The increasing egalitarianism of everything

This is part of a listserv discussion.

If I may, I would like to propose yet another model for understanding
this. In line with what I understand to be a consensus among
international relations people (and in conjunction with yet another
Heinlien book, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) you could call anarchy
the natural state of man: the set of all agents interacting on a small
scale. Governments are somewhat like protection rackets, in any given
form -- feudalism was more explicit about this, since after all, the
nobles swore to defend the serfs in return for their food and labour.
However, as communication gets better, the mobs are more capable of
defending themselves (which, of course, has been status q since before
the fall of feudalism), and furthermore, more capable of organizing
themselves than the ruling classes (the lords of feudalism, now
relegated merely to the status of glorified middle managers). So, an
active pure anarchy becomes progressively more practical and less
dangerous the better communication becomes, since the historical
situation of the lord/protector/wiseguy class having all the good
intel and all the good technology is getting progressively less true
(the intel business and the tech business are becoming more
egalitarian, certainly).

Problem is, of course, that whole industries are based around the idea
that the ruling class has all the intel and all the tech, and deigns
to give the outsiders access to snippets at whim. The current uses of
IP law are based around the idea that there are producers and
consumers, and that consumers can neither produce nor reproduce
without breaking things. However, the limitless perfect copying
capacity of computer networks means that consumers can make perfect
reproductions at much faster rates than any producers could distribute
them, and subverts the few-to-many producer/consumer population ratio
previously fundamental to the IP sale business model, while
simultaneously making it near impossible to use existing civil court
IP law to counter it. Likewise, the US military (and probably others)
are suffering major problems because of a few loose-lipped cannon
fodder types having access to things like twitter and facebook,
thereby ruining whole operations before they even begin. Even hardware
industries may fall, since the production of cheap 3d printers and
other advances by the hobbyist maker-culture makes possible a popular
means-of-production seizure of a kind more radical than any marxist
could imagine, and may do the same to the industrial and
military-industrial complexes that it has begun to do to the
media-memetic complex.

Is this bad? Depends on who you ask. It's a game-changer, for sure.
The basic feudal model (with minor variants) has been status q in
human societies for at least the past four thousand years, and
probably longer. Most people will feel unmoored, if not a bit
alienated. In the short run, it will also mean game over for most of
the people and organizations that fundamentally depend upon a
few-to-many ratio rather than depending upon skill or quality. It will
probably be great for skilled hobbyists, and it already is to some
extent. I think that, if played right, in the long run it could be
pretty nice for almost everyone. But, it's a different gameboard, with
different rules, and I think there will be some thrashing while the
former ruling classes adjust.
- Show quoted text -

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 9:36 AM, wishnevsky wrote:
>
>
> A new word, if not a new idea.
>
>
> Wikiocracy
>
> Emerging ideas can only be comprehended by means of metaphor and allusion,
> as a rule. There is a wonderful array of happenings, most duly noted by
> those people who make their livings commenting on trends, emergent memes and
> concepts, but one of the most consequential changes to the global body
> politic is occurring unnoticed, in plain sight. A Marxist would call this
> the “withering away of the State,” but that is only part of the issue.
> Concepts such as “crowd sourcing,” wikipedia, “googleism,” free internet and
> many more are just a part of this emergence.
>
>
> Consider these points; The most rigid and monolithic state in history, the
> USSR, evaporated in a few months, with very little violence, an event
> predicted by no one, that has not been studied to any extent. Perhaps it was
> the political equivalent of a “rogue wave,” unforeseen and unique. But
> perhaps it was a harbinger.
>
>
> The fastest growing economy in the word, China, has a governmental system
> that defies classification, indeed description. There is a Marxist ruling
> class, a “People’s Army” morphed into a collection of industrial
> conglomerates and a middle class of unfettered capitalists unseen since the
> days of the Robber Barons. Underpinning it all is peasant based Feudalism.
>
>
> In 1950, China was the feeblest nation on earth, and now it bodes to become
> the leading superpower within a generation.
> India, also a basket case in 1950, is the type-case for unbridled diversity
> with 21 "scheduled languages," nine “major” religions, the entire range of
> human skin tones and uncounted ethnic groups. In spite of this prescription
> for confusion, they have achieved the largest democracy in the world,
> although the actual system of rule is largely undefined. Chaos and Discordia
> are not listed among the gods of India, perhaps they fled in horror. This
> multiplicity has not harmed their rate of growth, however.
>
>
> Brazil, by no means a monolithic state, is also in the running for the
> superpowers of the near future. It is easy to see that the monopolistic
> totalitarian gestalt of government has not survived the test of history.
> To return to Russia. Autocracy has moved through Anarchy to what?
> Unprincipled Oligarchy? Free Market Obscurity? Does anyone really know? No
> matter, their growth rate is healthy. Arthur C. Clarke had the most accurate
> prediction when he said that in 1984, the USA and the USSR would pass each
> other, going in opposite directions.
>
>
> The same indescribable process is easily visible as the hyper-democratic
> internet devours all types of monopolies. Wikipedia destroyed Encyclopedia
> Britannica without a whimper. Craigslist has removed the financial base of
> every newspaper in the country. The music industry killed Napster, crippling
> itself in the process. Now the “Industry” grows smaller every year while the
> amount of available “Indie” music passes any limits of calculation. No one
> can even keep up with the number of genres these days, they seem to have run
> out of hyphens.
>
>
> Robert Heinlein’s Science Fiction classic, “Double Star” plays with the
> concept of electronic democracy, where political parties are defined by
> occupation, not nationality and voting is instant. How far is that from
> implementation? The technology is available now, politicians are the
> laggards.
>
>
> SF writer Vernor Vinge postulated the Cyber Singularity, where computers
> recreate themselves past the point of human comprehension, another point we
> are approaching rapidly. All this ties into a real blue-sky concept, the
> “Global Brain” where the Internet becomes self-aware, an actual Deity. Pie
> in the sky? The first Global Brain was established by the Spanish Empire of
> Phillip the First, based on muscle power, sails and parchment.
>
>
> All this sheds light on the establishment of the first two “Instant
> Political Parties,” The Tea Party and the brand new Coffee Party. The
> reactionary Tea Parties, they are already suffering schism, were more
> collections of rump groups that received influxes of money from the Health
> Industry and support from Fox News.
>
>
> The Coffee Party appears genuine grass roots, started in January by
> filmmakers and activists Annabel Park and Eric Byler. The first real-world
> event was March 13, and there were nearly 400 events nationwide. There are
> well over 200,000 “fans” on Facebook, far more than the number of Tea Party
> fans.
>
>
> This is not an advertisement for the Coffee Party, rather an attempt to show
> that the process of “going viral” can apply to more weighty matters than LOL
> Catz. There have been un-programmed mass movements before, of course. It
> was a generation ago that many people decided to experiment with LSD, for no
> particular reason, with results that have not yet finished reverberating to
> this day.
>
>
> But this phenomenon is a new thing in the world, so it behooves us to
> recognize it as an emergent process, a process that is reshaping our lives
> at warp speed. Hang on.
>
> St. Wishnevsky
> wishnevs@bellsouth.net
>
>
>
>



--
--
John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/

Plates of shrimp, social priming, and the wikiality of the superorganism (yet another pseudophilosophical bullshit session)

The following is another brain dump, but it may make more sense since parts of it have already been articulated elsewhere in semiunderstandable terms.


We may not all agree with reality as a fully social construction (solipism is a four letter word to the mathematically disinclined), but I think we all can agree that a certain amount of how we interpret events that are arguably 'real' is socially or intellectually influenced. Whether or not there's something 'out there', most of the time we interact primarily with our internal model, which may or may not correspond very well with the external (1:1) model, and we also use our model to make sense of the confusing and altogether super-ambiguous signals we get from our senses.

Now, priming is the term given to the way that our short term memory (especially the bits of it that we can't directly access) influence the interpretation of new signals often more so than long term memory. This makes sense. Our long term memory is contextual, since we have so much stuff in there that it would take forever to figure out that the shape on the ground is a poisonous snake if we have to sort through all the images recorded in that time when we flew a kite in the city and bumped our knee first (by the time we get to the category of 'forest animals' we're probably already bitten, and by the time we loop around to how to get to a hospital we're already half dead). The short term memory provides context, sort of like an index. But priming becomes increasingly complex and powerful at the level of multilayer symbolic interaction we get to with written and spoken languages that are more complex than what cats and dogs are capable of.

Priming affects not only our interpretation of signals, but also influences our output. 'Freudian slips' are only the most obvious examples. Many times, the signals are modified just enough to cause a change in word choice: the connotation will subtly change, though the denotation (and therefore the obvious meaning) will remain.

Now, this effect has a relatively small effect with a small group of relatively uncommunicative people. With a small group of highly communicative people, we get into what McLuhan calls the 'tribal system' -- think of it as being like the rumour mill in a small town, where a game of telephone stablizes into a semicoherent perception after a few iterations because of the incestuous interconnection of all nodes with comparatively few jumps: after hearing six variants of the same rumour, most people will decide to repeat only the version they like, likely back to the same people who have heard all the others, and a few versions will crystallize as canon due to repetition and popularity.

But on the tubes, we have an absurdly LARGE number of people with an extremely SMALL number of hops and minimal distortion of a given message (the human element of distortion is relegated to summaries, commentaries, and questionable mischaracterizations in an environment when the entirety of the original can be copypasted or linked to with minimal effort). This causes what McLuhan calls a 'global villiage' (which is actually such an overloaded term these days that most of the time when it's used it bears very little resemblance to what McLuhan meant by it) wherein a tribal system is scaled up massively while maintaining roughly the same level of interconnectivity and hops between nodes. This allows massive near-instantaneous propagation of all sorts of messages to all sorts of people, and in fact allows most of this communication to be bidirectional despite the large number of nodes, some of which are hubs or even combination maven-hubs. So, despite the fact that person X is on the other side of the world, they can still hear about person Y's actions of questionable taste/morality, and comment in a method that may reach person Y more or less intact. The rumour mill has become part of the underlying infrastructure of spaceship earth.

But, what of priming?

Priming was previously limited simply by the potential for bidirectional propagation and the modification (or, might I posit, processing) caused by the back-and-forth. With the internets, we currently have not only a global villiage with a massive number of people processing and communicating primed subtexts nearly instantaenously and nearly constantly, but we also have a semi-permanent log of a great deal of them.

And now for something completely different. (do you believe that?)

Carl Jung is credited with the concept of 'synchronicity', which is (very roughly) defined as meaningful coincidence. Both the word 'meaningful' and the word 'coincidence' are entirely relative to the point of view and level of abstraction one is working at, obviously, but it's a nice thing to build on. Jung, in fact, didn't come up with the idea, but he probably thought he did. In the movie Repo Man, synchronicity is called the 'plate of shrimp' effect.

The normal explanation for this is termed 'the law of very large numbers': in other words, no matter how uncorrelated with reality a bias is, given enough data one can cherry-pick pieces of evidence to convincingly impose a pattern. Cherry-picking data is called a stochastic process, and is the cornerstone of science and cognition, as well as being the cornerstone of defense for all forms of dogma (anti-evolutionism, dogmatic materialism, political propaganda, conspiracy theories, fundamentalist creationism, racism, and cultural elitism, to name a few). In theory, the major difference is that dogma cherry-picks things to flatter itself and defame other dogmas while science is supposed to cherry-pick things to flatter and defame everybody on and off in turns. Synchronicity is typically explained away as starting with a meaning and ignoring all coincidences that don't flatter it.

However, does that actually pan out? The 'meaning' in the synchronicity is rarely there before it is seen -- instead, the meaning is picked out because of a few strange coincidences, and once it is picked, the number of coincidences involved expand significantly.

A certain amount of this is going to be the law of very large numbers by itself. However, a certain amount is probably going to be due to other people's research on the *exact same meaning*. For a simple example, Burroghs started a journal of accidents involving the number twenty three, which spurred Robert Anton Wilson to do the same. Both authors dropped references to the number's 'meaning' in their books, and a certain amount of the following of 23-related coincidences is probably due to indirect references-to-references-to-references (Jim Carey's movie "The Number 23" is probably not directly inspired by Burroghs or RAW, despite the trailer referencing several things found in the works of both).

There is something that is called the "net of synchronicity" -- something that a follower of coincidences starts to notice, wherein (far more than even the law of very large numbers should probably explain) certain strange coincidences seem to be highly interrelated. For instance, Burroughs connected 23 with the name "Clark", while Wilson connected 23 with Aleister Crowley, the Sirius system, and the 1960s drug counterculture.

I suppose that in a way, the net of synchronicity is probably the collective product of the interchange of primings within a somewhat interconnected group of people interested in particular types of coincidences. Wilson got 23 from Burroughs, and picked up Crowley from a friend of a friend of Burroughs, and then got the Sirius association by juxtaposing the 23 element with the Crowley element, and a good number of his contacts during that time were associated with the 1960s counterculture. In the internet age, synchronicities can piggyback upon each other, and synchronicities can become self-fulfilling prophecies due to both direct and indirect influence (subconscious anxiety on a flight 13 can cause a pilot to panic and crash rather than think critically and pull off an emergency landing, changing a happy ending into a disaster, while meanwhile a movie producer may reference the number 13 simply in order to piggyback on the existing fears surrounding it). This can happen far faster and far more complexly than without it, and a lot of the early sources are still around and documented there. Time binding is becoming far more efficient.

One can probably argue (as I am wont to do) that in a way, through these layers of both conscious and subconscious communication and processing, we are becoming sort of a super-organism. Without the internet, we are sort of like a loose colony of cells, like slime mold (which is a colony of single-celled organisms that manage to work together well enough to pass for a single organism occasionally but can easily break into its component parts, and then reassemble). With the internet, we are a much larger organism, wherein the cells (us human beans) are highly interconnected by high speed broadband axions, and wherein short term stable pattern in a continuously evolving conversation between huge numbers of nodes. This synchronicity net can both consciously and subconsciously influence a large number of people, which of course will influence their actions to some extent. Given enough time, a stable self-organizing pattern of instructions will occur, and a number of actions that are seemingly unrelated will cause a 'perfect storm' situation for a given action, which will then happen. This action cannot really be said to be the choice of any given person. Instead, this action (being quite deliberate in retrospect) is the emergent decision of all of humanity as a single entity, with no hierarchical structure being involved in the actual decision. This action in of itself may become the cornerstone of a totally new synchronicity net.

So, tl;dr: wierd conspiracy theories, wiki defacement, 4chan, twitter, and facebook are the unwitting central and peripheral nervous system for a being the size of the earth and exponetially more intelligent than any given human on the network.

Probe

The Probe

A Gutenberg Galaxy

Spreads out before Me

A mirror of Fallacy

Permeates my screen.

This darkness, my insides

My name is Deat'h