Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“The ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’ from now on would have lives of their own, participating in a perpetual ballroom dance where partners are exchanged promiscuously according to design.”

-Sanford Kwinter

Two threads of discourse dominated twentieth-century urbanism in the United States: the Jane Jacobs-Robert Moses dichotomy and the rise of the suburbs. The former was fundamentally a question of power. Should hyperintelligent master planners decide how cities develop, or should more agency remain at the block level, in the hands of city-dwellers themselves? The questions of how cities should function and whether they should favor vibrant street life or big business, infrastructural megaprojects and automobile throughput all followed from that primary question of power.

The suburbanization debate was slightly more one-sided and, as the trend intensified, the discussion assumed a more urgent tone. The car-dependent developments that exploded on the urban peripheries after World War II not only had their own serious social, environmental, and aesthetic problems, but they were undermining the central cities themselves by draining their residents, money, and cultural vitality without offering a satisfactory replacement. A long list of essential urbanist texts supports the argument against conventional suburbia, with few convincing rebuttals in favor of the trend.

By the 1990s, cities started making a comeback and the sense of urgency about solving the problems of suburbanization began to wane ever so slightly. It became easier for urbanists to ignore the difficult periphery and focus on the city—the Jacobs-Moses question—once again. Many continue to ponder the recent revitalization of American cities, a phenomenon exemplified by New York’s transformation into the tourist-friendly Giuliani/Bloomberg project that by now has fully matured and proven itself a model for smaller cities to emulate. Ed Glaeser and Richard Florida, among others, have made careers on explaining this phenomenon, flawed though their accounts may be. The suburban threat to the continued existence of cities had subsided—cities were back—but a nascent phenomenon had by then raised fresh doubts about the abiding need for classical urban space: the internet.

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The Information Age city, it seems, is qualitatively different than its predecessor. For the twentieth-century city, location was the central issue: people physically leaving the city for the suburbs, and the infrastructure that made that movement possible. People and material objects couldn’t occupy two locations at once, so being in one place meant not being in another. The spatial allocation of urban resources was a zero-sum game, and cities were losing.

Today, a different dichotomy has surpassed the urban/suburban one in relevance: the increasing separation of lived experience into physical and digital components. The question of which human activities need to keep happening in “meatspace” and which ones can fully migrate to the internet is a question that both cities and suburbs must answer, and it pulls the rug out from underneath the suburban problem (to the extent that the problem still exists). The growing pains and upheavals that cities underwent in the late twentieth century can be understood as early steps in the transition to the present mode. Sanford Kwinter writes that “the City of the 1970s and 1980s was arguably the laboratory—testing and training ground—for the internet-driven, image-glutted, global, deregulated market capitalism of the 1990s.” Software and the digital are now eating the physical city like the suburbs once were, and if the new trend is less visible, it’s almost certainly more potent. As urban culture detaches from the places that have historically generated it, metropolitan vapors swirl into formerly unlikely places. Places like Manhattan take on characteristics of suburban shopping malls as suburban malls themselves are increasingly designed to resemble urban commercial districts.

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The internet, like suburban growth before it, forces an affirmation of why cities are necessary. As suburbs boomed and cities emptied out and decayed in the 1960s and 1970s, we had to decide whether cities were indeed obsolete and the suburbs an adequate replacement. Intuitively, we knew that wasn’t the case, but we had to hope the course of history would prove us right. Likewise, the eruption of digital replacements for urban functions—from commerce to social interaction to cultural production—forces us to reexamine any beliefs we held that those functions are the reasons we still live in cities. We can inhabit physical and digital space simultaneously, as opposed to choosing between the city and suburbs, but as Glaeser and Florida have pointed out, cities are as vital as ever in the Information Age, and the digital entities that have begun eating the city’s traditional roles—Amazon,  Facebook, and even Craigslist—are not undermining cities themselves.

Cities, ultimately, embody the battle against entropy in which human civilization is always engaged. Entropy—a system’s passage from difference to uniformity—is precisely what cities enable us to avoid. The work that it takes to build cities and maintain them is the very act of humanity resisting a descent into randomness, and everything that can truly be called urban actively opposes that uniformity. The real threat of twentieth-century suburbanization was not its inefficiency or even the social limitations it imposed, but that it indicated a societal failure to resist entropy. The hollowing out of urban centers and the rebirth of those places as blandly repetitive bedroom communities, in this light, threatened more than just cities themselves as it suggested an acceleration of civilizational heat death.

Digital space, then, is the next front in the civilizational war on entropy that we have always been waging. Cities are as important as ever in this phase, although the form they will assume is uncertain. The internet may absorb certain time-honored functions of the city (and it’s already doing so) but there is a limit to how far this process can go. Algorithmic recommendation systems will eventually descend into entropic noise unless fed by the real cultural wealth that cities generate. Apps like Yelp, Meetup, and Foursquare are built directly upon the geography of the physical city and cannot exist without it, and Amazon’s supply chain requires dense population centers to work efficiently. Like suburban sprawl, the tendency of the digital world is toward entropy, endlessly piling up data and discarding nothing. Without the restraining and ordering effects of cities that world will eventually become a Library of Babel, a channel muddled by bots talking to bots. We might stop using the physical city to shop, meet strangers, or consume entertainment, but when we finally escape every need we have for cities, it will mean we’ve also finally escaped our need for civilization.

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And so here we are, ready for an assault on our Everest: the mind that lies behind the low-reactor Sociopath face. A face that gazes upon the worlds of Losers and the Clueless with divine inscrutability. It’s certainly been a long climb.

With the resurrection of David Wallace and the ascent of Robert California to a richly undeserved heaven-on-earth, a harem of  young East European women, the crew at The Office teed up their final season, and presented us with our last and biggest challenge. And finally, we are ready to take it on.

Under the creepily steady gaze of Robert California, Jim wilts and chokes. Dwight blusters like a frightened dog, “Stop trying to get into my head!” But ultimately even that courageous Clueless soul cowers.

But you and I, we are going to break through. Our gaze may flinch. We may lose the staring contest with Robert California. We may fail to perturb the preternatural poise of David Wallace. But we will figure out the minds that lie beneath.

As The Office winds its way to a satisfyingly redemptive American series finale this week, the remaining questions in our own little sideshow tent will be answered in deeply unsatisfying and empty ways.  

Here’s a brief recap of the series so far if you need it. Welcome to the finale of the Gervais Principle.

Power from Emptiness

In the grand, operatic world of the Titans, a Sociopath has fallen. Dunder-Mifflin is now Sabre, and the once-mighty CFO David Wallace skulks in his lair, unshaven and somewhat drunk, spiraling down into a personal hell under the increasingly worried gaze of his wife. His normal preternatural poise has temporarily collapsed. He looks out at the world with a crazed gleam in his eyes.

Fallen and disgraced, rocking to the manic beat of his son’s drumming, Wallace yells defiance at the universe:

“SUCK IT!!!“

Raging at an absent god — one who does not talk back or otherwise provide proof of his presence — is the sign of a recurring liminal passage in the Sociopath life, marking the start of yet another Sisyphean effort to extract a sliver of meaning from existence.

For Wallace, “Suck it” is not just a cry of despair and defiance. It is also the name of the product that returns him to grace in the human world. And it is a product that not even the prodigiously gullible Michael believes in at inception.

Rather appropriately, Wallace’s Suck It! is a vacuum cleaner. Originally developed for use as a toy, and later sold to the military for millions, allowing him to buy back Dunder-Mifflin. An amoral device that generates power from emptiness.

That is what Sociopaths ultimately do with their lives if they survive long enough: generate amoral power from increasing inner emptiness, transforming themselves into forces of nature.

As a side-effect, they also manufacture transient meanings to fuel the theaters of religiosity (including various secular religions) that lend meaning to lives of Losers and the Clueless. This meaning is achieved via subtraction, through withdrawal of complexities that the latter are predisposed to ignore, leaving behind simpler, more satisfying and more tractable realities for them to inhabit.

When Sociopath stories end, the Loser and Clueless stories that continue become bereft of meaning; sound and fury signifying nothing. When Sociopaths turn their attentions en masse to new frontiers, they leave behind complete cargo cults that continue to function for a while. The Office in its last season is such a world, with its major Sociopath stories complete, and its borderline Sociopaths, Jim and Darryl, busy flirting with the full-blown kind in Philadelphia. The show never really jumped the shark during its nine-year run (though it came close with the PB&J wedding). The Sociopaths merely left the building.

The Quest for Unmediated Realities

The Sociopath journey begins with what is essentially a religious dissatisfaction. A dissatisfaction  that awakens the first time Sociopaths contemplate their situation in life.

On the one hand, they find the contemporary account of reality to be suspiciously convenient for those with power: it explains the prevailing social order as a necessary and natural one a little too neatly.

On the other hand, they find themselves facing the intolerable expectation that they accept powerless stations, defined by scripted actions and fixed rewards within that order.

Whether they dismiss prevailing accounts as rationalizations and begin a search for deeper meanings, or defy expectations and reach for power beyond their station, Sociopaths begin their unscripted journeys to rid themselves of that fundamental dissatisfaction; the sense that reality is more complex than whatever is being presented to them. That important things are being hidden from view, and not for their own good.

They are not entirely sure what they are looking for, but they do know that they are looking to engage reality directly, without mediation by other humans. To turn the famous line from A Few Good Men around, they are looking for the truth about social realities because they think they can handle it.

Sociopathy in our little conceptual universe derived from The Office is not about hatred for other humans. It is about this seeking of unmediated realities, a process in which ultimately other humans, including mentor Sociopaths, only get in the way.

The Sociopath’s journey, mythologized to serve the religious needs of the Clueless, is what gives us the Hero’s Journey.  Mythologized in a different way to serve Loser religiosity, the Sociopath becomes the priestly agent of larger intangible forces, offering absolution for sins and unpredictable signs of grace.

To the Sociopath, the very same journey, lived from the inside, is a nihilistic journey into emptiness, a gradual abandonment of the possibility of ultimate meanings.

The first sort of possible meaning to be abandoned is moral meaning.

Finding Amorality

In The Office, we never see an instance of the emergence of amorality. We encounter fully-formed Sociopaths already in an amoral state of being.

But examples can be found elsewhere.

In the Yes, Minister episode Whiskey Priest, we find this illuminating exchange between Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Sociopath Permanent Secretary, and the Clueless Minister,  Jim Hacker. The exchange follows a disagreement over an issue that Hacker is attempting to address with morality, and Appleby with pragmatism:

My arguments had clearly left him unaffected. “You are a moral vacuum Humphrey,’ I informed him.

“If you say so, Minister.” And he smiled courteously and inclined his head, as if to thank me for a gracious compliment.

Of course,  Hacker is soon persuaded to get off his moral high horse and pursue the expedient course indicated by Sir Humphrey, as the personal political costs become clear to him.

Later, when Hacker’s private secretary Bernard Wooley comes to Sir Humphrey with the worry that he too might turn into a moral vacuum, the latter manages to enlighten Bernard and turn his worry into an aspiration. The moment of enlightenment is also the moment Bernard casts asides his Loser doubts and turns into a committed Sociopath, on the fast track to the top job.

Amorality is merely the first step. As the journey proceeds, Sociopaths progressively rip away layer after layer of social reality. The Sociopath’s journey can be understood as progressive unmasking of a sequence of increasingly ancient and fearsome gods, each reigning over a harsher social order, governing fewer humans. If morality falls by the wayside when the first layer is ripped away, other reassuring certainties, such as the idea of a benevolent universe, and predictable relationships between efforts and rewards, fall away in deeper layers.

With each new layer decoded, Sociopaths find transient meaning, but not enduring satisfaction.

Much to their surprise, however, they find that in the unsatisfying meanings they uncover, lie the keys to power over others. In seeking to penetrate mediated experiences of reality, they unexpectedly find themselves mediating those very realities for others. They acquire agency in the broadest sense of the word. Losers and the Clueless delegate to them not mere specialist matters like heart surgery or car repair, but control over the meanings of their very lives. 

So in seeking to unmask the gods, they find themselves turning into the gods.

When they speak, they find that their words become imbued with divine authority. When they are spoken to, they hear prayerful tones of awe. The Clueless want to be them, Losers want to defer to them.

Gods Who Talk Back

To understand the theaters of religiosity inhabited by the Clueless and Losers, it is useful to start with a quote usually attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.

The divide between theism and atheism is a divide for small and average minds. Whether or not you mythologize your metaphysics by adding gods and divine events is ultimately irrelevant.

The important distinction, for the great mind of the Sociopath, is whether or not the god talks back. This is why we began this series, four years ago, by characterizing Sociopaths with an interchangeable pair of adjectives: Darwinist/Protestant Ethic.  One is nominally an atheist perspective, while the other is a theist perspective. But in neither perspective does the divine talk back.

That the gods do not talk back when we address them, is a realization that is as old as humanity itself. But conscious acceptance of the fact has always been rare, and eagerness to believe the opposite common. William James was the first to really get why:

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

Anchored as they are in thoughts about social realities — people and events —  the religions of Losers and the Clueless are ultimately religions of happiness. Heaven is simply the part of the social order deemed sacred, and contemplated in private. Even in solitude, they are never truly alone, because they seek exactly the socially mediated relationship to reality that the Sociopath seeks to escape. Their gods are present with them even in their solitude, talking back in comforting tones through social memories chosen for review.

This inability to experience being alone is what James called the religion of healthy-mindedness, which we recognize today, a century later, as the social well-adjustedness of Losers and the childlike obliviousness of the Clueless. We examined these in detail in previous parts.

The gods of the Sociopaths, by contrast, are absent meanings and voices. Theirs is a true aloneness. Their religions are the opposite of healthy-minded. They are, for the most part, recipes for neurotic self-destruction, but with a shot at freedom.

When Sociopaths accept the divine roles that the Clueless and Losers eagerly thrust upon them, they find themselves ruling the realities of others. But any human stand-in for an omnipotent conception of divinity must ultimately betray the believer.

The key, when betraying the Clueless, is to get them to blame themselves. With Losers, the key is to get them to blame each other. Each pattern of blame redirection gives us a particular theater of religiosity, and specific role for the Sociopath within it. Each also rewards the Sociopath with a specific kind of agency.

The Rankable Hero-God

Small minds discuss people. In Jamesian solitude, the minds of the Clueless turn to contemplation of their idols.

The gods of the Clueless are idealized organizations and unreconstructed idols. In what is perhaps the finest soliloquy in The Office, Dwight reveals his hidden passion for table tennis by reciting the names of a pantheon of minor gods:

All of my heroes are table tennis players. Zoran Primorac, Jan-Ove Waldner, Wang Tao, Jorg Rosskopf and of course Ashraf Helmy. I even have a life-size poster of Hugo Hoyama on my wall. And the first time I left Pennsylvania, was to go to the hall of fame induction ceremony of Andrzej Grubba.

The urge to give expression to religious feeling by reciting the names of rankable gods is a deep and primitive one. To recite the names with Dwight-like unreconstructed ardor is to create farce. In our godless times, the urge finds expression in any sort of unexamined taxonomic urge. In its mature form, this instinct creates the satisfying rituals of rosaries and metered hymns.

What is notable about Dwight’s table-tennis religiosity is the far-removed but familiar nature of its object. Though he is good enough to beat Jim, what makes professional table tennis a useful heavenly realm for him is that it is legible but almost unattainable. It is a large, but finite and countable number of steps away. His heroes are very distant, but a countable number of medals and rankings away. The heroes themselves can be ranked on the upper rungs of a stairway to heaven.

The Clueless seek idols to emulate. Their gods are heroes they want to be like, and whose lives and stories they contemplate in private. The rules of the Clueless heavens are not fundamentally different from the rules of Clueless Earth.

It is not just the gods who are finite and countable in number, everything in Clueless religion is legible. Nothing is intangible. Sins are countable as points docked. Rewards and punishments are also countable. When Dwight attempts an office coup for instance, Michael punishes him by making him do his laundry for a month.

Serving as high-ranking heroic god in this legible religion is easy. So long as Sociopaths stay sufficiently distant, and hide the elevator they took to heaven, their status is secure. They are perceived as being too high up to directly compete with. Even failures do not tarnish their divine images. When gods fail, they merely drop a few rungs, shuffling heavenly rankings.

It is a fundamentally innocent, child-like religiosity. And as we saw last time, the programmed organization exists primarily to protect this innocence, for use in sacrificial betrayals, when failures are blamed on their incompetence.

Moments of Sociopath betrayal, for the Clueless, are also their rare moments of unscripted autonomy. But mostly, they do not take advantage of such moments. Instead, they react with either a misguided sense of honor and loyalty, accepting punishment for incompetence, or ineffectually attempt to dodge blame. Occasionally, they might try a Clueless kind of revenge, such as Michael’s attempt to start his own paper company.

In rare cases, the reaction to betrayal is a loss of innocence, an event that the Sociopath cannot entirely control.

If the Sociopath is lucky, the betrayed Clueless will catch an unmediated glimpse of illegible realities, successfully process the terror, get beyond revenge motives, and turn into into an amoral new Sociopath. A potential ally or competitor, but always a welcome source of new energy and scarce companionship in the Sociopath world. This is very rare. Direct Clueless-to-Sociopath transitions, without time spent in Loserdom, is unlikely.

If the Sociopath is less lucky, blame for betrayal will be directed at an existing group of Losers, where it will diffuse harmlessly as general resentment and disappointment that cannot be processed within Clueless frames. This outcome might lead to the Clueless graduating to Loserdom themselves, where they turn into less useful, checked-out pawns.

The latter outcome can be engineered, as we saw last time in our Golden Ticket counterfactual example, but not very reliably. The former cannot be engineered at all. Enlightenment can always be encouraged, but never scripted.

Wrangling Loser Spirituality

Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events. In Jamesian solitude, the minds of Losers turn to endlessly reliving social events and the associated churn of status and emotions. The banal sorrows and pleasures of group life, which we saw in Part IV, are endlessly reviewed for significance in private.

The external consequence of such private processing of intangibles is emotional resolution that heals or creates rifts.

The  internal consequence of such private processing is that Losers see themselves as spiritual, not religious. 

They may still participate in the theater of temples and icons, especially if those external objects are suitably aestheticized to symbolize their inner experiences. But they ultimately look inwards for significance. So to Losers, there is a distinction between the symbolically meaningful gravitas of organized religion and the meaningless absurdity of table-tennis or Star Trek religiosity.

Their “spirituality” manifests as a yearning to be indivisibly part of something bigger than themselves. They satisfy this yearning by looking for pools of positive collective emotions into which to dissolve their sense of self.

So their heaven is not a pantheon of heroes, reachable via a long ladder of achievement. Instead, it is an abstraction derived from emotional experiences shared with others. Atheist Losers call it belongingness. Theist Losers might describe it as oneness with the divine, but it is not the non-social self-dissolution of the Sociopath mystic. It is just regular belongingness with some theological flavors added. 

It is this capacity of intellectual abstraction from “religious” to “spiritual,” and the emotional capacity for dissolving identities into groups, that allows Losers to convince themselves that they are more evolved than the Clueless.

This difference between Clueless (ritualistic) and Loser (spiritual) moral calculi, appropriately exaggerated, is illustrated in the episode The Job, where Dwight tries to teach a course on paper manufacturing for the staff during a temporary tenure as manager:

Dwight: Good! Now, let us discuss precipitation. Stanley! When rainfall occurs, does it usually fall in a liquid, solid, or gaseous… state?
Stanley: Liquid.
Dwight: Very good! You have earned one Schrute Buck.
Stanley: I don’t want it.
Dwight: Then you have been deducted 50 Schrute Bucks!
Stanley: Make it 100.
Dwight: We — Don’t you wanna earn Schrute Bucks?
Stanley: No. In fact, I’ll give you a billion Stanley Nickels if you never talk to me again.
Dwight: What’s the ratio of Stanley Nickels to Schrute Bucks?
Stanley: The same as the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns.
Dwight: Okay…

Instead of such farcical calculations, Loser resolution-seeking works by balancing illegible emotional experiences against each other, in a process of null-seeking. So the anger caused by an act of betrayal might be soothed by a symbolic act of contrition that restores emotional balance to the moral universe, and perceived relative status.

But by their very nature, emotions overweight social behavior over material substance. Having a $100 bill thrown contemptuously at you hurts. Being politely handed $10 feels good. The Loser mind, predictably, sees the first act as a slight and seeks revenge, and the second act as nice and seeks to repay it.

We saw an example from the The Office last time. In the sales-commissions episode we find that for the support staff, sharing in the salespeople’s commissions and being thrown a thank-you party are emotionally equivalent. Both heal the emotional rift, but one leaves the salespeople vastly better off.

The Sociopath as Priest

It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are  able to manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms.  The result is that the Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution, and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.

To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while they are being manipulated.

Sociopaths encourage this mode of processing by framing their own contributions to betrayal situations as necessary and inevitable. They also carefully avoid contributing to the emotional texture of unfolding events, otherwise their roles might come under scrutiny by being included in the emotional computations.

This is a crucial point. This is the practical reason for the low-reactor affect of Sociopathy.

For theatrically skilled Sociopaths, other non-vanilla affects are possible. “Divine anger” (Jan),  ”charming but firm elder” (Jo Bennett) and “unpredictable demigod” (Robert California) are examples. These framing affects are designed to shape outcomes without direct participation, in ways that cannot be achieved by neutral low-reactor affects.

Any apparent participation in Loser/Clueless processing, such as David Wallace’s guest participation in the office charity auction, or Jo’s invitation to Michael to visit her in Florida, are strictly nominal and not meant to be taken seriously (Michael of course, does not get this, and attempts to cash in the invitation, at which point Jo rebuffs him).

These non-vanilla personalities operate by adding to, or subtracting from, the net emotional energy available to go around in Loser emotional calculations, but without intimate involvement. Sociopaths basically create the emotional boundary conditions of Loser life in simple or complex ways, depending on their skill level.

In the theater of Loser spirituality, the Sociopath must add only inevitable-seeming events that have material consequences, and non-participatory emotional boundary conditions.

So to the Loser, the Sociopath effectively presents a priestly mode of divine but constrained agency, accompanied by non-involved emotional power. This puts them in the position of being able to grant absolution to Losers for their sins.

Here’s how this happens. Whatever emotions Losers cannot resolve among themselves remains as unprocessed, private negative emotions. These they are naturally inclined to view as sinful, since their god is shared positive emotions. Looking around, in the Sociopaths, they find trusted sources of non-involved, healing emotional capital.

And so with every divide-and-conquer betrayal, instead of blaming the Sociopaths who govern the social order, they look to them for absolution and emotional healing. Guilt is the one emotion that Losers cannot always resolve for themselves, since it sometimes requires quantities of forgiveness that mere humans cannot dispense, but priests can, as reserve bankers of the fiat currencies of Loser emotional life.

But as with betrayals of the Clueless, the moment of betrayal presents unscripted danger for the Sociopath. This is especially likely if the Sociopath demonstrates a failing that breaks the priestly character.

Losers are usually collectively, rather than singly betrayed, but Sociopaths are created one at a time. The danger is that some individual Loser just might catch an unmediated glimpse of reality during a divide-and-conquer move, assign blame correctly, and turn into a competing Sociopath, instead of seeking absolution.

Unlike Clueless loss of innocence, which is an awakening to the illegible side of the social order, Loser disillusionment is a loss of faith in shared emotional experience as the central social reality of life (in other words, they awaken to the thought that love is not what makes the world go around, and is not all you need).

The newly minted Sociopath might even acquire agency over the group’s desire for collective action, and achieve enlightenment and power at the same time. But as with Clueless enlightenment, this is often a welcome development for Sociopaths, despite the immediate competitive threat. New free energy is always welcome. A mob cannot be reasoned with. A union with a Sociopath leader can.

And as with the Clueless, enlightenment can be encouraged but not scripted.

Meaning and Power through Withdrawal

Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas. And in Jamesian solitude, Sociopaths find ideas contending in their minds. The creative destruction they script in the world of Losers and Clueless is mirrored by a creative destruction in their minds.

This process creates power, but destroys meaning, especially the meanings of social realities. The result is increasing inner emptiness and external power.

It is this very emptiness that allows the Sociopath to play hero for the Clueless and priest for Losers. Recall that Sociopaths create meaning for others through the things they subtract, rather than the things they add. This is something conspiracy theorists typically don’t get: manufacturing fake realities is very hard. But subtractive simplification of reality is much easier, and yields just as much power.

From the persona they present to the Clueless, they subtract human fallibility and imperfection, presenting an illusory ideal of heroic perfection for the Clueless to identify with, and hopelessly strive toward.

From the persona they present to Losers, they subtract all participatory emotion, turning themselves into detached priests, bearing messages and gifts of emotional capital from hidden benevolent realities.

In each case, the Sociopath’s role is marked by a withdrawal of information from the scene: information about their own personalities and inner lives, and information about specific situations and material realities.

It helps that the moral calculi of both the Clueless and Losers are incomplete, so they are primed to not notice what is being withdrawn.

The former cannot process anything that is not finite, countable and external. They can only process the legible. 

The latter cannot process the material aspect of anything that involves strong emotions, or unresolved private negative emotions. Where the material cannot be separated from the emotional — intense financial negotiations are a prime example – they cannot process reality at all.

What the Clueless and Losers cannot process, the Sociopaths withdraw from the scene. What is left behind is more meaningful by virtue of being simpler than unmediated, uncensored reality. From the Loser and Clueless points of view, Sociopaths are merely removing noise that they don’t know how to deal with anyway.

The Clueless can process the legible, so a legible world is presented to them.

Losers can process a world where emotional significance is the only kind of significance, so a world pregnant with emotional significance is created for them.

Which means that the power of Sociopaths derives from the things they remove from the scene: illegible, emotionally charged material realities that are potentially infinite in their complexity.

In other words, the raw material of power.

Over these withdrawn realities, Sociopaths exercise agency on behalf of others. They do not grab power. Power is simply ceded to them.

Power Literacy

This process of carving out, via subtraction, finite and tractable realities for the Clueless and Losers to inhabit, can be repeated ad infinitum, creating layers of social realities for evolving Clueless and Losers to journey through. If the first layer is a morality theater run by the amoral, other theaters involve other comforting social realities. If this sounds like gamification, it’s because it is.

It is possible to progress through these layers without discovering the Sociopath world at all. Losers and Clueless can discover and decode specific bits of social reality, like the idea of amorality. Such discoveries do not automatically turn them into Sociopaths.

Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks.  Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe.

There is, to the Sociopath, only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human — such as justice, fairness, equality, talent — is raw material for a theater of mediated realities that can be created via subtraction of conflicting evidence, polishing and masking.

Mask is an appropriate term for any social reality created through subtraction, because an appearance of human-like agency for non-human realities is what the inhabitants require. By humanizing the non-human universe, we make the human special.

All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally not be a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy.

So the process of ripping away masks of social reality and getting behind them ultimately turns into a routine skill for the Sociopath: game design. Once you do it a few times, it becomes second nature, a sort of basic power literacy. An understanding of the processes by which the fictions of social reality are constructed, and growing skill at wrangling those processes.

But the acquisition of this skill comes with a cost.

Reality Shock

When a layer of social reality is penetrated and turned into a means for manipulating the realities of others, it is automatically devalued. To create medals and ranking schemes for the benefit of the Clueless is to see them as mere baubles yourself. To turn status-seeking into a control mechanism is to devalue status.

To devalue something is to judge any meaning it carries as inconsequential. In terms of our metaphor of masks of gods, the moment you rip off a mask and wear it yourself, whatever that mask represents becomes worth much less. So the Sociopath’s journey is fundamentally a nihilistic one.

The climactic moment in this journey is the point where skill at manipulating social realities becomes unconscious.

Suddenly, it becomes apparent that all social realities are based on fictional meanings created by denying some aspect of natural, undivided reality. Reality that does not revolve around the needs of humans.

The mask-ripping process itself becomes revealed as an act within the last theater of social reality, the one within which at least manipulating social realities seems to be a meaningful process in some meta-sense. Game design with good and evil behaviors.

Losing this illusion is a total-perspective-vortex moment for the Sociopath: he comes face-to-face with the oldest and most fearsome god of all: the absent God. In that moment, the Sociopath viscerally experiences the vast inner emptiness that results from the sudden dissolution of all social realities. There’s just a pile of masks with no face beneath. Just quarks and stuff (it is interesting that we have chosen to label the Higgs boson the “god” particle; our mask-seeking is truly desperate).

This is reality shock: the visceral experience of the fact that there is only one reality, with no special place for humans. This is the shock that sends David Wallace across the last threshold into fully-realized Sociopathy, as his entire theater of manipulative game-designer authority crumbles around him.

This moment is visceral, not intellectual. It is again possible to get to a merely intellectual appreciation of the “this is all there is” raw physicality of the human condition. That is not the same thing.

That is why, when Robert California explains his detachment from the power struggle between Andy Bernard and usurper Nelly Bertram, nobody really gets what he is talking about:

“All life is sex, and all sex is competition, and there are no rules to that game. There is one person in charge of every office in America. That person is Charles Darwin.”

Darwinism here is merely a motif for an experienced reality, not a description of it. It is a way for a Sociopath to explain his condition to others using the categories of our times.  A thousand years ago, an awakened Sociopath might have used any of a hundred theological motifs for the same idea: the absence of god, the absence of deeper meanings beneath visible social realities.

This is why the term absent god is more appropriate than atheism. For Sociopath philosophies to be coherent, there is no need to postulate the non-existence of god (though that is the Occam’s razor choice). He merely needs to be divinely Otherwise Occupied and absent from our little universe.

The ultimate parent merely needs to be away. That’s enough for Sociopaths to play. This is why some of the greatest Sociopaths in history have actually been sincerely religious (Rockefeller for instance, was a committed Baptist).

The reality shock really is a shock for the Sociopath. Jan does not ever recover from it. Ryan never gets far enough to encounter it. On The Office, only three characters  weather the shock: David Wallace, Robert California and Toby.

To weather the shock is to first process the sheer terror of a viscerally absent god, and then suddenly awaken to the deep freedom the condition represents.

Free as in Speech, Free as in Lunch

Once the Sociopath overcomes reality shock and frames his life condition as one defined by an absence of ultimate parental authority, and the fictitious nature of all social realities, he experiences a great sense of unlimited possibilities and power.

Daddy and Mommy are not here. Anything is possible, and I can get away with anything. I can make up any sort of bullshit and my younger siblings will buy it. 

The sense of freedom is one I like to describe as free as speech, and as in lunch. 

Free as in speech describes the Sociopath’s complete creative freedom in scripting social realities for others.  Cherished human values are merely his crayon box.

Free as in lunch describes the Sociopath’s complete freedom from accountability, in his exercise of the agency ceded to him by the Losers and Clueless, via their belief in the reality of social orders.

Non-Sociopaths dimly recognize the nature of the free Sociopath world through their own categories: “moral hazard” and “principal-agent problem.”  They vaguely sense that the realities being presented to them are bullshit: things said by people who are not lying so much as indifferent to whether or not they are telling the truth. Sociopath freedom of speech is the freedom to bullshit: they are bullshit artists in the truest sense of the phrase.

What non-Sociopaths don’t recognize is that these aren’t just strange and unusual environmental conditions that can be found in small pockets at the tops of pyramids of power, such as Lance Armstrong’s racing team, within a social order that otherwise makes some sort of sense.

It is the default condition of the universe. The universe is a morally hazardous place. The small pockets of unusual environmental conditions are in fact the fictional realities non-Sociopaths inhabit. This figure-ground inversion of non-Sociopath world-views gives us the default perspective of the Sociopath.

Non-Sociopaths, as Jack Nicholson correctly argued, really cannot handle the truth. The truth of an absent god. The truth of social realities as canvases for fiction for those who choose to create them. The truth of values as crayons in the pockets of unsupervised Sociopaths. The truth of the non-centrality of humans in the larger scheme of things.

When these truths are recognized, internalized and turned into default ways of seeing the world, creative-destruction becomes merely the act of living free, not a divinely ordained imperative or a primal urge.  Creative destruction is not a script, but the absence of scripts. The freedom of Sociopaths is the same as the freedom of non-human animals. Those who view it as base merely provide yet another opportunity for Sociopaths to create non-base fictions for them to inhabit.

Sociopath lives, lived under these conditions of freedom, are incomprehensible to non-Sociopaths. So they imagine hidden social realities governing the lives of Sociopaths, turning them into forces of nature.

That is the ultimate imaginative act for non-Sociopaths: filling the inaccessible world of Sociopaths with convenient extrapolated social realities. Fictions that they can use to explain free Sociopath lives to themselves as being caused by some mysterious, hidden social order.

So Sociopath hero-god-priests come to inhabit entire universes imagined for them. And from these universes, a peculiar sort of Sociopath sometimes descends. One who seems to play neither hero, nor detached priest. One who strives, but fails, to participate in the emotional realities of non-Sociopaths. One who seeks to protect the innocent and help the disillusioned rediscover faith.

We are finally ready to explain Toby.

The Birth of the Messiah

Of those who weather reality shock, most simply accept their life and their permanent estrangement from non-Sociopaths. They have ascended to freedoms they cannot explain to those who do not possess them. They are somewhere between contemptuous and mildly indulgent towards those who inhabit the realities they create. Indifference is the default middle-ground attitude.

In other words, most Sociopaths learn to creatively exercise and enjoy their freedoms.

Some freely emulate other Sociopaths. Others carve out more imaginative paths. Morality becomes a matter of expressing fundamental dispositions rather than respecting social values. Kindness or cruelty, freely expressed. Those who are amused by suffering use their powers to cause it. Those who enjoy watching happiness theaters, create them through detached benevolence.

But freedom can also be a scary condition. It offers no canned reasons to do one thing instead of another, or even do anything at all. It offers no fixed motivations. There is nobody to blame for failures, no meaningful external validation for success. If physics allows it, you can do it. The consequences mean whatever you decide they mean.

So for some, freedom becomes a burden rather than a source of power. Life without scripted purposes and roles, instead of being viewed as a canvas for creative expression, becomes intolerably meaningless. The visceral knowledge that every act is a free choice, for which one can only hold oneself accountable, with nowhere to direct blame and nowhere to seek solace or absolution, becomes something they yearn to un-know.

The dissolution of social realities leaves behind only the cryptic material universe that must be painstakingly decoded through that supremely nihilistic behavior, scientific inquiry. But without a social order within which to value and make sense of decoded realities, such inquiry comes to seem like a worthless endeavor. Is a dinosaur fossil more meaningful than the Higgs boson? It is a meaningless question.

Freedom gained becomes paradise lost: the paradise of finite realities, mediated meanings and a comforting social order.

And so some Sociopaths reject the freedom and attempt to rejoin humanity.

And fail.

What is known cannot now be un-known. There is no way to reverse the effects of the red pill of Sociopathy.

So instead, such Sociopaths turn into compassionate Messiahs, protecting the innocence of the Clueless, restoring the faith of Losers, using their Sociopath powers to guard the exits of paradise lest some unwittingly walk out. Unlike Sociopaths at peace with their freedom, who generally welcome enlightened new company, Messiahs send them home to paradise when they can.

They continue hopelessly to try and participate, especially in collective Loser emotion. But the experience is empty for them, knowing what they know. So despite themselves, they subtract emotional content rather than adding either positive or negative content. They become social black holes.

Michael gets this instinctively. His hatred of Toby is the most rational of all his behaviors.

But the redeemer Sociopath, seeking to preserve paradise for those who have not yet lost it, is ultimately human too. Despite himself, he too must ultimately fail to guard the exits.  This is why Toby has piles of unprocessed Loser complaints in his office. Unredeemable emotional IOUs handed to a priest offering meaningless absolution.

And so we have the story of Toby. A theist Sociopath born as a Seminary drop-out. An ineffectual Messiah who wanders off to Costa Rica to find peace, but finds himself crucified in a ziplining accident. Resurrected, he returns unhappily to Dunder-Mifflin, where he continues to fail to protect paradise.

His story ends with him screaming disconsolately at his own absent god, in an empty church:

Why you got to be so MEAN to me?

Certainty of Nothingness

So here we are, at the end of our long journey of over 30,000 words. We visited the worlds of the Losers and the Clueless and learned to speak their languages. We pondered the workings of Clueless arrested development and the Loser stock market. We talked about the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose world of organizational sins.

And now we’ve toured the worlds of the free, unsupervised children of an absent god who commit those sins, leaving others to suffer the consequences.

We’re left, at the end of our journey, pondering the human condition according to The Office. Is the human journey one of creative progress scripted by gods. Or one of accumulating social costs created by the unsupervised and indifferent free children of an absent god?

Do we have any ultimate answers? Did we learn anything?

I can do no better than to close with the final scene of Burn After Reading.

After the colossal political mess that is the subject of the movie winds down, leaving behind a trail of dead bodies and ruined careers, we find a jaded CIA officer, played by J. K. Simmons, taking stock with an underling:

CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?

Palmer: I don’t know, sir.

CIA Superior: I don’t fuckin’ know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.

Palmer: Yes, sir.

CIA Superior: I’m fucked if I know what we did.

Palmer: Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say

CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ.

Thank you Office fans, you’ve been great. Writing this series has been the most pointless, yet simultaneously the most rewarding, undertaking of my life.

I am glad to report I learned nothing other than to not do it again.

Enjoy the series finale tonight.  An e-book version will be inflicted on you shortly.

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Busy week so I thought I’d do a roundup and let you guys catch up a bit with a roundup. The year has had a rocky but solid (heh!) start, with some pretty strange posts. Not counting a couple of meta posts, we have had 15 posts in the first third of the year, 9 by me, and 6 by residents.

1. The Economics of Social Status (Kevin)
2. So I Shall be Written, So I Shall be Performed (Mike)
3. A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality
4. The Locust Economy
5. The Wave of Unknowing (Drew)
6. Social Dark Matter: On Seeing and Being Seen
7. The Dead-Curious Cat and the Joyless Immortal
8. Honesty and the Human Body (Kevin)
9. Binoculars versus Cameras
10. Solidarity and Recursion (Mike)
11. Adventures in Amateur Talking-Headery
12. Machine Cities and Ghost Cities (Drew)
13. Stone-Soup for the Capitalist’s Soul
14. Eternal Hypochondria of the Expanding Mind
15. Schumpeter’s Demon

The call for sponsorships a couple of weeks ago has so far brought in $1850 this year from 17 sponsors, which I think beats the total for the same time last year. Thank you, and feel free to chip in to support the site as and when you’re able.

The popular hit of the lot was probably the Locust Economy piece. So in this first third of 2013, the Iron Blogger was not beaten by resident challengers.

I seem to be on a weird sort of immortality/eternity kick (three posts with one of those words right in the title) mixed with some experimentation with story-telling in parable form.  Every time I think I am settling down to develop some meaty theme, something distracts me and I go down a new bunny trail. It’s going to be a year of weirdness.

Here’s the complete 2012 roundup, from where you can backtrack to ribbonfarm prehistory and posts in cuneiform if you are so inclined.

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Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt.

In economics, a good is anything that “satisfies human wants and provides utility.” This includes not just tangible goods like gold, grain, and real estate, but also services (housecleaning, dentistry, etc.) as well as abstract goods like love, health, and social status.

As an economic good, social status is a lot like health. They’re both intangible and highly personal. In proper economic terms, they are private goods – rivalrous and mostly excludable. And the fact that they’re hard to measure doesn’t make them any less valuable — in fact we spend trillions of dollars a year in their pursuit (though they often elude us).

But status differs from health in one very important respect: It can be transacted – spent as well as earned. It’s not a terminal good, but rather an intermediate good that helps us acquire other things of value. For example, I can trade some of my status for money, favors, sex, or information — and vice versa.

Health, if it’s possible to spend at all (e.g. in pursuit of career success), is extremely illiquid. But as I will argue today, status is so liquid — so easy to transact, and in real time — that it plays a fundamental economic role in our day-to-day lives.

Before we dig into the transactional nature of social status, let’s ground ourselves, briefly, in its biology and sociology.

The biology of status

No one plays status games in Heaven. Why bother? Souls have no want for food, sex, or smartphones — and thanks to His omnipresence, God even takes the fun out competing for an audience with Him.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, we (embodied primates) engage in all manner of status games. It’s one of the ways we compete over access to scarce resources like food and mates. And it’s something we share with a lot of other social animals — chickens, dogs, chimps, etc.

Here are some of the concepts that govern the day-to-day biology of social status:

• Prestige vs. dominance. Joseph Henrich (of WEIRD fame) distinguishes two types of status. Prestige is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by our ‘approach’ instincts. Dominance, on the other hand, is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and is governed by fear and other ‘avoid’ instincts. Of course these two types of status aren’t mutually exclusive, but they’re analytically distinct strategies with different biological expressions.
• Fitness displays. In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller argues that many of our most prized, socially-desirable qualities — athleticism, artistic skill, eloquence, intelligence, physical beauty — serve as fitness displays, i.e., advertisements for the quality of our genes. We are attracted, socially and sexually, to people with high skill and beauty, largely because these traits are honest signals of good genes. [1]
• Hormones. There are at least two hormones involved in processing social status: testosterone and cortisol. To grossly oversimplify, testosterone is the ‘aggression hormone’ while cortisol is the ‘stress hormone.’ In a recent paper (and also a great TED talk), Amy Cuddy et al. asked participants to adopt either a high-status pose or a low-status pose for ten minutes. The researchers then measured participants’ hormone levels and their willingness to take risks on games of chance (a behavior associated with feelings of power). Participants who took high-status poses showed increased testosterone and reduced cortisol levels, and took greater risks, relative to their counterparts who were asked to adopt low-status poses.
• Body language. Cuddy’s experiment also illustrates the role played by our bodies in mediating status. Specifically, we’re wired to interpret people’s use of space in terms of status — the more space you take up, the higher your status. Also relevant are postures of intimidation, submission, and vulnerability.

The point I’m trying to make here is that social status is not arbitrary. Instead, it’s grounded, very concretely, in the biology of honest signals – and as such, it’s subject to very real constraints. Wild swings of status are possible, but they’re mostly the stuff of stories. Our daily lives are governed by much smaller — and more predictable — gains and losses.

Sociology: Keeping (and cooking) the books

Ultimately, status lives in the minds (and bodies) of all the humans within a given community — by which I mean, primarily, other people’s minds and bodies. You might maintain a sense of your own status, but it’s not really up to you. Status is fundamentally about how others perceive and interact with you (and what they allow you to get away with). It’s like keeping a checkbook — you might maintain your own ledger for planning and making decisions, but the official balance lies with the bank.

There are many ways to define status, but as a working definition let’s take status to be

the total amount of social influence a person has over the other members of his or her community.

There’s a lot to unpack from this definition. Here are some of the more interesting implications:

Status is defined with respect to a community. This accords with how we reason about status in the real world. You don’t have one canonical status for all occasions. You might have relatively low status in your workplace but high status at your church, with hardly any cognitive dissonance on the part of everyone involved. [2]

Status is zero-sum (to a first approximation). There’s only a fixed amount of influence to go around. Some have squirmed to dodge this conclusion, but let’s just bite the bullet and be done with it. If nothing else, this should motivate our discussion of status as an economic good. [3]

Status is not a positional good. It’s sometimes argued (e.g. on Wikipedia) that status doesn’t have a cardinal value — only ordinal (rank) values. According to this view, status is synonymous with your relative position on the totem pole — but I don’t think this is correct. You can be the highest-status member of your community by a wide or narrow margin, depending on how much influence you have. There are ‘distances’ involved, not just relative positions. Geert Hofstede’s power distance index is an illustration of the cardinal nature of status.

Status is a value that summarizes a very high-dimensional quality. The underlying reality is the set of all pairwise influence values (A’s influence over B, A’s influence over C, etc.). These values can be averaged or summed (which is how we typically think of status), but they also have a variance, a kurtosis, etc. To complicate things even further, we might consider treating status as the weighted sum of all the pairwise influences — weighted (perhaps perversely) by the status of each of the people being influenced. Additionally, some influences aren’t pairwise at all — you can have influence over an entire group, even without having much influence over any of the members in isolation. I don’t think it changes much of the analysis here, but it’s useful to know that we’re dealing in approximations.

Status is (in part) a knowledge problem. Your status is based not just on how people react to you, but also on how people think everyone else will react to you. This gives rise to all manner of higher-order effects: common knowledge issues, perception management, manipulation of consensus reality, etc.

Because of these higher-order effects, status is most reliably measured in public. We tweak our private estimates during every pairwise interaction, but reconcile those estimates during interactions that take place in front of larger audiences — because that’s where we can observe the reactions of everyone else. This explains some of our desire to watch speeches, movies, events, etc. in large crowds, despite the convenience of watching from a screen at home. Large crowds can be manipulated, of course, but the very manipulation is itself an honest signal of influence.

Basic status transactions

Now we get to the really interesting stuff: the economic properties of social status.

Let’s start with transactions, since they form the basis of an economy. Status is part of our system for competing over scarce resources, so it should be no surprise that it participates in so many of our daily transactions. Some examples:

• We trade status for favors (and vice versa). This is so common you might not even realize it, but even the simple act of saying “please” and “thank you” accords a nominal amount of status to the person doing the favor. The fact that status is at stake in these transactions becomes clear when the pleasantries are withheld, which we often interpret as an insult (i.e., a threat to our status).
• An apology is a ritual lowering of one’s status to compensate for a (real or perceived) affront. As with gratitude, withholding an apology is perceived as an insult.
• We trade status for information (and vice versa). This is one component of “powertalk,” as illustrated in the Gervais Principle series.
• We trade status for sex (and vice versa), which often goes by the name “seduction.” Sometimes even the institution of marriage functions as a sex-for-status transaction. Dowries illustrate this principle by working against it — they reinforce class/caste systems by making it harder for high-status men to marry low-status women.
• We reward employees in the form of institutionalized status (titles, promotions, parking spots), which trade off against salary as a form of compensation.
• We can turn money into status by means of conspicuous consumption, or status into money by means of endorsement (i.e., being paid to lend status to an endeavor).

None of these transactions is perfectly clean, and most of them are impossible to audit (arguably a feature rather than a bug, for some transactions). Paying with status is much murkier than paying with dollars, and it’s easy to get something other than what you expected. But don’t let the uncertainty or the potential for cheating distract you. There are real gains to be had from these kinds of trades — so, as humans always do, we find a way. Our emotions, for example, often tell us when we’ve been cheated in a status transaction, even if it’s hard to articulate exactly how.

In addition to participating in direct, X-for-Y trades like the above, status also functions as collateral or “table stakes.” (We often call this type of status “reputation.”) In many ways, a favor is like a loan (of time, energy, or some other resource) collateralized by the status of the borrower. It’s a weird kind of collateral, since it can’t be transfered to the creditor if the borrower defaults. But the borrower’s status can be destroyed or ruined, which provides incentive enough for most purposes. The bigger the favor, of course, the more status needs to be put up as collateral. This explains why it’s hard for a low-status person to ask a high-status person for a favor, but easy for a high-status person to make the request.

“Bidding for status” is another activity with economic characteristics. The nature of a bid is that it sets a particular ‘price’ that can be accepted or rejected. Robin Hanson suspects that speaking in public is a way of bidding for status. The very act of standing in front of a group and speaking authoritatively represents a claim to relatively high status. If you speak on behalf of the group – i.e., making statements that summarize the group’s position or commit the group to a course of action — then you’re claiming even higher status. These bids can either be accepted by the group (if they show approval or rapt attention, and let you continue to speak) or rejected (if they show disapproval, interrupt you, ignore you, or boo you off stage).

Similarly, every request for a favor is a complex bidding process (i.e. negotiation) framed largely — and often implicitly — in terms of status. When a manager, for example, gives a task to a subordinate, many nuances are involved in negotiating the ‘price’ of the favor in terms of the subordinate’s status:

• Does the manager frame the task as a favor (high status for the subordinate), as a request (medium status), or as a demand (low status)?
• Does the manager lower his or her status when making the request? Please and thank you are just the two most ritualized ways of doing this; there are many others. Alternately, does the manager attempt to raise the status of the subordinate? E.g. “You’d be really good at this.”
• Conditional verbs (would, could) allude to the subordinate’s autonomy (and high status), whereas declarative verbs set an expectation that there will be no negotiating (low status).
• Does the subordinate acquiesce immediately to the request (low status), hint at requiring extra terms (medium status), or outright reject the request (high status)?
• Does the subordinate accept the task happily (low status) or begrudgingly (high status)?
• … Etc.

One-off transactions (like a favor) usually take place within the context of a relationship. Different types of relationships can be viewed as primitive ‘contracts.’ Friendship, for example, is a contract whose terms specify that the two friends are roughly equal in status (at least within the frame of the relationship) and that they’ve agreed to dispense with fine-grained accounting of every status transaction. In Impro, Keith Johnstone says of friends that they are “people who agree to play status games together.” The emphasis here is on games – friends play status for fun rather than for keeps. Other types of relationships (manager/subordinate, mentor/mentee, partnerships, client/vendor, etc.) set different terms for how status is to be transacted between the parties, which I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Status as money

So far we’ve been talking about status as a good without trying to articulate its formal economic properties. So now I’d like to propose that status functions as money. We have a few idioms that encode this idea — social capital, political capital, etc. — but the analogy goes a lot deeper than our ordinary use of language permits.

In economic terms, for a good to function as money it must serve three related purposes:

1. A medium of exchange,
2. A store of value, and
3. A unit of account.

We’ve already discussed how status functions as a medium of exchange. Because it’s so fluid, it can be used to price favors and other goods at relatively fine resolutions, and it facilitates transactions that wouldn’t otherwise be able to occur. Negotiating with status beats the hell out of bartering — i.e., trading one specific good for another — thereby allowing smoother, more efficient economies to develop.

I hope it’s also clear that status functions as a store of value. It’s not as stable as gold or USD, which hold their value with much less volatility. But status can certainly be accumulated (within a given community) and it doesn’t depreciate too quickly.

Whether status functions as a unit of account is much less clear. A unit of account is what allows e.g. a firm to know whether it’s operating at a profit or a loss. And this requires, well, an actual unit – something precise and quantifiable, neither of which is status’s strong suit. Nor can status be aggregated across individuals. But where it lacks objectivity, it is at least subjectively measurable, i.e., across an individual’s life history. At the end of a work day, for example, you’ll have a pretty good sense for whether you gained or lost status that day. And at larger time scales (quarters or years), you can have reasonable certainty about whether you’re doing better or worse than you expected. This allows status to function as a unit of account for your individual P/L. It certainly helps you make decisions about when to switch roles or jobs or careers, or when to seek out new friends — or just try something different. It also lets you (and others) know when you’ve gone bankrupt, which is usually accompanied by some kind of formal intervention from the community, up to and including excommunication.

So: status may not be an ideal money, but it’s close enough for the metaphor to hold water. (Also encouraging: apparently money and social status are processed in the same region of the brain.) At any rate, here’s what happens when we apply monetary economic concepts to the realm of social status:

Liquidity. Status, like other forms of capital, can be more or less liquid. Status liquidity is inversely proportional to how much it is institutionalized. Institutional forms of status include titles, formal roles, positions within a hierarchy, desk/office location, parking spots, and membership in decision-making bodies. These forms of status hold their value much better than reputational status — which is why they’re coveted by employees — but they also make some transactions more difficult. If you’ve ever worked with someone who’s not as valuable as his title or role would suggest, you know how frustratingly inefficient such an arrangement can be.

Gresham’s Law. Gresham’s Law states that “bad money drives out good.” The classic example is that people will attempt to spend coins suspected of being counterfeit before they spend coins that they know to be honest. Does something similar happen with social status? Emphatically, yes. Within the economy of an office, say, we can distinguish between the ‘honest’ status earned by doing one’s job vs. the ‘counterfeit’ status earned by carefully manipulating one’s image. It’s all too easy to reach an equilibrium where counterfeit, image-based status drives out honest, reality-based status. Once an office culture allows its employees to win large amounts of status by ‘talking themselves up,’ everyone drops what they’re doing to focus on seeking credit and avoiding blame. In such an economy, only a sucker does any real work.

Status inflation. Inflation is a bit tricky because it requires that value be measured in terms of a specific unit — which can then be debased by ‘minting’ more of those units. Dollars clearly fit the bill, but we can find inflationary tendencies in almost every explicit measure of status. Companies — and sometimes even entire industries — can experience title inflation, for example. Or top-heaviness, which is basically an ‘inflation’ of the hierarchy. I don’t know of any studies that attempt to measure office inflation, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that as companies age, they tend toward office buildings that have more windows, or just nicer space in general. Even more cynically, I wonder if the practice of hiring interns is driven (in part) by the same incentives that lead to other forms of hierarchy inflation.

Status arbitrage. I’m not sure if the analogy is perfect, but the word arbitrate suggests a parallel between status mediation and financial arbitrage. If you play the role of mediator in a community, you can earn status by brokering conflicts. A conflict usually arises when two parties disagree about their relative statuses, i.e., when there’s a price discrepancy. Since any successful resolution will involve a re-pricing, it might be possible to view mediation in terms of siphoning off some of the status that needs to be exchanged in order to successfully resolve the conflict.

Currency blocs. Previously we defined status with respect to a community, but we could also flip it around:

A community is a group of people who agree on how to measure status among their members.

In other words, it’s a group of people who share a common status currency. Silicon Valley, for example, is a community oriented around a particular way of measuring status — the ability to influence the growth of engineering companies. But Silicon-Valley status won’t buy you anything in Hollywood — unless you convert it to something that makes sense in the Hollywood economy. (Financial wealth usually does the trick).

This definition allows us not only to draw boundaries between communities (porous and fuzzy though they may be), but also allows us to discuss the strength of a community, i.e., the level of agreement about how to measure status. Google, for example, is a fairly strong community insofar as Googlers agree on how to measure status among themselves, but Google engineering might be an even stronger community.

Treating communities as “status-currency blocs” helps explain how there’s relatively free trade (at low transaction costs) within the community — and also how trade is distorted across community boundaries. The fluctuating ‘exchange rates’ and asymmetric information make cross-community interaction more difficult. When a Google VP walks into a meeting with some employees from Facebook, say, everyone will be unsure about their relative statuses, and the group will have to spend time and effort (and a lot of posturing) in order to figure it out.

The “currency bloc” metaphor also helps explain both the benefits and the costs of institutional re-orgs. Merging two organizations, for example, can increase economic efficiency (by standardizing on a single status currency and thereby facilitating more interaction/trade), but the integration will also require some ‘repricing’ — with resistance from everyone who loses out.

Efficiency

If status acts as a medium of exchange, then one of the most important questions we can ask is how it contributes to economic efficiency.

For simplicity, I’m going to focus on the economies that develop in mid-sized office environments. As we’ve seen, status is just one of the goods flowing through such an economy. Other goods include money (salaries and bonuses), information, favors, desk location, task assignments, and access to decision-makers.

Different types of organizations have different ways of ‘metabolizing’ status. An engineering company, for example, has limited external use for social status, but uses it internally as a currency — to account for wins/losses and to facilitate the metabolism of less-liquid resources. A relationships business, on the other hand (e.g. a wealth management firm), does use status externally, as leverage in negotiating relationships. So whereas conspicuous consumption is a liability to an engineering firm, it’s an asset to a business that runs on relationships.

Let’s define a culture’s use of status as efficient if status transactions tend to advance the goals of the community.

An efficient culture, then, is first and foremost a meritocracy. Status will be awarded for skills and contributions that advance shared goals — making a big sale, meeting an important deadline, etc. And status will not be awarded for things that are orthogonal to (or detract from) the goals of the community. These include: nepotism, flattery and ass-kissing, race/gender/age, and humor/beauty/external status (unless they’re important for getting the job done). And seniority should correlate with ‘substantive contributions’; no one should be rewarded just for warming a chair.

But how status is awarded is only half of the equation; we also have to ask how status is spent. Do people use their status to pursue shared goals, or rather to advance their own, competing agendas? Executives who abuse the corporate credit card, get off on harassing their employees, or engage in certain types of empire-building, for example, are contributing to an inefficient culture.

Dominance status is an especially tricky proposition. There’s a niche for dominance in human societies, so trying to get by without it is an unstable arrangement. And it’s necessary for keeping people in line. But there’s also a real potential for abuse. People often use dominance to reinforce their status in ways that don’t advance shared goals. And in addition to being potentially inefficient, dominance also has the effect of silencing criticism. Criticism is always a threat to one’s status, but unless your goal is to maintain your own status at all costs, you need criticism to stay on the right track. No one makes perfect decisions at all times, and not everyone promoted into a position of leadership is good for the organization.

There are many, many nuances to attend to here — all of them important to maintaining an efficient culture. But in the interest of space, I’d like to call attention to two disease states in particular:

Gossip. Some gossip is necessary for moving information around, but often it’s used to lower someone’s status behind his or her back. This is especially pernicious. Because gossip can’t be confronted outright, it leads to an equilibrium where everyone needs to spread rumors and participate in the gossip mill just to maintain their position. Sticking to the economic metaphors, gossip is like a black market for shorting other people’s status in exchange for elevating your own (among your gossiping partners). Bridgewater — the world’s largest hedge fund and, I would argue, an extremely efficient culture — elevates gossip to the level of capital offense.

Politics. It’s hard, perhaps even impossible, to provide a neutral account of what constitutes ‘political’ behavior in an office, but here goes: Politics is any attempt to win status through actions that don’t advance the goals of the community. The economic analogue here is rent-seeking — vying for a larger share of the pie in ways that don’t increase the overall size of the pie. Rent-seeking behaviors in a status economy include: competing for access to high-status individuals, hoarding resources that could be put to better use, acting as an information broker (requiring payment instead of giving information freely), and (as we’ve seen) manipulating one’s image instead of attending to reality. Efforts spent on politics/rent-seeking represent deadweight loss in an office economy.

The macroeconomics of social status

It’s a somewhat arbitrary distinction, but traditionally microeconomics studies behavior at the scale of the firm and smaller units, while macroeconomics studies behavior at regional, national, and global scales. By way of wrapping up, I’d like to sketch some steps toward a macroeconomic account of status.

First there’s national politics, which is driven by status more than we typically admit. As Tyler Cowen argues:

Occasionally the real force behind a political ideology is the subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status.

This extends beyond overt identity politics (like the marriage equality debate). Even an issue like gun control, for example, is driven (at least in part) by the desire to stigmatize or support not just gun-ownership, but the group of people who own guns.

Jack Balkin explores similar themes in his article The Constitution of Status (a wonderful read, by the way), where he treats status very explicitly as an economic good. But in contrast to the micro scale, where status is a property of individuals, on the macro scale status is a property of entire groups of people. As such it tends to be manipulated (a) symbolically and (b) through the making and interpreting of law.

Finally, I have a hunch that we can even use the economics of status to understand civilizational decay. Such an account might start with the observation that status-seeking is a very powerful force. Thus, civilizations that can harness it more efficiently (toward material progress and/or military power) will grow faster. But a civilization can get in trouble when it institutionalizes a particular form of status (i.e., a particular status currency) that later becomes decoupled from the ever-shifting material economy. At that point, status-seeking behaviors that were once economically productive become counter-productive (i.e. rent-seeking), and sooner or later — or in some cases, much, much later — the civilization will fall.

___

[1] fitness displays. The argument for fitness displays (of both body and brain) is interesting. The body and the brain both have a large genetic (and ontogenetic) ‘surface area.’ Many genes contribute to their development, and if any of those genes are defective, something will come out looking (or thinking) a little wonky. This is compounded by the barrage of entropy from the physical environment — malnutrition, predators, and especially parasites (viruses, bacteria, fungi). When an adult ends up with a highly symmetrical face or a brain capable of wielding a large vocabulary, it’s a strong signal that his or her immune system was able to defend itself from a great many dangers that could have disrupted development. Geoffrey Miller explains this in a lot of great detail in The Mating Mind.

[2] status ~ community. In a slightly more sophisticated formulation, we could define status with respect to a given frame, which would encompass not just a particular community, but also a set of circumstances and/or concepts. For example, if the mayor of a town is cheering for her son at a soccer game, she’s a low-status member of the game (i.e. just a fan, not a player or coach or referree), while simultaneously a high-status member of the town – even if it’s mostly the same people involved. The endless reframing that goes on (and the attendant implications for status) provides much of the spice and drama of daily life. Understanding these frames and being able to manipulate them (even in the course of a single conversation) is the consummate art of the politician.

[3] status ~ zero-sum. If status is a non-zero-sum game, it’s not because you can re-define your community in order to change your status. Moving to a “smaller pond” might change your relative status, and might even change your absolute status, but it doesn’t change the size of the overall human status pool. Your increase in status comes at the cost of lowering the status of others. Instead, if status is a non-zero-sum game, it’s because communities can accord more or less influence and respect in aggregate to their members. In other words, raising the level of trust within a community is a way of creating more status/influence to spread around.

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Another year, another set of lessons big and small, pleasant and harsh. It’s time for the third annual call for sponsorships and backstage-peek day. If you read the 2012 and 2011 posts, you know the drill.  First, we’ll talk money, then we’ll go backstage to talk philosophy, do a little retrospective and look out at the year ahead. Things are now getting complicated enough that I need a little table of contents. If this goes on, next year I might need video. Here’s the agenda. Skip what doesn’t interest you.

1. Grow Branches and Roots
2. The Bristlecone Pine Business Model
3. Refactor Camp 2013
4. Refactorings Meetups and Online Groups
5. Ribbonfarm Consulting Exits Stealth Mode
6. The Gig Economy and Ribbonfarm
7. Be Slightly Evil and Gervais Principle series finales
8. Buy Me a Coffee retired, Crowdfunded Features in the works
9. Resident Blogger Tryouts
10. Now Reading

Money first. In 2012, 29 sponsors together contributed $3750 to support this site, a 66% increase over 2011 ($2250 from 25 sponsors). For 2013, four early birds have already contributed $300.  If you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and go ahead. The money is starting to make a serious difference.

Now for the philosophy. Every year, I add a single line to my evolving business philosophy. In 2011, my first problogger year, the line was go where the wild thoughts are. In 2012, it was go deep, young man. 

For 2013, the line is grow branches and roots.  What do I mean by that?

Grow Branches and Roots

A few months back, I read Michael Gerber’s classic guide to growing small businesses, E-Myth Revisited. The central idea in the book is that when you work for yourself, you have to make sure you spend as much time working on the business as you do working in the business.

Gerber argues that to work “on” a business is to build a business machine. Assembling, testing and automating that machine as much as possible is the invisible backstage work that Gerber calls “working on the business.”

I like the Gerber model, but I find myself instinctively porting the ideas from the machine metaphor to more organic ones. Certain fundamental premises change when you do that.

When you assemble a business machine, your goal should be to automate as much as possible. Where you cannot eliminate the human element, you need to squeeze out variability and make the human pieces as predictable, interchangeable, and low-cost as possible. You need to think in terms of markets that exist for finite periods of time and ways to maximize the total wealth you extract from your market, while it exists. The ideal machine-business is an optimized wealth extractor with a finite design lifetime.

But if you are starting with an organic metaphor, human variability is the source of much of the value, so it is something you want to maximize, within certain fluid boundaries, not minimize.  The comments section of a healthy blog is an example.You want variability there, not interchangeability. If Kay and Goblin, two of the more active commenters last year, said the same things, life would be dull for me. This is not an isolated example. Blogging is a game that fundamentally feeds off human variability.

Everything I do seems to work this way, based on 1:1 relationships and meetings. Ribbonfarm is slowly turning into a hand-crafted network that grows really slowly, one hand-poured coffee meeting at a time (yes, my new proximity to Portland is having its effects). I just discovered Wolfram Alpha’s Facebook Analytics tool (via a Portland-based, self-described “75% hipster” in the Ribbonfarm network as it happens). Here’s what Ribbonfarm looks like on my Facebook profile. The subgraph is bigger than my professional, academic and friends-and-family subgraphs combined. It has grown slowly over five years of meetups, events and and email introductions.

Actually, many modern business models seem to “grow” this way, fueled by human variability, rather than being “assembled” through economies-of-scale thinking. Which is why I am searching for a theory of economies of variety. It has become my holy grail both as a small-business grower and somebody interested in management theories.

So how do you envision growth and longevity for a business model fueled by human variability via an organic metaphor?

I like to think of growing a tree. This process has two pieces: growing roots and growing branches. There is also a specific tree you should seek to emulate, the bristlecone pine.

The Bristlecone Pine Business Model

It is funny that my philosophy lines from 2011 and 2012 foreshadowed this arboreal direction of business model evolution. I didn’t plan it that way. My 2011 line was about finding and preserving a core of wildness in the sense of John Muir’s thoughts on wild forests. The idea seeped through into the map I made up in 2012, where I situated ribbonfarm in the middle of a “Barbarian Forest.”

In 2012, my instincts turned towards “going deep” in the sense of growing roots. For me, this meant finding a way to reconcile my wariness of community building with the need to develop and catalyze deeper relationships with the potential to weather technological and economic turbulence (“i.e. what happens to me if WordPress, RSS and Google Reader disappear?”).

In 2013, my gut tells me that the key for businesses that seek the holy grail of economies of variety is to optimize for longevity rather than near-term profitability. It turns out that a key to building a business that feeds on human variability is in fact to pretend that you’re building a business designed to endure for eternity (there’s an iterated prisoner’s dilemma in there somewhere). It’s the right strategy even if you’re only interested in your own lifetime, so long as there is uncertainty in how long you will stay alive.

So you should pretend your business is a bristlecone pine, the longest-lived organism on the planet.

The key to that, I’ve concluded is Tim O’Reilly’s dictum, create more value than you capture. I am not exactly known for altruism, so as you can probably guess, if you think it through, this is in fact a selfish-optimal strategy in certain situations, like mine.

Within the “tree” metaphor, it turns out that “roots” are a good way to represent the value you create, and “branches” are a good way to represent the value you capture. I even found a Facebook meme via another member of the Ribbonfarm network, that captures the idea of “create more value than you capture” via an arboreal allegory.

Yeah, I am growing schmalzy in my old age (okay, I am just 38, but hanging around the no-country-for-old-men startup types makes you feel prematurely senile).

An economies-of-variety longevity focused business model is therefore a bristlecone pine with a root system that is more extensive than its branch system. Such a system has, I suspect, a higher chance of achieving longevity under conditions of environmental variability. It’s what Taleb would call an antifragile business model.

How do you build such a business?

Slowly.

Bristlecone pines act like bristlecone pines from Day 1, even if they don’t make it past fruit-fly old age. You can’t start off the blocks like a fruit fly and then suddenly decide you want “sustainability” instead.

So translated to business-speak, you grow as though you have all of eternity to grow, even if you rationally estimate your odds of survival past Year 5 at less than 10% (I am now in Year 3 as an incorporated business, and am not deluded enough to think that the odds of 90% failure by Year 5 don’t apply to me).

The bristlecone pine is my motif for the idea of slow marketing and immortal businesses, until I figure out an actual theory of “economies of variety” to describe what I am trying to do.

That’s why I’ve been toying with and discussing my “slow marketing” model with Friends of Ribbonfarm  for a few years now. It’s why I resist the temptation to try easy hacks that could, at least for a while, quadruple the growth rate in the vanity metric websites love to optimize for: unique visitors (a very ironic term, since the “unique” actually refers to counting interchangeable visitors correctly).

In the last year, both unique visitors and visits grew approximately 15% over the previous year (comparing Q1 2012 to Q1 2013). Bounce rate, the metric I pay the most attention to (though mostly I don’t look at metrics at all), dropped from around 6.30% to 4.97%. RSS subscriptions grew from around 4500 this time last year to around 5800, a 28% increase.

That’s what slow marketing looks like. Slow and unbouncy. Here’s a glimpse for you data geeks.

Refactor Camp

Refactor Camp 2013 was held again at the San Francisco Zoo, same as the inaugural edition in 2012. This time, the theme was urban futures. I am still working on a post based on what I learned (most likely the influence of the event will creep into multiple blog posts; I don’t really feel like doing an explicit roundup).

We considered starting a Fall Refactor Camp on the East Coast, but after some thought, gave up on the idea. One event is all I think I can manage to organize (and subsidize via sponsorships) in a year. But next year, we’ll try to make it more of a national event, both thematically and in terms of making the logistics friendlier to out-of-town attendees (we had a few out-of-towners both in 2012 and 2013, but we haven’t made any effort so far to encourage or plan for that).

The slow marketing philosophy is in effect here as well. We decided not to grow attendance capacity, but did increase the length of the event to two days.

Now that the event has survived two iterations, I feel enough confidence in its potential for longer-term survival that I’ve created a permanent website for it at refactorcamp.org.

Refactorings Meetups and Online Groups

If you’ve been following along in this attempt to grow a bristlecone pine, you know that I’ve been conflicted about the idea of growing a “community” around ribbonfarm. I basically don’t like the idea.

To keep creativity alive, you have to inhabit edges. To grow communities, you have to occupy centers. I’ve written about this fundamental conflict before.

Refactor Camp has turned into the natural solution, since it’s off to the side of Ribbonfarm proper, in my peripheral vision. When we started the first Refactorings Facebook group in 2012, I didn’t really give much thought to the experiment. A few people suggested it and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try. Now, more than a year later, it is still (much to my surprise) going strong. Formal meetups have gotten a bit irregular in the Bay Area, but the group has grown enough, and is active enough online, that serendipitous offline meetings are working out.

A few months ago, we seeded another group for New York, founded by a couple of 2012 Refactor Camp attendees who migrated there. The group is holding its second meetup next Thursday, May 2, at 6:15 PM, at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. Let me know if you want to attend and I’ll connect you to Jay Hinton, who’s pulling it together.

Benign neglect seems to be the way to implement slow marketing here, so the Refactor Camp website now has a meetups page where you can sign up if you’re interested in starting a local group in your city. We’re also starting to experiment with Google Hangouts. The first couple have been fun.

If there is critical mass (a judgment call, not a fixed number), and especially if there is a Refactor Camp alum in your area, I’ll make the necessary introductions and we can try to get the group off the ground, and I’ll try to find excuses (on-site consulting and speaking gigs basically) to get myself to your city.

And speaking of consulting and speaking…

Ribbonfarm Consulting Exits Stealth Mode

I am always pleasantly surprised by how much people seem to want to help me make this work, just based on enjoying a blog post or two. Goodwill is surprisingly cheap. I am also surprised by the number of people who think that I live off writing. One reader recently told me he thought I was “living the dream.”

As some of you are aware, I make most of my income — to the tune of 70-90%, though it varies a lot quarter to quarter – from consulting, not publishing this site or earnings from Tempo. I am not one of your impressive probloggers pulling in six figures directly from online activities.

Sponsorships and the book together pay for the direct costs of the online and offline activities, with some lunch money left over, but don’t yet amount to rent money.

But after two years, I am finally starting to find my feet as a consultant. I still haven’t recovered my pre-free-agency income levels (which is sort of the minimum benchmark I want to hit by Year 5 in order to justify keeping at it), but I am slowly getting there.

I’ve finally logged enough of a track record of completed gigs and talking-headery that a proper website seemed worth it. Like it, bookmark it, etc. There’s a slide-show on the home page that you can check out if you want to know what we actually do, and why “we” is the right pronoun. Check it out, share it, etc.

The Gig Economy and Ribbonfarm

I said when I struck out on my own that the blog isn’t about content marketing for the business: the business is about making the blog possible. That was not just a choice but a fact. I’d guess there’s maybe a few dozen readers with VP or higher roles in sufficiently large companies here, who could actually send a gig my way without a thought. Senior executives with the power to spend money, in my experience, rarely read long-form articles that attempt esoteric refactorings of thoroughly useless subjects. My leads have mostly come from my writing on other sites.

Most readers of this blog are themselves struggling Rent-and-Ramen entrepreneurs, designers and early career professionals far from VP-level purse-string access (the majority of Refactor Camp attendees, as well as people I meet up with for coffee or lunch, tend to be younger than me). This is why I’ve largely viewed marketing the consulting business as a separate problem from keeping this site going.

So unless there’s something you guys are not telling me, my assumption about most of you is that you’re not in a position to even sponsor the site, let alone hire me (though if you are, you’re welcome to).

But somehow, through the relationship flow from interesting comments discussions, to email, to participation in the online groups, to meetups and Refactor Camp, to occasional collaboration on consulting gigs or passion projects, this site creates value in a very different way: by helping participants do just a  little better in the gig economy.

So what does that make you, the reader? You’ve heard that line about social media, if you’re not paying, you’re the product, right? That’s what you are. The product.

Except that I don’t sell your attention to advertisers, I draw on your skills and knowledge to inform my writing here, and derive the second-hand intelligence that informs my consulting business. Refactor Camp and meetups have turned into the conduit for that flow of intelligence. My own modest attempt at resisting the growing locust economy by catalyzing production instead of consumption. I am not a complete cynic.

I am not making this up or pandering to your vanities. Advertising hasn’t really worked well enough to be worth the trouble on this site, which is why I don’t run ads anymore. But for just about every consulting project I’ve done in the last year, I’ve called on somebody I met through random meetups or Refactor Camp for free advice or expertise.

I’ve even been able to hire a few readers to help me out with bits and pieces of my consulting gigs.

I am not about to solve Obama’s underemployment problem single-handed, but Ribbonfarm is starting to turn into a modest little source of talent in the American gig economy (maybe one day it will extend to Canada and beyond). I’d like to grow that potential.

But I am not going to set up a job board or gig-exchange site. There’s enough of those around.

Instead, what I’d like to do is very slowly grow a curated recommendation network based on people actually meeting face-to-face and collaborating where possible. No commissions, no fees, no klout. Just actual trust, coffee and email.

That’s the idea behind this little directory on the consulting site. The list is short, and is going to grow bristlecone-pine slow.

Be Slightly Evil and Gervais Principle Finales

As you already know if you’re on the BSE mailing list, I plan to end the newsletter with a final issue soon.  Since the Office is also approaching its series finale on May 16, I plan to wrap up the Gervais Principle series as well. I’ll post the finale in the next few weeks, promise. For real this time. Even if it means flushing out a hasty and unpolished draft full of holes.

With help from Jane Huang, reader-turned-editorial-moonlighter here, I am working on combining the BSE newsletter archives and the Gervais Principle series into a big fat ebook. I’ll hopefully get it done by mid-May.

It’s been an interesting journey. The Gervais Principle series has wound its way across five parts through four years so far. The Be Slightly Evil newsletter, which I started in 2010 after the success of the first couple of GP posts, now has over 2200 readers. I’ve written over 50 issues of the newsletter.

It seems a shame to retire a successful and growing email list, but I’ve concluded that email lists are not a medium for me.

I also need to free up bandwidth to play with a new medium: slide-decks and business thought-pieces to market the consulting business. Watch the downloads page on the consulting site for developments on that front. I’ll add some sort of subscription mechanism once I add actual content there.

But the Slightly Evil philosophy will live on bey0nd GP and the BSE newsletter, as the Slightly Evil Practice within Ribbonfarm Consulting.

There’s even a page for it, accessible via an Easter egg, if you can find it.

Buy Me a Coffee Retired, Crowdfunded Features in the Works

Another ending, another beginning. After years of faithful service, I am retiring the Buy Me a Beer plugin. While the income — a few hundred dollars a year — was useful validation and feedback in the early years of Ribbonfarm, now that the business has grown to the point where I have had to retain a book-keeper, the money is not worth the headache of keeping track of it.

I also need to develop more serious revenue streams, particularly those that allow me to better balance consulting and writing.

One of the hidden tensions in running a business that’s a mix of media and consulting is the constant threat of conflicts of interest. I’ve had to turn down many gigs because it was clear that what people really wanted was to pay for PR in the guise of consulting.

But I’ve also had to turn away people who wanted to pay me to write about topics that interested them, with no strings attached or editorial interference. These are typically feature writing suggestions that would take as much work as say an analysis project for a consulting client.

The requests range from analyzing specific business ideas or sectors to analyzing TV shows. I get constant requests to pull a Gervais Principle on Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Game of Thrones, House of Cards and Deadwood (insert your favorite Sociopath show/movie here). 

I’d love to oblige, but while I am quite the extreme couch potato, even I can’t spend that much time watching and analyzing TV shows without more to show for it.

So starting this year, I am going to be using platforms like Kickstarter to fund more ambitious writing projects that require more research (or TV watching), with results that will show up here or on other sites. I thought of doing a Kickstarter for Game of Pickaxes, but I figured I ought to shoot for an indefinite series of small projects rather than one big one. Bristlecone pine again.

I am still working out the details, since figuring out a model that would be acceptable to editors of media outlets that might run the features, while satisfying the crowd-sponsors who fund individual features, is a bit tricky.

I’ll be posting the first such crowd-funded feature project in the next few weeks. Just another way you can support Ribbonfarm if you choose.

Resident Blogger Tryouts

Earlier this month, I received a milestone compliment via email. Reader Josh McHugh wrote (emphasis mine):

“Love what you guys are writing at Ribbonfarm. Really impressive and thought-provoking.”

People tend to be generous and encouraging with praise on email (trolls rarely escalate beyond the comments section), so I usually don’t take the actual content of such emails seriously, but the use of the plural was extremely satisfying.

After years of (slow, again) experimentation, I think I’ve finally found a sustainable model for evolving this into a group blog loosely built around the “experiments in refactored perception” mission-tagline. The resident blogger model is working out.

Mike, Kevin, Greg and Drew have each helped broaden the conversation here (and over at the Tempo site) in unique ways.

It isn’t easy to find contributors who fit into a young bristlecone pine in the right way, but I think I know what to look for now.

My mental model of the residency idea is very simple: an opportunity for serious long-form writers to explore a more ambitious theme over 4-6 posts, without any pressure to “perform” in the sense of hitting particular vanity metrics. As the “experiments” in the tagline suggests, I view this blog as an R&D laboratory for both my money-making work and my life. It’s nice to have company in the lab.

I can’t pay much, just a small $100 honorarium per post (that’s one way I use sponsorship money), but if the idea interests you, get in touch for a trial post. If the experiment produces interesting results, and you are interested in doing something bigger, we can talk about a residency.

At some point, I may try to offer a little online course to teach the sort of gonzo-longform refactoring that goes on around here. Look for that later this year.

Now Reading

Finally, to wrap up, I’ve finally gotten around to adding the most frequently requested feature for this site: a book recommendations page. Over the years, I’ve mostly stopped doing book reviews, but books are still a major part of what goes on here, and a huge part of conversations at meetups and Refactor Camp.

I’ll evolve this page as and when I can think of ways to improve it. It’s not yet automated, so don’t expect prompt updates.

So with that, I’ll sign off here. I am sure I’ve forgotten a couple of important things, but this backstage tour has gone on long enough.

Here’s to one more year in this bristlecone-pine growing experiment. Consider sponsoring if you are able, and thank you for reading and keeping this site going.

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Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

I want to take it as a starting point the idea that there is a certain fictional quality to our selves. The elusive nature of the self has been a perennial issue for psychologists and philosophers; there are nihilistic and mystical and mechanistic and pluralistic theories of what we mean when we talk about the self, the thing inside of us that defines who we are. But I find that the most useful theories of the self come from literature and drama, and take as their central point the idea that selves are to some extent roles we make up and perform in the dramatic improvisations of daily life. It’s perhaps a trite observation given its presence in one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines; Goffmann turned it into sociology; for now I just want to use it as a jumping off point to talk about Facebook and the way selves are now in the Internet era.

Self Construction

Whatever the true nature of selves are, it is part of their nature that they are constructed through a process that is both social and based in narrative. Anybody who has noticed that they present themselves differently in different contexts, or that they are occasionally called upon to cobble together stories that justify their current state and actions, should have no problem with this conceptual framework. A self is no more and no less than a character in our life-story that we are also constructing in the middle of living it. And we shape each other’s characters as we shape our own, in the give-and-take of interaction.

The notion of “social construction” scares some people off, but it is important to realize that to say that something is socially constructed doesn’t mean it can be anything at all, it just means that it is not hard and fast and given. Like the fictional characters in novels, selves need to obey certain structural rules in order to be comprehensible to themselves and others. For instance, they need to be maintain some stable characteristics over time; they have desires; their actions need to relate to their motives and emotions. But even more fundamentally, they need to be able to account for themselves; that is, to be able to present plausible narratives that explain their actions.

Technologies of the Word

Most of our self-construction happens through linguistic interaction with other people, But language does not exist on its own, it is always embodied in some medium, such as speech, writing, print, or the various forms language takes on the Internet. And these varied technologies of language have quite different properties that shape our usage and hence the way we construct ourselves.

Walter Ong was a literary theorist best known for explicating the differences between oral and written communication, or more generally the impact of technology on language. Given when he was writing, “technology” mostly meant writing and print, although electronic communication media (telephone and radio, and the beginnings of the Internet) make their appearance in his work. One of the key lessons one learns from studying Ong is just how strange the literate self is relative to the original conditions of human language and culture:

Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even the possibility of writing. Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything….Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might ‘call’ them back — ‘recall’ them. But there is nowhere to ‘look’ for them. They have no focus and no trace…They are occurrences, events… – Orality and Literacy, p30

The most obvious difference between oral cultures and our own is the vastly more important role of memorization and repetition in maintaining knowledge. Nothing is set in stone, or even papyrus, so long-term knowledge can only exist if it is endlessly repeated. This has a great many non-obvious consequences:

Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle. Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another. It separate the knower from the known. By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle. Proverbs and riddles are not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat… – O&L p43

Reading Ong can provide an interesting perspective that is in some respects meta to ordinary language use, enabling one to perceive the artificial situated paralinguistic mechanisms that create meaning. Writing, being a more recent invention than speech, has more obvious artifices. X particularly significant work of Ong’s is “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction”, which delineates some of the methods writers use to frame their words:

Except for a small corps of highly trained writers, most persons could get into written form few if any of the complicated and nuanced meanings they regularly convey orally…One reason is evident: the spoken word…has its meaning established by the total situation in which it comes into being. Context for the spoken word is…centered in the person speaking and the one or ones to whom he addresses himself and to whom he is related existentially in terms of the circumambient actuality.

But the meaning in writing comes provided with no such present circumambient actuality…the person to whom the writer addresses himself normally is not present at all. Moreover… he must not be present. I am writing a book which will be read by thousands…so please, get out of the room. I want to be alone. Writing normally calls for some kind of withdrawal.

How does the writer give body to the audience for whom he writes? The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity . “Audience” is a collective noun. There is no such collective non for readers… “Readers” is a plural. Readers do not form a collectivity, acting here and now on one another and on the speaker as members of an audience do. We can devise a singularized concept for them, it is true, such as “readership”…But “readership” is not a collective noun. It is an abstraction in a way “audience” is not.

One of the more striking parts of Ong’s essay is how he teases out the linguistic tricks used by modern writers for shaping their readers, and creating a (fictional) intimacy between writer and reader, for existence Hemingway’s opening of A Farewell to Arms:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

The definite articles “the” and “that” do the subtle work of uniting the reader’s imaginary world with the writers, or as Ong puts it:

“The late summer of that year,” the reader begins. What year? The reader gathers that there is no need to say. “Across the river.” What river? The reader is apparently supposed to know… “To the mountains.” What mountains? Do I have to tell you? Of course not. The mountains — those mountains we know. We have somehow been there together. Who? You, my reader, and I.

Ong’s larger point is that writers necessarily create their audiences, both in the sense that they have to imagine them in order to do the writing, and in the sense that the eventual readers are gently or not-so-gently cast into certain cognitive tasks and roles by the demands of the text. The techniques used to do this vary across cultures and across different media technologies.

Self-presentation in social media

Hemingway may have been a unique genius at creating a sense of imaginary intimacy between writer and reader, but now everyone using Facebook has a somewhat similar task. Facebook blends elements of orality and literacy in ways that are uniquely new to our time. Obviously the content of social media is largely alphabetic renditions of words, not oral speech. Yet the context is often closer to an oral presentation than a typical piece of writing in the print medium. For one thing, there is a certain immediacy about the interaction of writer and reader. There is at least the potential for this immediacy to be realized in bidirectional communication, something not readily supported by traditional writing (letters to the editor notwithstanding). The audience is not the faceless fictional reader of print, but a selected set of “friends” or “followers”. These all contribute to an oral feeling in digital communication, and the digital world has been evolving in directions that support those kind of uses over communication forms that are more closely based on writing (such as email).

Yet Facebook postings have qualities of print as well – most notably their permanence and ability to exist as things in the world, independent of their creators. The confusion between the permanence and contexuality of oral communication and the permanence of Facebook is the most common complaint about its effects on people’s lives, as youthful drunken indiscretions become part of one’s permanent record. We live in exciting times in which the rules for linguistic interaction in new media are not yet solidified, there is ample room for experimentation, and new variants of communication and the underlying technology platforms are invented every day.

One doesn’t have to be Hemingway to create intimacy on Facebook, because it is at least somewhat rooted in face-to-face life. But controlling and manipulating intimacy, figuring out the rules for what is communicated, who will be seeing it, how much of the private self to reveal, how much public role performance is required…that takes whole new skill sets. Some are quite adept at it, but most of us are not. Many people (including me) have noted and lamented the tendency of social media to collapse social space, to effectively trash the contexts we use to play out our varying social fictions. Mark Zuckerberg is on record as blithely informing humanity that the days of being able to present yourself differently in different contexts is coming to an end. Fortunately he’s probably wrong; I don’t believe such a basic part of human nature is going to be reconfigured by Facebook. If it does, people just won’t use it, or will use it in only carefully controlled ways while they leave their other selves for other media.

But like it or not we are all in the business of creating and promulgating public roles for ourselves. Facebook and Twitter performances are about the creation of public or semi-public personae, but so are the face-to-face performances of old-fashioned social interaction. Who is the audience for our online performances? Given they go out to an increasingly broad set of people, they take on aspects of Ong’s writer’s fictional reader. They feel somewhat in-between the sort of think I’d say to small gathering of friends and things i’d say when speaking in a public forum, and where exactly on that continuum is both uncertain and changing over time. So when I compose a tweet or Facebook post, my imagination must gather itself up and create roles for both me and the eventual recipients, without knowing exactly who they are. I feel like I am inventing rules for the medium as I use it, which is both exciting and unsettling.

Language is in itself is a technology of self-creation, and the media technologies that underpin it put radically new spins on how this everyday miracle is accomplished. The invention of writing opened up new spaces for thought and consciousness and being; print and radio further altered the landscape; and we are in the middle of another such revolution. The day-to-day dust-ups about Facebook’s privacy policy or the latest sock-puppetry scandal are very small issues obscuring the larger changes and more significant ongoing changes that can barely be discerned. The new selves that we forge as we inhabit the new media landscape will be different from what existed before. Yet not entirely alien – we are very different from the inhabitants of oral cultures, but there is a recognizably common human core. Despite the vast changes swirling around us, there is something stable that permits us to communicate and be present to each other.

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I recently reached an odd conclusion. A sense of history isn’t about knowing a lot of history or trying to learn from the past in order to create a better future. It is about living your mortal life as though you were immortal.

To understand why this is an interesting definition to play with, consider the following allegory.  Human life is like walking into a movie halfway through, and having to walk out again two minutes later. You’ll have no idea what’s going on when you walk in. And chances are, just as you begin to get a clue, you’ll be kicked out.

So unless you are lucky enough to walk in during a scene that is satisfying without any longer narrative context (think sex or violence), your ability to derive satisfaction from your two-minute glimpse will depend partly on your ability to construct meaning out of it.

One way to do this is to pretend to be immortal. This game of make-believe also reveals a few interesting things about literal immortality seeking, in the sense of seeking longevity therapies or waiting to upload your brain into Skynet, post-Singularity.

To pretend to be immortal is to approach your limited two-minute glimpse of the movie as though you’ve been watching all along, and as though you might stick around to see how it all ends.

You will have to manufacture unverifiable memories and unfalsifiable foreshadowings. You will have to devote some of your limited time whispering to your neighbors, and perhaps surreptitiously looking up reviews with spoilers on your cellphone.

But at least you’ll walk out with a satisfying story, even if not the story. So long as you walk away feeling like you’ve just enjoyed an entire movie, it doesn’t matter.

To do this at the level of an entire life is to spend much of your time having one-way conversations with the dead and the unborn,  through books read and written. You inhabit a world of ghosts while walking among the living.

These choices can lead to the sort of detachment and withdrawal from everyday life that we associate with seers, even if you don’t spend your time chasing profundities. You can seek this sort of pretend-immortality through stamp collecting or escapist fantasies.

These choices can also lead to odd patterns of identification with, and attachment to, dead or unborn cultures and people. It can lead to a sense of connection to larger human realities that is not purely genealogical. They can lead to social identities that make no sense to anyone, but are not exactly individualist either. They can make the contemporary living around you resentful and angry about your withdrawn, ghostly lifestyle.

The small difference between this kind of ghostly, vicarious immortality seeking and the literal kind is that in this kind, pretending is often enough.

The big difference is that sense-of-history seekers not only want to live forever, they want to have lived forever.

The sense of loss they feel about missing the invention of the wheel in 3000 BC is as poignant as the sense of loss they feel about missing the first interstellar human space mission in 2532 AD.

But this is only a symptom, the real difference lies deeper.

Life and Loss

Humans are somewhat unique among living things in their capacity for mourning the loss of things they never had in the first place.  Immortality is one of those things (I am using words like “forever” and  ”immortality” in a loosely realist sense, to talk about really long, but finite time periods, ranging from many human lifetimes to the lifespan of human civilization, to the lifespan of the universe. There are no mathematical infinities here.)

To seek to avoid the pain of death — something all living creatures do — is very different from seeking to live, or have lived, forever. Our immortality instincts arise out of our ability to vicariously experience the lives of others, coupled with our ability to peer into the past and future beyond the limits of our own lifetimes. Into regimes where direct experience is impossible.

Because we can read a historical or science-fiction tale and vicariously experience a low-fidelity version of the distant past or future, we can experience a sense of loss about not being able to experience the real thing more fully and directly. So we are designed for pretend immortality.

But some want the real thing as well.

There is a key distinction between pretend and literal immortality seekers. The former want to experience more in order to extract more meaning, which means vicarious, non-participatory experience is valuable on its own. Direct experience is just a bonus, except where it is necessary for extracting any meaning they decide is essential.

The latter want to experience more because being alive itself is a valuable state to them. They prefer being alive to being dead, and being young to being old.  They want to live a full, direct and pleasurable life rather than a ghostly, indirect and meaningful one. Vicarious experience is at best a means to an end for them. Ultimately, they want to personally experience all that life has to offer.

Becoming a pretend-immortal ghost, living a life that is vicarious to any significant degree, is unbearable to them.

Ghosts and Vampires

Meaning-seekers are afraid of misreading the universe; extracting false meanings out of it. They seek immortality primarily to get to more satisfying and meaningful readings of their condition. Seeking direct experience is a secondary, pragmatic objective in specific situations, it is not the raison d’être.

Experience-seekers are afraid of missing out on the rich direct experiences the universe offers. They seek immortality primarily to directly experience more of the universe. Seeking meaning is a secondary, pragmatic objective in specific situations, it is not the raison d’être.

These are different varieties of loss aversion and lead to different patterns of action.

Experience-seekers prefer doing over seeing. Meaning-seekers prefer seeing over doing. Neither requires nor precludes the other, but most people seem to prefer one to the near exclusion of the other.

We need names for these two types of immortality seekers. Let’s call them ghosts and vampires. Ghosts seek meaning. Vampires seek more direct experience of life.

In our stories, ghosts usually cannot do anything, but hang around until unresolved matters are resolved. Their satisfaction is based purely on meaning.

Vampires on the other hand, have a reason to go on living for as long as they enjoy the taste of blood and enjoy a very interventionist sort of immortality.

Pretending is enough for ghosts because there is nothing they particularly want to change; just a lot they want to see, but pretend-drinking blood is not satisfying because it is not an experience valued for the meaning it generates.

It is also obvious why vampires are more interested in living forever than having lived forever.

Since the actual direct experience matters, and pretending is not enough, the future is more interesting to vampires. The past, being inaccessible to direct experience, is only interesting in an instrumental sense, insofar as understanding it can help manipulate the future.

Ghosts seek appreciative knowledge of both past and future. Vampires seek manipulative knowledge from both past and future, but as a means to changing the future.

Which means it is useful to conduct thought experiments involving time machines to get at deeper differences between the two types.

The Time Machine Test

A useful test for telling ghosts and vampires (our human archetypes, not the fictional kind) apart is to consider how they might react to a time machine.

If you had access to a time machine that could put you anywhere in the past or future for five minutes before snapping you back to your own time, what would you do? Here are some specific questions for you to ponder:

1. Would you choose to travel to the future or the past?
2. If you choose the past, would you attempt to change the course of history to make your present better, or would you use it to participate in an experience that has always fascinated you, like the cowboy era?
3. If you went to the future, would you spend your time in the future memorizing stock prices or shopping for things to bring back to your own time, or would simply wander around, trying to see as much as possible?
4. Would you find a time-machine that allowed for ghostly, non-participatory observation, but no intervention (with future stock prices and sports results being bleeped from your memory after), almost as interesting, or uninteresting because of its practical uselessness?
5. If both kinds of time machine were available, how much more would you be willing to pay for a trip on the first kind? Would you rather take two non-interventionist trips on the second machine, or one interventionist trip on the first kind?

The thought experiment clearly demonstrates that whether you choose to go to the past or the future is mostly irrelevant. What is more important is whether you go where you go in order to improve your situation or just inhabit a different situation to deepen the meaning you are reading into life.

At the other extreme of the thought experiment, imagine you could time travel at will, as much as you wanted to, anywhere, anywhen in the universe.

Would you busily go around rearranging all of history until you had an optimal timeline for the universe, designed entirely for your direct experiential pleasure in some sense?

Or would you jump back to the Big Bang and simply live through the whole thing, occasionally fast-forwarding or sneaking a look ahead when you get impatient?

Do you want to watch the movie or produce it?

I’ll leave you to play with these ideas on your own, but I want to zoom in on one particular feature of life that immortality affords.

Satiation in an Infinite Universe

Both ghosts and vampires seek to satiate appetites.

An appetite for meaning is satiated when patterns start to repeat themselves with no stimulating variations requiring explanation. This is why it is easy to lose interest in a murder mystery (particularly poorly written ones that are nothing more than logic puzzles) if you peek ahead. For a ghost, successful resolution of contradictions kills motivation. Surprise is what drives life.

An appetite for direct experience operates differently. In a simple universe consisting only of ice-cream eating experiences, you’re not done when you’ve sampled all the flavors eternity has to offer. Knowing what flavor is up next does not necessarily kill your appetite for it. You might even want to deliberately rewind and relive an experience.

You might want to try different trajectories of sampling as sensory memories of satiation fade and your appetite is regenerated. So you might get sick of vanilla and travel to 2524 and binge on Martian Apple flavored ice-cream for a week, but you might want vanilla again some day and return to relive vanilla eating.

So this gives us another interesting difference. Regenerative appetites can motivate us to relive the same experience repeatedly. But meaning-seeking is typically not a regenerative appetite. You cannot generally experience the same Aha! twice. But you can (roughly speaking) eat the same ice-cream twice.

This shows up in how we process fiction and non-fiction.

Most of us consume our favorite works of comforting junk-food fiction multiple times. I suspect I’ll do at least one re-read of Lord of the Rings in my 70s, if I live that long.

But we typically re-consume non-fiction only enough times to understand it as deeply as as we care to. When we re-consume, we do so either because we have forgotten something we need, or because we realize we missed something the first time.

It helps to think about a couple of concrete cases. Well, as concrete as a discussion of immortality can get.

Wowbagger versus Connors

My two favorite immortal characters are Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors, from Groundhog Day. 

Wowbagger is about as pure a ghost as you can find. He is stuck in immortality and has been frustrated in his efforts to extract more meaning from his existence. He is thoroughly pissed off about having to continue hanging around. He has no real interest in more direct experience. So he spends his time insulting every living thing that ever existed. In alphabetical order. It is a thoroughly meaningless and inconsequential way of spending eternity.

Connors on the other hand, is reliving the same day over and over again in order to get it exactly right, and make what follows as perfect as possible. It is a pure vampire do-over fantasy (in an AI class I once took, the professor used Groundhog Day to illustrate backtrack search techniques for optimization).

It is not an accident that Wowbagger’s meaningless residual lifestyle is destructive rather than constructive. Meaning seeking is often destructive. You have to take things apart in order to see them more clearly. In his eternal exhaustion, that basic tendency has been reduced to a tic: insulting people.

A vampire version of Wowbagger would spend his time  sampling the blood of every living thing, in alphabetical order. Or eating an endless variety of ice cream flavors, in endless permutations and combinations.

A ghost version of Phil Connors would only change his actions to understand more, not to experience more. He would be less frustrated about having to live the same day over and over.

Crucially, Connors had a girl to win — a direct experience objective rather than a vicarious experience objective. Wowbagger did not. If Connors had been an old man trying to prove a difficult theorem, his story would have been different.

The contrast between the two brings up an important point that we haven’t addressed yet. Both are effectively immortal characters, but they are still finite in their cognitive capabilities. They are immortal but do not have infinite brains.

Infinite Variety and Finite Appetites

Appetites can be finite even if existence is not. To understand how they interact, we need to consider the question of how much variety the universe offers. Variety-seeking is the common factor between ghost and vampire lifestyles.  Meaning-seeking and ice-cream-eating (or blood-sucking) lifestyles are both about variety seeking.

We know that appetite for consecutive consumption of the same thing is finite. We might be done with an Aha! triggered by a mathematical proof the first time. We might be temporarily done with vanilla ice cream after 10 consecutive cones. Either way, we hit diminishing returns after a finite number of repetitions. Whether that number is one or one million is unimportant.

The interesting question is whether our appetite for unbounded variety is also naturally bounded.

This is a difficult question in general philosophical terms, but let’s take one geeky shot at it (there are more approaches to this question that I don’t have time to get into).

If we assume a thermodynamically closed universe where the second law holds, and where the assumption that everything is information processing holds (i.e., bits and atoms are two sides of the same coin), we can reach some mildly useful conclusions.

If the satiation of both kinds of appetite  – for meaning or ice-cream — are computational processes, satiation depends on the amount of informational variety in the universe.

Now I don’t know how truly varied the universe is, and whether or not it admits of a finite description (a “meaning” that you could grok in finite time), but in a way this is an irrelevant question.

The universe could be one huge string of random numbers that cannot be compressed down to anything smaller than the universe itself, or it could be so fractally compact that you could describe it using a little generative computer program that fits within a few kilobytes.

If you’ve thought and read about these things, you’ll recognize them as the Douglas Adams and Stephen Wolfram/digital physics assumptions about the nature of reality.

But as I said, the question of total variety in the universe is irrelevant. This is because you have to think about beings seeking satiation as finite computers within the same universe, processing it. In a hypothetical universe occupied by a single being whose brain represents one tenth of the mass of that universe, neither meaning extracted, nor pleasure extracted, can exceed the maximum-entropy state of that computer.

Once that’s done, the being is doomed to a state of eternal frustration about meanings it has failed to extract and experiences it has missed out on.

So the size of the eternal being’s brain itself limits how long it would want to live before being satiated. This brings us to another thought experiment. And since we’re already in God-is-a-black-hole territory, we might as well go there.

Keeping God Entertained

An interesting question is this: how big would an immortal being have to be, relative to the size of the universe it is in, such that it achieves satiation in exactly the same amount of time as it takes the universe itself to reach a maximal entropy state?

This being would be interesting because it would be perfectly designed for the universe it inhabits. It would be its own God.

My half-assed conjecture is that the being would have to be exactly half the size of the universe itself.  So whatever constitutes the boundary of the brain would have to contain half the universe. If it were smaller, it would have to leave some meaning or direct experience unextracted. If it were bigger, it would be done early and have to spend some time entertaining itself with its own internal thoughts. A God-being, co-extensive with the material reality it inhabits, would be pretty bored, unless it didn’t know it was a God-being, and was able to entertain itself with its own thoughts, figuring that out. I expect there’s a New Age cult out there somewhere, based on a speculative scientified theology of this sort.

I’ll leave it to someone with a better handle on information theory and thermodynamics to work out the details.

When we address the question at this level of abstraction, the distinction between vampire and ghost models of immortality vanish. For a sufficiently massive being, existence would necessarily be highly interventionist and therefore vampire-like.

It would not be able to think a thought without affecting the conditions of its existence in a non-trivial way, because it constitutes a non-trivial fraction of the universe itself. Omniscience implies unavoidable omnipotence. Or something of the sort.

I am out on a very flimsy limb here, so let’s get back to more human-scale ideas.

Play versus Movie

For human-sized beings with 2 lb brains, there is more than enough variety in the universe to keep both ghosts and vampires occupied for any time-scale they can conceive.

For human-sized beings, theories and models are also inevitable, since our minds are much smaller than the realities they seek to understand or experience. So in a way, the contemporary debate about between theory versus practice is moot. The opposite of doing is not theorizing, but seeing. How much you theorize is merely a function of the size (in informational terms) of your mind relative to the world it seeks to inhabit, either meaningfully, or pleasurably, or both.  If you want to create a startup, you can do without much theorizing. If you want to write a textbook on cosmology and the Big Bang, you’re going to have to do some theorizing.

But how much you seek to see, versus how much you seek to do, represents a real trade-off. You choose based on your preferred mix of meaning extraction and direct experience.

The distinction between ghosts and vampires is real for sufficiently small beings who can meaningfully choose between non-interventionist meaning-seeking lifestyles and interventionist experience-maximization lifestyles.

This means the vampires among you probably experienced a twinge of dissatisfaction with the movie theater allegory I started with.

When your approach to life is based primarily on doing rather than seeing, on influencing for gain rather than probing for meaning, on ice-cream eating rather than theorem-proving, a default understanding of the human condition as spectator sport is deeply unsatisfying.

If we use a play rather than a movie as the basis for the allegory, we open up the possibility of playing a part during our two minutes in the theater (Shakespeare liked this version). For a sufficiently tiny being, “playing a part” is about conscious agency, not an unavoidable consequence of size. A half-universe sized being cannot choose to be a mere spectator. The other half of the universe will not ignore it (insert Dark Matter and Dark Energy jokes here), even if it wants to withdraw and disengage.

But at smaller scales, choosing to audition for a part is a choice.

Life for a vampire is about viewing life as a play rather than a movie, and making your way to the stage within those two minutes and scoring at least a bit part for 20 seconds. If that means you miss much of the on-stage action during your two minutes, so be it.

Without time machines and other immortality technologies (which incidentally, includes interstellar space travel — living long enough to get to an exoplanet probably means either being near immortal or being born in space), the vampire life is fairly limited in what it can see.

Which is perhaps why I choose to be mostly ghost. My place is out here, in the peanut gallery of the universe.

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Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here’s how it happened.

I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon. He confirmed what we all understand in the abstract: that these deals are terrible for the businesses that offer them; that they draw in nomadic deal hunters from a vast surrounding region who are unlikely to ever return; that most deal-hunters carefully ensure that they spend just the deal amount or slightly more; that a badly designed offer can bankrupt a small business.

He added one little factoid I did not know: offering a Groupon deal is by now so strongly associated with a desperate, dying restaurant that professional food critics tend to write off any restaurant that offers one without even trying it.

Yet, I’ve used (and continue to use) these services and don’t feel entirely terrible about doing so, or truly complicit in the depredations of Groupon. Why? It’s because, like most of the working class, I’ve developed a locust morality.

Thinking about locusts and the behavior of customers around services like Groupon, I’ve become convinced that the phrase “sharing economy” is mostly a case of putting lipstick on a pig. What we have here is a locust economy. Let me explain what that means.

I, Locust

Why locusts? Because I just learned a fascinating fact about them: they are not a separate species.

Locusts are the swarming phase of certain polymorphic grasshoppers that are normally solitary creatures, but under certain conditions (such as overcrowding, certain chemical trigger conditions and other subtleties I don’t get) they change their physical appearance, get a lot stronger, a lot more gregarious and aggressive, and form huge nomadic swarms. The picture above shows the two phases of the desert locust. At one time, they were thought to be distinct species.

When I first learned about this bit of science trivia last week, my immediate reaction was “wow, locusts are basically zombie grasshoppers!” But the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that this is a case of fact being stranger than fiction. Locusts are stranger and scarier than the zombies of our imagination.

And the more I thought about it, the more I also realized that I was a locust. Maybe 1/8 locust as a consumer, and probably 1/2 locust as an economic producer.

If you’ve ever participated in the “sharing economy” in any way, not just the worst-case act of offering or using a Groupon deal, you’re a locust too. Participation in anything from Airbnb to Zipcar (convenient A-Z phrase there) makes you at least partly a locust.  It also does not matter whether you use a p2p resource base, one supplied by a small business sector, or one supplied by a big company. You’re a locust in all those cases.

I expect there are people out there who avoid operations of known dubious repute like Groupon, but the idea that this alone frees you of complicity in the locust economy is laughable. It is far bigger, and far harder to escape from than you think.

Zombies versus Locusts

For some time now, I’ve been fond of the idea that consumers are like zombies, and that during recessions, they are scarier than big capitalists (vampires). A few years ago, there was a vigorous online debate about the relationship between the state of the economy and the relative popularity of vampire and zombie movies.

Apparently, zombie movies are more popular during recessions.

It’s not hard to see why the analogy is so attractive. The identification of mindless consumerism with zombie behavior is very tempting. I offered my own related spin a few years back (The Gollum Effect).

But locusts bring a whole new level of detail, real-world precedent and seriousness to this class of metaphors. Because unlike fictional zombies, locusts aren’t the dumb instruments of a witch doctor or a mutant virus. They are actually smart and self-interested automatons, which makes them more scary.

In 19th century America, huge Rocky Mountain locust plagues were a feature of agricultural life. One swarm was recorded at 198,000 square miles (larger than California) and over 12 trillion insects, the “greatest concentration of animals ever speculatively guessed” according to the Guinness Book of World Records (via Wikipedia).

The economic devastation was big enough ($200 million between 1873 to 1877) to measurably impact the national economy during the plague years.

Then they suddenly and rather mysteriously went extinct. More on that later, let’s cover the basics first.

Locust Dynamics

I didn’t quite understand the entomology I read up on, during my few hours of browsing locust facts, but I came away with the amateur understanding that the reason for locust swarms is probably some mix of

• Opportunistic exploitation of a pattern of scarcity epochs punctuated by abundance spikes
• An element of predator satiation: a survival strategy based on overwhelming predators with numbers so that more of the species survives.

Locust swarms are also among the rare nomadic biological entities besides humans (nomadism is not a predictable pattern of movement, unlike migration,which is typically a sustainable pattern of movement through a resource landscape that’s not being devastated by the movement). They are nature’s rioting mobs, moving opportunistically from one store of food to another, without much concern for sustainability.

Whatever the biological details, the key point is that locusts devastate their foraging base.

Locust swarms don’t create new value. At a systemic level, the most charitable thing that can be said about them is that they efficiently strip mine value in a tyranny-of-the-biomass-majority way.

They out-compete other species through sheer numbers, and leave others to pick up the pieces as they return to their solitary, non-swarming grasshopper phase. In this case, human farmers. The collapse of locust swarms completes the cycle in a way we’ll get to.

Locust economies are built around 3-way markets: a swarming platform “organizer” player who efficiently disseminates information about transient, local resource surpluses, a locust species in dormant grasshopper mode, and a base for predation that exhibits a scarcity-abundance cycle.

So long as different locations are not synchronized, a locust market will usually have a surplus somewhere, even if it is a zero-sum or negative-sum market overall. Where that surplus comes from varies. In human farming, it is a natural consequence of the plant-harvest model.

Unfortunately, within the human world, it seems that the prey base is usually some sort of small business sector (either independent or franchisee chains). I will call this the  Jeffersonian middle class, as in economic actors driven by the producerist values espoused by Thomas Jefferson (basically “small, local and independent”).

The war between the 1% and 99% seems to play out with the 1% and the 90% collaborating to prey on the 9% in the middle — the Jeffersonian middle class.

This is a very different class than the paycheck middle class, which has a superficially similar financial life. But during hard times, the paycheck middle class turns into the locust class in both production and consumption behaviors.

In a locust economy, the Jeffersonian middle class is a terrible place to be. It is no accident that the worst-hit victims of the locust plagues of the 19th century were small farmers living the Jeffersonian dream handed to them by the Homestead Act of 1862.

Abundance and Scarcity

Locust swarms are aggressively and energetically social. Remind you of any contemporary pattern of human behavior?

There seems to be an implicit holier-than-thou assumption among sharing economy evangelists that social sharing is primarily about virtuous behaviors like generosity, empathy, minding the planet, conserving resources, avoiding waste and so forth. Only secondarily do they see it as a zero-sum/negative-sum adaptation to recessionary conditions — Bruce Sterling’s favela chic.

They rarely think of it as a predatory behavior at all.

I haven’t yet worked out the details, but it seems to me that there is a curious interplay of scarcity and abundance in locust economics. On the one hand, there is local scarcity. Only so much wheat to eat locally, only so many local coupons offered by restaurants desperate for marketing leverage.

Once you’ve used up your coupon from the local paper, you have to pay full price. But if you can obtain news about another coupon in the neighboring town, the game changes.

Once locusts acquire an informed kind of market mobility through better discovery mechanisms, they can range over a much larger area of wheat fields or restaurants. You can continuously derive savings at the expense of other economic actors (wheat farmers or restaurant owners).

Once you increase your foraging range sufficiently, “local” means the smallest area within which you never have to pay full price.

So the abundance here is an illusion created on top of local scarcity via cheap discovery of transient local surpluses, artificially created by small Jeffersonian middle class actors hopelessly looking for leverage, and co-opted by swarming-platform owners.

Whether it is underutilized inventory of living space, coupons, parked cars or anything else, for most of the people, most of the time, if you have enough of the market navigation information, and are willing to travel a little further than you normally do, you can always find a deal.

The catch is of course, that for platform organizers to be profitable, they have to aggregate such slightly evil locust instincts and create locust swarms. No individual restaurant patron sets out on a 20-mile drive to a neighboring suburb with the malicious intent of helping bankrupt a restaurant there. Most sincerely believe they are just enjoying an exploratory adventure, and most would probably go back if they discovered something sufficiently unique and amazing via a Groupon deal.

But the way the aggregation model for the swarming platform works, the only incentives that can be offered are the ones that work on those least capable of hooking a returning customer through unique value. A truly unique restaurant will likely be well-known and constantly overbooked anyway, and have no need to offer a financially crippling deal. Even if a particular individual charitably decides to return to “give back” to a particular restaurant, there is a good chance the locust attack has put it out of business, making individual good intentions moot.

So the system can only create transient locust swarms out of individual slightly evil intentions. A locust market is one which looks more information-efficient than grasshopper markets, but really just has a pattern of information flow that favors different actors.

I suspect it is possible to design an incentive scheme that would actually be sustainable, but still offer customers some opportunity for consistent savings through nomadic swarming. Some sort of hybrid locust-grasshopper economy. But I’ll leave that question aside for now.

Software and Locusts

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Marc Andreessen’s famous line, “software is eating everything.” The specific choice of the word “eating” is revealing.

Locusts also eat everything.

Well, almost everything.

What’s really going on is that software-enabled human locust swarms are eating everything they can access. Which generally means small business front-end layers wrapped around larger platforms. The locust swarms cannot actually take on true Big Industry unaided, for the most part. When Big Industry owns its own last mile (think McDonald’s) it is rarely stupid enough to offer up lunch for locusts.

Those who believe that the Internet-enabled economy is going to replace “hierarchies with networks” everywhere (whatever that mathematically nonsensical phrase is supposed to mean) are perversely choosing to ignore the reality of what is happening. It isn’t the 1% fat cats who are becoming victims of the new economy. It is the little capitalist in the middle. The brave little Jeffersonian middle class capitalist who could.

The long tail and the big head together are killing the middle everywhere. In education, locust swarms mean that this is a very bad time to be a mid-level education provider. If you’re not a top professor at a top university, or a long-tail independent provider of some sort of personalized education (such as bloggers offering courses on a very small scale — a game I am trying to get into), you’re in deep trouble. The education-seeking swarms will get everything they need from the top and bottom of the distribution and leave the middle to starve.

Hotels, taxis, education, music, publishing, restaurants. The list of locust-devastated/soon-to-be-devastated industries is growing longer every day. I suspect the locust economy is now bigger than California’s economy.

The smart Big Money is moving rapidly into swarming infrastructure (with apologies to John Hagel, I am starting to think “Pull Platform” is also lipstick on a pig — the 1% figuring out a way to use the 90% to feed on the 9% via a temporary alliance for mutual benefit).

The smart Little Money is moving into locust makeovers. People with little capital are figuring out how to arm themselves to be better locusts.

Is there a way to reclaim the middle? Is there hope for the Jeffersonian Middle Class?

The Myth of Jeffersonian Resilience

The Jeffersonian middle is the place where decency, goodness, hard work, an admirable work ethic, modest and non-predatory entrepreneurial ambitions and mainstream culture live. This is not the regular middle class but the Jeffersonian middle class that idealistically seeks an autonomous, meaningful existence.

The typical member of this class does not want to either build a billion dollar company or live off a passive-income lifestyle business based on exploitative arbitrage. He or she wants to work hard at a meaningful activity and asks only to be left alone to be content with modest rewards and economic autonomy.

These are the Clueless of the economy.

In fact both zombie and vampire narratives (and this locust narrative that I hope catches on) are based on the fears of this class. Even though the class itself is relatively small, it also serves as the class that the rest of society aspires to, or pretends to aspire to.

Wage slave and Big Company Executive alike dream of retiring to run small bed-and-breakfast or restaurant operations. So all like zombie and vampire stories.

It is also the class that foolishly believes in resilience without mobility at a small scale. Unless your idea of small-scale resilience is totally isolated communes behind an economic firewall that seals out the global economy (I have yet to see a working example of that ideal), you are coupled to the larger economy and vulnerable to bigger actors — Hamiltonian swarming-platform actors who believe in growing as big as they can, as fast as they can.

Because you see, it is not the Big Guys alone that you have to figure out. It is the Big Guys in an alliance with locusts whom you are predisposed to be contemptuous of, but are capable of sneaking through your defenses.

Being in the locust swarm full-time or part-time, sucks. But it is often the only way to make ends meet in the long tail. Being in the 1% (assuming you are okay moving from being slightly evil to Mr. Burns evil) is by definition not an option open to all.

But being in the Jeffersonian middle is probably the worst position to be in. Jeffersonian middle class dreams are not resilient even in grasshopper economies.

Unlike truly secure capitalists, who generally have enough wealth to cash in long positions in a declining economy for privileged starting positions in new ones as investors (Rockefeller’s descendants are still pretty darn rich several generations later), small-scale capitalists barely have enough resilience to ride out the economic volatility of a single human lifetime.

To be totally brutal about it, if you’re in the middle, you’re probably screwed no matter what the economic conditions are. Since industrialization began, there has rarely been a period where small business has been good business. If you’re not willing and able to grow big, your fate is to get eaten alive by either locusts (or directly by bigger organisms) or go out of business.

The resilience of the Jeffersonian middle class is a myth based on the false sense of security that comes with owning a business rather than relying on a paycheck. A very special kind of self-sustaining myth based on continuous churn.

To take coffee shops as an example, an unending supply of idealistic wannabe cafe owners enters the sector every year, operates at a loss for a few years, and exits. The result is that even under normal business conditions, without swarming locust consumers, this is a loss-making business with an extinction rate of around 90% at the 5 year point in the US. Starbucks has the scale to be profitable and resilient. Locust coffee drinkers happily drink the excellent, loss-making coffee from small, local Jeffersonian coffee shops and callously retreat to Starbucks or DIY homebrew if the prices go up.

Starbucks survives, coffee drinking grasshoppers survive, small coffee shops go in and out of business.

Add the locust-swarming platforms into the mix and you get mechanized, efficient predatory dynamics that speed up the idealism-to-extinction churn rate.

Throw in a recession, and instead of the devastation of true abundance (such as a harvest season), you get the devastation of a system in a state of scarcity that is trying desperately to send fake abundance marketing signals, in a hopeless fake-it-till-you-make-it attempt at survival.

The Fate of the Locust

Being a locust, and allying with the Big Guys to prey on the Medium-Sized Guys is no picnic either. Ultimately, it is a pact with the devil. Locusts are created out of a downwardly mobile paycheck middle class via dynamics I’ve written about before. Becoming a locust is smarter than staying trapped in either a doomed paycheck lifestyle or a faux-resilient Jeffersonian middle class. But only by a whisker.

The blogging/publishing component of my business (which is much smaller than my consulting business) is primarily an intersection of many locust economies. I am a prosumer locust in an alliance with Amazon, Google and various other locust-swarm pull platforms.

But what happens to locusts when all the crops have been eaten? To take an example close to home for me, what happens when traditional media is really gone, and there’s nobody slogging away to provide blogging fodder for locust media types in armchairs, like me? Almost all of my own consumption is traditional media — books, news stories and such — that I am helping Amazon and Google kill. I don’t really read other bloggers much.

Turns out, in nature, locusts most likely turn to cannibalism as a way to manage both supply volatility and secular supply decline during their swarming phase.

But ultimately, the swarms disappear. The intent of the swarming phase — riding temporary abundance to survival of the species — has been accomplished. In some cases, as with the Rocky Mountain locusts, if other factors come into play, they may even go extinct. In this particular case, the likely explanation is that farming destroyed vast quantities of locust eggs through large scale plowing of Midwestern lands via industrialized agriculture. So the small farmer and locust both disappeared, giving way to large scale agribusiness.

If traditional media gets killed and bloggers are forced to primarily work off each other’s work, an unpleasant endgame and shakeout will be triggered. I hope it does not come to that.

You can observe such cannibalization dynamics in the internal, so-called p2p dynamics in any locust market. Truth be told, participating as a provider in a p2p network like Airbnb or sharing a car is simply more inconvenient than owning your own place or car and having it always available.

When software eats everything by turning inefficient grasshopper consumers into efficiently swarming locust consumers, we pay for small new income streams and cheap deals by way of increased economic coordination costs and shadow labor.

In other words, in a locust economy, you cannot just decide to go somewhere and get in your car to drive there. You have to coordinate with other potential users of that shared resource. You have to keep your apartment clean and sharing-ready. You have to do minimum-wage work that you might consider beneath you (though such status concerns don’t bother me, annoying chores do).

In the sharing economy, we may not be eating each other literally, but we’re certainly eating into what Richard Dawkins called the extended phenotype of our neighbors. To the extent that your belongings are a logical expression of your genes and memes sharing them amounts to allowing others to eat them.

So the harsh bottomline of the locust economies, once the Jeffersonian middle class prey base has been bankrupted, is that we locusts turn on each other.

We call it peer production and prosumer economics, but it isn’t Jeffersonian producerism. It is locusts in their cannibalistic phase.

When the harvest is gone, software eating everything translates to prosumers eating each other.

There ain’t no such thing as a 50%-off lunch.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an expiring Groupon to use across town, and a meeting with a fellow locust to get to after. I hope that Zipcar downstairs is available. And then I have to get back home and clean my apartment — great use of a PhD in aerospace engineering, eh? — before my Airbnb guest gets here.

(Okay, I made up most of that last paragraph. Only the meeting-another-locust part is true. For now.) 

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Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“Unable to find a place outside the capitalist system, the postmodern subject loses any possibility of fulfilling the Enlightenment ambition of drawing a map that could claim to mirror reality.”

-Kazys Varnelis

When Frederic Jameson published Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism twenty years ago, he ensured that his essay’s subject, the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, would become the world’s most intellectualized hotel. Designed by John Portman and built in the late 1970s, the Bonaventure’s monolithic presence in downtown LA (like much of Portman’s work) still represents everything urbanists hate: The massive building is a mirror-clad fortress with a rotating rooftop bar that boldly shirks any responsibility for relating to or enhancing the cityscape that surrounds it.

Inside its walls, the Bonaventure is its own universe: disorienting, windowless, and lacking reference to any external reality (aside from the rooftop bar’s panoramic views of the city). Reflecting upon the building and Jameson’s essay, Kazys Varnelis observes that its confusing, illegible layout perfectly epitomizes the contemporary era: “For Jameson, the hotel’s complexity is an analogue for our inability to understand our position in the multinational, decentered network of finance and communications that comprises late capitalism.” In the past, we believed that we could comprehend the world that we lived in—especially the parts of that world that we ourselves had made—but Portman’s hotel was a society announcing that it had finally outsmarted itself and was willing to embrace that outcome.

—

During the last two decades, frantic technological process has destroyed, transformed, or at least shaken many of the institutions and activities that predate the internet and smartphones. Some have fared much better than others. Public space—always a broadly-defined concept—has been spared the upheaval that has afflicted, say, the print media, but its digital counterparts have certainly challenged it. Many commentators have explained how networks like Facebook and Twitter are our new public spaces, but these analogies are typically far oversimplified: A glance around any major city reveals that traditional public space still exists and flourishes in its familiar, pre-digital form. People still fill Central Park on a warm Saturday afternoon, regardless of what’s happening on the internet.

What has changed about public space is how we enter that space and organize ourselves within it. The complex interactions between people on the street, in the marketplace, and at social events and bars now also occur as more streamlined and rationalized processes on Craigslist, eBay, Meetup.com, dating sites like OKCupid, and, of course, Facebook and Twitter. On OKCupid, for example, much of the information processing that has traditionally assumed the form of nuanced face-to-face contact in dating now happens digitally from the comfort of home. Yes, it eventually becomes necessary to venture out into public for the date itself—this is the whole point of OKCupid—but a lot of the sorting, matching, posturing, and arranging can occur online.

In other words, the internet functions as a back office to the city’s “front end” of streets and public spaces. When we finally leave the house, as a society, we can just relax and enjoy ourselves because so much of the work has already been done. Traces of the prior era still persist everywhere—street vendors still hawk merchandise the old-fashioned way, and people still go to bars to meet prospective mates – but there’s a new, powerful dynamic layered on top of this, silently and invisibly searching and sorting, arranging us in public according to its own networked logic.

—

Cities have always been information systems as well as places to live, and the built environment occupies the intersection of those two roles. The Bonaventure Hotel represents a departure from the belief that we can understand the environments that we created for ourselves to live in, but traditional city planning—which favors grids, parks, and legible urban patterns—embodies the opposite assumption: that understanding those environments is not just something we’re capable of, but something we need.

Legibility and perception change with technology, however, and the traditionally-planned city assumed slow speeds, low mobility of information, and relative simplicity. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in their seminal Learning from Las Vegas, understood that city’s “new landscape of big spaces, high speeds, and complex programs” as a function of the car. No one driving at 70 miles per hour has time to interpret subtle details and nuanced symbolism. They need unambiguous signs that they can read quickly from far away—an “architecture of bold communication.”

If the car dictated the look of the 20th-century city, as epitomized by Las Vegas, the iPhone and the internet will provide the logic that produces the next version of the legible urban environment. The iPhone enables us to filter the mystery and ambiguity that surrounds us, extract relevant information, and navigate the unfamiliar. Legibility, instead of something we build into our environment using street grids or neon signs, is attained through handheld devices that scan for signals amid noise. An app like Yelp is to this new city what the huge signs of the Vegas Strip were to the prior iteration.

Reyner Banham explained Americans’ love of gadgets and devices as “the belief in a device like a surfboard as the proper way to make sense of an unorganized situation like a wave.” The iPhone and the Bonaventure Hotel are both surfboards, then: tools for facing a wild, complex reality without having to understand or control it. The imperative of urban legibility always implied power—for the designer as well as the user, who always demanded to see the big picture. Public space in the legible city was most itself when filled with a crowd responding to a leader. The widened streets of Haussmann’s Paris, for all their ordered beauty, were optimized for military operations. Those same public spaces, in the digital era, are increasingly staging grounds for algorithmic operations carried out on the internet, filled with centerless swarms instead of crowds. The most common criticism of Occupy Wall Street—the purest lesson yet in the ongoing transformation of public space—was always that it lacked a center, a leader, and a coherent position. Why would the movement have needed any of those, though? We used to organize, map, and comprehend; now we surf and swarm.

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You probably remember a grade school teacher who seemed to have eyes at the back of her head. Somebody who could walk into an unruly classroom and with just a look, quell the disorder and get everybody back into their seats. When such a teacher enters a classroom, any mischief underway is abandoned instantly. Those caught in the teacher’s direct gaze freeze or try to scramble back to their seats. Those who think they are in peripheral vision try to duck and hide. Those who believe they haven’t been seen try to flee.

This sort of teacher possesses an authoritarian eye: a way of seeing shared by certain sorts of effective teachers, drill sergeants, sports coaches and the sorts of large organizations that James Scott explored in Seeing Like a State.

The classroom example illustrates something important. Authority and responses to it are primarily about seeing and being seen, rather than doing or having things done to you.

When you know you’re being watched by an authoritarian eye, you voluntarily behave in simpler (or equivalently, more orderly) ways than when you know you aren’t.

The difference between the two regimes of behavior is social dark matter. And in today’s digital social environments, it is starting to behave in ways we don’t really understand. Because we feel watched in ways we don’t really understand, by forms of authority we have never experienced before.

The Video Version

Before we proceed, here’s a little movie about the ideas in this post. It’s about three minutes long.

The themes I am here are necessarily a bit abstract, and I’ve been using a little simulation model to explore them. This movie was created using that model. It’s a poignant and somewhat campy bit of almost-abstract expressionism, if I do say so myself.

Now let’s get back to business as usual. Words and such. Computer models can only take us so far.

Seeing and Being Seen, Digitally

I first started thinking in terms of dark matter a few months ago after reading a post by Toph Tucker that argued that a significant amount of social activity on Facebook was starting to retreat to the privacy of secret (unlisted) groups. Tucker argued that activity in these groups accounted for the discrepancy between the continued robust traffic growth of Facebook on the one hand, and industry watchers’ opinions that Facebook had somehow peaked. As he put it:

There is a discrepancy in the apparent pull exhibited by Facebook. Among industry-watchers, 30-somethings, preteens, and social media cynics of all stripes, there’s a strong narrative that Facebook is already passé.

Secret groups on Facebook, Tucker argues, account for the discrepancy and should be thought of as Facebook’s “Dark Matter.”  Such groups are rising in popularity (I am part of several) and for many Facebook users, activity within secret groups dwarfs activity that is more broadly visible.

I think this argument is essentially correct, though the specifics might change as digital communities evolve. I think Tucker’s notion of Facebook dark matter is worth generalizing to all social realities, whether physical, digital, or hybrid.

So that is what I am going to try and do here.

The Participatory Panopticon Chases its Own Tail

The dark matter idea complicates a related idea: James Cascio’s notion of the participatory panopticon (basically a situation of “everybody watching everybody else, all the time”, where the authoritarian eye is at least partly the eye of the collective itself, operating alongside various algorithmic Big Data eyes).

The metaphor of dark matter suggests an interesting situation where the collective is trying to retreat from its own omniscient gaze as much as it is trying to retreat from the Big Advertising Eye.

Managing the trade-off between seeing and being seen is something we’re naturally wired to do. Every time you pick a table at a restaurant, you are relying on ancient instincts that have evolved around this critical everyday decision-making behavior. Some of my favorite social science research, by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, concerns these instincts. Turns out humans choose the same sort of complex but legible environment when presented with sets of photographs of both natural and urban settings.

But it is not clear how these instincts play out when our sensory cues involve a scrolling stream of mixed media updates on a small screen, and our minds model the situation as some ambiguous mix of “community”, “graph” and “algorithmic Big Brother.”

The last element is of course, the newest one, and the only reason we aren’t in more of a panic about it is the banality of its primary association with advertising (but then, authority in action is usually banal to watch).

We have some useful instincts around “community” that port to the digital realm. Thinking about matters of kinship and genealogy has prepared us at least a little for navigating globe-spanning social graphs. But an algorithmic Big Brother is a new element in the environment.

Unfamiliar Controls

We have far more control over seeing and being seen digitally than the rather alarmist notion of a participatory panopticon suggests, but the problem is that these modes of control are deeply unfamiliar to us: avatars, anonymity, degrees of separation on a “graph”, complex privacy settings, augmented reality glasses.

These are not modes that work well with highly evolved subconscious instincts that map seeing/being-seen decisions to choosing physical locations in highly visual environments. Trying to apply existing instincts is like suddenly trying to use existing language skills to operate in Braille.

The situation is similar to the early twentieth century when two powerful new technologies, the automobile and the airplane, became available, but most people did not immediately acquire driving or flying skills. For several decades, most people remained primarily passengers, at best exercising control by ringing a bell to request a stop while on a bus. Driving eventually became a commonplace skill in the developed world, but flying never did (though it might now, if everybody gets a drone).

For the Internet, browsing is like riding a bus and occasionally getting off one bus and getting onto another. Content creation is like driving. Few do it now, but it should become as ubiquitous in a few decades as driving today. I suspect that programming, like flying, will remain a minority skill for quite a while.

Browsing, content creation and programming represent different levels of autonomous control over seeing and being seen digitally. But acquiring those skills is not the same thing as knowing what to do with them. To get there, we need to understand more about the enactment of authority.

The Enactment of Authority

That we behave differently depending on who we think is watching is a fairly trite observation. When a child is watching, we make funny faces. When somebody we find attractive is watching, we preen and posture. Voyeurs make sure they can see without being seen. Pick-up artists make sure they can both see and be seen.

What makes the gaze of authority special is that the watched voluntarily simplify and order their own behavior to prepare to act on the desires of the watcher.

This is the reason authority induces power. Just by looking, it turns what it sees into a ready and waiting instrument capable of enacting its intentions within a space of desires. Authoritarian seeing is like a magnetic field acting on a domain of free agency.

It is useful to understand authority as an enacted process rather than an attribute of a system. We can represent the authority process in general terms as this imaginary sequence of commands:

1. “Stop whatever you are doing” (abandon autonomous intentions that might compete with mine)
2. “Fall in” (enter a waiting state, prepare to do my bidding)
3. “Form a single file” (conform to a known, ordered state)
4. “Do X” (execute my intention)

The important thing about this sequence is that when authority is real, the first three steps often happen without any explicit instructions or cues beyond awareness of being the gaze of the authoritarian eye.

In fact, the first two steps happen naturally and require no training or special conditioning. The eye only needs to be perceived as an authoritarian eye. The third step — getting into a known, ordered state — is context-dependent and might require more or less training.

This is where design enters the picture.

Authority and Design

The idea that an authoritarian gaze might naturally precipitate a simple ordering in what it sees suggests something interesting: design may be an optional extra in the enactment of authority.

James Scott’s association of authoritarian ordering of reality with a specific aesthetic — high modernism inspired by scientism — is not always necessary. The ordering effects of authority existed before Le Corbusier came along with his platonic visual ordering schemes that attempted to turn human communities into imperial apiaries. They existed before reformist authoritarian forces co-opted science and mathematics into the rhetoric of authoritarianism.

The authoritarian eye can cause the precipitation of order without recourse to environmental or instructional design. The threat of violence is sufficient. As in the programming of computers, simple and ordered states are better starting points for action with predictable consequences. But the first two steps of the authority process may suffice in many situations, to create enough order for authority to be exercised in highly leveraged and predictable ways.

You do not need to imagine, specify and impose something like a platonic design such as a military formation. Authority works in simpler ways. Alpha chimpanzees do not need to train the troop to wear uniforms and march in military order to exercise authority. A disorder-quelling look will do (and remember, “disorder” includes any autonomous activity that the authoritarian eye does not care to understand).

For a long time, this idea — that authority is more about seeing than doing — eluded me. Accounts of the authority process such as Scott’s emphasize the consequences of positive action on the part of the authoritarian force. Simpler versions of the idea, such as the parable of Chesterton’s Fence, also focus on what the authority does or does not do.

I think we’ve gotten it backwards.

The Primacy of Authoritarian Seeing

I am convinced authoritarian design is merely the cherry on top. At least in dealing with social realities, what is more important is what the authority sees or does not see.

Why? Because authority exercised through direct coercive action is inefficient to the point of being useless beyond a certain scale. But authority expressed and exercised through the authoritarian eye is nearly infinitely scalable. The source of this leverage is of course the fact that humans (and agents in general), unlike non-sentient matter, can recognize and respond to being seen. 

So action can be restricted to the rare instance of “making an example” of an unfortunate victim. Such action actually reduces the effectiveness of the authoritarian eye beyond a point.

The condition of a social system that has submitted to authority is a sort of self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating collective learned helplessness. It has to be. Otherwise the authoritarian eye would not be worth acquiring, with or without imposing cathedrals and plazas for support.

We pay so much attention to positive authoritarian actions because their consequences are so disproportionately visible (high modernist city plazas, grand cathedrals, UI design decisions by Facebook employees, and so forth), and because we tend to attribute all the effects of authority to those actions.

The bulk of the dynamics of authority, however, lie in the voluntary actions precipitated by the authoritarian gaze. In particular, the self-ordering and self-simplification on the part of those caught in it.

If you stop whatever you are doing and pay attention to authority, much of the authority has already been exercised. You are already useful and usable in your waiting state.

For the authoritarian school teacher, who has yelled “Sit DOWN and SHUT UP!” a few times, like the bus driver on South Park, this ordered state is relatively simple to precipitate with just a look. For a military unit, this ordered state represents a far greater degree of discipline and potential for predictable action.

But in both cases, potential for predictable action– a waiting state — has been created by a look.

But what happens when the authoritarian eye is not looking somewhere?

The Emperor, Incognito

The authority process is the source of both the power and the weakness of authority.

The authoritarian eye creates the known, ordered state that turns the subject of authority into an instrument for the expression of authoritarian intentions. This is power. The leveraged potential created by the threat of force.

But in inducing this ordered state, the authoritarian eye also blinds itself. How does that happen?

Let’s go back to the example of the teacher walking into a classroom that is up to some mischief. Consider the four basic responses.

1. If you are front-and-center, freeze
2. If you’ve obviously been seen, scramble back to your desk
3. If you think you might not have been seen, hide behind a desk
4. If you’re sure you haven’t been seen, run

All four behaviors are responses to varying probabilities of having been seen in a state that might attract punishment. But instead of the wild behavioral response — fight-or-flight — we get the modified pair of behaviors characteristic of social species that operate under in-group authoritarian threat: submit-or-retreat (exit-or-voice is a more refined descendant).

But in all four cases, the very act of authoritarian seeing removes useful information from what is being seen. There is a reason we have the trope of emperors sneaking out of the palace and walking among the people as commoners. If the authoritarian eye actually wants to know what is going on, it cannot be seen to be watching.

But when the emperor cannot wander his realm incognito, a fundamental trade-off exists for any agent that seeks to exercise authority over a social system between power on the one hand, and knowledge on the other.

The Power-Knowledge Trade-off

When a social system enters an ordered state under an authoritarian gaze, it loses information, like a hard-disk being wiped clean. If the authoritarian gaze persists long enough — a human generation say —  the information loss can be permanent.

This is the problem Scott identified as the loss of tacit knowledge, metis, under an authoritarian gaze.

In our running example of the authoritarian teacher in a mischievous classroom, consider the state of free play that is disrupted and transformed into a state of ordered readiness for command.

The consequence that the teacher wants — stamping out of any brewing dissent and rebellion that might make the class ungovernable in the future — is achieved. But what is also stamped out in the process is anything the children might be learning or figuring out in that state of free play.

What makes the authoritarian gaze a net lossy gaze in an objective sense is that some of that information might actually have been valuable to the authority itself.

Submission, Civilization and Retreat

Humans (and other social species) have a category of responses specific to in-group threats of violence from authority: submission. 

As a first approximation, we can say that submissive behaviors are also nascent civilized behaviors.

The first two of the four responses I listed represent submissive social behaviors under an authoritarian gaze. They can range from fearful to proactively compliant or even eager.

The last two represent retreat behaviors. Depending on how quickly and unpredictably the eye moves and how much it sees, retreat behaviors may represent more or less of the response relative to submission behaviors.

In one extreme case, the eye may see so much, and move so fast and unpredictably, it freezes everything that is going on and sees an accurate snapshot of social dark matter in motion.

In other cases, it may see so little and move so slowly and predictably, that all agency (not just information) retreats away from the path of its gaze, leaving it staring at emptiness wherever it looks. This is authority weakened to uselessness (and the basis of the common trope in action movies involving heroes among ninjas or in dark forests).

So to summarize, the authoritarian gaze changes reality, simply by looking at it, in ways that both strengthen and weaken its position and potential. The part of reality that submits to the gaze represents power. The part that retreats from view represents weakness and potential challenges to authority.

Now here is the interesting thing: by forcing such a division between a space of retreat and a space of submission even when the natural behaviors are harmless or potentially useful to it, the authoritarian eye creates its own enemies and plants the seeds of its own destruction.

In the classroom example, if the teacher is known as a tyrant who expects perfect, orderly stillness when she enters the room, retreat is an act that criminalizes the potentially non-criminal.

Say ten children are animatedly discussing an exciting homework assignment, but when the teacher enters, one is too far from his desk to run back, he tries to duck out and run.

The very act of running makes him a criminal.

The ordering effect of the authoritarian eye carries with it an implicit negative judgement of retreat: if you have nothing to hide, why did you run?

Questions to Ponder

I’ve been battling the flu and wrangling tax and book-keeping issues for the last week (scurrying about under the authoritarian death-and-taxes eye so to speak) so I didn’t have time to cover everything I wanted in this post. So this is probably going to continue in some form. I don’t like to commit to a post series, given my record of going off the rails whenever I try, but we’ll revisit this stuff. Probably.

For now, I’ll leave you with a dozen important and obvious questions that I did not address:

1. What is the difference between social dark matter in retreat, versus social dark matter that is merely unobserved?
2. What changes when we substitute a participatory panopticon for an external authoritarian eye? In the movie, I’ve modeled the simpler case of an external panopticon. Clearly the “spotlight” of the gaze of the authoritarian eye would get coupled with the state of the “population” in the participatory case. How does that work?
3. How does a moving technological frontier change things? Does social dark matter continually retreat into an open expanse, chased by an advancing authoritarian eye? Or does it eventually get confined to nooks and crannies too unprofitable for the eye to peer into?
4. How does the emperor wandering incognito differ from a “half the population is spying on the other half” police state (a state that is at least superficially very similar to the modern emerging structure of digital reality)?
5. Can the authority-knowledge trade-off be broken? Or at least managed in a different way? (I believe it can; you just have to give up predictability, but you can retain the authority itself).
6. Is the algorithmic Big Data eye a locus of authoritarian agency in its own right, or does it merely redistribute agency among  the participants in the panopticon based on their skills and resources (which would make rich data scientists pretty powerful)?
7. How does all this interact with social interaction design — the warrens-and-plazas ideas from Xianhang Zhang that I explored a while back in relation to legibility.
8. How does active rebellion work? What if the dark matter, instead of merely submitting or retreating, acts to subvert the authoritarian eye?
9. Is retreat necessary for rebellion? Can the authoritarian eye be hacked by what it sees in plain sight? Search engine optimization is an obvious example. Does this generalize?
10. Conversely, can we design an Eye that causes useful information to flow into its gaze voluntarily, rather than retreat? (I believe so, but it comes at a price).
11. Do digital realities render pre-digital modes of dissent and retreat meaningless? Are things like Bitcoin really subversive in a traditional sense? In the movie, I put in some traditional anti-authoritarian rhetoric as a joke. It is not clear to me that digital politics will be the same as non-digital politics.
12. I’ve been tossing around a placeholder notion of centralized artificial digital agency (Big Data, Big Algorithm, etc.) People with dramatic imaginations usually go straight to Skynet and the Singularity, but I think what is actually emerging is a very different beast. What is the nature of this beast? What, if anything, does it want? Does it merely precipitate a useless, ordered waiting state wherever it looks, that does nothing for anyone? (that’s my null hypothesis)

We’ll see where we get with these questions if and when I get around to them. Don’t hold your breath though.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about curiosity lately. Specifically, about curiosity in the sense of  the proverb curiosity killed the cat: a potentially self-destructive pursuit of knowledge for its own sake that leads to unnecessary risk-taking. In humans such risk-taking often threatens not just the individual or even family/immediate group, but the whole species. Some people just have to go around figuring out new ways to blow things up, often with the noblest of intentions.

At a selfish gene level, the trait seems complicated, but not  mysterious. The question that really interests me is this: how do our selfish genes fool us into being curious creatures, who sometimes get themselves killed, to teach our gene pools more about the environment? Altruism, a similar potentially self-destructive trait at the individual level, manifests subjectively as love (especially for kin), a sense of belonging to one’s community, and a capacity for attachment to some notion of greater purpose. What might be the analogous subjective experience for curiosity?

Curiosity does not seem to be a fundamental drive, unlike what I am told are the  three basic biological drives (seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and conserving energy), so it is probably derived. Curiosity requires a certain energy surplus, since its visible signature is a restless dissipation of energy, but it does not seem directly motivated by energy conservation concerns. So is it derived from pleasure-seeking or pain-avoidance or some mix of the two? Does that make a difference?

I think it does, and I think the answer is that curiosity is primarily derived from pleasure seeking, not pain aversion. This has certain observable consequences.

***

Let’s get the genetic level of analysis out of the way first, so it does not distract us further.

You could view curiosity as simply the behavioral restlessness at the phenotype level that helps us break out of local optima on the fitness landscape at the genotype level, by introducing some randomness into the life-paths we trace through our environments.

Some curious cats get dead. Some get lucky. If a “curiosity gene” creates more luck than death overall, relative to populations that lack it, it will thrive. Individuals might pay the cost, as with certain kinds of altruism, but the selfish gene pool wins overall. All curious creatures either spread to occupy the planet, or kill themselves with their curiosity.

I doubt that there is such a thing as a “curiosity gene” but there is an idea I’ve mentioned before, called variability selection theory that sort of explains how we (and probably other archetypal curious animals such as foxes, cats and dolphins) grew larger, more programmable brains as an adaptation to uncertain environments that penalized over-adaptation to a single precarious niche.

That’s basically “curiosity” at the genetic level: the capacity of a gene pool to learn by turning noise into signal via wandering computers inside skulls, and using that knowledge to spread. Some such explanation, I imagine, will turn out to be correct.

So much for the selfish gene. I don’t really care about it much. Let’s get back to curiosity as a subjective experience of a psychological phenomenon in our individual lives.

***

For most of us in civilized and relatively safe environments, curiosity is clearly and rather obviously, pleasure-driven. We poke at something we don’t understand, usually with some sort of random access behavior. We hope to stir up something enjoyable. Stir the pot. Pot luck. Uncertainty and surprise are a necessary and inseparable part  of the experience. The associated positive feeling seems to be joy. We will make fine distinctions among pleasure-words in a moment.

We can imagine a pain-avoidance motivation for a kind of “curiosity”: learn about the unknown so you can anticipate and avoid any potential pain lurking in the shadows. But this seems implausible to me. Pain aversion corresponds to fight-and-flight. Not to poke-and-pry.

The reason it is even on the table for discussion is that human organizations often seem to display curiosity-like behavior (exploring the unknown in open-ended ways) driven by pain-avoidance motives. Businesses and nations for instance, engage in institutionalized “research” not to feed curiosity, but to insure themselves against future uncertainties.

When humans do that — poking out things to fuel worry and pain avoidance rather than joy — we (correctly in my opinion) view that behavior as some sort of anxiety disorder. Morbid curiosity about potential disasters and worst-case scenarios, coupled with runaway survivalist tendencies, is a pathology. Curiosity about what makes the sky blue, or where that tunnel leads, or What Might Happen If I Push That Button, is more natural.

The difference isn’t trivial. Curiosity about potential disasters is anthropocentric and clearly related to a fear of mortality. It is not open-ended, but driven by relevance to survival concerns. It is problem-solving masquerading as curiosity.

Curiosity as an open-ended seeking out of joy in the unknown seems to go the other way: taking on mortality risks in order to experience joy, with or without material benefits.

It may be pragmatic to anticipate pain and prepare for it (by buying insurance, hedging investments or getting inoculations for example) when the costs are sufficiently low, but conceptually linking curiosity to worry seems to be an unnatural thing to do. For one thing, the experience of this sort of anticipatory thinking and contingency planning does not seem to be the same as the experience of being caught up in a curiosity-driven adventure.

Insurance is most successful for all when nothing happens. Adventure fails for all when nothing happens.

***

As I already noted, energy conservation seems like an  implausible source of curiosity, but may have a different relationship to it.

We instinctively associate idleness with curiosity. It might even make sense to define idleness as the state of having more energy than is needed for the pursuit of immediate ends. In such a state, humans more naturally dissipate than conserve. Saving is a learned behavior, waste is natural.

Mathematicians and engineers sometimes say they try to be creatively lazy by finding shortcuts or formulas that automate tedious tasks. But a little thought immediately suggests that is not energy-saving behavior or efficiency seeking. This is boredom-avoidance.

The fruits of boredom avoidance may be cashed out in the form of increased efficiency, but energy efficiency is not what motivates it.

So what is boredom avoidance?

Boredom is partly a kind of pain, but I’ve concluded that it is more than that. Boredom is also natural curiosity curbed. To view it only as pain is reductive. The natural state of a living human might not be a state of restful equanimity. It might be a state of casual ongoing exploration of the unknown.

This is reflected in the proverb that the idle mind is the devil’s workshop. A mathematician or engineer who figures out a labor-saving calculation, device or program will generally  proceed to waste the saved energy by inventing further complications to keep himself/herself amused.

If it ain’t broke, it just doesn’t have enough features yet.

***

We’ve complicated the picture quite a bit now. It seems like it would be useful at this stage to more carefully distinguish between three different varieties of “pleasure.”

I am going to restrict the word pleasure itself from here on out to predictable, hedonic, sensory pleasure, of the sort that quickly hits diminishing marginal returns via hedonic adaptation. A marker of hedonic pleasures is that other humans are often involved in supplying them, which means hedonism is strongly related to power.

Two other varieties we can distinguish are happiness, which I will associate with non-exploitative relationships (happiness in the sense of Jonathan Haidt), and joy, which I will associate with curiosity and its fruit, meaning (as in “the joy of discovery”). In English usage, the three terms often bleed into each other, but let’s keep them separate here even if it feels somewhat artificial.

These distinctions are not entirely arbitrary. Pleasure, happiness and joy are the varieties of positive experience associated with the three basic positive-action drives of social species respectively: getting ahead, getting along and getting away. The first two are derived from human attachments, while the third is a relatively detached mode of positive experience.

If you want pleasure, you seek power. The absence of pleasure is hedonic deprivation.

If you want happiness, you seek relationships. The absence of happiness is loneliness.

If you want joy, you seek mystery: The absence of joy is a deep sense of existential meaninglessness.

The opposite of the pleasure of winning is the ignominy of defeat.

The opposite of the happiness of a relationship is the sadness of a loss.

The opposite of joy is fear.

You choose in pairs, or not at all.

***

Getting ahead is winning: a concept that has meaning mostly within a social context involving members of the same species. Not just the ritualized kinds of human SAT-score and medals victory, but things like the alpha lion getting to eat the choicest bits of the prey first, the pick of females, and the nicest spot on the grass to sprawl out on. Getting ahead — and therefore pleasure — is biologically the most basic, since it directly couples individual success with genetic reproductive success.

Getting along — and therefore love — is not as basic, and has a weaker link to genetic success. All species “seek pleasure” in some sense, but only some are social enough to seek happiness through emotional relationships that extend beyond maternal ones. You participate in a broader way in the success of an entire related gene pool. Happiness seeking is also about us-versus-them distinctions. To relate to some deeply, it appears you generally have to detest others equally deeply. Love without hatred is political fiction.

Getting away — and the joy of discovery — is the furthest removed from biology. It seems reasonable to say, in English, that we enjoy an unexpectedly beautiful sunset, but there is no hedonic pleasure in the sense of winning a lion’s share of  a scarce good through competitive success. There is also no love or belonging (or hatred or estrangement) in the sense of human relationships.

Genetically, it makes sense that curiosity would lead to the most detached, individualistic (and volatile) form of positive experience. The material fruits of curiosity are not just rare, they generally accrue to gene pools far away in time, space and genetic distance. There is no clear correlation between being interested in astronomy and number theory today and your genes or your third cousin’s genes being more successful. You might even discover things through curiosity that primarily benefit zebras in the year 2405. Worst of all, you might discover things that kill you.

By contrast, the material fruits of getting ahead and getting along accrue more locally in time, physical space and gene-pool space.

And since curiosity can in fact kill the cat, it also makes psychological sense that it is not as anthropocentric a drive as the other two.

***

You can also distinguish among the three types of positive experience in terms of the role of uncertainty in each.

For getting ahead, uncertainty is mainly about outcomes. Especially competitive outcomes. For getting along, uncertainty is mainly about trust in others. For both, uncertainty is something to be eliminated. We prefer certain victories to uncertain ones. We prefer faithful friends to unreliable ones.

But with curiosity, uncertainty in the path is actually what drives the enjoyment derived from the behavior. Removing the uncertainty impoverishes the experience. But curiosity is more than mere variety-seeking, which is a self-destructive trait. It is about variety-seeking with an eye to discovering meaning.

When curiosity contaminates competitive instincts, we often give up a winning edge to challenge ourselves more and learn more about the unknown parts of ourselves. When curiosity contaminates relationships, we try to introduce variety, see new mysteries in comfortable relationships, or seek out unpredictable and tumultuous partnerships.

But curiosity can also find expression in pure forms. And so from time to time, we pack our bags, buy tickets, and head off in random directions, both inward and outward, to potentially unpleasant and unhappy places. And we still enjoy ourselves.

Related to uncertainty is the idea of humor. Humor seems to always involve some sort of surprise, but not all varieties of surprise are the same.

Getting ahead humor usually involves the ups and downs of status shifts, and is often cruel. A court jester may occasionally sass the king, but he is more likely to borrow the king’s power and make fun of someone weaker.

Getting along humor is usually in-group humor at the expense of out groups. It too is often cruel.

But getting away humor, almost by definition is about laughing at yourself, because there is no one else around. It is chagrin-and-grin without an audience.

***

At the risk of death by pun, I will call the subset of individuals for whom curiosity is the dominant drive in their personalities the Joy Luck Club.

As in that story, joy and luck are inextricably linked (in the story by the mah jong motif, in this essay by curiosity). Seeking joy through engagement of true randomness — not just the good bits — is a form of feeling alive through play. This is not a case of trying to be clever enough to win in the presence of the unknown or trying to position yourself to enjoy the upside of success while avoiding the downsides of failure (yes, we’ll get to Taleb in a bit).

That’s a winner mentality. That is about skill and intelligence deployed in service of getting ahead, outliving and outlasting others, and keeping your own mortality at bay as long as possible.

Curiosity is not driven by a winner mentality. It is not about skill or intelligence, at least not primarily. It is not about preserving life against the forces of mortality. Play is about engaging mystery to possibly derive new joy through surprises, chagrin, humor, discoveries and inventions. The cost, outside of controlled play environments for children, is risk of death. Not just for the individual, but beyond.

There is a certain sense in which skilled games like blackjack and poker are less fun than unskilled ones like playing the slots. When skill is cordoned off from fate, what we experience is pure curiosity about our uncertain future.

I believe this trade-off is fundamental. To seek immortality is to be joyless in a certain sense. You may enjoy a certain amount of getting ahead and getting along – accumulate billions and live to see your great-great-great grandchildren perhaps — but to experience joy, you must fundamentally pursue luck without much intelligence, and take on mortality risks.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but a lack of curiosity is certain to kill joy. Incurious people are usually the biggest killjoys around.

I am dead-curious about this.

***

We part ways with foxes, cats, dolphins, magpies and parrots when it comes to what we do with the fruits of curiosity, and how that drives our further curiosity.

Alone among the curious animals (though this seems like a conceit that more research might invalidate), we seem to be curious about clearly useless things. Or at least, things that have no obvious and immediate use. Humans seem to frequently poke at things that yield returns, if at all, only generations later. And often in ways unsuspected by those who do the poking.

We stare at the stars, we peer through microscopes, we climb mountains and we dive to the ocean floor.

This behavior, so natural to humans, is incomprehensible to human organizations. So things like space programs or other pure curiosity driven efforts have to be justified by politicians on the basis of “will improve life here on earth through the discovery of new materials and advances in medicine.” This is probably the mother of all idiotic fictions. Fortunately, we don’t seem to require our institutional fictions to be credible. Merely sufficient to stop conversations we don’t want to have.

There is an interesting symmetry here. Organizations naturally try to avoid pain — the pain of business model obsolescence or national decline for instance – through institutionalized “curiosity.” They find joy-seeking unnatural and in need of justification (hence the paradoxical notions of “efficient” innovation with high “yield” or “impact” and the relentless war on waste).

This has even been turned into a depressingly banal formula for innovation: what pain are you seeking to relieve?

For humans the reverse is true. Curiosity driven by pain-aversion is unnatural, but curiosity driven by joy-seeking is natural and requires no further explanation. Efficiency is the last thing on our minds when we are being curious. The concept does not even apply: efficiency pre-supposes a goal. Waste is pain in the efficient pursuit of goals.

***

This situation makes complete sense once we recognize that we still haven’t managed to create organizations that are fully living in any sense of the term. Organizations share our capacities for pain-aversion and energy conservation, but not our capacity for curiosity. That means, when they aren’t serving the needs of individual powerful (sociopath) humans, they are primarily driven by self-preservation instincts.

It is possible to codify pain avoidance into organizational forms  relatively easily. It is also easy to wire organizational foresight capabilities to pain-avoidance. Contracts, incorporation models and insurance policies codify pain-aversion instincts.  Corporate law is a product of this engineering. “Innovation” is mostly business model insurance. When it manages to be more, it does so mostly by accident.

Pleasure and happiness sort of have weak cognates in the language of corporations. Pleasure for a corporation is winning a market and living longer. Happiness for a corporation is harmonious relationships with supply chain partners of the sort the Japanese call keiretsu. I suppose you could say that M&A activity is a sort of sex for corporations.

But there is no such thing as a curiosity-driven joy-seeking corporation in my experience. Individuals within corporations may be driven by a stealthy curiosity (or a tolerated 20% curiosity), but corporations as a whole don’t seem to be curious in any recognizable sense of the term.

I would like to invent a model for the Curious Corporation™ but I’ll leave that for another day when I am in more of a consultant mood. For now, I’ll just stake my claim to the term and elaborate in the unlikely event that someone pays me to.

Let us just say for now that by extrapolation from human beings whose curiosity is primarily morbid and neurotic, and focused exclusively on anticipating and avoiding risks, all large organizations are joyless wonders driven by morbid and neurotic curiosity at best, seeking to live for ever, and capable only of seeking market-winning hedonic pleasure and a certain amount of keiretsu and M&A happiness.

No corporation ever climbed a mountain just because it was there, or used a strong cash position to build the corporate equivalent of a Hubble Space Telescope. I would be delighted to learn of any counterexamples (be careful while considering this question though: we are talking of corporations themselves, not of human curiosity expressed through corporate leverage by individual powerful people).

***

Let’s consider the question of curiosity from the point of view of its absence: the state of joyless, pleasurable happiness (Julian Barnes has an interesting fictional exploration of the idea in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters).

I only recently realized that for a large number of people, including (surprisingly) very knowledgeable and intelligent people, knowledge is not a source of pleasure. An example appears to be Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Despite his erudition and knowledge, and voracious reading and learning, he does not seem to actually enjoy knowledge. He claims in Antifragile that he would rather be happy in a world he does not understand than miserable in a world he does.

That this is a false choice is the least of the problems here. The bigger problem is that such a view gives up the joys of curiosity. It almost sounds like a view of knowledge as an unpleasant necessary burden, to be eliminated where possible.

The view suggests that the pleasure and happiness of getting ahead and getting along on one’s own terms, of redemption of a social variety, is all you need. I do not think this is true. You can live a pleasurable and happy but joyless life — one lacking the fruits of curiosity — and you will feel that something is missing. We are more deeply wired for restlessness and trouble-making than we think. We want to know. We want to understand. 

But there are many people for whom curiosity is not a a powerful enough drive to make a difference. I suspect they are the majority. The Bilbo Baggins types, easily tempted into adventure, are not very common.

That is why novelty and innovation have historically been viewed with suspicion — a suspicion Taleb, among others, hopes to revive. But I’ll leave a full review of Antifragile for later, after I’ve had time to process that complicated book.  For now, I’ll just say it is a worthwhile book. Very thought provoking once you get past all the tedious anticipatory trolling and baiting of critics.

***

In terms of the distinction between appreciative and manipulative (or instrumental) knowledge that we’ve talked about before, you could say that a joyless approach to knowledge is an approach that seeks out only the manipulative aspect of knowledge, and ignores, or worse, actively resists, the appreciative aspect.

The realization that there are people who only relate to knowledge this way has sort of rocked my world. Besides Taleb, there are plenty of others who operate this way. Many machine learning experts and champions of phenomenological domain knowledge think this way, as do the sophisticated defenders of religion for its instrumental effectiveness. The argument goes that non-expert heuristics defeat expert models, and that naive science does worse than religion in making people happy.

True, but besides the point. Expert models and naive science exist in the human world because humans have an independent desire for larger, deeper meanings, and find joy in appreciative knowledge that does not require justification through a demonstration of instrumental effectiveness or even validity. Today the Big Bang theory is considered true and Fred Hoyle’s steady state model is considered false. But both are sources of appreciative satisfaction.

Our quest for meaning has its ups and downs (in fact it is those ups and downs that constitute the rewards of curiosity). Sometimes we exhibit remarkable naivete and let our enthusiasm for appreciative joy lead us astray. We make up bullshit theories and authoritarian high-modernist architectures.

Other times, we make  progress, as in the case of moving from creationism to evolution.

But these considerations are irrelevant if the satisfaction of curiosity is the primary drive.

***

For the curious, it is the joy of meaning that is central to the search for meaning, not the practicality or utility of meaning. And that joy lies in the volatility that is inherent in its pursuit. This is something that Taleb, oddly enough, seems to miss. In his ambitious study of things that gain from disorder — a getting-ahead/winner concern — he doesn’t pay much attention to things that might enjoy disorder, independently of whether they gain or lose from it. Of course, this criterion only applies to things capable of subjective experience.

To return to curiosity, if we agree that it is a relatively detached form of pleasure seeking, and if we agree that a good deal of what we figure out has no immediate practical value, we must conclude that seeking appreciative knowledge is not primarily a utilitarian behavior at the level of a single individual. In fact, the voluntary seeking-out of potentially mortal dangers, without clear a priori proof that they can be surmounted, is part of curiosity. At least in the wild.

So basically, curiosity is perverse. Russian roulette is no fun without a gun.

This is surprising to some people. They are surprised to find out that learning and exploration are not just transient costs to be recouped later after “winning” a race of some sort. That there are people who get bored and leave just as the extrinsic rewards start to come in. That these are in fact the truly curious people who engage in open-ended exploration in the first place. That people who compute the upfront costs and future benefits of curiosity generally conclude that it is not a worthwhile behavior.

This idea that curiosity is its own reward, worth giving up other things for, is captured neatly in the Garden of Eden myth. It is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that causes the fall of Adam and Eve. So why did they choose it?

They were curious.

My own experience with curiosity validates this intuition. It was simply enjoyable for me to learn, as a kid, how stars were born, and how they matured and exploded into supernovae, leaving white dwarfs behind. It was simply enjoyable to explore alleys I hadn’t been down before and figure out how long I could hold my breath.

Play is fun, play can be destructive.

Eventually, this seeking out of appreciative knowledge for pleasure did bring some modest rewards, but that is not why I pursued it. There are far better paths to rewards than curiosity.

***

There is a movement afoot today to devalue the very idea of meaning as in meaning of life. This philosophy can be stated simply as follows: everything that makes life worth living derives from privileged sensory experiences derived through instrumental action: doerism.

Doerism holds that knowledge ought to be viewed in purely utilitarian terms, that manipulative knowledge is more valuable than appreciative. That efficient knowledge is better than discursive knowledge. Knowledge that is both manipulative and amenable to being acquired and applied by a machine learning algorithm, without human participation, is superior to knowledge where human aesthetics and judgment must clumsily intervene.

Perhaps the most insidious idea in this movement is this one: understanding is not necessary for action and is therefore unnecessary and even dangerous.

This idea is insidious because it is completely true, but incomplete in a way that makes it irrelevant.

Yes, appreciative knowledge is often unnecessary for reaping the rewards of action (I am even happy to concede, though this is not actually true, that it is entirely unnecessary and that all manipulative knowledge can be robustly derived from phenomenological understandings of local domains through trial and error by our doers).

It is also obvious that appreciative knowledge pursued for its own sake can be a dangerous thing, and that impoverished appreciative knowledge applied as a design aesthetic can lead to tragedy (this is authoritarian high modernism, which we’ve discussed often).

So the antimeaning movement is really a restatement of the Garden of Eden position: do not eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The recent scare around the Higgs boson is a modern Garden of Eden story. I have no idea what the Higgs boson is, despite a recent visit to CERN, where I got an opportunity to tour the facilities and play a spot-the-Higgs-boson video game. But whether or not it is true that finding the Higgs boson might destroy space-time (it seems to be a popular misunderstanding), the fact that some people view that concern as sufficient reason to not look for it is very suggestive. Active avoidance of potentially dangerous knowledge — call it anticuriosity — is a deep-rooted cultural tendency, even if it is not a very natural human one.

So there are two types of people in the world. Those who say, “Higgs boson, damn the Universe!” and those who say “No!” to the idea, and other related Eve’s Apple types of knowledge (creating artificial life in the laboratory, gene-hacking, the truth about aliens).

***

Meaning, quite simply, is the joy extracted from truth. Not any kind of truth, but a very specific kind: truth as captured in appreciative models. Reach-exceeds-grasp models.

For the gonzo experientialist, who would blow up the universe for a Higgs boson, joy is to be found in truth through lived meaning. Psychologically, models are appreciative first — sources of pleasure — and instrumental second (if at all).

It is not necessary to have a theory about how appreciative models deliver pleasure to biological sacks of entrails, but since you and I don’t need a reason (let alone a practical one) for theorizing, here’s one that sort of amuses me: appreciative models are truth-pleasure prosthetics.

What do I mean by that?

Pleasure derived directly from the senses — a capacity we share with other creatures — requires no symbolic mediation. Pleasure and happiness — the getting ahead and getting along varieties — are both ultimately sensory.

Appreciative joy derived from symbolic models on the other hand, requires more work. It is still ultimately derived from sensory experience, but it is the added symbolic meaning that makes it worthwhile. A bag of chips needs no theory to be enjoyable. Neither does the company of a friend. But without our capacity for reading meaning into things, much of the pleasure in the universe remains inaccessible to us.

This, ultimately, is the poverty of doerism. It allows human vanity and narcissism to limit human experiences. To say that the realities we cannot skillfully manipulate are not worth knowing about or exploring seems to be a joyless way to approach life.

Those who lack the capacity to appreciate useless meanings tend to fall asleep in planetariums.

As Robert Browning once said, Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for?

***

While I am sympathetic to the concerns of the anticurious, I am fundamentally about voting Yes to curiosity. Not because I am immune to the known pleasures of the senses that the anti-meaning types treasure, but because I am not blind to the appreciative pleasures of entirely useless and potentially universe-destroying knowledge.

A bird in hand is not always worth two in the bush to the curious.

If the devil offered me a deal where there was a 99% probability I’d be told the secret of wormholes for hyperspatial travel, and a 1% probability that the universe would be destroyed, I’d immediately take it. I wouldn’t even consult the rest of humanity or call for a vote.

The interesting thing about the existence of knowledge sociopaths like me is that human security-seeking is doomed, not just because of outright criminals on Wall Street exposing the rest of us to Black Swan disasters but because a non-trivial portion of humanity thinks like I do, not out of greed or a desire to exploit others, but out of simple curiosity and meaning-seeking.

We are Pandora. All your fates are belong to us. Because we cannot resist asking the questions whose answers we probably don’t want to know and messing with and unleashing forces we probably cannot control. Curiosity is unfortunately not a democracy-friendly trait.

The unreliable coupling between seeking meaning and being more effective or happy in the real world does not really hold us back because we do not seek meaning to be more effective or happier in the real world.

That’s a gamble that may or may not pay off for some random person or zebra in the year 2533. Curiosity, in this lifetime, for you and me, is not about winning pleasure or finding happiness in love.

It is about prodding the unknown with a stick for the hell of it and battling ancient existential boredom with new meanings.

If this means stirring up unnecessary trouble, so be it.

***

I haven’t said much about immortality or longevity, but it is an idea that hangs in the air whenever you think about curiosity.  It’s been part of the subtext through this whole piece.

Here’s an angels-on-a-pinhead question. Are immortality-seekers necessarily joyless?

I think they are. If you cannot die, variety is not meaningful.

On average, curious agents probably die more quickly and in greater numbers, than incurious ones. This means the basic trade-off in human life might be between longevity and joy (which I have reductively defined as the sort of positive experience one gets out of yielding to curiosity).

In a way curiosity in humans is basically a death wish of sorts. A desire to at least control the course of mortality, if not its ultimate destination.

But this trade-off may not exist for organizations. I suspect that the way to create immortal corporations is to first try and create curious corporations.

If that turns out to be true, it would be very ironic.

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Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt.

In economics and biology, honesty is understood in terms of signals.

Signals are anything used to communicate, to convey information. A price is a signal of value. Conspicuous consumption is a signal of wealth. A growl is a threat — and the growl’s depth is a signal of the size of the creature’s body cavity.

Signals are said to be honest when they reliably correspond to an underlying trait or fact about the world. Otherwise they are dishonest or deceptive.

The temptation to deceive is ubiquitous. Deception allows an agent to reap benefits without incurring costs. That’s why the best signals — the most honest ones — are expensive. More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake.

This is the reason Apple retail stores are roomy and filled with helpful employees — it’s something their lower-margin competitors can’t afford. It’s also why species with good defense mechanisms (like skunks and coral snakes) evolve high-contrast colors. Unless it can defend itself, an animal that stands out quickly becomes another animal’s lunch.

Honesty is thus, in part, an economic proposition.

Humans are the most communicative species on the planet, but we’ve come increasingly to rely on the very cheapest signals: words. The problem with words is that they aren’t a scarce resource. Which is a more honest signal of your value to a company: when your boss says, “Great job!” or when she gives you a raise?

Talk, as they say, is cheap. This is especially true on the Internet. Faced with global deflation in the value of words, we’ve had to find other ways to gauge quality and honesty. PageRank, for example, works because incoming links are scarce (at least from high-quality websites). CPU cycles are also scarce, which is how the bitcoin network prevents double-spending. CAPTCHAs use a task that’s difficult for a computer but easy for a human; in other words, it can honestly detect the presence of a brain. And social networks use real-world identities, with their attendant reputations, to keep imposters and anonymous commenters out of the system (for better or worse).

In each of these examples, we’re looking for evidence of things we care about. Words (or bits), by themselves, aren’t a good medium for honest signals because they aren’t differentially expensive. False and/or low-quality sentences are just as easy to produce as true, high-quality sentences. To gauge honesty and/or quality, we have to look outside the words — to the economics of the process that produces them.

Getting information reliably from point A to point B also hinges on mediation. How many intermediate representations does the information pass through? And are any other agents putting their stamp on the information? Agency is disruptive because it acts as a lens, distorting information as it passes through a field of incentives. And agency is often difficult even to locate, as Mike Travers’ catalogue so wonderfully demonstrates.

Incidentally, cutting out the middleman is the cornerstone of science. When I tell you something, as one scientist to another, there’s an implied subtext: don’t trust me! Or my words! Go check them yourself, against reality. It’s a disintermediating move, one that helps maintain honesty across a huge network of agents with different agendas.

Taking the body seriously

As a matter of methodology, it’s often wise to ignore words entirely. This is especially useful when trying to understand the human social world, which is rife with agency and deception. Instead we should focus our attention (whenever possible) on the underlying economics, which is ultimately grounded in physical, ecological, and biological reality.

The lynchpin of this enterprise is the human body. Everything that happens to us, and every action we take, passes through the body. It’s the most immediate connection we have to external reality. And it’s through the body — that fragile nexus of metabolism and reproduction — that we confront the scarcity of the physical world. As such, the body is uniquely positioned to send honest signals.

This is why skilled interrogators are trained to read nonverbal body language — facial expressions, eye contact, gestures, posture, and voice. As former FBI agent Joe Navarro writes,

Understanding the biological basis for body language will help you appreciate how nonverbal behavior works and why it is such a potent predictor of human thoughts, feelings, and intentions…. [The limbic system] is the part of the brain that reacts to the world around us reflexively and instantaneously, in real time, and without thought [i.e., unmediated]. For that reason, it gives off a true response to information coming in from the environment.

It’s also worth noting that punishment (the basis for extended peace and cooperation) is inherently physical: confiscation of property, imprisonment, ostracism, corporal and capital punishment. Most people don’t pay taxes out of an abstract sense of civic duty — they’re afraid of men with guns showing up at their door. To the extent that words can be honest, it’s because of the (explicit or implicit) threat of physical punishment, whether by the state or by one’s peers.

The body is also important because it is primary. It comes first — both in phylogeny and ontogeny.

Our hominin ancestors had bodies well before they learned to use language, before they became properly, verbally self-conscious. (Before the Fall, if you will.) But lacking language didn’t stop them from engaging in all manner of activities that require communication: hunting, confrontational scavenging, finding mates, forming political coalitions, etc. Instead they used honest signals grounded in physical and biological reality.

The body also precedes language and abstract thought during individual development. A child first comes to know the world through his or her body, and later developmental steps build on top of that understanding. As George Lakoff argues, our capacity for abstract thought is grounded in (conceptual) metaphor. We reason about abstract domains in terms of more concrete, embodied domains. “The very words which form the building blocks of explicit thought are themselves all originally metaphors, grounded in the human body and its experience,” writes Iain McGilchrist, channeling Lakoff.

Finally, the body is the locus of emotion, the glue that holds relationships together. David Gelernter laments that online communities still haven’t figured this out:

The physical body is not irrelevant to a human community. The emotional subtext of human communication is crucial to human thought. It isn’t a footnote. Too many computer scientists don’t understand this.

Demography is destiny. History is subject to geology. To this I would add: society is grounded in biology. But, as I will now argue, the modern world has become particularly disembodied. This is most pronounced in the West.

The Cartesian Delusion

By and large we [in the West] locate ourselves behind the eyes and somewhere between the ears. It is as if within the dome of the skull there was some sort of arrangement such as there is at the SAC Air Force headquarters in Denver, where men sit in great rooms surrounded with radar screens and all sorts of monitors, watching the movements of planes all over the world. So, in the same way, we have the idea of ourselves as a little man inside our heads, who has earphones on (which bring messages from the ears), and who has a television set in front of him (which brings messages from the eyes), and who has all sorts of electrodes all over his body (giving him signals from the hands and so on). And he has a panel in front of him with buttons and dials and things. So he more or less controls the body… but he isn’t the same as the body.

Alan Watts calls this the “myth of the skin-encapsulated ego.”

By ‘myth’ he doesn’t mean falsehood, but rather an image or metaphor that affects how we think about the world on a very deep level.

‘Skin-encapsulated egoism’ is an organizing principle, if you will, for Western civilization. A shared fiction or collective delusion. A cultural frame we’ve been raised in, which shapes our inner mental lives and the societies we build for ourselves.

The myth of the skin-encapsulated ego — aka Cartesian dualism — is a decidedly disembodied worldview. It privileges the mind (or soul) and downplays the importance of the body. To make a caricature of it, Descartes would happily sit in a vat, cogitating and perhaps exchanging thought-packets with other Cartesian beings. His body is merely a vessel.

This way of looking at the world produces a disembodied consciousness. It’s an abstract, analytical, representational, cerebral mode of experience, one in which our bodies (and the world beyond them) are incidental — mere tools for our minds to manipulate.

In contrast, an embodied consciousness is concrete, empathic, enactive, and visceral — the awareness of being a creature with a body situated and enmeshed in the world.

It’s the difference between the kind of awareness required for finance, and the kind required for police work. The difference between a taking a math test and reading body language. The difference between linguistics and musicology. The difference between offline and online processing. The difference between self-consciousness and ‘presence.’ The difference between saying, “I have a body,” and saying, “I am a body.”

Embodied consciousness satisfies both of the criteria for honesty we discussed earlier. Because it is not mediated through the verbal, egoic parts of the brain, there’s one fewer agent whose agenda you need to discount. And because it’s anchored to the body, it’s subject to the economic constraints of the physical world, making it easier to send and receive honest signals.

Of course, both embodied and disembodied consciousness exist simultaneously in any culture, and also (at various times) within any given person. But it’s a matter of degree. How frequently and how deeply do we experience disembodied consciousness, vs. how frequently and deeply do we experience embodied consciousness?

The answer, I think, is that we experience disembodied consciousness more frequently, and more deeply, than at any other place or time.

WEIRD Culture

In 2010, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan made a splash in the behavioral sciences community with a paper entitled The weirdest people in the world? It’s a critique of a rather large swath of the research agenda in modern experimental psychology, i.e., experimenting on Western college students and using the results to make pronouncements about ‘universal’ human tendencies.

The paper revolves around the concept of WEIRD, which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The problem is that WEIRD people are, well, odd. Along various dimensions, they sit at the extremes relative to people raised in all other types of societies. They have different ideas about fairness, cooperation, and punishment; about the self and its relation to others; and about conformity and personal choice. They reason differently about morality, taking a more analytical approach. They even have different patterns of visual cognition. WEIRD people literally see the world differently.

Jonathan Haidt summarizes it for us in The Righteous Mind:

Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this simple generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.

Seeing separate objects is the hallmark of disembodied consciousness. Disembodiment produces distance and detachment, and the less you feel enmeshed in the world, the more likely you are to parse it with a clinical, analytic mindset.

Let’s look at how each of the five WEIRD factors reinforces disembodied consciousness.

Western. In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington gives the following characteristics of Western civ: a Classical legacy, Catholicism and Protestantism, European languages, separation of spiritual and temporal authority, rule of law, social pluralism, representational bodies, and individualism. (He conveniently omits imperialism.)

Of these, the two most important for producing a sense of disembodiment are the rule of law (which we’ll discuss in the section on democracy) and individualism. Individualism holds that people are isolated centers of awareness, action, responsibility, and moral worth. Relationships are seen as incidental features of the environment, not intrinsic to personal identity.

Educated. If modern education doesn’t produce a very strange kind of consciousness, I don’t know what does. Consider how unnatural classroom-based education is for a human creature. It’s a comprehensive exercise in restraint, in training the mind to exert control over the body. We force our children to sit still for hours upon hours; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to control their impulses; to delay gratification; to use words and reasons instead of violence; to wake up at prescribed times; to move from place to place when a bell rings; to ask permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). We systematically reward children for exerting control over their bodies and punish them when they don’t — reinforcing the ego-centered neural pathways and starving the body-centered ones. This enterprise, which lasts for over a decade, exalts the mind as the owner and master of its body.

(I find it singularly amazing that in 13 years of public education in America, I received literally thousands of hours of instruction in math, science, writing, history, etc., but not a single lesson on how to interpret body language. It’s as if our culture is scared of something — though I can’t quite make out what.)

Industrialized. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx explored the implications of living in a highly specialized, heavily industrialized society. The result was his theory of alienation — disconnection and estrangement from one’s own humanity. He identified and distinguished four types of alienation:

• Alienation from the work product
• Alienation from the work act
• Alienation from the motivation for work
• Alienation from fellow humans

To summarize his point: when your work becomes increasingly specialized, and when your body becomes an instrument (especially of external agency), you start to think of your body as a machine, as a tool. That’s how the industrial system sees your body, after all, and when you spend enough years being worked by that system, you can’t help but adopt its way of thinking.

If living in a world of bewildering social and technological complexity induces nausea, then working in an industrial economy induces alienation and detachment from the body. (And both fuel the desire to self-medicate.)

Rich. Wealth is an important part of the WEIRD complex because it insulates (alienates) us even further from the material conditions of our existence. Freed from resource constraints, the rich aren’t threatened by leaking roofs, loan sharks, or the spectre of living on the street. Most of us manipulate paper, pixels, and bits for a living. We might wear metaphorical yokes, but few among us get paid for raw physical labor. In short: being rich makes our bodies increasingly irrelevant for getting along in the world.

Democratic. Democracy is, among other things, a rational process, by which I mean that reasons have at least some currency in the system. Powerful people can’t do things simply because they’re powerful. When their actions impinge on others, the norms of a democratic culture demand reasons. Those reasons won’t always be good or sound (there’s an art to justifying an a priori position: confabulation). But they will at least be reasons, not just threats of violence. However meager, this is progress — and another step in the direction of disembodiment.

Also crucial to democracy is the separation of office from office holder. Barack Obama, in the flesh, isn’t really that important; most of his power lies in the Presidency itself. And this separation exists at all levels, not just at the top. But it wasn’t always like this. In feudal societies, offices were hereditary. Kingdom and earldoms passed along genealogical lines. The office existed in the man; his physical person — and his loins — were paramount.

… In addition to the five WEIRD elements, I would add two others that have helped shape our disembodied consciousness: peace and secularism, by which I mean the absence of violence and religion. It’s easy to see how violence cultivates an embodied worldview: fearing for your breath makes the body vivid in ways little else can. And religion has a similar effect, though it’s a bit harder to see with WEIRD lenses on. So let’s try to take them off.

Religion and the body

Religion has baffled me for nearly all of my adult life. Then, about a year ago, I had a realization: religion is not about beliefs.

In hindsight this should have been obvious. In trying to understand the phenomenon of religion, how could the (specific) beliefs matter? They’re what makes each religion unique, different from all the others.

But I grew up in the West, and a hazard of the Western (disembodied) sensibility is to focus on the beliefs — those verbal, propositional units that yield to analysis. Either gods exist, or they don’t. That’s what religion is about, right? Who cares about the menagerie of bizarre rituals; they can’t be particularly important.

I now maintain almost the exact opposite. Religion is a thin dross of verbal confabulation clinging to a bedrock of embodied practices. Talk is cheap. Behavior speaks louder than beliefs. And beliefs about the supernatural and/or esoteric are especially cheap, because those are precisely the domains where holding false beliefs doesn’t cost anything. Say whatever you like about the afterlife, but be careful what you believe about tigers.

So what happens when we ignore the beliefs and focus instead on the behaviors?

Enter, again, the human body. Religions pertain to the body in all sorts of weird ways:

• Funerary practices are quintessentially religious. Burial (the disposal of dead bodies) is cited as the oldest religious behavior.
• There’s no math in the Bible, but there’s plenty of genealogy, food taboos, and rules about what you can do with your genitals. (Snicker if you must, but remember that monogamy makes for more stable, less violent societies.)
• Nearly every religious ritual makes use of the body. This is so striking it warrants a list: kneeling, bowing, prostrating, holding hands, dancing, chanting, singing, wailing, quaking and shaking, congregating, meditating, wearing special clothes, shaving one’s head, fasting, sharing meals, eating crackers, drinking wine, gathering around a fire, animal sacrifices, self-flagellation, circumcision, pilgrimage, yoga….

The fact that rituals are embodied serves a number of separate but complementary purposes. (1) It reinforces body-centered neural pathways and suppresses ego-centered ones (the exact opposite of modern classroom-based education). (2) It enables kinesthetic learning by connecting abstract ideas (especially ones of great social significance) to bodily experiences, and vice versa. And (3) it allows members of a group to send honest signals of their commitment, especially when the rituals involve an element of sacrifice (whether time, energy, or material resources).

Sosis and Alcorta elaborate on the use of honest signals in their wonderful survey paper, Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred:

Religions often maintain intragroup solidarity by requiring costly behavioral patterns of group members. The performance of these costly behaviors signals commitment and loyalty to the group and the beliefs of its members. Thus, trust is enhanced among group members, which enables them to minimize costly monitoring mechanisms that are otherwise necessary to overcome the free-rider problems that typically plague collective pursuits.

The point is, religions ‘get’ that the body plays an important role in human social life, and that it can be harnessed to help groups cohere. And they encode this understanding in the deepest parts of their DNA. This, along with the tribal nature of most religions, is what has enabled them to endure for millennia, outlasting almost every other institution on the planet.

We may object to the politics or epistemology of some modern religions, but if we trivialize or dismiss them, we’re missing an opportunity to study how they have thrived for so long, and how we might apply those lessons in other areas of social life.

Toward an Embodied Worldview

As a shared fiction, the myth of Cartesian dualism is extremely useful. You might even say it’s the stone in the stone soup of the West. As such, it’s helped generate an incredible amount of peace, wealth, and technological progress, which we would be fools to forget.

But myths are necessarily lossy. By highlighting certain parts of reality, the disembodied, Cartesian worldview casts a shadow on other parts. It marginalizes important aspects of human nature, making them less prominent, less visible — but no less a reality.

It’s those marginalized aspects of human nature — and of the societies we’ve built to hide them — that I want to explore over the course of this year. I want to pursue and reconnect with an embodied worldview, one that sees the human body as an important source of honesty in our increasingly abstract political and social lives.

It’s not that I want to ignore or downplay the disembodied worldview, but I want to complement it with another, equally important perspective.

This is an extension of the project I started last time. In Anthropology of Mid-Sized Startups, I wrote

To fully appreciate what goes on at a growing startup, it pays to remember than an engineer is also a primate.

That’s the right idea, but I’d like to expand the scope a bit. To fully appreciate the modern world, it pays to remember the world it grew out of — one more tightly anchored to the underlying physics, ecology, and biology.

—

Thanks to Alex Vartan for reading a draft of this essay. Image credit: Jolyon.

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I don’t normally pay attention to token gestures, but Mar 1/Mar 2 are the National Day of Unplugging. I don’t know who is behind this idea, or how much momentum it has, but I really like it. My one experience of joining a Jewish friend to observe Sabbath was both deeply relaxing and thought-provoking.

A complete unplugging happens to be unfeasible for me, since Refactor Camp is this weekend, but I am sort of pleased about the serendipity here. I am suspending my normal 90% online life to do something that strongly depends on physical presence and face-to-face interactions.  Refactor Camp weekend is also Ribbonfarm Unplugged weekend.

So while I won’t be able to entirely unplug from the Internet (let alone electricity), I think this qualifies as observance in the spirit of the idea. If you like the concept, check out that NDU website for more inspiration. Figure out a way to unplug.

While this is a start, I don’t think a token day of ritual observance and a manifesto will really make a huge difference. What we really need, to preserve our sanity and really figure out how to regain control of our agency, is to truly understand how digital/electronic power have hacked our brains, and hack the digital forces right back. They’re not as inexorable as they seem.

I want to share one particularly good unplugging hack I discovered recently, which has made a huge difference in my life. I bought a pair of binoculars. Specifically, these excellent Pentax binoculars:

I’ve wanted binoculars since I was a kid, but somehow never got around to buying them as an adult. I am particularly proud that I had the discipline to buy small, lightweight and waterproof binoculars I knew I would actually use, rather than bigger, powerful ones that satisfy gadget-philia more than observation needs.

But why are binoculars an unplugging hack?

Because they intensify present-moment sensory experience to a degree that you end up systematically choosing the present over the camera-deferred future. It is much easier to disintermediate the camera using a different device than simply trying to use it less. It’s the gadget equivalent of the solution to the “don’t think of an elephant” problem (the answer is “think of a giraffe instead”).

This moment — and the opportunity to experience it more intensely through binoculars — will be gone immediately. You have to choose whether to experience the moment or capture an impoverished digital memory that you are unlikely to ever review.

I’ve now carried my binoculars with me on several long waterfront walks, observed seabirds, container ships, trains and snowy mountains. I’ve taken them with me on a couple of long train and car rides, and to the Swiss alps. It seems to count as odd behavior. People stare when I whip out my binoculars while they’re whipping out their cameras or smartphones.

The camera today — especially the smartphone and lightweight point-and-shoot — is a dangerous device. Twenty years ago, film cameras were cumbersome enough (and film expensive enough) that most normal people didn’t experience reality through them by default. The dangerous device then was the camcorder, which tempted you into looking at the world entirely through a viewfinder.

Today, cameras being entirely digital and plugged into the Internet via wireless links means that they represent the temptation of continuous sharing. They are now as dangerous as camcorders used to be. Things in the environment start to be viewed and evaluated primarily in terms of their potential as online social objects. We see a spectacle and see an invisible Like button hovering under it. Once Google Glass goes mainstream, this will be literally true.

This power and potential is great so long as we remain conscious of what social sharing adds to the present experience. Does it enhance it or impoverish it? Does the act of sharing make you pay closer, more mindful attention to what you are looking at, or are you turning snap-and-share into a mindless operation like filing unread paperwork or retweeting unread links on Twitter?

Is your camera encouraging you to file away your life instead of living it?

These are not isolated behaviors. They represent a widespread abdication of agency and indeterminate deferral of direct experience. We are starting to inhabit a culture where we  are more likely to forward the experiential possibilities of our life to other people, our unreliable future selves, or digital systems, rather than choosing specific experiences in the moment.

I am never big on prescription, but I’ll offer one here: don’t do that.

And if you buy binoculars to counter the power of the camera in our lives today, please don’t buy those terrible camera-binocular hybrids you see advertised in Sky Mall catalogs. That would defeat the purpose.

I’ll stop here, just short of 900 words, which for me is a pretty disciplined act of unplugging in its own right, since I normally go on for at least 3000 words. But you’ll probably be hearing more from me on this topic in the future. I might even try to figure out a way to regularly observe a digital Sabbath (anyone want to write a WordPress plugin for me called “Digital Sabbath” that takes this site offline every Friday-Saturday and puts up a “Get offline!” page instead?)

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It’s now been over two years and a dozen talks since I first started speaking with my blogger hat on. Each time I go to one of these things, I realize just how out of place I am.

The talking-head conference circuit (as opposed to academic) is designed around polished and powerful speakers with a true flair for the dramatic. They manage to be theatrical without being corny. They are engaging and accessible without coming across like used-car salespeople. Even when you are aware of the halo effect, you cannot help but be enthralled by people who are truly, naturally good at this stuff (like Bill Clinton say).

These are professional speakers  in the fullest sense of the word.

Me, I mumble, hem and haw, get tempted down unscripted rabbit holes on stage, lose track of time, go too fast or too slow, pause too much or too little, forget to repeat for emphasis, and generally put on a pretty amateurish show each time.

But here’s the funny thing: increasingly I find that it is people like me who seem to be on the agenda at these things. It is sort of like the rise of reality TV over scripted, or the rise of blogging over traditional publishing. I seem to be part of a broad amateurization of the speaker circuit.

I fully expect some sort of iStockSpeaker site to pop up soon, full of people like me in the directory.

The Speaker Circuit

Chances are, you don’t actually know what the “speaker circuit” is. Here’s a secret: neither does anyone else. Some parts of it are very legible. Bestselling authors with agency representation belong in this legible part, as do ex-Presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs and the like. This is the marquee talent on the road.

Other well-understood parts are the “roadshows” (speakers who take the same act everywhere, to events organized by others, as well as their own for-profit workshops and seminars), dog-and-pony shows for specific messages managed by PR agencies, corporate retreats and university commencement speeches.

Off stage, the people who belong in the legible part of the circuit are pretty impressive. They network smoothly and energetically, non-clumsily pitch their books, companies or consulting services, deal graciously with swarms of fans, and overall, maximize the hell out of their time at any event. When you meet them, they immediately make you feel comfortable.  When you run into them between events, you realize that their lives are beautifully organized around speaking gigs. They move smoothly from one event to the next with no disruption to the rest of their lives.

And then there are people like me. Off stage, I have to very carefully pace myself and ration out my limited supply of social energy in order to actually enjoy the event. Each time I go to an event, the rest of my life gets disrupted for days before and after. If I have two or more events in quick succession, things get pretty chaotic. I count myself lucky if there is even one person in the audience who has heard of me before.

I am an amateur in the fullest sense of the word.

There is some clear social structure as well. Keynotes for example, are best understood as talks by speakers who are better known than the events they headline, and can therefore add some marketing pull. There is a delicate Groucho Marx type balancing act here: nobody wants to keynote any conference that will have them.

Nominally, a keynote is simply any talk in a typical position on the agenda (say first single-track talk after breakfast on the first day) that is billed as an introduction to theme for the event. Quite a few speakers claim “keynote speaker” status based on having simply occupied the position at some point, but you aren’t a true keynote speaker unless you’re more famous than the event itself.

But when you put together all the clear elements, you still end up accounting for only about 20% of the stuff that makes up the “speaker circuit.”

By comparison to a corporation or industry, explicit organizational structure accounts for much less of the nature of a given event or space of events. It is a fundamentally murkier part of the collective economic life of homo sapiens.

I still haven’t figured it all out. That’s part of the reason I keep going to these things. Somewhere in there, there is a sort of Gervais Principle for the conference circuit that I might figure out someday.

Truth be told, as far as explicit networking value, driving book sales or business development go, speaking gigs are basically not worth the time investment for 80% of the speakers. My suspicion is that most of the direct value accrues to a small fraction of attendees.

The Amateurization of Speaking

You don’t have to fully understand how the speaker circuit works to realize that there is a widespread amateurization going on. When I first started doing speaking gigs, I thought I needed to spend some time working on my stagecraft. But I very quickly realized two things.

First, the few times I tried to do a more polished, halo-effect type talk, even though the videos clearly looked better, I personally hated doing them, and interactions with people afterwards were less fun. The better you are on-stage, the more distance you create off-stage. Of course, there is some minimum skill needed, but the bar is not as high as people think.

Second, I realized that conference organizers are typically not looking for halo-effect dramatic content from amateurs like me. There are others on the scene who are there fore the purpose. People like me are part of the amateur portion of the proceedings.

And increasingly, that’s the more important part. Sometimes it’s the only part.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about why this is happening. Part of it is simple supply and demand. There are now more conferences, with more agenda inventory to fill, as cheaply as possible. And the blogosphere is one cheap source.

The Internet also makes it much easier to organize events. Everything from identifying and communicating with a target audience, to registration, sponsorships and logistics, becomes easier with the Internet (remember when conferences relied on paper mail for organization, before around 1998?). Barcamps and meetups are the most obvious examples.

But this doesn’t explain why there are more events. Where is the demand coming from?

Events and the Internet

My theory is that this is due to a chicken-and-egg feedback loop between physical events and the Internet.

If you think about it,  the Internet really borrows much of its organizational structure from the transient part of offline social order, not the fixed part.

In other words, the Internet is a set of ongoing sprawling events, a continuous show. Not a set of institutions defining a social order.  You don’t have things like cities, organizations or homes. You have a flow of activities with vague temporal boundaries. For the first few 1.0 years, we made the mistake of using fixed-institutional metaphors for the Internet (homes, offices, cities, communities), but shortly after the 2.0 era started, we witnessed a decisive shift towards transient-structure metaphors.

Like the stream for instance. While an offline institution like a corporation can be viewed as the embodiment of a stream, the metaphor really works much better when mapped to an event.

This coupling with the Internet is what has led to the increased demand.

The virtual world, by making bits cheap, ultimately devalues straight-up overt communication. There would be no contest between attending a talk in person versus watching a video if the only content were the talk itself. The virtual option wins every time. For content where this is true, virtual events ultimately kill physical events.

But by vastly boosting the amount of content online (like this blog for instance), the Internet radically boosts demand for associated context and subtext. When texts become cheap, context and subtext become relatively more valuable.

This is one reason why I think offline events are a necessary part of sustainable blogging. Or any sort of online activity.

Europeans seem to instinctively understand this much better than Americans. I’ve now spoken at two European events, and both times, I got the sense that the organizers understood what they were doing much better. They struck the right balance between context and agenda. There was more of a festive air to the proceedings.  Online components were more thoughtfully integrated.

This could be partly because America is more of a low-context culture than the rest of the world, with a much more transactional approach to events.

Events are Eating Organizations

In a way, the best way to understand what’s going on is that events are eating organizations. This is a corollary that follows from Marc Andreessen’s observation that software is eating everything. Events are software. Organizations are hardware.

Organizations are ultimately abstractions that make some class of interactions cheaper by codifying them within a structural boundary. Digital technology makes much of that codification fluid or entirely unnecessary. A software project living on github does not really need to have an associated organization until much later in its scaling journey.

You could say that software eats Gesellschaft and all that remains is Gemeinschaft. Events without organizations.

There is a new Greatest Show on Earth: the Internet. The subtext and context for this show are the new breed of amateurized events. This is more than just disruption of traditional conference culture by new conference culture. It is a slow shift in the very nature of social organization.

I think there’s a lot going on as part of this overall process. Events have always been important in the history of technology (the 19th century was a parade of World Fairs for example), but generally organizations have been the more important part of the equation. Technological eras are identified by their associated institutions.

With the Internet however, organizations recede into the background, and events carry more of the burden of economic and cultural life. At one point, it even struck me that Silicon Valley is best understood as one continuous tradeshow. Startups, until they become profitable, are more like booths or exhibits at a 19th century World Fair than companies. Meetups are pre-organizations that may never turn into organizations. The tech blogosphere is more like live event commentary than “news” in the sense of newspapers. The press in the traditional sense is an institution, but the blogosphere is a show.

This suggests that there are interesting challenges ahead for organizations with a particularly high proportion of Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, like universities.

On the one hand, they are likely to get unbundled into events, wherever context and subtext are important.

On the other hand, for “commodity” courses (like Statistics 101, say), with relatively low context/subtext and high textuality, we will see massive aggregation online. This is already happening with MOOCs on Coursera, Khan Academy, and so forth.

Blogs as Extended Events

Lately, I’ve started to think of what I do as an ongoing event with online and offline components, rather than content creation. The writing is the story of the event. It makes most sense when situated within the event stream it catalyzes.

I am not quite sure what that means, but it is a fertile framing that gets me thinking more clearly about some challenges. Every year, more of ribbonfarm seems to go offline or offsite.

And speaking of shows, here’s the video of my talk at LIFT last week, and here are the slides.

I’ll be at ALM Chicago March 5-7. I’ll be doing a workshop format talk on systems thinking. Hopefully I’ll meet some of you there.

And of course, my own biggest little experiment, Refactor Camp, is two weeks from now. We’ll see what happens in this second iteration.

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Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”   -Henry David Thoreau

New York and New Jersey have a first world problem: The Bayonne Bridge, which connects the two states, will soon block the entrance to the largest seaport on the East Coast, the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal. In other words, New York City and its surrounding region have too much infrastructure, and the older infrastructure is starting to interfere with the newer infrastructure, forcing a public evaluation of priorities.

The Bayonne Bridge, which fulfills the modest task of enabling people in cars to cross a river between Staten Island and its namesake city, needs to be raised: Its 151-foot navigational clearance is too low for Post-Panamax ships (the mega-vessels that will become the ocean’s biggest and most efficient movers of goods after the Panama Canal is widened in 2014). If the bridge remains in place, the port conveniently located closest to the Eastern seaboard’s largest population center will potentially stagnate as a Norfolk or Savannah arises to take its dominant position (just as Port Newark itself surpassed similarly obsolete facilties in the mid-twentieth century). If the Bayonne Bridge does not get out of the way in time, the global freight network will re-optimize itself at a slightly less efficient level, forcing goods to travel farther and more expensively. The plan is to raise the bridge 60 feet higher.

—

Throughout history, the city has concentrated and centralized the many complex activities and institutions that make civilization possible. Advanced commerce, culture, and technological innovation all begin when people leave their scattered rural settlements to move into closer proximity with one another, and we call those denser living arrangements cities. The rituals and enterprises that characterize cities are too numerous to list here, but they have typically been harmonious with one another: The agora was a hub of economic as well as political life at the most accessible and central part of the city. Before the automobile, streets served a variety of complementary purposes, only one of which was transportation. In the later industrial era, the docks that lined Brooklyn’s waterfront were an interface between the commercial activity of shipping and the neighborhoods where those workers lived, together forming a cultural fabric that was recognizable as a coherent physical place.

The modernist twentieth century fragmented the unified, harmonious city. Le Corbusier famously called the house a machine for living, and his influential La Ville Radieuse extended that metaphor to the metropolis at large. Like any good machine, the modernist city’s functions began splitting off into distinct and specialized parts, and a variety of innovations arose to enable these changes: single-use zoning, cars, grade-separated highways, high-rise office and apartment towers, and bedroom suburbs. Scale and speed ensured that this separation was more than philosophical—a car traveling at 60 miles per hour could hardly share its path with other stationary human activities. The holistic city, woven together in a complex and delicate fabric, found itself on the wane.

Le Corbusier’s idea of the city as a machine ushered in the infrastructural era, as his vision relied heavily upon infrastructure and the engineers who designed and optimized it. Freeways, bridges, tunnels, towers, and standardized housing units were the building blocks of that city. In practice, as seen in the postwar United States, people lived in residential places (the suburbs) and worked in commercial places (downtown). Land use suddenly existed as a concept. Infrastructure carried those people—now called commuters—from one specialized place to another.

Many of New York City’s bridges and tunnels, including the Bayonne Bridge, are products of this imperative to move huge volumes of commuters between increasingly separate homes and workplaces in the modernist city. Robert Moses, who built much of that infrastructure in New York, helped to fulfill Le Corbusier’s prophetic vision, and Moses waged war on the premodern city in doing so (even trying unsuccessfully to ram crosstown highways through Midtown and Lower Manhattan). The close-knit, vibrant districts that thankfully still flourish throughout New York, in the eyes of Moses and anyone obsessed with efficient, machine-like urbanism, were simply in the way. In a sense, the city itself—the traditional, un-optimized, and human-scaled city—was in the way.

Now, the Bayonne Bridge is in something else’s way. The bridge finds itself superseded by a new, global logic that cares little about the flow of commuters from home in Staten Island to work in New Jersey. As Robert Moses needed to bulldoze old neighborhoods in order to make way for his bridges and highways, the bridges and highways now need to make way for forces best described as anti-urban. Two infrastructural developments that exploded in postwar America—commercial passenger aviation and container shipping—epitomize this new era.

Le Corbusier’s modernism segmented the city by function, stretched it out, and increased its scale while leaving it in a recognizable form. The world-spanning (and world-shrinking) systems of air travel and container shipping atomized the metropolis and sprayed it into the air, letting it circulate wherever the wind carries it. Airports and seaports are simply the visible points where these globally-networked abstractions make contact with the city.

You will know these new systems, of which air travel was just an early example, by the extent to which cities are in their way and extraneous to their purposes. Early airports, such as Chicago’s Midway, were built relatively close to city centers, but they rapidly retreated from urban areas as capacity needs grew and jet takeoff trajectories became shallow. In the United States, the trend peaked in 1995 when Denver International Airport opened on 53 square miles of land far outside of Denver itself. Airports require passengers, which is why they’re anywhere near cities at all, but every other force pulls them outward. Newark’s huge container port, similarly, replaced and undermined the Brooklyn and Manhattan waterfronts that supported entire social ecosystems, and gained untold efficiency by minimizing human involvement in shipping. Cities, in both examples, are sources of supply and demand—model input values—that these systems would gladly bypass if they could afford to.

The logic that gave birth to cities now dictates that we gather in the abstract, transitory space of the network, and build our civilization there. Marshall McLuhan, in 1967, proclaimed that “the city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists.” Cities, of course, will stick around for a while, but McLuhan realized early that their role was increasingly symbolic. Metropolitan vapors, to borrow a phrase from Lars Lerup, may originate in cities but they rapidly diffuse via a multitude of physical and digital channels. Like a vampire, the global system drinks the city’s vitality and nourishes itself. The Thoreau quote above, then, is just as apt today: We don’t ride our networks; our networks ride upon us.

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The fable of Stone Soup is probably my favorite piece of European folklore. In the Russian version, which I prefer, called Axe Porridge,  the story goes something like this:

A soldier returning from war stops at a village, hungry and tired. He knocks on the door of a rich, stingy Scrooge of a woman. In response to his request for food, she of course claims she has nothing. So the canny soldier asks her for just a pot and water, claiming he can make “axe porridge” out of an old axe-head he spots lying around. Intrigued the woman agrees.

You know how the rest of the story goes: the soldier quietly hustles a bunch of other ingredients — salt, carrots, oats — out of the old woman, under the guise of “improving the flavor” of the axe porridge. He does this one ingredient at a time, offering an evolving narrative on the progress of the porridge (“this is coming along great; now if only I had some oats to thicken it.”)

The result is some excellent porridge that they share, while applauding the idea of axe porridge together. The shared fiction that soup can be made out of an axe-head results in the fact of real porridge for all.

There are some deep insights into the psychology of wealth and the nature of progress in this fable, insights that are very relevant for our times.

Two Narratives of Wealth and Community

There is something quintessentially European about Stone Soup. There is individualist hustling, a fluid conception of the relationship between the rich and poor, and an energizing element of the paradoxical (represented by the stone or axe-head: is it necessary ingredient or not?).

And speaking of Scrooge-types, it is also very unlike that other European fable of wealth and community, A Christmas Carol, which ironically (despite its overt Christian context) is not particularly European in spirit.

 Both fables offer implicit commentaries on the nature of the relationship between wealth and community, but I’ve concluded that  A Christmas Carol is fundamentally wrong-headed. It is based on a characteristically religious incomprehension of wealth creation as a sort of de facto sinful black-box process, for which absolution must be sought, either during or after the act. The incomprehension leads to the conflation of wealth and corruption caused by wealth. A Christmas Carol suggests that the rich ought to unilaterally share out of a sense of compassion, empathy, charity, moral duty and yes, guilt. In other words, it limits itself to challenging just the moral authority of the rich. The poor for their part, are forced to accept the demeaning status of recipients of charity.

Stone Soup on the other hand, challenges both the moral and intellectual authority of the rich, and is ultimately a more satisfying tale because of it.

On the second front, intellectual authority, the fable illustrates that the rich do not necessarily understand wealth any better than others, any more than the landed understand geology better than the landless. They simply have more of it. The study and possession of wealth are two entirely different, and mostly unrelated, things. In the fable, the soldier actually demonstrates a better grasp of the psychology of wealth than the old woman.

On the first front, moral authority, there is no presumption that the person holding the money has a right to determine what to do with it. She merely has the right to engage in a battle of wits with others who have the right to try and part her from it.  So the fable turns the proverb “a fool and his money are soon parted” into a basic set of rules of engagement:

1. Your rights to your wealth,  do not extend beyond your understanding of it.
2. You are fair game for hustlers who understand your wealth better than you do.
3. The role of the state is to limit the violence with which you can be hustled.
4. If you are poor, you have the right to hustle the rich within certain limits.

What I like particularly about the story is that it offers a moral framework for the movement of wealth that does not depend on redistributive, trickle-down or revolutionary logic. It does not require the rich to feel generous or guilty. It does not require the poor to feel ashamed or grateful. It does not require the desperate to feel angry. It merely requires that everybody think about their transactions. It also legitimizes slightly evil behaviors like deception and certain kinds of lying.

The problem with those big ideological frameworks is not that they are immoral but that they are static and dead. I prefer a living, continuously negotiated, slightly evil economic order over a dead one, no matter how noble in conception.

Living versus Dead Economics

Redistributive, trickle-down and revolutionary moralities of money all share a common feature: the idea that relationships between the rich and the poor need to be normalized in a way that hands over control of big chunks of the economy indefinitely to one side or the other (the poor, the rich and the outlaw classes respectively). This sort of economy is always a dead economy, no matter whom it favors, and whose behavioral biases are activated.

Another way to understand this is in terms of waterfall as opposed to agile financial logic. An institution is simply an upfront lump-sum payment of estimated transaction costs for a class of transactions expected to extend indefinitely into the future.

When you negotiate a paycheck with an institution, you’re done until you leave the job or try a re-negotiation. What’s more, even these negotiations are informed by social proof and mimicry rather than an actual examination of the transaction. It’s a rigged game.

A social order is a set of institutions, each defined by boundaries at which  negotiations occur. These negotiations are always ritualized to a degree, favor one or the other side systematically, and apply to an indeterminate amount of wealth flows.

Each of these models impoverishes the economy by draining agile intelligence from individual transactions in the interests of reducing transaction costs. Individual interactions between rich and poor (one dollar or other resource unit at a time, two people at a time) are replaced by a social order with fixed relationships between arbitrarily delineated classes. The vast majority of transactions become partially or completely ritualized. Between low-end haggling with street vendors and high-stakes battles over public billions in legislatures, most of economics is reduced to ritual.

It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the stupid economy. The dead economy. An economy created by the waterfall logic of class warfare.

Taken to an extreme, the majority of the population develops an aversion to haggling and negotiation; a distaste for actually looking at and assessing the subjective value of whatever is on the table. Instead, we choose fixed-price shopping over bargain-hunting (or at best, play gamified and rigged coupon sports), social proof (“am I making more than my brother-in-law?”) over valuation, and develop social taboos around the open discussion of money. And we criminalize even healthy patterns of hustling.

Revealingly, while the salaried rarely discuss their paychecks, free agents often swap stories about hourly rates and the value of projects won or lost. When income becomes volatile and intelligent, it becomes decoupled from status and sheds its taboos.

Barefoot Economics 

I am a recent convert to the idea of barefoot running, based on the theory that most modern shoes are orthotic casts that deaden feet. You don’t feel the ground; your muscles and nerves atrophy. I don’t run barefoot, but I do use so-called minimalist shoes: lightweight shoes with thin soles, no heels and no arch support. At best, they offer some protection against sharp pebbles and such. You have to be aware of where you step, your foot muscles have to actually work with the information flowing in with every step.

Minimalist shoes offer a useful design pattern for organization design. To the extent possible, institutions should be designed to be economically barefooted. This means, retaining as much information flow as possible around each individual transaction (or foot fall). You’ll pay more in overheads in the short time, but you’ll remain more economically alive and survive longer.

Today’s institutions are like running shoes from ten years ago. Heavily padded and cushioned, with arch supports, thick heels and sold with convoluted reasoning around ideas like “pronation” and “supination” that don’t actually apply in the vast majority of cases (those are real enough conditions, but are probably vastly over-diagnosed and over-treated).

We do need institutions though. Most of the economy cannot run barefoot. What might be good heuristics for the design of minimalist economic shoes?

Normalized and ritualized transactions represent economies of scale and scope, and are captured in an institutional order.  The general logic of the institution stands in for the specific logic of every individual transaction. The creation of an institution is essentially an economic intervention, to correct a structural problem (just like an arch support is a structural intervention to correct extreme pronation) in a class of transactions, and efficiently deal with “dumb money” (wealth that truly does not contain any information).

Within limits, such interventions are justified, to correct gross structural problems. Such interventions make sense when the economy is in extremely strange regimes that makes transaction costs skyrocket (think about buying groceries in a country with daily triple digit inflation for instance).

But the function of any major structural adjustment, (such as the New Deal, Reagonomics or the French Revolution), whatever the underlying ideological motivation, is not (or should not be) to permanently get rid of the need for all thinking around individual transactions.

Rather, structural adjustments need to go just far enough to make transactions computationally tractable in proportion to the value being traded, and then stop. If I buy a $3 coffee, I should not spend more than say $0.30 worth of my time figuring out the logic of the transaction and whether it is a good deal for me. If it takes me $10 worth of effort to figure out whether the $3 coffee is worth it, either I am so rich that it doesn’t matter, or something is seriously wrong.

The advantage in a transaction should not be structurally assigned to a member of one class by default, but situationally awarded to whoever is willing to bear higher transactional costs. This is generally the poorer party, thanks to the natural logic of marginal utility (which has some subtleties when applied to the wealthy, however, as discussed in this excellent post on the Interfluidity blog). Social norms must allow for such transactions to play out. When the poor are not allowed to hustle, the economy starts to die.

The fable of stone soup is a fable of barefoot hustler economics. Imagine a much more ritualized economy, where the soldier meekly accepts the assertion of the old woman that she has no food to spare as morally and economically authoritative, simply because she is rich. He walks away and starves. He doesn’t think he has a right to try and outwit the old woman. That means the end of innovation (which, in case you didn’t get it, is what stone soup symbolizes in our re-interpreted fable here). Even worse is an economy where the poor cannot even come into contact with the rich. Those are some thick-soled economic shoes indeed.

Fortunately our hero in the fable is a hustler in a hustler-friendly world. Every conversational move is pregnant with transactional intelligence. He wins because literally and metaphorically, he is hungrier. He is willing to pay a higher transaction cost for each resource unit than the old woman. And she pays for her lazy thinking by letting him prevail.

The incentives for the old woman are another story: why does she not simply walk away? Why is she vulnerable to having her curiosity hooked by the idea of stone soup? That’s the story of the social threat old money perceives from frontiers and the potential for new money and the eternal new-money/old-money yin-yang. I’ll save that tale for another day, but the Interfluidity blog post I linked to above covers the first half of the argument.

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On the weekend of March 2 and 3, we will be organizing the second annual Refactor Camp. The theme for Refactor Camp 2013: Jailbreaking the Bay Area. The event will be held at the San Francisco zoo, same as last year.

Regular tickets are $75 and sponsoring attendee tickets are $150.  The ticket includes lunch on both days, and is organized on a no-profit-no-loss basis. As with last year, the goal is to do a small and intimate event, where the intent of the talks is to catalyze small group conversations. We’ve kept the event size the same (40 odd attendees), but extended the event to two days instead of one, based on feedback from last year’s attendees, many of whom will be attending again this year.

Approximately 28 of the 40 odd available spots are already taken by early invitees, so if you are in the area (or are able to drive/fly in) and would like one of the remaining dozen spots, grab ‘em while they’re still available. You can register via the link above.  The link also has details on the theme and a detailed agenda.

This year, the event will have a slightly broader footprint, since a handful of people are flying in from other parts of the country (including me of course, from Seattle).

As with last year, we’ll have a field session at the zoo itself, and another on the beach across the street.

Last year, after the inaugural Refactor Camp, we started a Facebook group for the attendees that has since grown into an active online/offline community with monthly meetups.  If you’re interested in the group, this is the easiest opportunity for you to join, since the membership rule is that you must meet at least two current members in the real world.

The Theme

If you’ve been following my writing over the last year, you probably know that I’ve developed a growing personal interest in urbanism, particularly the problem of revitalizing aging cities through retrofitting of clever technology. From Uber to Airbnb, this sort of thing is already happening, and what interests me is whether such technological developments can be connected up to ideas like superlinear corporations, civic entrepreneurship and so forth.

I think of these possibilities as “jailbreaking” old cities with a lot of locked-up potential. San Francisco is a particularly good example to think about in detail, but I am hoping the insights that emerge from our discussions will be applicable more broadly.

We’ve got a really stimulating mix of talks that will touch on everything from real estate markets and ride-share models to school reform and the charter city project in Honduras. One of the highlights is a simulation exercise on Saturday afternoon,  devoted to figuring out how to build a post-apocalyptic survivalist community, complete with zombie defenses.

New York Area Readers Meetup on January 30

Finally, if you’re in the New York area, and are interested in meeting other readers in the area, message me. A few volunteers have started an online/offline meetup group in the area, and are hoping to get enough critical mass going to do something like Refactor Camp on the East Coast. The first meeting will be on January 30.  I won’t be able to attend, but hopefully I’ll be able to make it to one of the future meetups.

I definitely hope we can pull off an East Coast Refactor Camp sometime, perhaps as early as this fall. Though I’ve now moved to the West Coast, I think I am fundamentally not a one-coast guy, so it would be nice to develop roots for ribbonfarm in the New York area.

I was a reluctant convert to the idea of doing events related to ribbonfarm, but after over two years of experimentation with formats ranging from 1:1 coffees with people, to small meetups to a larger event like Refactor Camp, I’ve really started to enjoy this aspect of writing a blog. Let’s see how long we can keep this going. I even bought the refactorcamp.org domain, so I’ve made at least a $10 commitment to keep this going.

LIFT, Geneva Next Week

Finally, I’ll be in Geneva to speak at the LIFT conference next week. If you’re planning to attend, do find me and say hello. I’ll  have some time for coffee etc. too, on Feb 6-8, in case you are interested in meeting up outside the conference.

This will be my third speaking gig outside the United States, so I think I can now call myself an “internationally known speaker” now. Woohoo, the climb up the talking-head greasy pole continues.

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The story of neurasthenia or “invalidism” is a curious mid-nineteenth-century chapter in the story of the emancipation of women. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Bright-Sided, it was almost entirely a social phenomenon:

The largest demographic to suffer from neurasthenia or invalidism was middle-class women. Male prejudice barred them from higher education and the professions; industrialization was stripping away the productive tasks that had occupied women in the home, from sewing to soap-making. For many women, invalidism became a kind of alternative career. Days spent reclining in chaise longues, attended by doctors and family members and devoted to trying new medicines and medical regimens, substituted for masculine “striving” in the world.

What makes this curious, and rather ironic, is that invalidism was becoming widespread just as new possibilities were being opened up to women, through the slow substitution of fossil fuels for muscle power.

This was not a coincidence of course.

Opiates for the Masses

Invalidism was a peculiarly American condition that later spread worldwide. In fact, it was called “Americanitis” for a while. Besides middle-class women, men in certain middle-class professions, such as clergymen, whose social and economic roles were being disrupted, were also common sufferers of the condition.

The condition itself was a chronic cousin of the acute condition that used to be called a “nervous breakdown.” In both cases, doctors once believed that some sort of actual mechanical breakdown of nerves was involved. The symptoms were predictably vague: fatigue, anxiety, headache, neuralgia and depression. The treatments ranged from laudanum (a tincture of opium) to various patent medicines and electric shock therapy. These were prescribed treatments supplied by the medical establishment of the day, not surreptitious use of whatever drugs were deemed illegal by a prevailing social order.

The APA no longer recognizes neurasthenia, and it is tempting to dismiss it as a sort of socially induced and legitimized hypochondria to fill a vacuum of purpose. After all, medicine is much smarter and more scientific today. Instead of such pseudo-science around social maladies, we can now apply real medical science to real disorders like Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Instead of the dangerous or useless patent medicines of the nineteenth century, we can rely on billion-dollar pharmaceutical miracles. Instead of playing fast and loose with addictive opiates, we restrict ourselves to coffee and alcohol for the most part, carefully dispense prescription drugs, and ponder the case of marijuana with level-headed scientific caution.

Yes, I’ve decided I need to practice my irony in 2013.

But more seriously, the widespread use of prescription drugs (or more generally, socially acceptable psychoactive substances) to get large populations through tough transitions is a constant in history. Marx did not get it quite right. Religion is not the opiate of the masses; it only mops up what actual opiates cannot fix.

Drugs and grand narratives are inextricably linked in history. We can plausibly conjecture a precise relationship: the more incoherent the prevailing story, the stronger, and more varied, the drugs required to navigate it while the retconning is in progress. I’ve always found it odd that in the Dune science fiction series, the hyperspace navigators were the ones who lived suspended in a psychotropic “spice” melange: it is not those who can successfully navigate strange new realities who need drugs, it is everybody else.

Drugs might also cause transitions, not merely accompany them.  During a recent discussion, a gonzo futurist friend (the term is due to Justin Pickard) mentioned a speculative theory about one cause of the European renaissance: the gradual shift from beer and wine to coffee and tea as the main psychoactive substances in daily life. There is something very appealing about the idea of an “enlightenment” being caused by a shift from depressants to stimulants.

In other words, to understand any chapter in the story of humanity, it is not enough to ask, what is the plot? and what were the archetypes of the day? We must also ask, what were they smoking? 

There are days when I think that culture is primarily a function of what we smoke. I’ve gotten increasingly convinced, since I wrote the post on future nausea last year, that historigraphy is best understood as a branch of pharmacology.

Digging and Filling Holes in the Psyche

The individual psychology of what happens to at-risk populations during a major economic transition seems quite clear. An Oliver Wendell Holmes quote supplies the diagnosis: “The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.”

Parkinson’s Law supplies the prognosis: “work expands to occupy the resources available.”

Parkinson’s Law is usually applied to explain the creation of make-work in bureaucratic organizations, and is normally regarded as a pathology. But it is only a pathology when social constraints restrict the expression of a healthy underlying drive: to do meaningful things with available potential. When meaningful things cannot be found, meaningless and arbitrary things become acceptable.

For American women in the nineteenth century, it was a case of double-jeopardy: not only was their existing purpose taken away, they were prevented from pursuing opportunities that were opening up. Hypochondria expanded to fill expanding minds denied more interesting occupations. Medicine and narrative were skillfully woven together to prevent women from even recognizing their condition for the most part, supplying them instead with a futile activity with which to occupy their lives.  Prevailing sensibilities were expanded to accommodate that activity via fashion. Ehrenreich quotes a biographer of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy: “Delicate ill-health, a frailty unsuited to labor, was coming to be considered attractive in a young lady of the 1830s and 1840s.”

If medicine enabled a futile life script, fashion helped craft a narrative around it capable of surviving at least the scrutiny of a drug-addled mind.

It is tempting to apply the Myth of Sisyphus metaphor of rolling a rock up a hill here, but women were denied even an elevating and energizing absurdity of a life (Sisyphean activities are more common on frontiers, and generate their own intoxicants: kool-aid). Instead, they were offered a lifetime of digging and filling holes in their psyches.

It was not the first or last time in history the noble medical profession devoted a great deal of resources to its shadow purpose in civilization: helping societies navigate rough grand narrative shifts by appropriately medicating potentially troublesome groups. Which is all groups caught between safely fossilized rentier enclaves that can ride out tumultuous change, and chaotic frontier populations that can surf it to power and new wealth.

The story of civilization is the story of the one-eyed drunk on kool-aid leading the blind, who grope their way forward in a pharmaceutical haze, while secure gods gaze down from rentier heavens, sipping their champagne.

The Lost Generations of History

Why would a society, faced with vast opportunities opening up on an expanding frontier, not unleash the capabilities of an entire under-utilized half of the population to pursue them? Why drug it into uselessness?

The question crops up repeatedly in history, and the affected class is often some sort of prosperous middle class. Nineteenth century American women are just a particularly dramatic example. Sometimes, you can blame a malevolent external force, such as in the case of China during the opium wars, or alcoholism on Native American reservations in the United States.

But most often, societies that enjoy a good deal of control over their own fates do this to themselves. Between the eclipse and obsolescence of old institutions and the rise of new ones, there seems to be an unavoidable trough of lost potential, filled with anomie. In such troughs, you find the lost middle-class generations of history. Fragments on the cutting room floor of the human drama. Great art and great depressions (economic and psychological) seem to emerge from such troughs.

In America today, we have everything from Adderall to Zanax helping us find our way to a post-industrial economy, and everything from gun violence to social dysfunction being attributed to drugs. 

If you really want to experience second-hand the eternal hypochondria of the expanding mind, try some of the recent writings of Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, herald of the contemporary pharmacological age, and confessional narrative pioneer. I was unable to get through even a third of the first essay (the best part is the title: “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life”), so I am not going to attempt the book. At first glance, Wurtzel’s life appears to be the farcical repetition of the tragic history of feminism, but viewed as a representative of a declining middle class, rather than women, her story still has elements of genuine tragedy.

There is nothing inherently problematic about using drugs to achieve a soft landing into a new economic order. A soft landing is a valuable thing. If major forces like steam in the nineteenth century, and the Internet in ours, are unleashed without restraint, institutions with the potential to endure, and the laboriously accumulated social capital within them, get swept away. Baby and bathwater alike are lost.

Minimizing Institutional Rubble

But just because soft landings into a new economy — which most people interpret as either preserving existing institutions or evolving them gradually — are desirable, does not mean they are possible.

The violence of a major economic transition, I’ve come to believe, is largely independent of human efforts at comprehension and control. It is simply the ungovernable outcome of a contest between the economic forces being unleashed and the capabilities of the institutions that must face them. Small forces are easily and non-disruptively absorbed. Large changes turn the prevailing order into a landscape of institutional rubble. The bigger the shock, the less control humans have over the speed and duration of the transition. Like 19th century Americans in the early decades of steam, we are living through a Magnitude 9 economic quake.

There is going to be a minimum amount of institutional rubble. The best we can do is ensure that there isn’t more rubble than absolutely necessary, and carefully choose which institutions to sacrifice, at every level of economic agency from individual to Congress.

This is a curiously counter-intuitive idea, because we are talking about dealing with an emerging plenty. Why can we not use the new resources to soften the impact? Enough pillows for all, and no pills, with nothing broken during the move?

This is like asking why we cannot use the energy of an earthquake to fuel the construction of sufficiently earthquake-resistant buildings. It’s the sort of deluded hope that drives inventors to seek perpetual motion machines and once drove alchemists to seek the philosopher’s stone.

Yet that is also the paradoxical sort of hope that generates the forces of creative destruction in the first place. I haven’t yet figured out the precise nature of the paradox, but I took a stab at identifying it a couple of weeks ago, via the parable of Schumpeter’s Demon.

When I get that story straight, I think I might understand the nature of wealth.

The hardness of the landing and the total amount of rubble are not up for debate. The question is: who gets the pillows with which to cushion the impact? The answer: the less doped-up you are during the transition, the more pillows you can grab.

In fact, we can substitute cushions and pills for guns and butter and repurpose the idea of production frontiers in Economics 101 textbooks to state a sort of hard-landings pareto principle: the mix of pills and pillows you can buy to navigate a transition to a new economic order is limited by the resources of the prevailing economic order.

Hard Takeoffs and Landings

When an institution fails to achieve a soft landing into a new economy, its occupants must fend for themselves. This is where drugs come in.

When we think of the pharmacology of grand narratives, our attention naturally turns towards the dramatic. If you watch Breaking Bad, you could be excused for thinking that small town Middle America is post-industrializing in a pale blue methamphetamine haze. All pills, no pillows. The perception would not be entirely unfair. Grand narratives are to some extent self-fulfilling prophecies, and meth-heads do seem to be having a disproportionate influence on that particular subplot of the story.

But it is the legitimate (or borderline) drugs of an era that tell the more important story. If the Prohibition in America marked the maturation of the Industrial Age, it is the abuse of coffee and alcohol that marks its decline. A line from Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work has stayed with me since I first read it:

Office civilization could not be possible without the hard takeoffs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.

A civilization enjoying a period of relative calm, of the sort the Silents and Boomers enjoyed, can afford to to ritualize its drug use. I grew up drinking perhaps one small cup of coffee in the morning and one cup of tea in the afternoon. Now, like many Americans, I seem to down coffee by the unceremonious, burnt gallon. That’s what it takes to buy some pillows and avoid breaking bad.

We are about as far from the Japanese tea ceremonies and English afternoon tea as civilization can get. In fact, my de Botton routine has finally gotten to absurdity, now that I live in Seattle with its short days. I made up a little cartoon recently to illustrate this:

Let me hasten to reassure here: I exaggerate for comic effect. I am not yet a raging coffee-alcoholic (at least 2 people messaged me with concern when I posted the cartoon above on Facebook, and advised me to take more Vitamin D supplements; rest assured, I do take my Vitamin D quite religiously).

Jokes aside, the American Pacific Northwest does seem to be the epicenter of the ongoing economic quake. It is at once home to the prototypical enterprises of a globalized post-Internet world (Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and the Port of Seattle, which handles a large chunk of American container traffic coming in from Asia) and the most determined efforts to deny that a transformation is happening at all, through an almost religious belief and engagement in small-and-local thinking. The region is chock-full of backyard humane eggeries, Arduino enthusiasm and coworking spaces.

The pharmacology of this regional transformation is a fascinating phenomenon. The state of Washington is the coffee capital of America, and recently legalized marijuana, but it endures some of the highest alcohol taxes in the nation. I don’t know what that adds up to (I am told the high hard alcohol taxes are primarily about supporting the local wine and beer industries).

Last weekend, during a getaway to Portland in neighboring Oregon, I stocked up on cheaper alcohol. I’ll save my take on Oregon and Portland hipsterdom for another rainy day.

Beyond Anomie

Rather strangely for me, I am feeling unusually optimistic these days.

Perhaps it is sheer surprise at having survived almost two years as a free agent without going destitute. Like Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, I may have learned to fly by accidentally missing the ground while falling down. I have no clear ideas about how the emerging economy works, but apparently I have a place within it for the time being.

But I don’t think that’s really it. I see a cautious optimism catching on more broadly. It isn’t just me.

Perhaps it was the opportunity for a cathartic collective projection of anxieties that the Mayan apocalypse afforded  us last year. Making jokes about a dramatic end-of-history scenario (my favorite was a repurposed Superstorm Sandy fake picture with Godzilla in it, re-captioned for the Mayan end-times) might have helped us dress right for a less dramatic end-of-chapter scenario. Or perhaps it was the fiscal cliff farce.

Whatever the cause, I am getting the sense that the worst of the psychological trauma of the transition may be behind us (the actual economic damage is probably yet to peak).

At the very least, we seem to be past the denial and anger stages of the Kubler-Ross process of mourning. We have accepted the impending demise of a way of life. The mainstream appears to be somewhere between negotiation and depression, and I think a few of us at least have moved on to acceptance.

It’s a start. I am going to try and sober up a bit and see if I keel over with future nausea or remain standing. If I do, I’ll try and figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Look for purpose and stuff.

Purpose and Stuff

I’ll leave you with one final idea today, about the relationship between purpose without institutions, under-utilized potential and prescription drugs.

Like many who have a background in the decision sciences, I have a strong belief in the power of regression focusing: the idea that working backwards from a goal is more tractable than working forwards from a prevailing situation. Many AI systems use regression focusing to simplify automated planning.

For humans, narratives grand and small, encoded within viable institutions and default scripts, are what supply purpose to human striving. Even when prevailing big-P purposes — such as space exploration in the last century — are hopelessly romantic, they serve to drive the story. Unattainable P-urposes seem to be the stones in our repeated attempts to brew stone soup (“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Robert Browning, who wrote that in 1855, lived through the industrial revolution, and was among those who managed to navigate it with optimism rather than despair; he was a trustafarian, but it would be unfair to hold that against him).

When prevailing narratives prove inadequate for filling the vacuum of purpose, anomie descends. And we head to the drugstore for something stronger.

In times of peace, we are born to purpose, into middle-class scripts. In times of chaotic change, finding purpose becomes the purpose. There is a neat little idea (due to Teilhard de Chardin I think; I can’t remember where I first encountered it or the exact quote) that “purpose is not given us in our lives, it is the work of a lifetime to find purpose.”

That is more true in some eras than in others. This is one such era. We are living through a period where our mainstream grand narrative is driven by an over-medicated, over-caffeinated and inebriated faith in the cargo cult of failing middle class scripts.

But to abandon the cargo cult and look for purpose is a risky undertaking. Anomie and uncomprehending what-hit-me destitution await those who try and fail.

Staying with the cargo cult is almost as risky, and getting riskier by the year. For many significant at-risk populations, the question is not whether to jump, but when. Too early or too late, and you get killed. Unsustainable arbitrariness is the fate of those who don’t abandon ship in time (more on cargo cults another day; they are becoming my latest obsession. My working hypothesis is that hipsterdom is one of many middle-class cargo cults emerging today).

I don’t know what the big P-purpose of the post-industrial age civilizational grand narrative is (it is definitely not space exploration), but there is a certain peace to be found in accepting a plurality of little-p purposes and smaller meanings while we figure it out. I find it encouraging that many are finding meaningful commitments in their individual lives, even as horizons shrink and triumphalist globalism wanes, just as it did during the Gatsby era in the early part of the twentieth century. This phenomenon can seem like fatalism (Bruce Sterling’s “Dark Euphoria”), but there is a chance it is merely an emerging healthy pragmatism.

When slowly falling expectation levels meet slowly increasing commitment levels, angst slowly starts getting squeezed out of your life. Life begins the day after you give up trying to figure it out. As one of my clients likes to say, it’s a beautiful thing.

We might abandon the drugs and brew up a new pot of stone soup yet.

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I’ve been writing ribbonfarm as a solo act for over five years now. Blogging can get to be a pretty lonely activity, so I figured I could use some company for a change. I didn’t quite like any of the existing models of collaboration in blogging, so I invented my own: the blogging residency. Think of it as something of a cross between a sabbatical and a writer-in-residence program.

We’ll start our little experiment with Mike Travers of Omniorthogonal, Kevin Simler of Melting Asphalt and Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus, all of whom contributed guest posts last year. For me at least, their posts were like breaths of fresh air in this increasingly insular little refactoring shop, which has gotten a little too full of my own in-a-rut ideas over the years.

Each of them will be contributing between 4 to 6 posts here through the year. Check out the Blogging Residencies page to learn more about the “refactored perception” themes they plan to explore.  Thanks to your ongoing support since I began accepting sponsorships, I can afford to actually pay these guys small honorariums for their contributions. So there is hope yet for the future of publishing.

To kick things off, I asked all three of them to articulate their understanding of “refactoring,” the umbrella theme here at ribbonfarm. So here you go (and for once, I can grab the popcorn and let somebody else defend their ideas).

Three Perspectives on “Refactoring”

 Mike

Refactoring as a writing technique, in its most obvious interpretation at least, means the willingness and ability to slice, dice, and recombine existing conceptual structures in the hopes of coming up with new and more powerful ways of thinking about the world. This is not that new — this is what philosophers and scientists have been doing since abstract thought was invented.  But putting a new label on it, and considering it in light of the software engineering practice from which the word derives, takes it to a meta level. Can we actual refactor thinking itself?

Drew

To refactor something is to recode the familiar version of it–to effect change by moving information around rather than by changing properties of the thing itself. Reorienting one’s own perception of reality is a principal means of refactoring and an ability that writing and technology share. In a civilization that has refined its ability to detach information from concrete objects and freely manipulate that information, refactoring becomes more powerful, more unstable, and more frequent (see Taleb’s “Extremistan” metaphor) which is why it is an ever more compelling lens through which to view the world we currently inhabit.

Kevin

In one word:  reconceptualizing.

In one phrase:  finding new structures for existing ideas.  (Analogous to the concept in programming — finding new structures for existing code.)

Goal:  producing insight — seeing things differently, and hopefully more clearly and powerfully (which allows you to build out further ideas and conceptual structures more easily).

Contrasts (but is not in conflict) with the following:

• original research
• summarization of existing ideas
• education
• popularization

Examples of conceptual refactoring:  perspective shifts, perspective inversions, metaphors (how X and Y are related), generalizations, reframing (or creating a new framework), distinctions (splitting a formerly atomic concept into two related concepts, by introducing a new dimension).  There are probably more examples here, which would be interesting to try to catalogue, a la code refactorings.

Why Blogging Residencies?

Despite the place of the medium in “social” media, blogging doesn’t really have good social models that actually allow for interesting collaborations.

• Blogrolls are basically an exercise in mutual back-linking transactions. They don’t generate new value, just mutual admiration and SEO-juice.
• Team blogs are difficult to pull off except under special circumstances, given the highly individual voices of different writers. Most team blogs are effectively either aggregators, or magazines in the old sense of the word, rather than a true expression of the unique characteristics of blogging.
• The culture of guest posting is the ephemeral: drive-by blogging that misses more often than it hits. Most bloggers use it more as an expedient way to have somebody “cover” their posting schedule. Sort of like substitute teaching. It works for some types of writing, but is too limited for other types.

I like the idea of an extended “residency” because it fosters more serious collaboration. Last year’s guest posts from Mike, Kevin and Drew felt like a breath of fresh air to me (and to many long-time readers).  I am hoping to not just play off themes introduced by them this year, but I hope they are able to play off each other’s themes as well, in a way that enriches their home blogs.

We’ll see how this experiment goes. In the meantime, please welcome our new blogging residents. Starting in February, one in every three or four posts should be a resident post. Should keep me on my toes.

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