fact it should count as many more. And it contains embedded instructions on when and how to share it.

(if) “but without government ___”

(then) “post pic # 382 from phone”

Application to the Superorganism

We have spoken extensively here about modeling the modern social media engine as a legitimate, verifiable brain, which works in the same manner as an artificial neural network.

We might summarize this idea as follows. People behave on social media in the exact same way as neurons in a brain. Your feed is a series of impulses you gather from your dendrites (connections), you evaluate which of those signals to amplify, and then you like or share a signal, sending it down your axon (repost) to other neurons. This evaluation you make, about whether to share something or not, is performed based on an internal function rooted partially in your biology, but probably rooted largely in your indoctrinations.

The main difference between social media and a human brain is that the neurons are sending 1s and 0s, fire or don’t fire, whereas the information being conveyed in social media are ideas, which are comprised of a tremendous amount of additional information. If each word is a Wittgensteinian composition of a hundred signals, and an article or picture is worth a thousand words, then each share of an idea is maybe a hundred thousand neurons firing in the social media metabrain. That’s a garbage number, that’s probably far too low, but pretend that’s right. If we look at internet usage per minute statistics, we’ve got somewhere around 270 million ideas spreading per minute through the internet. That’s 450 billion signals per second.

An average neuron in the human brain fires between 0.1 and 2 times per second, and the brain has 86 billion neurons. Based on our very bad garbage estimation translating ideas into bits, this social media internet thing is already “thinking” five times faster than a human brain, with each of us playing a role as a neuron. And as our general internet language pivots to memes, this rate will increase as much as fifty-fold. Critiquing the “Wittgenstein Garbage” part of the estimation would necessarily lead us to revise this number upward.

And the metabrain neurons (people) who pivot more towards meme sharing will be able to fire more, thereby producing a disproportionate influence on the thought patterns of the overall metabrain.

I guess what we’re saying here is to quit college and go be a memelord.

Also, if someone can distil this article into memeform, that’d be great.

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Being An Adult

Someone I do not know named Oliver Blanchard posted a meme on Facebook in 2018, accompanied by his analysis of why the meme is wrong. It was shared 21,000 times, and his analysis was basically an elaborate justification for why it’s okay to hate someone based on for whom they voted.

https://www.facebook.com/olivier.a.blanchard/posts/10156879016273530

How internet memes are used to manipulate your behaviors: An example.

Chances are that you have seen this meme floating around, especially around elections. It isn't what you think it is. It is not a friendly digital handshake. It isn't meant to help neighbors mend fences. It is a deliberate instrument of psychological manipulation.

I worked in Marketing for nearly two decades. I know this kind of device when I see it. Let me explain.

1. The image

Note the childlike simplicity of the image, the super basic smiling face. The finger pointing up at it. The open posture. The baby-like head. What part of the brain is this image stimulating? It looks like the kind of flip card used in psychological tests, right? Or something from a children's book. Why do you think that is? What emotions is this image designed to instantly trigger?

2. The message

Now note the subtlety of the message, layered over the image: I'm the adult. You're the child. Also note the cleverly toned-down passive-aggressive scolding, the peer pressure at the root of it. (You want to be an adult too, right? Don't you want to be a grown-up?)

3. Script-flipping

Note how it flips the script: "No matter what I do, I'll still be your friend" is flipped to "no matter what you do, I'll still be your friend." It's easy to miss. Take a second to appreciate the insidious cleverness of that technique.

4. Accountability avoidance

It makes you (the "child") feel guilty and "bad" for holding someone (the "adult") accountable for their harmful actions.

It also changes the subject from an objective harmful action (voting for a divisive, hate-filled, or antidemocratic agenda, for instance) to the subjective realm of "being friends" and the emotional safety that comes from preserving social bonds.

5. Tapping into the human operating system

If it wasn't already clear, beyond the deflection, it's also an authority play. It exploits hardwired adult-child archetypes AND people's need to belong and feel accepted by their peers.

Psychological manipulation: That's all this meme is about. (Or did you think it was designed by some random soccer mom somewhere?) This meme is deliberate. It was designed by people who know exactly what they are doing and how to achieve the response they want.

The purpose of this meme and others like it is to normalize malicious political views and suppress pushback, using guilt, confusion, and social pressure as subconscious levers of control. It is not designed to bring people together regardless of their political views. That is not its purpose.

Learn to spot when you're being manipulated by online memes.

PS: Whatever "side" you may be on, and whatever your politics may be, if you're sharing this meme, either you've been had, or your penchant for gaslighting is showing.

Despite how unsophisticated it looks, this is one of the best ones I've seen.

This statement is doing basically all the work in Mr. Blanchard’s meme analysis post:

"(voting for a divisive, hate-filled, or antidemocratic agenda, for instance)"

That statement presumes that one side of a vote is obviously [that] while another side of a vote is obviously [not that]. In our media system, each side views the other side as [that], so given the parameters in which we actually make sense of the world, his analysis advocates segregation and tightening of echo chambers around political myths.

Now let’s add Rittenhouse to the analysis.

One rather extreme red myth going right now, which I heard as recently as yesterday, is that the blues hate Rittenhouse because he shot a pedophile, because the Blues are pedophile sympathizers. If we take this red myth as true, and then apply the meme analysis to that myth, the analysis justifies the reds severing ties with their blue friends over their presumed pedophilia sympathy.

I do not believe that particular red myth is true. I just think most of the blues have been fed a very extreme set of lies and omissions about the entire Kenosha outburst from beginning to end, that the riots themselves were a product of “mostly good people” trying to make sense of this extreme set of lies, and that a second layer of lies was piled on the first about what happened during the Rittenhouse encounter to cover up the first layer. And that people are so invested in these lies that they can't recalibrate their opinions. I don't hate them for buying into these lies, because it's not their fault. I can remain their friend no matter who they vote for. I can act the meme, because acting the meme is far more adult than severing a friend relationship over their misunderstanding about an issue or situation.

In short, Mr. Blanchard’s meme analysis presumes a truth-seeking function exists that is objective and works, but this truth seeking function is completely missing from our modern discourse. And I can already tell you without knowing Mr. Blanchard at all what his opinions are of Kyle Rittenhouse, because of whose Facebook wall I lifted the link to his global post.

Let’s do Rittenhouse

I typed the following summary up from memory a few days ago in a Facebook argument. Since then I have fact checked the entire thing, and only found three factual errors in it. Read it and see if you can find the errors. It is a reply to a blue tribe friend I’ve known for decades who enjoys sparring with me on my wall, and whom I consider a good friend, who asked me “you aren’t siding with this shitbag, are you?” My response:

You were sold a completely warped picture of what happened in Kenosha by a biased media feeding an echo chamber to make money off of clicks. The full story of what happened could not, possibly, in any way, convince anyone to side against Rittenhouse. This is what actually happened.

First off, the Jacob Blake shot by the cops was totally legitimate. Blake was an accused rapist and wife beater waiting to go to trial for raping his baby mama, and there was a restraining order on him and a warrant for his arrest. He broke the restraining order and was attempting to kidnap their kids in the baby mama’s car. Baby mama called the cops. Cops showed up. They did everything they could to use nonlethal force to stop him from kidnapping the kids and it didn't work, and he beat up a cop while trying to drive away after shrugging off several taser hits, stealing the car. They couldn't just let him go because if they did, the kids would be in danger of a high-speed chase. The cops had no choice but to shoot Blake to protect the children after Blake had every repeat opportunity to avoid the situation. Then the media grabbed a couple videos of it, edited out everything except for the gunshot, and told a lie about what happened to get people to riot. The entire protest was dumb from the beginning and if you supported that protest you're either tremendously misinformed or secretly evil. Almost assuredly the former, because very few people are secretly evil. Pedophiles, wife beaters, and armed robbers excepted.

Next, out of town Antifa kids, including another rapist, another wife beater, and an armed robber, showed up in Kenosha and burned buildings for three days while the cops tried not to stop them because they were worried about escalating things. For two straight days they roamed the streets and burned peoples homes and workplaces, and they didn't even live there. The black folks from Kenosha weren't burning buildings, the white west coast out of towners were.

On the third day of protests, the boog folks showed up to try and stop the rioters from burning buildings because the cops refused to do it. There was a big protest at city hall, the cops formed a line to prevent them from burning the local government building to the ground, and forced the protesters into the streets. The boogs tried to defend the businesses. The aforementioned rapist, wife beater, and armed robber tried to set fire to a gas station. Rittenhouse put the fire out, which is why they attacked him.

While being attacked, Rittenhouse did the exactly correct thing to do when being armed and attacked with nonlethal weapons, which is withdraw. He was fleeing being attacked when an Antifa member fired an illegal gun into the air to try and make him think they were shooting at him. He returned fire and killed the rapist. This is absolutely legal and proper defensive gun use. Then he continued to retreat to try and eliminate the situation, when the wife beater tried to tackle him and take his gun away, so he shot him. Then he continued to retreat when the armed robber drew a gun on him and pointed it at him so he shot him. Then he continued to retreat and they finally let him.

When this trial is over the Rittenhouse case is going to be taught in DGU classes because he did everything right. What he did was above and beyond correct, both legally, and technically, except for potentially one violation of firearm possession minutiae that's a dumb inconsequential law, and I expect him to be found guilty of some level of firearm possession minutiae.

Further, if you're going to pick a side culturally, you have to choose between a boy scout medic who came to a town to prevent it from being burned, and a roaming band of rapists, wife beaters, and robbers trying to burn a town down.

What facts in this from-memory rant were wrong? Did you catch them?

Rosenbaum was an out of towner, Huber was a local, Grosskreutz was from out of town but nearby.

Rosenbaum was indeed a multiple repeat pedophile sexual predator and used to date single mothers as an attack vector to get to their children. Huber was indeed a repeat domestic abuser, although not explicitly a wife beater. Grosskerutz was never convicted of armed robbery, he was just indicted and pled out in return for his state testimony against Rittenhouse, a fact Snopes (for instance) omitted.

While we’re at it, here are some other notable Snopes omissions: It’s not only the defense’s position that Kyle heard a gunshot prior to turning on Rosenbaum, but also the position of the New York Times after extensive video review. Grosskreutz did not have his hands up when Rittenhouse shot him, but in fact was pointing a handgun directly at Rittenhouse and later bragged on social media that his goal was to empty his magazine into Rittenhouse. Snopes completely left out the context of three consecutive days of anarchist arson, of no fire protection due to the anarchy, and of no police presence because they were being fully utilized to prevent the arson of City Hall, over a completely legitimate police action.

Compare my account above, with the small errors fixed, with any single article on the instance by NPR, CNN, Vox, or any blue tribe media source. They are missing almost all of the important information. The co-host of The Young Turks, a deeply progressive/liberal podcast, quipped that she did not even know until this week that the men shot by Rittenhouse weren’t black. Half of the country literally has no idea what actually happened, but holds views on the instance so deeply that they may burn buildings again after Kyle is acquitted due to self-defense. They’re going to claim the acquittal is because of a biased judge, and demand political action against Kyle. Biden will have to appease these people somehow.

The important thing to realize here is that if most of the Blue Tribe knew the facts, they’d run like hell from any opinion whatsoever in this trial. Rioting because a wife beating kidnapping rapist got shot does not fit #METOO, nor does defending a serial pedophile and another wife beater. They have no idea who they’re supporting, because if they did then the story would get no clicks.

It.

Would.

Get.

No.

Clicks.

The evil actor in this situation is certainly not Kyle Rittenhouse. But it also isn’t, by my read, the people who hate him. The evil actor is the media that made them hate him for clickbait profit, to cover up their prior act of inciting an arsonist riot for clickbait profit. Or, alternately, the evil actor is the business model abstraction itself which drives the media entities to behave this way, because if they didn’t do it someone else would.

In short, the Nash Equilibrium of Handwaving Freakoutery strikes again.

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I’ll post a link to the podcast when it goes live.

This article is weird. Please bear with me, because it’s hopeful, and hope is good, and in woefully short supply even among the people like you and I who are trying their best not to peddle despair. We’ve crafted an analysis of the current human condition that’s fairly grim in the past year, across a myriad of articles, so before we get to the hope, let’s recap the grimdark in plain English before we pivot to talking about video games.

In the Grim Dark Future of 2020, There is Only (Culture) War

We are all addicted to our smartphones. They are very finely crafted to suck our attention. We get a dopamine fix from even turning them on, and we get a larger dopamine fix from liking and sharing things. The more time we spend on them, the more of our actual lives are influenced by the virtual space, and the virtual space is very different than the real space. In real space, homicides are at historic lows, terrorism is barely a thing, mass shootings are fabulously rare, and gun ownership doesn’t really matter all that much in the numbers. In real space, chromosomes dictate biological sex, men and women have statistically measurable differences in their interests, and the impact of Isms (sexism, racism, Islamism, communism) on our modern lives are also historically low for most people. In the real world, who we are is a blend of nature and nurture, a blend of genetic capabilities and behavioral predispositions, and of white space into which givens, thoughts, and behaviors are installed.

But there’s a problem. The phones are controlled by companies who want you to use the phones more, so there’s a feed. They call it a feed for a reason, because it’s a conveyor belt that feeds you brainstuff, and your brain eats it, and installs it into that whitespace. And they get the most money when you eat the most brainstuff. This requires your attention.

The content creators of the brainstuff, largely dominated by what we might call legacy media outlets, have a deep psychological understanding of what makes you share the brainstuff in your feed to your friends’ feeds. Anxiety and fear drive sharing, sharing drives traffic if it fits certain echo chamber narratives, and their entire business model is based around clicks. And when people like your shares, you get yet more dopamine, so you become addicted to the anxiety and fear. And Facebook rises to fill that market demand, as if by magic.

Furthermore, no media outlet can bail on this business model, because they’re competing for market share in a limited resource space — the fixed resource of human attention spans. A classic “tragedy of the commons” problem develops, because people’s attention hours don’t scale with the amount of available media, and there’s no way to control the number of media sources competing for that attention resource. They can’t back away from peddling outrage porn, because if they did, they’d lose market share, so we all march hand in hand towards internecine violence, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, and dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

This overall analysis framework, less perhaps the doomsaying and Ghostbusters quotes, is apparently permeating the big dogs within the “Attention Economy” itself, and that’s where our story may turn surprisingly towards the better.

WTF is Fortnite Anyway?

Fortnite is a very, very successful video game.

“That’s some shooter game that kids play and do dances, right?” Au contraire, mon frère.

I mean, yes, it is in fact that. But it’s more. It’s not anywhere near as beautiful, deep, and perfect a game as Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but the guys who cooked Fortnite up are either geniuses, or very lucky.

When I was in sixth grade in an urban Atlanta burb, we did the MC Hammer. We did it on the playground. We did it in the halls. We did it on the bus when the bus driver wasn’t looking. You remember the MC Hammer, right? Of course, you do.

If you are remotely within my approximate age band, deep behavioral triggering will probably activate if a random person on the street walks up to you and says:

Stop.

Hammer time.

You might in fact start dancing. At the minimum, you may have to mentally quell the urge, which was installed in the whitespace of your head by MTV, combined with infrastructure and business hierarchies in the form of RIAA and the record labels. Fortnite is that powerful, and they got there from a unique blend of game design elements and business tricks.

One:

They stole a good idea.

In the deep belly of video game culture, we find people called “modders.” They’re deeply committed video game addicts with coding skills, who take games they like and create “mods” of them, remixing them into game variants, or totally new games. It’s their hobby. In 2013, some modder called “PlayerUnknown” cooked up a shooter mod based on a Japanese book/movie called “Battle Royale.” Some people maintain that Hunger Games itself was a Battle Royale rip-off. For our purposes, accept that if you know Hunger Games, you know the plot. Everyone gets stuck inside a boundary with no starting weapons and tries to kill each other with whatever they find. Last man standing.

This mod went so big that PlayerUnknown (a.k.a. Brendan Greene) found his way into building a new video game around the concept: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG. Being developed in South Korea, it went very big there, and going big there means you get big everywhere, so this game got very big.

Fortnite was over on the side — a bit of a team survival game where you bash down materials and make forts. A nicer looking, somewhat different, Minecraft. They stole the Battle Royale idea from PUBG, shoehorned it into their game, and by March of 2018, had overtaken PUBG in terms of market share.

Two:

They made it cartoony.

Adults don’t hate cartoony games. Just ask Super Mario. But they very much dislike their kids playing gory ones. Just ask Skyrim. In choosing “cartoony,” they had a wider market.

Three:

They gave it away for free.

You can install Fortnite Battle Royale right now, for free, on any device you own. Try it.

That’s the foundation — combine all that in a blender. Parents are more likely to let their kids play this game than any other game out there, because it passes the “cartoony” test, and they don’t have to pay for it. It becomes popular among adults because it’s cross platform, accessible by anyone, and has addictive gameplay. Also again because it’s free. It becomes popular among adults with kids because it hits that sweet spot of Aging Gamer Wants To Spend Time With Children But Hates Pokemon. Playing it is no harder than installing Netflix on your Roku. We’ll return to Netflix below.

And then, once they had everyone’s attention, they plopped in MC Hammer. For a tiny bit of money, you too can do “the Floss” while you’re running for your life, building buildings, and terrorizing your opponents. The circle is complete, to the tune of two hundred and ten million dollars per month, and all they’re actually selling is dances, costumes, and fluff. In 2018, they basically matchedMTV’s gross earnings at their 1997 peak. Just that one game. And they have way more viewers. Fortnite has 125 million players world-wide, and pegs out at over three million players actively playing at times.

International soccer players did Fortnite dances in the World Cup. NFL players followed suit. Major League Baseball has been screaming about Fortnite addiction in their players since last May, and are now worried about it literally infecting the clubhouse itself. Baseball players are playing Fortnite during games. Probably some spectators too, because let’s face it, baseball is boring.

The executives in the rest of the Attention Economy are freaked out, but I’m not. I wonder if we can conceive a way to leverage this thing to escape the spiraling culture war.

Fortnite as a Template for Culture War Armistice

Bijan Stephen wrote one of the best articles I’ve read in months on The Verge, unwittingly, about this topic. Unfortunately for Mr. Stephen, he probably never thought his article would be yanked whole hog from the corners of gaming industry publication and used as a template for overall culture war analysis. Tough luck, Bijan, buckle your seatbelt.

The attention economy is dying, and it’s not pretty; there is only so much time in the day to pay attention to things, and we as a society have reached the limit. (By things I mean ads.) Fortnite, though, has managed to stay culturally relevant and even grow since its 2017 launch — which is unusual. And that’s because its creator, Epic Games, has figured out how to get people to keep paying attention.

Wait, you mean there are other ways to monopolize people’s time than feeding them fear and anxiety through their smartphones? This is culture war armistice genius, and it flows from a wider look at the Attention Economy than the current legacy media companies, nor even I as a supposed culture war analyst, have been taking.

Mr. Stephen, do tell!

“Paying attention” was a phrase before it became a literalization, before canny people realized just how much money time is worth. The advertising industry — and therefore the industries it supports, like the media — is predicated on the idea that if you’ve heard of something and have a positive association with it, you’re more likely to buy the product or the experience. And that isn’t wrong: people make decisions for reasons unfathomable even to themselves all the time. It makes sense to monetize humanity’s fundamental irrationality. (Sucks to the economists who peddled the Rational Consumer model of microeconomic behavior!) But the base assumption that the whole edifice is built on is becoming unstable, because what happens when society’s attention is entirely monopolized?

Clearly the answer is internecine violence, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, and dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria. Or not?

A recent report put out by the media and technology research firm Midia underscores that point: “[E]ngagement has declined throughout the sector, suggesting that the attention economy has peaked. Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritizing between them.” The trend, they write, has persisted for a while, and only now promises a revenue slowdown — as told through disappointing quarterly results from a few of the major games publishers. “Arguably sooner than most of the games industry would have thought.” As Midia analyst Karol Severin says, “competition within the attention economy is now more intense than ever before.”

The problem is attention doesn’t scale.

That’s almost verbatim out of a HWFO article. Actually, we wrote that article, albeit not about video game publishers running into that boundary, but rather about the legacy media running into it.

Enter Fortnite. As the most popular game in the world — or at least the most well known — it represents a substantial portion of the attention economy. Fortnite is ubiquitous among the under-18 set, and its microtransactions have reaped billions in profits for Epic Games. It really can’t be overstated just how popular the game is among young people: it’s become a shared culture, with all the in-jokes, references, and coded language that entails. If you’re around two or more kids, the chance that they’ll do a dance from the game grows astronomically.

But Epic’s real genius is in how it markets to the game’s young audience: Fortnite is, above everything else, a place to hang out with your friends. That’s why it isn’t weird that Weezer is playing unreleased songs on an in-game island, and nobody bats an eye when the DJ and producer Marshmello plays a concert in a virtual park.

The game’s immense popularity, and its status as a hang-out spot, has its competitors in the attention economy worried. Last month, Netflix mentioned in its 2018 earnings report that “we compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.” As Polygon noted then, Netflix sees the game as its “stiffest competition” because, to the streaming giant, the most valuable consumer metric is screen time. If people are playing Fortnite, they can’t be watching Netflix.

Nor can they be disconnecting from actual reality to watch outrage porn on their smartphones.

Perhaps our committable attention hours to outrage porn masquerading as “news” isn’t a fixed quantity after all. Perhaps our attention hours to all things is a fixed quantity, and if things other than outrage porn steal more of the attention span within the overall attention economy, the freakoutery goes down. Perhaps the path to a culture war armistice isn’t merely more reality, it’s also more Fortnite-ish things.

What Does This Look Like?

The reason we play video games instead of movies is because they’re interactive. Interacting with things is more fun that watching them passively. There’s more dopamine high from playing a shooter than watching an action movie, just like there’s more dopamine high from playing a sport than watching sports. The juice people get from sharing fear and anxiety on Facebook and Twitter is from the interaction of it. In some ways, the social feeds are akin to interactive news — it’s news with a dopamine high granted by participation. Instead of simply kicking Facebook’s table over, what’s needed is a better “game” (read: more dopamine per minute played) targeted at the interactive-news addicted demographic.

We need OutrageNite.

Somebody write that game please. I guarantee there’s a market for it.

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There’s a fantastic Cult Classic horror movie from 1984 called “Cathode Ray.” You’ve probably never heard of it. What made it truly amazing was the terror came not from violence, but from a dystopian layer that builds in its creepiness minute by minute and challenges your notions of free will itself. It opens like this.

A rural family in Georgia, on a Saturday afternoon in the fall, goes through their normal routine before heading out to tailgate at a college football game. Ordinary Americana. The two boys wake up, and immediately start playing the movie’s equivalent of an Atari 2600, but before they take the joystick they stick a hypodermic needle in their arms, which feeds them some kind of drug drip from the game console. They stare at the television, and their parents don’t even notice the IV. The mom even steps over the tube, as if this is normal. Creepy. The dad opens up his newspaper for the morning, but instead of a newspaper it’s got a TV embedded in it, and he too jacks in a strange tube from the TV right into his arm. Mom doesn’t say a word. The special effects in this movie are kind of garbage because it was low budget, but the director focuses on the mom here, and her utter disregard for the tube in her husband’s arm. Very creepy. Mom goes to the bathroom and takes a shit, which is the sort of thing you could only squeeze into very low budget cult movies back then, and there’s a TV on the counter. She turns it on, and sticks a hypo in her arm while she’s doing it.

Eventually everyone is late getting out the door for the tailgate, because they’re all so distracted with these drug-inducing TVs. They transition to their Jeep Wagoneer with all their tailgate gear, and built into every hard surface of both the dashboard and the head rests are other TVs, each with another tube, and everyone jacks the needle into their arms for the drive. The drive scene is surreal, because every other car on the road, on their way to Sanford Stadium in Athens, is also full of people staring at cathode ray screens with IV drips in their arms.

When they arrive at the tailgate, they open the back, set their chairs up, get out the cooler of beer, and then get out four tiny portable TVs replete with this strange hypodermic infusion apparatus that literally nobody in the movie has mentioned. They finally go to the game, and above the football game there’s a giant, half an acre sized cathode ray TV blaring a video feed of the game at them, with a little hypodermic tube at every bleacher seat. None of them watches the game on the field, they all stare at the TV. When their team scores, they pose for a family picture in front of the massive, omnipresent cathode ray screen, with tubes in their arms. Roll credits.

If you’re trying to find this on Netflix, please stop. You haven’t heard of this movie before because doesn’t exist. It’s a willful fabrication to remind us not to believe every bullshitter on the internet, but also to convey a far more important point. We are literally living in that horror movie right now.

Thankfully, a few people are starting to talk about it.

Media Roundup

Simon Sinek, on the topic of millennials in the workplace, goes into the technology saturation of millennials here:

He also focuses on the dopamine issue, laying it out specifically. Social media interaction releases dopamine. Dopamine is the same neurochemical that gives us pleasure when we drink, smoke, and gamble, all the most important elements for a fun Saturday night. His overall point is that adolescent millennials become addicted to this dopamine high because of early exposure, and it fundamentally undermines their ability to create deep, meaningful relationships, so they turn back to their phones. So that’s a big problem for the Millennial and younger generations.

But the overall problem is bigger than that.

Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Vice President of Facebook, got a lot of press recently for stating the obvious: social media is “Ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

He outlines the effects, which for anyone reading this article are probably already obvious, those being short-term dopamine driven feedback loops, no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth, etcetera. He states that social media is “eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.” His explanation can be paraphrased thusly:

The psychology of likes/shares/upvotes grants us a temporary dopamine high unrelated to real truth or real value, and when the high is over, it leaves us vacant and soulless, seeking another high, so we post another cat video, or another Hillary / Trump meme. The dangers he sees are lack of civil discourse, interpersonal strife, and the possibility that bad actors might leverage the system. His explanation, and his worries, are related to the psychology of the thing.

But the overall problem is even bigger than that.

Jaron Lanier, a very well-respected futurist thinker, goes into his take here:

Before I get into a summary of his position, I’ll just mention that the one time I spoke deeply with Mr. Lanier, at a music conference in 2016, I got the very distinct impression that he was mostly regurgitating talking points he’d heard at elite Silicon Valley cocktail parties and wasn’t thinking deeply about the stuff he was spinning. If true, that may actually make this interview more interesting, because it may mean he’s a relatively good representative of the general Silicon Valley zeitgeist.

He hits on an important algorithmic feature of social media, in that the automated feed curation heuristics intentionally develop echo chambers, bend you towards certain advertisers, and force you into argument loops to generate traffic. But then he defaults back to the popular and myopic fear of “bad actors using Facebook in ways Facebook can’t understand.”

But I say to you, Jaron-Lanier-cum-Silicon-Valley-cocktail-party-proxy, the overall problem is even deeper than that.

Laurence Scott calls the pseudo-social space within our phones the “Fourth Dimension,” and hits on some of the same highlights as above, but brings up another interesting point, and I’m not sure he fully understands the implications.

Does social media bring us together or push us apart?

Are we neglecting the physical world when we’re living in the fourth dimension?

With our limitless opportunities for living online, there’s a real sense that it’s almost a part of our citizenship to get involved in the constant digital communication. Yet at the same time, we are constantly being told via this medium that our physical world and environment is under threat. It’s a great platform for activists to get their messages out there about fracking or the decline of the bee population. So it’s not so much that we are neglecting it, but more that we are hyperaware of it, funnily enough.

But the problem is deeper than that, because this hyperawareness is not good for a stable nonviolent society.

Bret Weinstein goes into it on Rogan here:

Bret postulates that part of our latent genetic programming as a species, is to band into tribes during times of resource scarcity. We work together when resources are plentiful, to expand our population to the resource limit, but when we reach the limit this latent genetic code becomes activated. We band into groups, identify the weaker groups, be they within a nation or outside our borders, and we run the “genocide” or “war” program. Just like the ants, which I went into in a lot of depth about here:

We Are All Apes Behaving Like Ants

We do these things because they work, from a gene propagation game theoretical standpoint.

Bret further goes on to draw it back to social media. Our social media feeds give us constant messaging in three predominant flavors:

1. Look how great my life is! (kid/dog/beach pictures)

2. Look how terrible the world is! (Trump/Hillary/Racism/Privilege!/Etc)

3. Look at all these rich motherfuckers! (Caitlyn Jenner/Elon Musk/Queen of England)

The combination of these signals creates a false picture of the world, which is very close in analogy to the sort of resource scarcity boundary that activates the latent programing to band into violent tribes. You start to think that your life is not as adequate as the ones you read about, that other people have more stuff, that your stuff isn’t enough stuff, and the tiny cluster of resource-scarcity neurons start banging away at your unconscious, infecting your world view. If you don’t believe that’s going on, head on over to r/latestagecapitalism. It will make your eyes bleed.

But as bad as that is, and war and genocide are plenty bad, the overall problem is even bigger than that!

Rafael Behr gets closer to the mark, with his piece in the Guardian about “the outrage economy.”

You can log off, sure. But you can't stop the outrage economy | Rafael Behr

He spends a lot of the article railing against the right, but hits the mark with this gem:

Extremes of opinion cause spikes in web traffic, which suits publishers and platforms. In the currency of clicks, an inflammatory, racist article by Katie Hopkins, for example, yields a double payoff. It is shared by people who agree and by people who violently disagree.

Key phrase: “the currency of clicks.”

Robert Shrimsley gets even closer with his opinion piece in the Financial Times:

Subscribe to read | Financial Times

Sadly, the rules of the outrage economy mean everyone is behaving rationally. The outragers have identified a market and are supplying it; the media organizations, which rely solely on advertising for revenue, know these cheap-to-produce stories secure hits. The more reaction they garner, the more alluring they become. Every denunciation is a win, every furious comment stream proof of their power to engage and enrage. This, in turn, leads to more attention, newspaper columns and TV appearances.

Key phrase: this media behavior is rational. And the reason it’s rational, goes back to the ancient marketplace problem of “The Tragedy of The Commons.”

Attention as a Resource

There’s no better example in my mind of the Tragedy of the Commons than the killing, harvesting, and multiple extinctions of the whales, and there’s no better article that digs at the market details of how and why we did that (literally to butter our bread) that than Seth Miller’s piece, here:

We Did It to Make Margarine

And I’ve found few examples that better explain how this works in marketplace dynamics than this hypothetical by Slate Star Codex:

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

But if your attention span is limited, which I postulate below is a surety, I’ll summarize. If there’s a shared resource, and that resource is fixed in quantity, the best result for individuals who seek to use that resource would be to collaborate to ensure that the resource isn’t depleted. But any one individual who takes more than “his or her share” (whatever that means) of the resource is disproportionately rewarded. This means the individual reward scheme doesn’t match what’s best for the common resource, and you end up with a scenario where all the individual actors do everything they can to harvest that common resource, which is a completely rational act at the individual level, and we spread 99% of the blue whales on toast.

This is what’s happening right now in the media.

There are a fixed number of people in the country. Some 325 million people. Each of these people only exists for 24 hours per day. Carving off (let’s postulate) two hours per day on our media saturation addiction, we have 650 million “attention hours” that we might supply to the media by spending them clicking. That’s a fixed number. It can’t go any higher. The supply of attention hours is inelastic to demand.

But the media gets paid by the click.

So what do they do?

1. Since the fixed resource is time, they make the articles shorter, and eliminate all nuance. This is a raw click-increaser because shorter thoughts are more easily shared, despite them making complicated conversations impossible. What’s up Twitter?

2. Anything they can do to addict the smartphone user to their content is additional traffic. (Look how great this person’s life is!)

3. Most traffic comes from secondary sharing, so they tailor articles to echo chambers, sensationalism, and general freakoutery. Anything they can do to make people argue is additional traffic. (Look how terrible the world is!)

4. The other main secondary sharing hook comes from envy. (Look at all these rich motherfuckers!)

It’s not just the fake news, it’s the real news.

In short, this Tragedy of the Commons scenario with attention spans incentivizes the media corporations to create the exact environment Weinstein holds as predictive for war and genocide. And “incentivize” is too weak a word. They’re required to do this, because if they don’t, some other company will, and the other company will seize their market share. It is a business model recipe for disaster. We’ve built a system that not only can create a violent catastrophe, it must do so.

What’s the Solution?

This is the part in the article where the clever author, who’s built you into a fervor of suspense and fear, drops his or her enlightened, awesome solution and then you tweet that out to your friends and feel warm and happy from your dopamine fix. Problem is, I don’t have a solution, and I’ve spent a long time trying to cook one up. Any way I attack the problem, I reach a dead end. The classic solution to Tragedy of the Commons scenarios is forced cooperation at the hands of a central authority, such as a government. Natural Resource Conservation Service. Whaling treaties. But that doesn’t work in this space, for two reasons:

1. Free speech is fundamental and essential to any system of self-governance,

2. Even if you wanted to censor the entire internet, you couldn’t.

Every media outlet in the country, probably the world, would somehow have to come to a great agreement to cooperate in avoiding the coming (probably violent) catastrophe. But even then, whichever media outlet pushed the boundary the hardest would make the most revenue, and if any media outlet came along outside of this hypothetical Grand Pact, they’d be rewarded with market share.

I have no solution. Not a one.

The very best I can figure is to buy beans, bullets, and bandages before the media butters their bread with us all.

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There are a lot of reasons to hate Facebook.

They collect data on you, and sell it. They even do it when you’re not logged in to Facebook. They do it even if you don’t have a Facebook account. They manipulate their users with political bias. Their advertising algorithms promote virtual redlining, which is about the clearest possible example of “systemic racism” I can think of, given that it’s a system which requires no actual racist individuals to perpetuate. Their users are more vulnerable to identity theft. They lie to their advertisers, allegedly. They lie to Congress, allegedly. The Russia thing is popular these days.

That’s a lot of reasons. One might argue that many of those aren’t intentional, they’re just a function of the impossibility of managing and operating a platform as big as theirs. But you must admit, that’s way more reasons than MySpace had when it tanked.

But even all those reasons, in aggregate, are barely a scratch compared to the magnitude of the next one. To understand it, we need to spend a little time parsing ubernerd horror fiction.

Grokking the Scissor

Halloween 2018, a (thoroughly fictional) anonymous and highly distressed reader (this isn’t real) sent Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) a whale of a tale to put on his blog. (Scott wrote the story) The narrator of the story was a software developer in a software advertising company. Their firm had cooked up an idea that they should use deep learning artificial intelligence algorithms to discover the most controversial statement possible. The story was entitled “Sort by Controversial.”

You should really go read this thing and come back. It’s fabulous. But if you’re time constrained, I’ll give you the gist in quotes.

[…]

We trained a network to predict upvotes of Reddit posts based on their titles.

Any predictive network doubles as a generative network. If you teach a neural net to recognize dogs, you can run it in reverse to get dog pictures. If you train a network to predict Reddit upvotes, you can run it in reverse to generate titles it predicts will be highly upvoted. We tried this and it was pretty funny. I don’t remember the exact wording, but for /r/politics it was something like “Donald Trump is no longer the president. All transgender people are the president.” For r/technology it was about Elon Musk saving Net Neutrality. You can also generate titles that will get maximum downvotes, but this is boring: it will just say things that sound like spam about penis pills.

Reddit has a feature where you can sort posts by controversial. You can see the algorithm here, but tl;dr it multiplies magnitude of total votes (upvotes + downvotes) by balance (upvote:downvote ratio or vice versa, whichever is smaller) to highlight posts that provoke disagreement. Controversy sells, so we trained our network to predict this too. The project went to this new-ish Indian woman with a long name who went by Shiri, and she couldn’t get it to work, so our boss Brad sent me to help. Shiri had tested the network on the big 1.7 billion comment archive, and it had produced controversial-sounding hypothetical scenarios about US politics. So far so good.

Let’s pause the story for a moment, and talk about artificial neural networks, or ANNs. I have no training in these things save one grad school class a decade and a half ago, and I’ve never used them since. I’m no genius, but I can present a muggle’s view of how they work.

You have nodes. The data in the nodes on the left-hand side is input, like college football statistics. Just slap them in. Then there are layers of hidden nodes, each of which houses a mathematical function, with several variables you can monkey with like twisting a knob. Each operates on its input, turning it into a different number, and passes that number on to the next node. Maybe another hidden node, maybe the “output layer,” which is the answer you’re looking for, like the score of a college football game. Sometimes the node structure can be set up in a tangled way.

You input the statistics for the 2017 Alabama Georgia game, and it gives you the wrong score, so you go back into each of the nodes and monkey with those knobs until it gives you the right score. Then you stick in the statistics for the 2014 Clemson Syracuse game and it gives you the wrong score, so you tinker with the knobs again until it can spit out the score for both games reliably.

But since computers think very fast, you feed it every college football statistic from the last 50 years, as well as every result, in computational batches. You write another program to tweak the knobs for you, and you hit ‘go.’ Let it optimize for a week and it’s learned to predict college football scores, within some confidence interval. If Vegas hasn’t done this yet, call me.

The Shiri’s Scissor story is about building a network of these little nodes that takes the topic or title of a reddit conversation, runs layers of mathematical functions, and estimates how controversial the statement would be. Then, as the story goes, they run it backwards to generate perfectly controversial statements.

I’m not sure the ‘backwards’ thing really works, particularly in this context, but it’s a story so we suspend our disbelief and move on.

[…]

Shiri’s problem was that she’d been testing the controversy-network on our [corporate] subreddit, and it would just spit out vacuously true or vacuously false statements. No controversy, no room for disagreement. The statement we were looking at that day was about a design choice in our code. I won’t tell you the specifics, but imagine you took every bad and wrong decision in the world, hard-coded them in the ugliest possible way, and then handed it to the end user with a big middle finger. Shiri’s Scissor spit out, as maximally controversial, the statement that we should design our product that way. We’d spent ten minutes arguing about exactly where the bug was, when Shiri said something about how she didn’t understand why the program was generating obviously true statements.

Here, the story gets creepy, because nobody in the room thought the idea was at all controversial until they started sharing their views of it with each other. When they did, they get into the conversational equivalent of an Asian Land War, which ends with Shiri’s termination of employment as well as another coder named David who sided with Shiri in the argument.

Only after that, did they realize that yes, indeed, Shiri’s Scissor (as they called it) had worked.

On them.

They had inadvertently discovered their first “Scissor Statement.” A statement so controversial it was guaranteed to tear a social group apart. Their social group. And they could train the AI to any data pool.

They called up DARPA and told them they had a superweapon. Shiri and David sue the company for wrongful termination. The company destabilizes Mozambique for the Army demo. The CEO gets in a fistfight with David, and the company is destroyed because of the one internal leak of that one original Scissor Statement, about how they should write their code. Ripped each other apart over an AI derived statement of maximum controversy. The story continues,

[…]

We got off easy. That’s the takeaway I want to give here. We were unreasonably overwhelmingly lucky. If Shiri and I had started out by arguing about one of the US statements, we could have destroyed the country. If a giant like Google had developed Shiri’s Scissor, it would have destroyed Google. If the Scissor statement we generated hadn’t just been about a very specific piece of advertising software — if it had been about the tech industry in general, or business in general — we could have destroyed the economy.

The narrator gets a new job doing something unrelated, sits on what he knows, and hopes the whole thing has blown over.

[…]

Then came the Kavanaugh hearings. Something about them gave me a sense of deja vu. The week of his testimony, I figured it out.

Shiri had told me that when she ran the Scissor on the site in general, she’d just gotten some appropriate controversial US politics scenarios. She had shown me two or three of them as examples. One of them had been very specifically about this situation. A Republican Supreme Court nominee accused of committing sexual assault as a teenager.

This made me freak out. Had somebody gotten hold of the Scissor and started using it on the US? Had that Pentagon colonel been paying more attention than he let on? But why would the Pentagon be trying to divide America? Had some enemy stolen it? I get the New York Times, obviously Putin was my first thought here. But how would Putin get Shiri’s Scissor? Was I remembering wrong?

The narrator rebuilds the Scissor in his spare time and confirms that not only was Kavanaugh in the list, so was Kaepernick, the Ground Zero Mosque, and the gay wedding cake baker. The story doesn’t mention the North Carolina transgender bathroom law, but I imagine it would qualify. Topics which are obviously true or obviously false until you speak to someone else who holds the opposite opinion.

[…]

If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing. It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody. At first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. Crescit eundo. You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work, they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is.

This may sound familiar, in the wake of the midterms.

[…]

You guys, who haven’t heard a really bad Scissor statement yet and don’t know what it’s like — it’s easy for you to say “don’t let it manipulate you” or “we need a hard and fast policy of not letting ourselves fight over Scissor statements”. But how do you know you’re not in the wrong? How do you know there’s not an issue out there where, if you knew it, you would agree it would be better to just nuke the world and let us start over again from the sewer mutants, rather than let the sort of people who would support it continue to pollute the world with their presence?

[…]

Delete Facebook. Delete Twitter. Throw away your cell phone. Unsubscribe from the newspaper. Tell your friends and relatives not to discuss politics or society. If they slip up, break off all contact.

Then, buy canned food. Stockpile water. Learn to shoot a gun. If you can afford a bunker, get a bunker.

Because one day, whoever keeps feeding us Scissor statements is going to release one of the bad ones.

Great ending. Super spooky. I love it.

It’s bullshit of course. The technology wouldn’t work. Reddit is not a great database to do this sort of thing because what divides people in controversy is more complicated than a title, so you’d need the AI to understand what it was reading. Also, it’s difficult to run these things in reverse and get results that aren’t nonsense.

But that got me thinking, if that doesn’t work, what could work?

Dr. Evil’s Folly, a Love Story

Dr. Evil wakes up one day, hungover from a late-night bender of attaching laser beams to the dorsal fins of ill-tempered sea bass. Typical Monday. And he says, “my nukes are wet, my ICBMs are rusted, my germ warfare division wet the bed in the ’08 crash, and there’s no such thing as a Nude Bomb.”

“What could I do to destabilize all of Western Society? I need one of them Shiri’s Scissor things. Except real.” And he sets to putting it in motion.

Evil Inc. Software Development Plan:

The first big problem with the fictional account of Shiri’s Scissor is that AIs really aren’t that good at giving us cohesive, creative results. They’re either one or the other. It’s either emulating results it’s been trained to emulate, or it has these creative outbursts that are sometimes compelling but still very foreign to humans, such as disturbing eyeball dogs.

So Evil Inc. breaks the problem into layers, with humans serving as nodes in the ANN. Evil Layer 1 is the content layer, where 1000 highly trained creators constantly spit out the most controversial content possible to serve to Layer 2. And because Evil, they pay these creators on commission based on how controversial their content is.

Evil Inc. then populates Layer 2 of the ANN with humans as well, but because Evil, they get these nodes off Craigslist.

A million of them.

Each content evaluator node is set up with a computer, an outrage feed from Layer 1, and a button that says “outraged” or “not outraged.” Then the ANN nodes are crosslinked, so any content flagged as “outrageous” gets forwarded on to another node in the layer. The same content might spill through multiple nodes, depending on how outrageous it is, increasing the commission for the people working in Layer 1.

Then, because don’t forget Evil, they decide they’re not even going to pay these poor sops from Craigslist. They hook a tiny IV to each of their arms, that injects an extremely small dose of a drug cocktail brewed up by Evil Inc. It’s a weak blend of heroin and cocaine, polished off with a chemical warfare thing from the 1970s that converts the concoction to pure unpolluted dopamine. But it’s a tiny dose.

The Craigslisters end up spending all their spare time giving Dr. Evil free labor in return for the dopamine hit, because they develop an addiction.

To tune this human powered Shiri’s Scissor, Evil Inc. sets up an algorithm where unused connections between the nodes fade out, and heavily used ones grow stronger. After this optimization, the most possible outrage will travel through the system. This causes the outrage evaluation nodes to bunch up. The tighter the groups draw, the better they can zero in on the outrage.

For the final evil architectural choice, they up-connect Layer 2 to Layer 1 in the hottest bunches, feeding the most outrageous content back to the content layer for reprocessing. It is the perfect outrage engine, and it takes Evil Inc. a decade to develop.

When Dr. Evil is finally ready to go live, he looks out the window of his volcano lair, and to his shock and dismay Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey beat him to it, with a human powered outrage engine a thousand times bigger.

Barely a Scratch

This is what Facebook and Twitter are, except with every media outlet in the world providing the content layer, on advertising commission, and nearly two billion dopamine addicted users providing the evaluation layer, for free.

Read that again.

They didn’t do this on purpose. It’s nobody’s fault. They made platforms for people to share cute videos of their cats, and that remains a large part of the content, but buried within it is Shiri’s Scissor.

The content layer is made of creators in the media which are paid by the click, view, or subscription. The evaluation layer consists of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media users, who get a tiny dopamine fix every time someone likes their post. They operate exactly like a neuron in a brain. They catch stories via their dendrites, which is their social media feed. If it outrages them, they share it, which fires it down their axon to other dendrites in the network.

This is the procedure ANNs simulate. Facebook and Twitter are simulating it too, almost identically.

Then the social media platform adjusts itself to populate your feed with stuff you’re more likely to share, and its learning algorithms strengthen these connections into what Dr. Evil knows as his tuned subclusters of nodes, but what we know in the media as echo chambers. The echo chambers are a result of social media neuroplasticity.

And then for the icing on the cake, Twitter users can occasionally feed outrage back up the chain to the media, which can then literally run outrage stories to feed to the evaluation layer about Twitter feeds. Like this:

It’s all there, right down to the dopamine cocktail drip.

It doesn’t feed us the perfect, AI derived Scissor Statement, but it feeds us the nearest possible analogue, constantly, in real time. The ugliest feature about Zuckerberg’s Scissor is that by the time it’s identified the perfect Scissor Statement, the statement is already deployed, because the target destabilization group for the Scissor Statement is the Facebook users themselves.

And this isn’t just speculation. A 2011 study in the Journal of Marketing Research farmed a month of New York Times articles and did an analysis on this very topic — “what goes viral.” After controlling for variables such as article placement, author reputation, time on the front page, and such, they determined that anger and anxiety were two of the top three predictors for secondary article sharing. This is the Scissor at work. You can track it with mathematics.

Were they to replicate the analysis for 2018, which is far more toxic than 2011, and for Vox or Fox instead of the Times, and for Facebook and Twitter instead of email sharing, I suspect the profile would be tremendously worse.

This is a recipe for disaster. What happened in Myanmar can happen anywhere. It’s not “bad actors,” it’s the system itself. Everybody needs to quit using these things.

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I never met Robert Aaron Long, the man who killed eight employees of Asian massage parlors in Atlanta this past week. But I knew his dad. And watching how the media has covered this over the past few days strikes me as a case study in how the media engenders terrible and unproductive conversations for profit. There are productive conversations to be had in this space, but we simply aren’t having them. We are incapable of having them, not just personally or as a culture, but the business of media itself is trapped in a diversified decentralized version of the “Cobra Effect,” where everything we do makes things worse instead of better. Which means these problems will never ever go away.

Let’s talk about the Cobra Effect, then about my connection to Robert’s dad, then what’s happening in the media, then what should be happening.

The Cobra Effect

When the British were occupying India they tried to get rid of cobras, because cobras are bad. They offered bounties for dead cobras. Locals killed cobras and got bounty money. Then the locals started breeding cobras to sell to the British, because that’s way easier than killing wild cobras. Then the British got wind of the scheme and cancelled it. Then the breeders turned the cobras loose and the number of wild cobras went up instead of down.

When the French occupied Vietnam, they offered a bounty on rats. Instead of breeding them, the Vietnamese rat catchers would sever the tails off the rats, turn the tails in for bounties, and turn the rats loose to breed more rats.

The French and British clearly never read Mark Twain. From his autobiography:

Once in Hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so troublesome, that Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of paying George a bounty on all the flies he might kill. The children saw an opportunity here for the acquisition of sudden wealth. ... Any Government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.

The Cobra Effect happens when a centralized institution offers an incentive and the incentive leads to the exact opposite result they or we should want.

The Father of Mr. Long

I’m not going to name him here despite his name probably being googlable at this point, but I worked with the shooter’s father, herein “Dad,” for the better part of a decade at an engineering company in Atlanta. It was a diverse workplace, with plenty of women, black folks, and such. My boss was a Jehovah’s Witness and naturalized Eritrean immigrant. “Dad” worked in a different group, but we had lunch regularly.  We only ever had one employee in our 40+ member firm who expressed any outward racism, as far as I’m aware, and he was fired over it.

One time Dad approached me and wanted to take me to lunch, just he and I. I said sure. Turned out that I’d said something in an offhand way that offended his Christian sensibilities and he wanted to hash it out. I didn’t even remember saying it. It was a good, honest conversation, where I shared my Quaker background, he shared his faith, and his concerns were resolved. I never had a problem with Dad.

I never recalled Dad being racist, but I’m white and was in a different department so I don’t have the appropriate perspective. I reached out to one of the black employees from the company, a coworker whom I still maintain contact. Asked if Dad was ever racist. Here’s a portion of that conversation.

And I never met Robert, so I have no idea whether he was racist in any capacity or not. But it seems likely that at a minimum he wasn’t being raised in a racist manner. It does seem likely he was being raised in a very traditionalist Christian manner.

Does the shooter’s motive matter to the ladies he killed? No, it doesn’t. They’re dead, their families are bereft, and the damage is the same damage whether it was racism or sexual insanity or political extremism or he was shooting them to steal five bucks. It only matters to the media.

The Media

The media’s job is not to discover the truth of things. The media’s job is to farm social media for viral traffic to accumulate the most hits possible. This is how they pay their bills. They are trapped in this, and couldn’t choose to act otherwise even if they wanted to, because if they opted not to chase the outrage they’d lose market share to whoever did chase the outrage. This warped version of the “prisoner’s dilemma” is the lens through which all modern Americans formulate their opinions of the world, and leads us to the Cobra Effect.

You could see this with the Pulse Nightclub shooting. That shooter didn’t even realize he was in a gay bar. He asked the bouncers where all the women were before he started shooting. It was a raw Muslim extremist ISIS hit, but the media made it out to be about the gay community because that got more traffic. While I obviously have no first-hand knowledge, my second-hand knowledge lends me to believe they’re doing the exact same thing with this shooting, but with even deeper financial incentives.

Attacks against Asians are on the rise in the United States, and I’m sure a nonzero number of these at the beginning of 2020 were attributable to White House rhetoric. But on net this problem is highly likely to be multivariate. Within the USA, violence victimization for every racial category is dominated by perpetrators of the same racial category, with one exception. Asians.

Conservative pundits (or outright racists) might point to those historical numbers as a way to blame blacks, but my read on that table is that Asians are generally such a nonviolent bunch that some other demographic had to jump in to fill the gap. And violence is known to track with GINI coefficient, and known to be concentrated in urban centers, so it’s not surprising why the gap gets filled in this manner. Further, 2020 was violent all around. The George Floyd protests did more damage to urban businesses than a Category Two hurricane, so I’m not convinced the demographic ratios of violence changed much in 2020. We’ll have to wait and see the numbers.

But that’s not a story that gets clicks, and the media is starved for clicks post-election. CNN’s numbers are down a staggering 50%. If they can create a chain of events leading back to Trump, they get the viral traffic juice they’re missing, which goes something like this:

Long > Mass Shooting > 6 of 8 are Asians > Racism motive > Trump

This exact conversation was likely had among the editors of most starving news organizations the moment it happened, and The Cobra Effect was engaged in an industry wide, decentralized manner, while trampling not only what is likely to be the truth, but also trampling some more important conversations along the way, that we should have. Any of these other important conversations must be snowed under or rerouted to keep the chain to Trump alive. The ratings demand it.

As the conversation evolves in the next week, it will likely evolve to “yes but he frequented Asian massage parlors because he was white and wanted to dominate Asians, therefore whitecisheteropatriarchy, therefore racism, therefore Trump.” Or it will pivot to “yes but Georgia has no waiting period for gun buying, therefore gun control,” as if making a mass murderer wait a day would solve the mass murder problem. Or it will pivot to a culture war attacking Christianity, as if reading the bible is a gateway to mass murder. All of these are distractions, clickbait, ways to earn the media a few extra pennies so they can keep the lights on while making the underlying problem worse. Cobra Effect.

The Sex Trade Conversation

I live in Atlanta. We have a robust Asian community sporting many legitimate Asian spas where you can go for an amazing spa experience in classic Asian bathhouse style. We also have places that give hand jobs. Every city in the country has places that give hand jobs. Every city has come to an internal resolution, a compromise, about the sex trade, and while these compromise resolutions vary from place to place, they generally fall within a particular band which goes like this:

Spas which give hand jobs are probably safer than rampant street prostitution for all involved. Spas which give hand jobs pay taxes. Spas which give hand jobs don’t sell drugs. Spas which give hand jobs are going to pop back up elsewhere even if you spend a lot of money shutting them down. Ergo, allow your city to have a few spas that give hand jobs in certain areas of town and fight them in zoning if people don’t want them near their homes. That’s basically how it works on the ground, pretty much everywhere.

Is that the correct resolution? I don’t know. The religious element wants no hand job joints on moral grounds, in part because it leads to temptation. More on this below.  The libertarian element wants the sex trade legalized entirely. The social justice element wants the sex trade normalized while also reserving the right to demonize the men who use it.

Why are these spas predominantly Asian? Is it sex trafficking? I’m sure at least in part. But is it also that these ladies can make a lot more money here than where they come from, and send some of that money home to feed their families, build schools, and such? That’s an economic driver related to the strength of the petrodollar. Presuming they are exploited, and exploitation is bad, would sending them home lead to a worse situation? Is the Asian handjob trade fundamentally worse than the Sugar Baby trade that pervades all modern interactions on Tinder? Why aren’t these ladies allowed to immigrate and participate in the Sugar Baby trade instead? Or just find a nice man to marry? Immigration law is part of this. Do the number of hand job joints go down if we open up our vice grip on K-1 visas?

I don’t know the answers. This is a complicated conversation that generates no clicks, but a conversation we should have.

The Porn Conversation

Porn is pervasive, every child with a smartphone can get an infinite amount of it, and it is increasingly trending towards more taboo acts. Is this healthy? Does it build better or worse relationships? Do we even care about relationships? Is there anything we could do to stop it if we wanted to? Or are we as a society going to have to adjust the way we rear our kids to deal with this environment? Does porn exposure alone lead to the sorts of rare boundary cases we saw this past week, or is there more to it? Is this a multivariate problem, and could we eliminate a different variable than porn if we deem the porn to stay? How much porn is healthy and how much is unhealthy?

Then there’s the incel problem, which is rooted in the way the internet has changed dating. A hundred years ago, if a town had 100 single men and 100 single women, they pretty much paired up with what was available and made babies. Internet dating has made it easier for one man to date multiple women, and the 80/20 M:F ratios on the dating sites have concentrated the 20 into the top 5 of the 80, and it doesn’t work for anyone. The men swipe all day and the women are drinking from a firehose of undesirables. Throw polyamory into that mix. The way ancient societies handled polygamy was by flushing out the bottom men in wars, or as slaves or eunuchs, so the ratios worked out. We can’t do that, so what do we do? It’s a known fact that violent revolutions are predicted in part by the ratio of young unmarried unemployed men.

I don’t know the answers. This is a complicated conversation that generates no clicks, but a conversation we should have.

The Religion Conversation

There are religious sects, Christian, Muslim and others, which draw very distinct boundaries around allowable sexual behavior. The rules vary by sect, and are sometimes very strict. It’s an open secret (or not a secret at all) among many of the more fundamentalist sects that their members, and in many cases leaders, struggle with porn addiction, sex addiction, or both. They wage this battle daily.

What counts as sex addiction? Is it once a day, a week, a year? Is it “more than you’d like,” which may mean “any at all?” If the goal is “zero porn,” what’s the enforcement mechanism? Is it social shame, or is it group forgiveness and openness? To borrow 4chan/reddit terms, would “FapForgiveness” work better than “NoFap?” Is the struggle against sexual sin being properly weighed against the other sins? Are there areas of the Bible we can look to, such as St. Paul in Corinth, that can give the religious minded better ways to negotiate America’s apparent hard pivot towards Babylon? Was the story of Onan misinterpreted entirely?

I don’t know the answers. This is a complicated conversation that generates no clicks, but a conversation we should have.

Every Article

Every article is telling you what to think. Every article is telling you the answer. Every article is telling you to hate the dude or lady that believes a different article. Every article is farming clicks from your arguments.

Whatever the answers are, it’s clear to me that the current method of social dialog, whereby the media farms echo chambers for outrage and buys BMWs with the ad money, is not going to get us where we need to be. It distracts from the important conversations and capitalizes on the least common denominator.

It throws the cobras back into the wild.

This is the Long Problem.

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As we have recently discovered, these are true things:

There’s no homicide epidemic at all. We are at a historically low plateau of homicide, and when the media trots out it’s “30,000 gun deaths per year” number, they do everything they can to hide the fact that 20,000 of those are suicides, and seven eights of those gun suicides are men. The “gun deaths” problem is actually not much more than a symptom of a larger “men’s health” problem. But nobody knows this, because nobody’s going to march on Washington for men’s health. The feminists certainly won’t do it, because it doesn’t match their privilege narrative, and the men aren’t going to do it because they’d look like crybabies. Which may in fact be related to the suicide thing, in a “toxic masculinity” kind of way. But that’s a different story, for another day.

The story today, is not about homicide, or suicide, or even about guns at all. It’s about the profound reason why nobody knows these true things.

Consider the following quote, by Pulitzer Prize winning political commentator Peggy Noonan, on the state of the media during the 2016 presidential election:

That is my theory: media bias now is in part a financial decision, instead of what it used to be, a good old-fashioned human and institutional flaw.

This contributes to public division — to the great estrangement we see in America. I talk to media folk a lot, being one, and haven’t found anyone who’s said, “Why yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing, deepening our national divisions for profit!” Although I shared my theory this week with a senior manager of a news organization who quickly mentioned another major news organization and said: “I think that’s what they’re doing.”

The whole article is a good read, but I’m not convinced that anyone is doing it purposefully. I think they’re all doing it, to varying degrees, out of raw necessity, and the whole thing ties back to the evolution of the business model itself. For our case study, let’s use the only numbers I have available, which are mine from Medium.

I posted my first gun policy article on Medium on March 13th of this year, mostly so I didn’t have to copy and paste the same argument repeatedly into the wall of culture-war gun threads I was swimming through on Facebook. It gave me an opportunity to really dig deeply into the numbers, and expose the vicious games of data manipulation I kept seeing over and over in the media. Didn’t think it would get big, but I threw it up onto a subreddit to see if anyone else was interested in reading it. Apparently, a few were.

Medium has some interesting traffic monitoring features built into its UI, where you can monitor the sources of your traffic. Here’s a snapshot:

The first day this went up, I linked it to Reddit, on r/libertarian. I figured some of the folks there would find the article ideologically appealing. Then I popped some popcorn.

A day later, other users had cross-posted it to r/skeptic, r/liberagunowners, r/firearms, r/conservative, and r/programming. Six days after that, r/bprogramming. Six days after that, r/TrueReddit, r/conspiracy, and the big one, r/The_Donald.

Don’t blame me, I didn’t post it there.

Watching the Medium statistical pages was fascinating. The article appeared on tumblr, on twitter, on a retired US Navy discussion forum, on java development forums, and even on a discussion website for Furries. Every time it hit another high traffic location, the Facebook number would jump from secondary sharing for a few days after. It traveled through the sphere like vines through a shady yard, occasionally finding a patch of sun in which to flourish and branch out. Or like electrical impulses in a brain.

Please note at this juncture that the drive of the article, “so-and-so is lying about guns,” is very useful in the culture war, to certain people who have adopted a side in that war.

I wrote some more articles, focused on looking deeply, and visualizing properly, the data behind gun violence in the USA. They did not attack conservative or liberal individuals, but many of them were very critical of the media, and much of that criticism was admittedly leveled against media elements who play to the left.

I won’t bore you with details. The traffic the other articles received varied widely, and came from very different sources. No more Furries though. The best ones got almost no traffic at all. As I explored this, I landed on one conclusion. The more useful the article was for people currently in a culture war argument, the more secondary traffic it got, particularly from Facebook.

Chasing the Battlefield Cash

What became crystal clear to me, as I watched the traffic around these things develop, is how many more clicks I could farm if I wanted to. I’m an entrepreneurial sort of guy. I own a business. I believe in market freedom. Thankfully I’m not some poor sap trying to make a living on Medium. If I really wanted traffic, the formula would not be to do what I was doing, which was building a case for a specific solution to solve a clearly identified problem. The formula would be to identify the highest traffic topic on Facebook, and feed those people what they want to hear.

I would craft articles in two forms.

1) “All the people you’re arguing with are stupid and here’s why”

2) “Share this article to prove how virtuous your side is, or alternately how much more virtuous you are than your friends because you found the article first”

These are the two most common forms of culture war weaponry in employ today, by people on all sides. One is the attack, which undermines someone else’s virtue, and the other is the defense, where you buttress your tower of virtue against attack. They take these forms because virtue is the fundamental quality of a culture. This stuff gets liked and shared far more than anything else.

After I’d written my hypothetical article about whatever the news cycle had chosen to be the crisis of the day, perhaps some 3 AM cocaine bender Trump tweet, I would load up my hypothetical farm of a dozen throw-away accounts on Reddit, (I don’t have one of these, I promise) I’d post the article in five places with five different accounts, and I’d use the throw-aways to upvote it systemically throughout the first two or three hours of it being posted. Then I’d laugh maniacally while I raked in the literal tens of dollars I’d earn through the Medium Partner Program. Might even be able to afford one reasonable bar tab at the end of the month.

And what would that make me?

It would make me a “journalist.”

My how things have changed, since George was on the scene.

Day in the Life of a 2018 “Journalist”

Everybody in every commercial media outlet today wakes up, takes a shower, drinks their coffee, and heads to work. And they spend their morning commute, and the time before it, and the time after it, thinking some variation of the same thought. “How am I going to get clicks today?” Folks running YouTube channels do the same thing. Facebook addicts do it too. Instagram. Everyone does it. Hell, “how to get more traffic on your Medium articles” is one of the most worn out topics on Medium itself. Meta.

When your entire job is to get clicks, and you’ll starve if you don’t get them, you get those damn clicks any way you can. Which means you find the culture war, wherever it’s happening, and you feed it. You feed it argument fodder. You feed it virtue signals. You feed it whatever it needs to keep warring. The modern media have abandoned measured, reasoned thought, and have shifted to a new job.

They are Culture War Arms Dealers.

This article is one of those “Evergreen” articles that bloggers talk about. It’s written in a way that the content won’t expire, and it will forever be relevant, so I’ll still be raking in the fractions of pennies years from now. Pull up the front page of Medium in a second tab, or CNN.com, or Fox News. Count the articles which are either culture war weapons for people to crosspost into Facebook arguments, or are signaling for people to throw on their own feed to out-virtue their friends list. Start watching for these things routinely. Use a wide lens. Make it your Zen Koan. “What is the sound of one finger clicking?” When I pull up Medium’s politics page, a lot of the material could be classified this way. And those authors will get their clicks and make a little money.

This is not a critique of Medium. The Medium model is actually quite fabulous. This is a holistic critique on the entire thing, the combination of technology, markets, drivers, players, individuals, and consumers, who form a continuous gestalt of crazy.

How much do you think Vox makes?

Vox has been kind enough to make their general traffic numbers public, and from that, we can back our way into some of their revenue numbers. In 2016, they got around 4.7 billion views, world-wide, and their gross revenue was around 100 million dollars. That would be two cents per view, which is over ten times what Medium’s paying me. That’s probably not a very reliable way to analyze it, though, because a lot of Vox’s earnings are piped through YouTube as Vox has shifted to video content. It’s all blended and crosslinked.

Let’s acknowledge that two cents per view is a bad number, but let’s stick with it for now on the presumption that other revenue streams also scale with the traffic numbers to which we do have access. Here’s a bad day for Vox:

They only (hypothetically) grossed $46,337.06 that day. The Superbowl is always a good day:

That’s $120,650.16 of purely hypothetical gross earnings. God bless football. If we’re keeping track, that’s a 260% differential. These swings are money. The traffic incentive is palpable.

Handwaving Freakoutery

In the strange and erudite fictional lore of Robert Anton Wilson, he speaks of a grand conspiracy of the Illuminati, whereupon the hidden masters of humanity brainwashed the clueless masses to feel emotions of anxiety, fear, and confusion whenever they see the word “Fnord” in text. They also aren’t able to consciously perceive the word, owing to the specifics of the brainwashing program. This allows anyone within the Illuminati to interject the word into news articles or commercials to prevent the brainwashed masses from evaluating the media content with reason. Be clear, this obviously isn’t real, nor is it original. It was a concept lifted from the Principia Discordia, a goofy religion parody document cooked up by some 1960s San Francisco hippies who were probably partaking of things a bit stronger than craft beer. But the concept is terrifyingly applicable to what’s happening now in the media, in a way that hearkens back to Ole George’s picture above.

Why else would almost everyone believe in a homicide epidemic that isn’t true? Here’s a snapshot of some social media reaction to one of the articles in the series, screen grabbed from Facebook:

“But how can my view of the world be wrong, when it’s all over the TV channels?”

Fnords perhaps? We have forgotten, as a culture, that the TV isn’t real.

I know a lot of folks who complained about PTSD signs after the 2016 election. This was a real thing, covered extensively. Is it as significant as returning from a Middle Eastern deployment? I doubt it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real. And it stems entirely from media saturation, continuous exposure to images, words, articles, videos, phrases, and such, for which only one description truly applies, coined by this guy. “Handwaving Freakoutery.”

In some ways, we are experiencing a direct result of a kind of pseudo-George Berkeley style subjective idealist epistemology, which goes like this. There is no objective reality, there is only the reality in our minds, which we construct ourselves via sensory stimuli. A sea change in stimuli has transpired over the last two decades, where less of that stimuli comes from the real world, and more of it comes from our glowing screens, be they phones, computers, or television sets. The Glowing Screen Space is saturated by culture war arms dealing clickmongers making us fear things we shouldn’t and milking our anxieties for clickmoney. And we bang away on our keyboards and phones, like rats in a Skinner box.

We have built our own Operant Conditioning Chamber.

The media is using irrational emotions to manipulate people’s behavior. This isn’t new. It’s been used in marketing and advertising for almost a century. And when an advertisement does it, we know with 100% certainty that it is on purpose. We have been trained to watch for this. Many people think the media today is pushing these anxiety messages on purpose as well, to force a gun control agenda that is divorced from the facts. And some of that may be true.

But the deeper I get into analyzing this this thing, the more I think there’s something wholly new and different going on. I think the media is pushing a lot of this purely because their new revenue modes are attached to anxiety. Creating anxiety is literally their job. It wouldn’t matter what sort of anxiety they create, as long as they create some, because anxiety generates traffic. That drives an evolutionary change in the business model itself. The current profit modes in media delivery reward anxiety mongers. To compete in the media marketplace, they must peddle anxiety or die.

And that is far more terrifying to me than raw media bias. That is a system that will lead to chaos, as it feeds back onto itself, and it cannot be controlled.

Guns are just one issue in an ocean of media behavior that exhibits these qualities. This media behavior crops up on every front, from the environment, to the Middle East, to healthcare. And violence has begun to erupt at the periphery of each of these issues, driven by the freakoutery. Take, for example, the barrage of messaging that Republicans were literally killing people with their Obamacare repeal attempts in June of 2017, prompting some nitwit to show up at a baseball field full of Republicans and start shooting them. Was he crazy, or was he simply fighting back? Both? His actions were not sane by any objective measure, but they may have seemed completely sane to him, given the world in which he lived, fed to him by his phone. Opinions of Obamacare aside, it should be clear that these sorts of violent boundary cases will multiply as the freakoutery expands.

The media has us on a rail towards chaos and catastrophe. As Voltaire said, “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

And they’re doing it for the clicks.

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Mass shooters and the media are a symbiotic meme. Each reinforces the other, and some ride this symbiosis to riches while others die. And nobody talks about this, especially the media, because they don’t want to let the very lucrative cat out of the very deadly bag. But I’ll do it, since I don’t make that much money anyway. Let’s first look at my numbers, then at some good science on the subject, then wrap the whole thing up into a nice ugly, gore-soaked package. We also talk music, which it turns out, is important.

HWFO

You’re currently reading a blog that’s 50% gun statistics, 50% culture war analysis, and 85% media criticism, owing to how Venn Diagrams work.

I like the cultural analysis stuff better, personally, but the gun articles get all the traffic. If I were trying to make money from this endeavor, I would only write gun articles. And here’s why.

If I write nothing I get somewhere between 500 and 1000 views a day on this publication from residual traffic on old articles. But on August 4th, I got 2,736. On August 5th, I got 15,029. I must have really written a balling article on August 3rd.

But I didn’t write a thing.

What did happen on August 3rd? Someone killed 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso.

My August 4th article must have been pretty incredible, though, right? The day after the shooting? 15,000 hits say it had to be a great one.

Didn’t write a thing.

Someone else killed ten more people in Dayton.

But they both used guns, and those shots are like the clapper in a giant, insane, social media bell. Massive arguments about gun control reverberate through Twitter and Facebook, fed by the media, as people constantly link articles that they find useful in their anxiety driven yelling fits. Every link drives a click and every click earns some media behemoth a third of a penny, give or take. And when I say they’re ringing the bell, I’m not joking. Let’s talk about bells.

Sound Synthesis and the Reverberation of Gore

One of the first things synthesizer players learn is how ADSR envelopes work.

Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release. These are amplitude parameters, or the volume of a synthesizer note. How loud it is. Attack is how fast the note grows in volume, decay is how quickly it falls off while the key is still held, sustain is the volume it maintains after the initial key strike, and release is how long it takes to fade away. Here’s a snapshot of how you’d set up Ableton’s Operator synthesizer to replicate a bell:

The ADSR envelope is that black box in the middle. The attack is steep and linear, the decay is exponential, and we don’t care about sustain or release with bells.

Here’s what the waveform looks like when you sample it:

Look familiar?

Say it with me. Booooonnnnnngggggg.

My experience running this publication has taught me some interesting trends. If I have an article that pops on Reddit, the traffic decay envelope is quick — several days, as the thing falls off the front page. If it hits Facebook, the decay is a week or longer, and the amplitude is much larger as well. The Medium snapshot above is the attack and decay from three major articles hitting Facebook feeds in the wake of two consecutive mass shootings.

The Left Is Making the Wrong Case on Gun Deaths. Here’s a Better Case.

Everybody’s Lying About the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide

The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper

This is the Ballad of the Blood-Soaked Clicks, made real and stripped bare. This blood money bell reverberated through my Medium account and made me enough cash to buy a week’s worth of groceries. But my traffic doesn’t even register, compared to some place like CNN.

Which means CNN has a curiously disgusting financial incentive to ring the bell.

Scoreboard!

One CNN article bounced around during the reverberation of this particular shooter media bell builds an index of who the most “successful” mass shooters are, like some kind of video game high score list. Gunviolecearchive.org even formats theirs like a video game scoreboard. Check this out:

I feel dirty even including it in the article. Look at it. Now look at this.

Look similar?

Can you imagine the outrage if a major media outlet had a list of top ten bridge jumping suicides ranked by how high the bridge was? It might incite someone else to jump from a higher bridge.

Jamie Madigan, Ph.D. knows quite a bit about the psychology of games, and how high score lists can motivate people to keep playing them, or overachieve as compared to their peers, when they see these lists. It’s a dopamine fix related to “Social Comparison Theory,” which is a theory from Leon Festinger, more famous for his work on Cognitive Dissonance. Here, Dr. Madigan explains how to use Social Comparison Theory to design better high score lists:

This is a great video, but I’m pretty sure he won’t like me linking it and telling you to do what I’m about to tell you to do. I want you to watch the first half of the video and pretend we aren’t talking about games. We’re talking about mass murder. And then pretend that you’re not watching the video for suggestions on things we should be doing to make people play more games, but rather things we should specifically avoid, to keep people from mass murdering each other.

Do his slides look like our media behavior?

Please don’t confuse the argument here. I’m not saying mass shootings have anything to do with ‘violent video games.’ I’m saying some of the things that game designers do, psychologically speaking, to make people play more video games are corollary to things the media is doing, psychologically speaking, with their media coverage of mass shootings.

And this isn’t just pissing in the wind. We have real science supporting this contention, specifically related to suicides, homicides, and mass shootings.

Mass Shooters are a Media Driven Social Contagion

Adam Lankford performed an interesting study in 2017 indicating that the media coverage afforded to mass shooters equates to about 75 million dollars in free publicity. Abstract:

In recent years, some critics have suggested that the media make mass killers into celebrities by giving them too much attention. However, whether the media coverage these offenders receive actually approaches the amounts given to celebrities has never been tested. This study compared perpetrators of seven mass killings during 2013–2017 with more than 600 celebrities over the same time period. Findings indicate that the mass killers received approximately $75 million in media coverage value, and that for extended periods following their attacks they received more coverage than professional athletes and only slightly less than television and film stars. In addition, during their attack months, some mass killers received more highly valued coverage than some of the most famous American celebrities, including Kim Kardashian, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, and Jennifer Aniston. Finally, most mass killers received more coverage from newspapers and broadcast/cable news than the public interest they generated through online searches and Twitter seems to warrant. Unfortunately, this media attention constitutes free advertising for mass killers that may increase the likelihood of copycats.

Jillian Peterson and James Densley mentioned this copycat effect in the LA Times this August.

Third, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives. People in crisis have always existed. But in the age of 24-hour rolling news and social media, there are scripts to follow that promise notoriety in death. Societal fear and fascination with mass shootings partly drives the motivation to commit them. Hence, as we have seen in the last week, mass shootings tend to come in clusters. They are socially contagious. Perpetrators study other perpetrators and model their acts after previous shootings.

The best breakdown of this effect is probably by Kareem Shaya at Open Source Defense. You should read that article and come back, but here’s the short summary.

Lots of research has gone into copycat violence related to suicide. The Vienna subway suicides, the Golden Gate Bridge suicides, and others have prompted researchers to do studies on the copycat effect of suicide. From OSD:

Copycat suicides are so well-studied that the phenomenon has been named — “the Werther effect” — after a Goethe character who’s said to have inspired a spate of copycat suicides in the late 1700s. Modern studies suggest that celebrity suicides can have the same effect today: “Compared to the number of suicides as predicted by the model, [Robin Williams’] death was associated with a 12.8% increase in suicides in August and September 2014 and a 25.5% increase in suicides attributable to suffocation during those months.”

Which in turn leads the National Alliance on Mental Illness to draft rules about how the press should cover suicide. What the media should say, and what it shouldn’t, to ameliorate the copycat effect. And the press, by and large, follows these guidelines. Following them doesn’t cost the press any money, for two important reasons:

1) Media consumers don’t really care about the details of a suicide, and

2) The media wouldn’t make any money off the copycat suicide anyway.

If Joe on Bankhead Highway kills himself after Robin Williams does, then Joe doesn’t get a spread on the front page of CNN or Fox. Joe is worth zero clicks.

Jennifer Johnston Ph.D. and Andrew Joy published a comprehensive look at this effect in 2016. Some of their quotes from the APA related press release are damning.

“We suggest that the media cry to cling to ‘the public’s right to know’ covers up a greedier agenda to keep eyeballs glued to screens, since they know that frightening homicides are their №1 ratings and advertising boosters,” she said.

[…]

“If the mass media and social media enthusiasts make a pact to no longer share, reproduce or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers, we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years,” she said. “Even conservatively, if the calculations of contagion modelers are correct, we should see at least a one-third reduction in shootings if the contagion is removed.”

One third reduction. Is that model accurate, and predictive? I don’t know. At the surface, changing the way the media covers mass shootings looks far easier than (somehow) magically evaporating the nation’s most popular rifle, and would save a lot more people than making a mass shooter carry thirty ten round magazines instead of ten thirty round magazines.

But we run into a game theory problem, that we’ve discussed before, which goes back to the tragedy of the commons in the attention economy. For this specific example, it goes about like this:

CNN could decide not to cover a mass shooting in the way they’re covering it. So could Fox. Good for them. But what happens when MSNBC or Vox decides to cover the shooting in the same way as they did yesterday? They get the clicks, the market share, the traffic, and the number of reads on these bad articles doesn’t change. The social contagion hasn’t been mitigated at all. All that’s changed is who makes the blood money.

And we have no gatekeepers. If every major media outlet made a grand pact to cover mass shootings differently, maybe Breitbart scoops up the traffic. Or some Medium blogger. So the media themselves are in a Prisoner’s Dilemma, where they are forcing themselves to literally kill more people in mass shooting events because if they don’t do it someone else would. And this is what it looks like:

Ten cameras for every mourner, feeding the beast it’s daily dose of Culture War Ammunition. The people on the right-hand side of that photo killed 33% of the victims the ones on the left are mourning. According to the math, anyway.

The media and the mass shooters are in a complex symbiosis of bullets, blood, and money, and it’s going to take a very coordinated effort across organizations that appear to hate each other to break the cycle, and stop ringing the bell.

I hope they break it. I don’t need the grocery money.

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