The Church of Irony and Hipster Saints

Now, it has been going around that I am a proponent of the church of irony, which is to say I am a believer. This is, of course, untrue. I am merely its messiah* — a title which holds no formal standing in the church. The church being what it is, doctrine holds that I am a false prophet and full of lies. Though given how I am the primary source of information on church of irony practices and beliefs, I can see how there has been some confusion. The church is a preposterous thing and I do not take it seriously in a religious sense. You might say I am very serious about the idea of the church**, and its use for illustrative purposes. Then again, it would be entirely appropriate if I were more serious about it than I let on. The nature of the project dictates that the church's beliefs reflect mine in a partial or distorted way. Consider it a funhouse mirror for the soul — neither wholly honest nor dishonest.

* Christ, they say, was Jewish.^ One might hazard that the existence of an honest freelance messiah is actually a rather inconvenient thing for an extant church hierarchy. Though even more so, it seems difficult to state that Christ could have faith at all, given His unique perspective on the whole God question.

^ Not that I am comparing myself to Jesus... or, technically I am, but not on any important level.

** But not so serious as to capitalize it. Consider this also my jab at Capitalized Concepts in general.

You could shave by means of such a mirror, if you had to, but only if you knew how it was bent. To know this, you must recognize your own face by its distorted image. It has been said that the church of irony is self-referential, and this is its downfall. Perhaps, but the whole history of philosophy is marked by self-recognition ("Know thyself" may ring a bell). And in a funhouse mirror, one may by chance percieve some features more clearly.*** To put it another way, absurdity necessarily contains some understanding of truth, or else it could not be recognized as absurdity.

*** Some features, in order of likelihood: the nose, the abdomen, and the sense of perpetual outrage.

[Absurd Digression]
By example: if I know that I am headed west, this is implicitly knowledge that I am not moving east. If I wish to head east, I need simply turn around. The truth/absurdity problem is presumably not be as easily resolved, though. Suppose I intend to scale Mt. Taranaki. It may be that I know with certainty that I am not at the top of Mt. Taranaki. Implicitly, I recognize some aspect of my current situation as inconsistent with my knowledge of Mt. Taranaki. Still, it cannot be overstated how difficult it is to reach the summit of Mt. Taranaki purely by empirical observation.

An illustration:

	vs.
Mt. Taranaki		Not Mt. Taranaki
	vs.
Also not Mt. Taranaki		Mt. Taranaki in Disguise

But what if, in my certainty, I turn out to be mistaken, and I actually am currently atop Mt. Taranaki? Well, I may be mistaken. I can always be mistaken. Possibly Mt. Taranaki has been socially constructed — which does not fully answer the question, either. I may tell you that a certain bridge has been constructed out of stone, but this will not enable you to build a new bridge. I may also tell you that the bridge was put in place by dropping it, all at once, from a very great height — but it is likely that I am mistaken. The problem of being mistaken is one of the things the church may yet manage to illuminate*. In the meantime, the author presently agitates for a more widespread understanding of statistics and probability.

(More clever skeptics may suggest that if, instead of Mt. Taranaki, I use Olympus Mons or Mount Doom, to illustrate that truth may be inaccesible or fictional, respectively, the analogy changes. It does! Interesting cases, both. But anyway...)

* More likely, a church representative will mistakenly arrive atop Mt. Taranaki, but believe he has scaled an undiscovered peak. Noting the excellent view and striking resemblance to Mt. Taranaki, he will found the Our Lady of Mt. New Taranaki Church, Daycare Center, and Wholesale Liquors.
[End Absurd Digression]

It may be helpful to elucidate some of the church's early and arguably core tenets. The church of irony was founded upon the proposal that the inherent purpose of the universe is to maximize the total amount of irony in the universe. Naturally, this requires that the universe contains beings capable of observing irony. By extension, it requires that these beings be capable of suffering, and for full measure that they be capable of suffering as a result of the observation of irony. This is a religious understanding; it is not falsifiable. With regards to scientific understanding, the church is wholly in favor of sincere scientific inquiry, on the premise that it would be ripping good fun if, in the distant future, at the very culmination of human civilization, earnest scientists discovered that the laws of physics were in fact a hoax all along. At this point, the laws of physics must arbitrarily change, and presumably the universe as we know it is destroyed.**** The church is very much in line with those Protestants who claim that dinosaur bones are a hoax, perpetrated by God and/or the Devil. Nonetheless the church also wishes they would shut up about it.

**** Or delicious chocolate ice cream rains from the sky; it's quite impossible to say. Be warned that, potentially, the ice cream is also an intelligent being capable of suffering.

Readers of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will note the similarity of the church's stance to this passage:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Both theories are entirely in the spirit of the church, and the church is most likely (though it prefers not to admit it) in the spirit of the Guide. Perhaps it will reassure my concerned friends that the church of irony is a religion undertaken with an attitude of humorous science fiction, rather than humorous science fiction undertaken with an attitude of religion***** (which is to say, the Church of Scientology).

***** One breakaway sect of the church believes that verbal expressions have their own physical force, and that rhetorical reversals (such as the above) serve to drive a great piston engine that turns the clock of the universe and creates the sensation of time. This is of course impossible, but has led to extensive speculation as to what, precisely, it was that the Watchmaker said to the watch. The most popular candidate is currently, "It's about time!"

Ethical Arithmetic, and a Matter of Opinion

Lots of things to come back to, but first, an exercise in categorization. (Note: I imagine something like this has been done before, potentially by utilitarians, but it's been a while since I've read any.)

First, I propose that there is a quantitative and highly descriptive measure of one's ethics: The ratio S of the amount of suffering one will undergo to prevent similar suffering in others. The most fundamental example is the case of giving one's life to save that of another. Under egalitarian assumptions about the value of life, this is a ratio of exactly 1:1.

Some caveats: real-world ethical behavior is almost invariably more complicated than this. Firstly, there is the problem of quantitative measurements of suffering. There are as many valuations of suffering as there are people, but still, this is only a difficulty of measurement. For now, the individual is asked to rely on their own judgment of the relative merits of, say, long-term malnourishment vs. a swift kick to the testicles.

Secondly, there is the blanket term "others". In practice, people value the suffering of others at very different rates, depending on their relation to them. Alternatively, other humans represent a continuum of self-ness and other-ness. The exemplary case is the common willingness of parents to sacrifice for the well-being of their children. Note that under the alternate terminology, this suggests that these parents identify more with their children than with themselves. Conversely, someone may be generally considerate, but have a particular animosity for some foe, and delight in that person's every setback. For the purposes of this exercise, I will base the quantity S on perfect strangers.

Thirdly, there is the problem of agency. Most people, I would estimate, are more likely to allow suffering to occur than to actively create it. Most likely, this can be accounted for by the time, effort, and anxiety incurred by performing such an action, or by veering from one's ordinary course. In that case, this becomes a sub-problem of valuation.

Also related to valuation is the problem of the perception of suffering in others. People cannot take action to prevent suffering they are not aware of. Perceiving suffering requires the trait of empathy, and the ability to witness or imagine the suffering of others. In the interconnected modern world, most moral failures are failures of imagination.

Returning to the initial notion of S: S is the ratio of S_s, the amount of suffering undergone by the individual, to S_o, the amount of suffering prevented in the generic other. On a tentative basis, let's equate the creation of joy/pleasure with the prevention of suffering (though this is, I suspect, much more subjective than pain and suffering). Anyway, on to categorization:

S < 0: This is Sadism. Such a person goes out of their way to cause pain to others. They might, for example, work several days tarring roofs, in order to save up money for a pair of steel-toed boots, in order to more satisfyingly deliver a swift kick to your testicles. The problems of agency and empathy come up here in reverse -- such a person is more likely to enjoy their own actions than to be pleased, in the abstract, by starvation in distant countries. Also note that values of S less than -1 represent the radical case of someone who might, for example, break their own arm in order to make you late for the theater.

S = 0: At precisely 0, the person is said to be a Sociopath or Solipsist. For the solipsist, this might more fairly be called the case where S is undefined, since the true solipsist does not allow for an "other" to measure against. By my own reckoning, I consider the sociopath more dangerous than the sadist; if not recognized and prevented, a sociopath will take the most efficient route they can to their goals, whatever those may be, and potentially cause great harm along the way. It is expected that positions of prestige and power will be disproportionately occupied by talented sociopaths unless considerable safeguards are in place. Whether democratic elections, in various forms, effectively provide such safeguards is a matter of heated debate.

0 < S < 1: This represents, I presume, the spectrum of normal human behavior. let's call this Civility: people compromise, do small favors when asked, give charity to the less fortunate (since money is more useful for those who have less), and generally make some effort to avoid harming others. There is, of course, a wide variety here, from those who would risk near-certain death to save the life of another (e.g., a 95% chance of their own death against certainly preventing another's, which yields .95), to those who could hardly be bothered to get off the couch if someone were being crushed under it.

S = 1: This I will call Utilitarianism,"the greatest good for the greatest number." Obviously, a great many previous thinkers have also called this utilitarianism. In its purest form, this case is the most literally selfless, as it makes no distinction between the self and the other. In the ideal case of perfect perception, a society composed of utilitarians will be the happiest, as every action will maximally decrease the net suffering in the world.

S > 1: But wait, there's more! Here we enter the somewhat mystical territory of Altruism. While not selfless in the same way as utilitarianism, and in some sense sub-optimal, I find it hard to call this ethically inferior to the previous case. In a way, it mirrors the case of the sadist, in so far as there are obvious nonsensical scenarios. Few people would, for example, give Warren Buffet $100 as an expression of altruism -- the money could do more good elsewhere, and altruism need not be wholly irrational. What is far more intuitive, though, is a parent (as mentioned above) risking death for even a slim chance of saving their child (for a 75% chance of die-trying against a 25% chance of success, S is 3, and strictly non-utilitarian). Parents, as I said, are a special case, but the calculations are the same for total strangers, even if the attitude is rarer.

Note: This kind of calculation is not actually how people think, of course, especially in emergencies. People are notoriously bad at estimating probability, especially under duress. Rather, it represents how they might think of the situation when given time to reflect. In a crisis, parents are compelled to act by their emotional bond with their child. An equivalent altruist would need to feel the same bond with all humanity.

As long as one does not get to the point of self-destructive behavior, I'm inclined to say that utilitarianism versus altruism is a matter of personal choice, and neither can be said to be wholly superior. Given perfect information, utilitarianism is optimal, but no such thing exists. In practice, it may be perfectly useful to act as though there is more suffering than one can observe at any given time. Furthermore, given that society is not composed solely of utilitarians or altruists, there are almost always numerous opportunities for efficient (S < 1) prevention of suffering, and the difference will only come up in exceptional cases. Still, altruists with very high values of S must take care to avoid debilitating guilt over trivial matters.

Anyway, if you are still reading, congratulations. I feel as though I've only scratched the surface here, but a truly thorough treatment would probably require writing a book. On that note, acknowledgement goes to Rob, who got me thinking about the altruist/utilitarian divide during an unrelated religious hypothetical.

Me: So if we assume Heaven and Hell, then the most moral act is to give up your own salvation for that of another, but --
Rob: You mean, for two others...
*Tangential debate ensues*

The Over/Under on Underrated Oeuvres

While I am, as you may have noticed, a big fan of context, I also think that "overrated" and "underrated" are two of the less interesting concepts in criticism. Joe Posnanski adeptly demonstrates the problems with "underrated" as a long-term reputation.

Underrated is a Zen place to be. What I mean by that is you can only be underrated for as long as people do not notice that you are underrated. Once someone starts calling you underrated, you begin to lose your footing. When enough people start calling you underrated, you stop being underrated. And when you become known as the “most underrated anything,” well, the jig is up.

Overrated has slightly different problems. When you say something is overrated, there is a risk that what you are actually saying is that you object to other people enjoying it. It actually directs your point away from whatever it is you object to, and makes it an attack on the fans. Here's the thing: fans are easy targets. You can find idiots in favor of nearly anything; it's very easy, in any sort of public debate, for both sides to trot out opposing idiots as straw men.

The nice thing about this as a logical fallacy is that the designated idiot has no doubt committed all manner of extravagant crimes against logic in the first place, making yours look not so bad. Of course, what happens in the end is that both sides feel free to ignore each other, and you get a nice display of pomp and fury without the risk of any real communication occurring.

An example: Rush Limbaugh is not really worth paying attention to. Some would say he's a big fat idiot. That is perhaps not productive discourse, but I feel relatively comfortable saying that Limbaugh is not acting in good faith. But, for some reason, Limbaugh has been big news lately. He seems to have a certain amount of clout in the GOP, but it's hard to say for sure -- maybe he's just easier to spot nowadays due to the lack obvious leadership in the GOP. But anointing him leader of the GOP is actually an advantage for the Democrats, because it makes the Republicans look crazy. And the gist of the argument becomes, "Rush Limbaugh is overrated." While this is politically useful, it has the downside of focusing even more attention on Limbaugh. So he becomes a bigger deal, gets more coverage, and increasing the perception that he's overrated.

Along the same lines is the practice of reading about celebrities in order to feel outraged at how much coverage they receive. Some people are "famous for being famous," but even originally noteworthy people are sometimes swallowed up by their own fame. Arguably, I am contributing to the problem even now.

But back to my main point: while the mechanisms of these cultural feedback loops are interesting, the contents themselves rarely are. When you claim something is overrated, you're giving a large, nebulous group of people control of the context. While in some cases the overrating has its own significance -- Limbaugh being overrated translates into real political power, for example -- it's still peripheral to the core argument. Eventually, you have to get down the business of explaining why he's wrong (I am assuming, for the purpose of argument, that you can find something to disagree with Rush Limbaugh about).

EDIT: And after that, you have to get down to the real business of explaining why you're right.

Conspicuous Signals

While the Daily Dish is often fascinating, this post troubles me. There are a number of assumptions with troubling consequences. It is itself a response to Matt Yglesias, who regrets that reading a book on the Kindle does not have the same signaling capacity as reading it on paper. Conor Clarke objects to his concern on the basis that it is a desire for "conspicuous consumption." He refutes conspicuous consumption in this fashion:

First, the supply of status in a given society is fixed. If I go from being the 198,745,647th most popular person in the United States to the 198,745,644th most popular person, I must displace some others on the way up. In the game of status, not everyone can be a winner. Second, conspicuous consumption leads to an arms-race mentality that produces wasteful consumption. Every dollar or minute I spend pruning my outfit or adjusting my bookshelf is a dollar or minute that I will not be spending on something intrinsically enjoyable, like writing a blog post.

Firstly, the notion of "status" as a single, linear scale is demonstrably nonsense. Consider the case where the book is Das Kapital, and then consider Atlas Shrugged. Each book will signal something different to different observers, not a flat "+15 status points." The idea of a unified status scale only works if you conflate "status" with "wealth" -- which, to be sure, often occurs in normal cases of conspicuous consumption (indeed, since the Kindle is an expensive luxury, it fits the traditional definition better than any single book). There is a difference between signals which are intended to convey superiority and those which are intended to convey certain values or interests (they may be intertwined, however).

Actually, the question of intent to signal is rather interesting. Yglesias could, if he wished, still purchase the physical copy of the book. Why doesn't he? The Kindle copy is cheaper and more convenient, functionally superior. If he bought the physical book, that would be a wasteful display -- conspicuous consumption.

Secondly and relatedly, Clarke assumes that all outward signs ("outfit...bookshelf") are there only to serve as signs. He seems to discount the possibility that one has read (or even intends to read) the books on one's bookshelf. Now, if the books are there to serve as status symbols, then they are false signals, a representation with no reality -- a lie, if you will. I think we can all agree, without further ado, that we disapprove of liars and especially posers. But why? Well, for one, they are polluting a formerly useful channel of communication.

While everything about us is, to some degree, a signal, books are especially useful in that regard. Signals are often symbols -- they stand for something else, a community, an idea. Your mohawk, my leather jacket, a briefcase -- they suggest things. A book, simply enough, stands for the text between its pages, and all its attendant notions. A well-understood book is very concise in this way. Not to mention, for the book to be at it's most effective, you should be reading it. It requires action and continued effort to display, and this is fundamentally honest. To carry around a book with no intention of reading it -- how sad!

So, a representation with no reality is a lie. Then what is a reality with no representation? Isn't this also dishonest? If I wrap a romance novel in brown paper because I am ashamed of it, there is something amiss. In that case, though, the concealment is a deliberate action on my part. For Yglesias, it is simply the nature of the Kindle that causes the appearance to be separated from the contents. Obviously, the Kindle has many advantages, and I wouldn't judge him for using it, but it does lack a certain intrinsic honesty found in books.

As I mentioned, the problem with signals is that they can be faked. This is the disadvantage of brevity. Some things are easier to fake, however. It is easier to carry one book falsely than to arrange a whole fake bookshelf, and harder still to make sure all those book are well-worn and tastefully annotated (note: but not impossible). The lesson here, however, is not to say "all representations are false", throw up your hands and give up on communicating with other humans. It simply requires that you not take any one signal in isolation. CONTEXT MATTERS.

Now, this does produce something of an argument in favor of "conspicuous consumption," from the observer's point of view. If someone is willing to spend money on something, they must care about it to some degree -- or they care about appearing to care. Sometimes this is good enough. This is how I interpret the custom of wearing a suit to an interview: it doesn't really prove that you're "professional"; it proves that you realize they expect you to look "professional," which is a good first step.

As a final point, Clarke mentions that one can now use Facebook and Twitter to substitute for the "book cover effect" by creating virtual bookshelves and such. These are great (I use one) and have the advantage that you can keep note of books you've borrowed from the library and read (conspicuous non-consumption?). On they other hand, if you're concerned about false signals, they're much easier to fake because, after all, they're free. I concede, however, that free-ness removes the issue of wasteful spending. More importantly though, these programs aren't really a replacement, since they operate on the Internet. Much as I love the Internet, it still pales in comparison to the physical world as a medium for socialization.

In essence, I object to Conor Clarke on the grounds that not all visible activity is conspicuous consumption.

EDIT: The whole blogpile begins with this piece in Vanity Fair, which is interesting but pushes the status/conspicuous consumption angle much more heavily. Clarke is justified in using the term on those grounds, but it was not clear to me from his piece (see, folks? context). Derek Thompson's response to the VF piece is also worth looking at. Everything I argued above still holds, but I may have misrepresented Conor Clarke on the way. Hopefully I can tackle this whole "culture snobbery" thing from another angle soon.

Democracy is Not the Issue Here, Part 2

Continuing our nascent foray into social theory blogging... with another ridiculous wall of text:

I concluded my first post by claiming that "money buys noise". But first, let's take a closer look at Digg and other aggregators, and then onto "long-tail" theory and its supposed rebuttals.

Digg, unlike many sites, is straightforwardly democratic: users vote various pages up or down. For popular items there is a feedback loop: items with more positive votes are displayed more prominently, and thus have a greater opportunity to receive votes. It's negative voting that presents the most problems, however, as it allows controversial items to be denied significant consideration. As a result, we would expect the average successful item to have a broad base of appeal be quickly digestible (no Digg item that takes more than one sitting to process will have any success). I have no extensive experience with Digg, so I'll leave the final analysis to others. The governmental analog is a kind of collectivized democracy, a cross between classical Athens and Soviet Russia... with a nod to the immediacy and frivolity of the 24-hour news cycle.

As an adjunct to anarchy, Digg is not terribly troublesome; as long as there exist Diggers who are exploring the Internet in depth, uncommon items will have at least have an opportunity to rise. As a content aggregator, Digg is supposed to make interesting content easier to find; the complexity of the interlinked web is reduced to a single, linear space. The argument against this is that it reduces an infinite homesteader-style prairie into a crowded tenement (with a penthouse on top). It certainly does make things easier-to-find, though... Ah, there it is. If you like what comes to the top, Digg improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet. But if the things on Digg are so common that you've already seen them, you aren't going to stick around (or do you? and do you vote them up or down?). If the aggressive explorers abandon the site, this should produce a vicious cycle of ever-more-limited content and ever-less-intrepid content locators.

Of course, it should not surprise anyone that popular things are more popular than unpopular things, but there has been a great deal of sturm and drang over just what the coefficients should be in this equation. Chris Anderson of Wired is credited with coining the term "long-tail" theory, to describe the phenomenon where, on the web, it is possible to profit from selling a large number of unpopular works. For example, let's look at this counterpoint from the Wall Street Journal, that constant friend to egalitarian theories:

"By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive."

I hope what you're taking away from this is that the glass is clearly half-empty, and that Amazon sell a lot of books -- millions of titles in fact. Amazon sells over 25 million different titles, 2.7% of which is about 675,000. Quick, how many books fit in the average bookstore? This is not exactly the New York Times best-seller list. And it fails to consider the most important question: how did these books become part of the privileged 2.7%? How many of them were at one point part of the tail? And, and one more thing... Are they any good?

Back to that in a minute. I have someone to be angry at, the writer of this Slate article :

But according to Elberse, that sort of anecdote is the exception. The reason? We're not very adventurous. Elberse examined the rental habits of customers at Quickflix, a Netflix-like service in Australia. She found that no group of customers exhibited "a particular taste for the obscure." Sure, a small number of customers regularly rented films from deep in the catalog—but they tended to be people who watched a lot of movies generally and so had much more "capacity" for venturing into the Long Tail. And still they chose a lot of hits: The most widely traveling Quickflix customers picked only 8 percent of their rentals from the least popular of available titles and 34 percent from among blockbusters.

Science journalism is doomed. We aren't given anything to tie those percentages to. We're given a lot of arbitrary mosts and leasts. But let me pull a Wall Street Journal here: there is some portion of Australian mail-service film-renters, for whom two-thirds of the movies they watch are not "blockbusters." And of course, that's ignoring that such a service appeals to people who watch a lot of films (because it is monthly), and encourages them to watch films indiscriminately (because they can get as many as they want). But let's just look at that "particular taste for the obscure" line. Of course there won't be such a group... if I take the sum of all people who watched a film of (let's say) 92% obscurity, I am actually taking the average of several different obscure tastes. Where do I end up? the center! magic! Whereas if I take the group of all people who have watched rented no "blockbusters," clearly, I have such a group. Furthermore, movies are probably the most homogenized major media.

You want a long tail success story? Talk to someone whose business model didn't exist fifteen years ago. Talk to a guy selling T-shirts for a living, while providing content for free. Talk to some guys who can raise millions of dollars because they make funny pictures about video games. Yes, webcomics are our cultural standard-bearers. God bless 'em.

Wait, actually, let's look at films... why are there films that everyone has seen? Because people are only aware of movies that are showing in theaters, which are large, expensive buldings to establish and maintain. Theaters want to be assured that the movies they show will attract an audience. They want a professional movie. This requires cameras, technicians, stagehands, extras, and a whole infrastructure that simply is not required to write Finnegan's Wake. They want professional actors, preferably famous, so that you don't need to spend any effort convincing people you have good actors. They want a professional marketing campaign, so that no matter how lousy the movie is, people will see it before word-of-mouth sinks it. By the way, did I mention money buys noise?

The businesses of advertising is almost wholly based on this. Word of mouth is the gold-standard form of buzz, because by definition it comes from known, trusted sources. The hyperlink structure of the web is modeled on academic citation, which is just a more rigorous version of word of mouth. In recent years, as advertising audiences have become more sophisticated, cynical, or perhaps just overstimulated, advertisers have gone to greater and greater lengths to inspire trust (hint: you should not trust them). Of course, people know you shouldn't trust advertisers, which has inspired disguised advertisements or "guerrilla marketing," the goal of which is to inject advertisement into a normally trusted or at least independent source -- paid bloggers, press releases disguised as journalism. This tactic is also favored by spammers and computer viruses, e.g., sending the virus to everyone in your e-mail address book. The citizens of the Athenian democracy knew it as the "Trojan horse" tactic. Taken to its logical conclusion, "guerrilla marketing" eventually produces the total breakdown of society as we know it -- by gradually voiding every source of information beyond your immediate social circle. Hooray?

Okay, that's a little far-fetched, because we have things like the Better Business Bureau and people are still furious when you violate their trust. And maybe I'm being a little hasty in autamatically categorizing advertising as "noise" (shameless falsehood, if you prefer). Advertising can contain information: the name of the product, various facts about it. You may be interested in the product. But you probably aren't -- and you can't trust those facts without independent verification (information that is part-right wastes far more time than bald-faced lies). At least you shouldn't trust them, because businesses are sociopaths.

Not that I think the average businessperson is a sociopath -- possibly a greater percentage than the human average, due to selection bias -- but large, publicly-owned companies (the kind best positioned to put money into advertising) are large, complicated entities with highly abstracted chains of responsibility. Most include in their charter a clause which promises to "maximize shareholder value." This encourages company executives to put stock price above all other concerns, for fear they may be sued otherwise. If a corporation is to be considered legally a person, it must be conceded that rarely is anyone in position to act as a conscience. Now, corporations are not evil: they are very specifically sociopaths -- for my purposes, this means having no empathy but stil having ability to feign empathy if it provides advantage. In a system that does not actively prevent it, sociopathic businesses will be the most successful, as they have no moral restrictions to their actions.

Now, suppose you are a sociopath in a position of power, and that your products occupy a dominant position in the marketplace. Will you focus on providing accurate information to consumers? Rationally, you should attempt to build arbitrary brand loyalty and discourage the use or even awareness of your competitors. You do this by, respectively, exaggerating differences in your product (to prevent commodification) and disparaging all attributes of your competitor. Both of these are noisy. In fact, it is in your interest to generally increase the amount of noise in all channels. As the established player, you are in favor of the status quo, so any free flow of accurate information has potentially negative consequences on your market share. So, for example, by taking control of one channel of information and spreading doubt and uncertainty about other channels, you can easily make it far too difficult for people to bother.

As examples, which just occurred to me in force, I present to you A) the demonization of bloggers by the mainstream media, and B) the demonization of the mainstream media by Republican talk radio types.

Epiphanies aside, this should demonstrate that long-tail theory is not necessarily a fact of human existence -- it's a fact of a capitalist economy with significant information inefficiencies. At the very least, this should have a severe effect on the rate of change in the "hump" of the popularity curve, which in turn would flatten the long-term shape of the curve.

Democratic systems on the Internet are almost certainly more homogeneous than anarchical/networked systems, but we can't say by how much unless we have a way to remove external stabilizing/noise-creating forces from the system.

One more quick thought: for the general benefit, it is necessary to construct systems of laws that do not advantage sociopaths. To the extent that a system allows money to be accumulated by sociopaths, and moreso to the extent that the system allows money to be converted into power, that system is primed for failure (not collapse, necessarily, but failure to "promote the general welfare," as the Constitution puts it). This suggests, at minimum, that all political campaigns should be publicly financed and that there should be strict oversight of political advertisement. On the more general point of "noise-pollution" in information channels, the solution is more difficult, but should involve tighter truth-in-advertising laws, a rigorous and even-handed fourth estate, and most importantly a cultural movement towards intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and the absolute refusal to tolerate being lied to.

Democracy is Not the Issue Here

As my colleague Ethan has been kind enough to supply me with a starting point, I will attempt to refute him.

He correctly points out the problems of unabridged democracy, but he fails to consider the defining factors of the internet. Let's take two of the primary missions of government: protecting its citizens and maintaining an orderly distribution of resources.

Firstly, individuals on the Internet are incapable of harming each other in any serious fashion*. To the extent that the Internet mirrors the Athenian forum, each of us is maneuvering across it in a little bullet-proof Pope-mobile, which is also blessed with the power of teleportation. The potential for tyranny of the majority here is rather limited.


Governments also concern themselves with the distribution of various limited resources. And from the territorial perspective, the Internet is without bounds. Land is cheap and the construction of any edifice is limited purely by time and the skill of the architect. Anyone** can have a website, and even more so a blog, MySpace profile, Facebook account, Youtube videos. These are all proprietary services, of course, but they are all products of the cheap-space economy. So if communities can't control what you own, where you are, or what you do, what do you have to fear from government?

Well, alright, it is possible to restrict movement on the internet, as the government of China is happy to demonstrate -- you just need to control or have leverage on the entire infrastructure. This, of course, is the reason for net-neutrality advocacy -- to pressure actual governments into preserving the Internet as a level playing field with a low entry cost. ISPs, Governments, and backbone providers all have the ability to change the "laws" of the internet, but from the internal perspective these are more like physical laws.

But really, what I am trying to get across is that the Internet isn't a democracy, it's an anarchy -- at least for the individual consumer. From the view of a business, it is far more of a democracy. That's the beauty of advertising revenues -- everyone's eyeballs are assumed to be equally valuable (They aren't, especially if you want to get statistical, but it's close enough). A retailer or content provider may very well consider itself at risk of being voted out of existence if no one uses their site. But this is just capitalism layered on top of anarchy. A slightly different mechanism holds for sites dependent upon community acceptance or involvement, such as Wikipedia. Although in raw form, Wiki editing is fairly anarchical as well -- it's only when you zoom out to an extended time frame that the results look democratic.

So if your options are unlimited and no one can tell you what to do, where's the catch? In a word: noise. The currency of the Internet is information. You can go anywhere, but you need to know how to get there, and you need to derive some utility from what you find there. Utility here is anything from lower prices on bulk sorghum to intellectual debate to pictures of cats -- assuming you wanted pictures of cats. If you wanted pictures of cats and I give you hardcore pornography, your interests are not being served. Because of this, search engines are the biggest enablers of the Internet as we know it.

The search engine is an inherently meritocratic idea; your position is determined by your relevance to the question at hand. As a website owner, you don't need to do anything beyond create the site. Just be relevant, and Google or Yahoo or MSN will come find you and tell people you've got what they want -- and these people will tell their friends, and link you on their blogs or Facebooks or what-have-you. Even better, these days, most engines (Google most notably) will account for this word-of-mouth support by increasing your relevance score. At least in theory. Now back to that bit about noise.

Noise is anything bad (subjectively) that gets mixed in with what you want (the signal). If your information is noisy, it costs you more time to pick out the signal. If you can't effectively search for what you want, you just aren't going to bother. This is why no one tries to get a date by flipping through the phone book. Actually, that one is noisy both ways -- you probably wouldn't want to date someone who cold-called you from the phone book (which makes you less likely to try). It's also why no one is reading this essay by this point. And this is why advertising is the most dangerous thing for the egalitarian internet. Money buys noise.

I'm going to stop there before this becomes completely unwieldy, and expand on this in another post. Suffice to say, I don't see democracy as the problem. "Of course not," you may say, "Dumb people are the problem." Nope, not even them. Part 2 coming soon, I hope. Christ! Why is analyzing society from the ground up so complicated?

*Identity theft and fraud being the exceptions -- and this will play into my larger point.

**Above a fairly low economic threshold, at least in the developed world.