As I’ve referenced before, algorithms keep us unhappy. I am guilty of this as much as anyone.
The never ending cascade of worm filled toffee apple of reddit is my go to. It’s a carefully calibrated algorithm that enrages me with news of the tragedies of the world, mixed with the most beautiful scenery, food, women and inventions.
It is a beautiful lie.
All social media is at it’s best an incomplete picture of the world, and reddit is no different.
As such, it begins to erode our view of our own life if we let it. I find myself viewing people, food and situations through the lens of comparison, which is not fair to anyone, especially not myself.
Reality is dirty, dusty and uncurated, and more and more I am trying to live in that world.
Make the Best Quality of Goods Possible at the Lowest Cost Possible, Paying the Highest Wages Possible”
Henry Ford
Henry Ford is not someone that I would aspire to often. Ford did some things right, and like many historical figures he was a complex man.
That being said, he understood a core concept of Capitalism, one that many, I’d argue most companies have forgotten.
If you cannot pay your workers enough to afford you products, you will eventually murder your own bottom line.
Searching for jobs of late, I’ve found many that are hiring, despite the pandemic. However, the wages being offered are shall we say misaligned with the geographical location.
I did a quick cost estimation, and it would take most people to live in a studio apartment in Los Angeles alone 22 dollars an hour, if they were to pay for all of their expenses. ( health insurance, rent, car repair savings, savings for retirement ect. )
However, the number of full time 40 hour a week positions paying under that, jobs that require years of experience, and a college degree is staggering, and unfortunately short sighted.
The long term health of the world has long been put aside in the shadow of the nuclear bomb. The decision of business leaders to not pay their worker’s enough, while lining their own pockets, has had a profound impact of the psychy of the american worker.
First off, it has led to a decline of so many non-essential and non-competitive businesses. Millennial Killing X industry is little more than a dog whistle to those businesses that refuse to adapt, and shows how symbiotic “journalism” has become. (a topic for another day).
The younger population has no excess income, and so have begun to shy away from those dalliances that their parents afforded. One of these is the overwhelming number of people who are in my life deciding not to have children.
This is a direct result of not being able to afford them. This is of course a long term problem, a problem that Japan is facing right now, and one that is threatening to hurt their economy and national security.
I could go on, but I will end with a simple query. When the party is over, and all the capital is sucked up into the bank accounts of just a few, where do you get your food cooked, and your shelves stocked? who grows it?
When the last employee is bankrupt who will make your economy run?
John D. Rockefeller 1885- One of the Richest Men Ever
I think much of the criticism of the 1% of wealthy people is valid and justifiable. However, I am reject the dehumanization of these people in order to push an ideology.
Capitalism with all of its failures is in my eyes the most efficient way to distribute goods and services. That being said, there is little reason for certain things to be monetized, and it is the role of the State in these places to act as the governing body. Private healthcare, private prisons, and private schools all have perilous moral quandaries attached to them.
(how can a doctor do no harm when he works in a system that perpetuates that harm?)
However, Capitalism’s biggest failures are of course those who’ve generated the most “success” (in the 1950’s version of the word, meaning money).
Imagine becoming exorbitantly wealthy. You no longer have to work or to struggle. Your wildest fantasies become real. You can use your money to overcome nearly every single problem in your life. You eat lobster and prime rib for every dinner, and fly to Japan for the weekend. It is perfect.
The rub begins a few years in. The brain is a pesky habituation machine. It is the core of human nature to always hunger for more. But what happens when there is no more? When your wearing a 200,000 dollar watch there is no finer watch. Sure you might collect art or real estate after that, but it all leaves you hollow.
Life is meaningless without struggle.
For some, they turn to philanthropy, to problems that their money cannot solve to focus on. Bill Gate’s attempts to combat disease, or Elon Musk’s adventures to Mars and to AI Human fusion are interesting examples of this, (not that either of them is perfect, they are by all accounts human and horribly flawed).
The other choice is to do the thing that once brought them satisfaction, accumulate greater wealth.
One might even see them as the modern day dragon, dragons themselves being commentary on the behavioral sink that wealth hording is.
Not only does this lack of meaning lead to a skewed view of reality, the social interactions of the Megawealthy are by and large skewed to their own fellows.
Fame and money attract people who are scammers, and beggars. Each interaction becomes a calculation for the uber-rich, what does this person want from me? Even if say you become friends with a lower income individual who desires nothing from you and asks for nothing, there will always be someone in that person’s life who will attempt to use you through them.
The lack of needing anyone else as a consequence of being wealthy is also incredibly isolating.
When you take all of these factors together you begin to piece together the lie of wealth.
The wealthy begin to see anyone not as wealthy as beggars and thieves, they no longer see themselves as part of a community or country, and very little brings them the same rush that being wealthy once brought them. Thus the modern day dragon is born.
Does this make their behavior right? I cannot say, all I can say is while I do not excuse them, I understand them.
Choose a website. Any website. Chances are you are not being shown the true chronological and wholesale content of that website.
Instead you are seeing what the complex math of an Algorithm decides is worthy.
Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter are the biggest offenders of this but they are by far not the only ones.
While this might be argued to give a better user experience, I’d argue that it’s more about the nature of causing conflict, which extends user time, which by and large is an attempt to extract advertising revenue.
This makes sense. We were offered connection, at the price of privacy, but these things were not spelled out to the public. We were blissfully unaware that our information was harvested, and sold to the highest bidder, the advertisements were the icing on the cake, the extra money.
The real dystopic algorithm is the one that shows us the content that prompts interaction, and then proceeds to take note of that interaction.
Slowly, but surely these algorithms attempt to understand and exploit the cognitive weaknesses inherent in all human beings.
All of this of course comes down to the idea of money. Or should I say the idea of a Zero Sum game idea of money. But that is a topic for another day.
A native American from the Cherokee tribe, he consistently defies easy labeling. He fought on the side of the confederacy, and he owned slaves, yet he came from an arguably more oppressed group, native Americans.
An smart man, he wrote for the local paper, and involved himself in politics from a young age, fighting for the rights of his people, against state, local and federal policies.
I won’t go over all of Stand’s trials and tribulations here. He lived a complex, checkered, immoral, and human life. He faced adversity from every possible angle you could think of but ultimately he was a man of his time.
Was he a good man? Who am I to say? I just find him horribly fascinating. A man who himself was the victim of institutionalized federal racism willingly enforcing that racism on others. A man who fought to preserve his tribe yet, fought for a government that most likely would have turned on him eventually for being non-white.
To me he stands as the perfect example that history is never simple, never clean, and ultimately is the story of humans in all their flawed glory.
Distraction is a powerful tool. Love him or hate him, whenever I see the president speaking in the news, I begin to sift through the news links on page 2.
Usually, congress, or some similar organization slips an unpopular piece of legislation under the noses of the United States’ people in plain sight.
It’s not so much a conspiracy as a tactic that taps into the central nerve of the current century. Our access to information is nearly infinite but our capacity to pay attention is hopelessly limited.
With the internet information’s power hollowed to a shell, the smartphone the last nail in the coffin. Few need a degree in English now that you have access to the opinions of the greatest literary minds’ on demand.
However, with this openness of information came the algorithmic dystopia. A constant nozzle of putrid bile, the worst of humanity poured daily into our minds, not our of malice, but instead out of capitalistic short sighted greed. Whatever the reason, man sits at the font of the whole of human tragedy, and sips from that poison cup, meeting it with near bottomless yet impotent rage.
Yet, it need not be this way.
The solution is simple, yet exceptionally difficult to achieve. Each wo/man must choose actively what they pay attention to.
It is not that the tragedy of the word are not worth paying attention to, but it is instead a humble detonation. “i am small. I can maybe save myself, and maybe I can make the world not a worse place to be. Saving others, that is truly an extraordinary feat.”
Many consider this defeatist, and I admire them for that, their hope and determination is admirable, but I think we do not honor the wo/man who simply does not make things worse, quite enough. The one who pays attention to what he can control, and directs his energy not at the masturbatory failures of the world but the failures of his personal world.
S/he is the one who votes in all the local elections, and volunteers where they live, donates what s/he can, and simply works to make their corner of the world a little better each day.
Some days you can only save one person, and it’s OK if that one person is you.
In the time between the 1950s and the early 2000s, knowledge was power. Information hid behind books, in scholarly papers, and in the minds of scholars.
Going to college qualified you for the highest positions of employment on the basis alone that you had access to this forbidden knowledge and more importantly the proof you’d studied it.
The university education however, began to slip with the introduction of the internet, and the paradigm of power shifted as fast internet evolved.
As a child, we’d wait 10 minutes for a 5 minute video to load, lectures that were an hour long would take 1-2 hours of uninterrupted loading, and considering that the internet used to take a phone-line to connect that was a tall order.
With the advent of faster internet and the slow building of the Internet’s collective database, information long lost to the stacks of libraries became easily accessible.
Businesses no longer needed an MBA candidate to tell them how to run their marketing at top level, when they could simply look up what that candidate knew.
Without really meaning to the internet transformed the once instant success of a college degree into a hollow shell of a requirement, many businesses demanding it for tasks as simple as mail room attendant.
Moreover, it should be stated that universities were not ever constructed upon the basis of job skills training. While this was often a pleasant side effect of the educations received at these places, the true purpose of any university is the advancement of knowledge. The teaching parts were often stapled on as an unpleasant reality for many a researcher, a requirement to receive the funding they need.
The outside world, the business world, decided collectively that the job should be correlated to the education, though as of late one might argue this is simply a convenience measure for their HR departments to quickly remove a swath of candidates from the running of any one position.
Thus, as knowledge became easily available it became worthless, and little has come in its wake to replace it. Or so it seems. As a new resource once seen as trivial replaced it.
The nature of structural change is difficult and slow moving, even without the influence of the capitalistic actors such as the news, and social media.
With them, the United States citizens have become simply burnt out.
Each day a new horror is unleashed before us, and we are exposed to them at an increasing rate.
Algorithms spew either echos of our own thoughts or those things that rile us.
But most of us are just burnt, because despite all the roaring against the machine many of us feel our wishes are being ignored. Largely because they are.
The current nature of the US Political system isn’t evil. It’s ultimately self serving. Corporations give unlimited campaign donations to Congresspeople and Senators who ultimately become lobbyist themselves upon retirement.
Each of them rationalizes their taking of this money. “oh well if not me, then someone worse than me will come along, so yes, I might have to do some terrible thing to the American people, but others would do worse.” They say.
But that is not, as many people want it to be, a moral failing, but a systemic failure.
The solution is not a moral crusade, but instead the slow injection of policies that change the structure of how the system works.
I say slow, not out of some urge of caution, but instead as a flavor agent of sorts to make such a change more palatable to people in power. Very few people in power would vote for something that so dramatically threatens their self interest and so this system of implementing reforms would have to take place over a decade or so.
While this all might sound cynical, I am at my heart a man who thinks that a practical long term solution is much better than a flashy short term one.
The court of public opinion is a powerful entity, but the current need to shame individuals is troublesome and puritanical.
Shame does not work to enact long term change. It is a short term solution that makes the one throwing it feel better.
Which makes sense. Nearly all creatures avoid discomfort, and seek comfort. It is the natural human response to want to remove the uncomfortable, and troublesome elements in the shortest time possible.
Unfortunately, in both individual and societal growth, quick fixes are the antithesis of sustained long term change.
The main problem with shame, and by reflection the whole of cancel culture, is that we have a method for vengeance, but no mechanism for forgiveness.
I am not saying that we should forget, or even allow certain individuals back into the collective tribe, but the current method of punishment is indefinite banishment. This seems a bit harsh, and does not encourage people to come forward and seek redemption.
If there is no method for redemption in our culture, no standard to be met collectively, what reason is there for the individual to change authentically? Moreover, seeing the destruction of their fellows will this not drive those who have similar beliefs further underground?
Here, in the quiet warmth will their views not continue to fester and rot, while they wear a mask?
Are we to summon the inquisition, and torture innocents to find these few hiding elements?
Would it not be better to simply have a true path to redemption?
Some may say providing a path would lead to immodest and untruthful seekers of forgiveness, but are we to toss the rest of those that actually want to be part of society out with the heathens?
It is no secret that the United States, my preferred nomenclature for the country so often regarded as America, is in limbo of sorts.
Love him or hate him, the president of the USA ‘s actions are ineffectual for the most part. At the beginning of the pandemic he denied how serious it was.
This is not a political statement, though I am sure people will make it one. I can understand from a historical and personal perspective why many of his supporters chose him.
The current US President is precisely why Plato hated democracy.
However, I do not think, as ineffectual he can be he’s the problem.
We’ve not changed in 20,000 years always demanding leadership and sacrifice but not demanding it of ourselves.
We’ve lied to one another. We’ve acted against our best interests. We’ve earned our leaders.
We allowed our merchant class to export our jobs, because we feared what unions might inspire. We allowed our politicians to take money from special interests because we’ve swallowed the lie that the government is too corrupt to distribute funds to campaigns.
Each freedom stripped away did so in the face of great fear, and like all fears each time we did nothing to challenge it, each time we ran from it, it grew stronger and demanded more.
In the years of the Obama Administration we grew complacent. We did not demand accountability for things he’d done, we assumed racism was fading, we assumed people were simply going to do the right thing, that the historical forces were now one their way to permanent utopian levels.
We gave up the good, slow, habitual work that led to the first black president, and in that void others, powered by fear, hate and poverty elected a man unfit to lead.
The current state of the united states is on all of our heads. We all have work to do. We will always have work to do. That is the nature of the universe.
Max W Beaulieu 