In Praise of Breasts ... and a little commentary on "free" speech on social media

Breasts are wonderful. They feed babies. They're beautiful. And you can't post a picture of breasts on Facebook. You can on Twitter but they warn viewers before one can see them.

Lies and conspiracy theories are awful. Being in a pandemic highlights the fact that a distortion of facts can literally kill people. You can post lies and conspiracy theories on Facebook and now - in some instances - Twitter will warn you when you're about see a lie or conspiracy theory.

If you post a snuff video which results in a death, it will be be taken down (and I'm not sure but think there would be criminal charges as well).
If you promote behavior which results in a death, it gets left up.

Weirdly, people are outraged that Twitter now warns when something is a lie but these people are not outraged that they warn you when you're about to see nudity.

Don't pretend that social media isn't already selectively flagging and censoring content on platforms or that such actions don't already reflect judgment calls. Don't pretend that you want to live in a world where there is not a degree of content moderation and / or warning flags on platforms. Don't pretend that even "speech" doesn't have consequences for which you are responsible.

Dee Hock, the Creator of Digital Money Is Now Generating Digital Thoughts

Dee Hock fascinates me. He knew that money had been many things over time, from tobacco leaves to gold bits to pieces of paper - and realized that with the advent of the computer it could be digital bits. As VISA's founding CEO, he dreamed up a system that could turn digital bits into money. VISA became the first organization to ever hit a trillion dollars in transactions in a year. A trillion. Dollars.

He understands business and finance as well as anyone and he's quite the critic of it.

He turned 90 a couple of weeks ago. And I just found out that he tweets. He sounds at turns like some mystical guru and old curmudgeon, self-righteous at times and insightful at others. But always provocative.

Here are a few of his tweets:

• Watching Trump trying to play President is like watching a walrus trying to play a piano.  
• Simple purpose and principle give rise to complex, intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulation give rise to simple, stupid behavior. 
• When observing the rich and powerful, take care not to confuse cunning with intelligence, avarice with ability, and notoriety with merit.
• 1st manage yourself, 2nd manage superiors, 3rd manage peers. Hire good people and induce them do the same. Only then do you become a leader.
• Capitalists invest their money in commercial corporations. Employees invest their lives. Which deserves the greater return?
• Philosophy of unrestrained capitalism:
• As few as possible, should take as much as possible, from as many as possible, as often as possible. 
• Dogma has this to recommend it; the believer is relieved of the struggle for knowledge, understanding and wisdom.
• Every life is subjectively epic and objectively trivial.
• The universe is constantly wanting to play with us. Why we greet it with such a grave demeanor, long face, and furrowed brow is difficult to fathom.

You can scroll through his tweets here. It's a deep well.

https://twitter.com/deewhock 

Freud, Jung, Hidden Impulses, the Collective Unconscious, Hitler, Putin, Conspicuous Consumption and - Finally - Community

Freud's Couch Was Sort of a Bed

About a century ago two competing models for modern media emerged in the U.S. and Germany. Using what they were learning about psychology, the Nazis created state propaganda to sway the masses to serve the interests of the state and advertisers in the U.S. used those same insights to serve the interests of the corporation. (A fascinating documentary, the Century of the Self, makes this argument and can be found here.)

William James published what some argue was the first textbook on psychology - the Principles of Psychology - in 1890 and Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and Civilization and its Discontents in 1930. If you visit the apartment in Vienna where Freud pioneered psychotherapy you don't just see that the Freudian couch was actually a bed. (Freud thought that a bed was a safe and  cozy place from which to free associate but perhaps the preponderance of sexual references would have given way to a preponderance of food references had he instead used a kitchen table.) What you get from the museum that once was his office is this very exciting sense of the mind as a new frontier. Rather than blame spirits or madness for weird thoughts and behavior, these early psychologists were taking a scientific approach to the mind, hoping to better understand the impulses that seemed to lay below the seemingly thin veneer of our civility. Jung's concept of the collective unconscious might be suspect but it gets to the reality that something binds us that is almost mystical and that these impulses could be tapped to sway large groups to do strange things - like drive to the mall on a sunny day or shout angry slogans at political rallies.

These insights were exploited with new and transformative technology of that time. The radio was the first technology to allow people across an entire nation to hear about the wonders of the Third Reich or nylons and electric razors and it was quickly followed by TV.

Obviously it made an enormous difference whether a community used these powerful new media technology to promote the interests of the state or the corporation. Someone once said that the book most likely to change minds in the Soviet Union would be the Sears Catalog. Magazines, newspapers, radio and TV shaped minds - and thus communities - as only churches and sacred texts had before. And it was no coincidence that the state and corporation undermined the dominance of the church last century.

This century's transformative media is the internet and the social media it has enabled. The shift in advertising revenue from newspapers to the internet has shattered old business models and forced a scramble to discover new audiences and sources of revenue for reporting and commentary.

And curiously, the choice about whether this model will be funded by the state or the corporation, by advertising for political interest and shared values or great values on products you'll love, is still in question. This week's senate hearings with the social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google gets to the question of how social media has been used to manipulate voters and thus American policy rather than merely focus on getting us to buy more goods.

It's worth noting that this is social media.

About the same time as the emergence of the radio and television, a third really powerful technology emerged: the telephone. This was intimate and personal and allowed two people to communicate and in the process strengthen relationships. I think it's telling that so much of the internet is experienced on a phone. Even though actual talking on the phone is not even in the top ten activities people do with their phones, what they're doing is closer to what was done on the phone last century than what was done with TV and radio. They're creating and feeling part of a community.

Community is a third goal, different from the goals of consumption and propaganda. I think one thing we're seeing in the success of Twitter and Facebook is the strong impulse to belong. You can dismiss this as tribalism but I think it speaks to communities of the mind and shared values, to what it means to be human and feel the part of something larger. It's worth noting that the strength and vulnerability of these brands is that they are platforms. Zuckerberg doesn't make editorial decisions about what posts your Aunt Leola or cousin Curt should make on Facebook. They do. Your friends are rarely selling goods or trying to win votes for the political party they are starting. (Although I admit I would be interested in seeing the posts of someone who was starting a new party; that sounds like an interesting person.) They are simply connecting, sharing what they are proud of, what impresses them, what they are worried about and what made them laugh. The third way beyond media as a tool for conspicuous consumption or political propaganda is media a tool for creating communities of the mind, of shared interests and simple friendships. It's not novel that people would do that; it is novel that people could do that across distances, with a tool more inclusive than the phone or the kitchen table.

Bot Puppets

In the 2016 election, bots were busily posting and reposting weird memes to people who confused cynicism with sophistication, people who found credible claims like, "the Pope endorses Trump!" and "Clinton has used the Clinton Foundation to make Millions!" Millions of bots on Facebook and Twitter were busily forwarding fake news to gullible users who still didn't understand that a brand new site labeled "TrumpWillMakeAGreatPresident.com" or "MelaniaWillBeAMoreBeautifulFirstLadyThanBill.com"  is less likely to be offering objective news than the New York Times. Given they had already believed that the New York Times and other "mainstream media" sites were not to be believed, they actually found this put up overnight sites more credible than the mainstream media that still practiced journalism according to standards that predated the internet.

These bots were particularly busy swaying what the social media algorithms had identified as "soft Clinton" supporters. While they couldn't hope to win many black voters in Philadelphia over to Trump, they could feed rumors to voters likely to vote Clinton and thus convince them there wasn't enough difference between Clinton and Trump to justify voting. Just getting Clinton voters to stay home was enough to tip the election in the three states that gave Trump the national victory while only giving him the edge of 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It was as if someone had concluded that a car salesman and a car thief were no different but it worked.

My elderly mother was having trouble with her computer during the election. After a lot of finagling I got her back online and signed into her Facebook account. This was either late October or early November.  I was aghast at the sheer volume of "news" articles posted to her Facebook feed. Obviously bogus news sites that looked credible to her were decrying Michelle Obama's lack of fashion sense and lauding Melania, showing Trump's promise to restore America or Hillary in an angry face. I honestly scrolled through about 50 of these posts while seeing only a couple of personal posts from her friends or family. And each post seemed to be from yet another fabricated site. It was absurd.

I don't know how many people will ever admit they were swayed by bots. It's not flattering to be duped by computer code. (Although I imagine that by 2017 we all have been at least once.)

My term for the folks who were swayed by bots? Either to believe that Trump somehow cared for them or that Hillary was just as bad? Bot puppets.

If you are a regular reader of this blog I expect you to incorporate the term into your daily vocabulary. Here is how you use it.

"Oh don't be just a bot puppet Justin. You've got to be smarter than three lines of code. Your argument doesn't even make sense."

"Did you just forward that argument from a bot? What are you, a bot puppet now? Just doing whatever the computers tell you? Think for yourself Justin."

"Well, Shelley is such a bot puppet that she doesn't know the difference between nytimes.com and notyourtime.com. Seriously, that woman will forward anything from anywhere as long as it blames Bill Clinton for whatever she's upset about today."

The goal is to make it shameful to rely on memes to do your thinking, to make bot puppet have all the stigma of racist.

Wait. That might not be enough to sway some of Trump's base that it's a bad thing to be a bot puppet.

Trumpian Twitocracy (For proper pronunciation, imagine an angry Elmer Fudd saying this)

There is a lot of criticism of Trump for his tweets designed to punish companies he's mad at or reward the companies he's happy with.

To be fair to Trump, it is the first time that anyone has tried to manage an entire economy with tweets. Not the first time a leader has tried to make friends rich and opponents poor, just the first time to do it  140 characters at a time.

Feudalism, communism, capitalism ... twitterism? Twitocracy? Not sure what to call it but it is a fascinating new development in economics.

I'm trying to influence the small economy of Estonia with tweets but so far to no avail. I'll continue to experiment and report back once I've collected data.

Tweets from August '11

The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization is now available in paperback at http://bit.ly/pC9E8q.

Apparently I'm getting too much teeth whitening agent. It's starting to affect my hair.

Systems Thinking in Kuala Lumpur in mid-September.http://bit.ly/nvl098 See you there.

Must be weird to be a politician. You have simultaneously proclaim that this is the best country ever and that we're all doomed.

Like white men dancing, House Republicans voted for huge deficits during expansion now voting for balanced budget during recession. Timing?

Seems like there's an overlooked market for 3-D tattoos

There is, she said, far too much emphasis on the ability to make love and not nearly enough on the ability to repair it.

Traditional newspaper subscriber is worth $1,000 / yr. Online subscriber is worth only $3. Any wonder newspapers are hurting?

Idea for revenue enhancement for online news: bad news free, good news costs extra. (Pay more for news but less for meds.)

It had been a great deal, sure. But still he should have known better than to buy a game console with a misery stick.

Your credit rating's bad. Collateral?" "Hmm." Searches pockets. Pulls out a fistful of odd objects. "Yellowstone Park, aircraft carrier..."

RT Bill Gross: By the end of 1993, there were 623 websites: http://j.mp/rlv2Zn Isn't that an amazing fact! Fill in the blank. What did we do without?

Economist: will credit downgrade force Congress to admit idiocy of brinkmanship rather than compromise? http://econ.st/oj4ghL

Chula Vista has voted for well dressed illiterates rather than well read nudists. Borders book store has become TJ Maxx clothing store.

Tea-Brained: someone not only lacking judgment about economics but the judgment to realize this should preclude them from influence over it.

S&P downgrades government bonds, triggering a massive sell off of stocks and flight into .... government bonds. @im_allen_warren

Gay activists want Bert & Ernie to marry. How could anyone manipulate puppets like that?

Now that they've fixed the economy, tea party members have a new demand: they would like - even once - to be invited to an actual tea party.

His religion was fortune cookiarian. He religiously ate Chinese food and used the fortune cookie message for that week's inspiration.

Building on the popularity of fantasy football, I'm thinking about starting a daydreaming league.

What if Bachmann's campaign was launched by activists just trying to make Palin look credible and even they never assumed she might win?

Panic! Panic! Things are bad and getting worse! (Just wanted to make the point that a tweet can do everything a 24/7 news source can.)

Here in Vancouver, BC the housing market is a bit different than California's. House recently sold for $355k MORE than original asking price.

Turns out that Shakespeare was not even written by Shakespeare but by another man with the same name.

Wonder if I'm the only one who has ever searched for Yelp's potluck section.

Bachmann promises gas under $2. Given last dip below $2 was due to collapse in economy, economist thinks she can:http://econ.st/n4nZuj

Must be in Canada ... I could have sworn I was just greeted with a "Ron jour."

Business idea: the booty free disco. Could be a chain of them at every border crossing.

AOL is worth ~$1B. Google is worth ~$160B. AOL costs $9/mo. Gmail free. Free is worth more? No wonder they call them socialist networks.

Steve's retirement puts a new slant on the question, "how do we create more Jobs?"

Now we learn if Jobs was just one of the most extraordinary business leaders of all time or whether he was also good at company design

"The next hot cuisine? Really? Well how do you make Chinese comfort food?" "Just melt cheese on everything." "Oh."

In '86, Steve Jobs bought Pixar from Lucas for $10M. In 2006, he sold it to Disney for $7.4B, becoming Disney's largest shareholder.

People thought it was cute that she'd learned to say "bye-bye" so young, not realizing she was actually asking to shop.

The magic app for students: the upgrade your grade app.

Idea for t-shirt that comes with free redneck: ONE WORLD. So really, there just isn't enough room for you and your kind here.

Subway here in San Diego still not operational.

You could tell the car had been made in Detroit because the blinker had a distinctly Motown rhythm to it.

The kind of girls who had given names to their fat cells

Ta da!! The Fourth Economy http://amzn.to/o6dKRU should show up as available in print edition any day now!

Csikszentmihalyi’s Evolving Self - most overlooked of #BestBooks

Just a coincidence that typical "reign" of alpha chimp (4-6 yrs) is same as most presidential / PM terms?

It seems terribly generous of the book industry to categorize a four year old's account of his trip to heaven and back as nonfiction.

Well that's one way to quiet all the politicians: make them wait until the opposing party says they can talk. http://bbc.in/pqSuey Baffling.

He was still hurt by her seemingly premature attempt to put him in a rest home after he'd twisted his ankle in his early forties.

Tweets from Jan 2011

Egyptian government shuts down Internet - citizens forced to use hieroglyphics. On possibly related note, protestors build human pyramid.

Wonder how different you'd be if you were someone else. If your folks named you Alexander the Great instead of Reginald, for instance.

Another year and again snubbed by the organizers of Davos. Don't these people know that I have a blog?

3 happiest sounds in the English language: haha, ah, and aha. Apparently, exhaling makes us happy.

I swear they said Asian cuisine but was surprised to find mashed potatoes and digestive cookies. It was, sadly, an Agin' cuisine buffet.

Citizen - Journalists risk lives to cover national policies. Where are the employee - journalists to risk jobs to cover corporate policy?

Don't criticize anyone til you've walked a mile in their shoes. By then, what w/ the pain and blisters, you should be able to really cut loose.

Walmart has 'anti-aging' makeup for 8-year-olds? Wouldn't it be enough for them to resist aging by simply not wearing makeup?

Everything you ever do has to be, by definition, doable. I don't know why I keep having to relearn the need to change tasks until they are.

I'm thinking about getting a tattoo. Sort of. Just the words, "This is not a tattoo" written on my bicep.

"That's ridiculous!" "Well yes dear, but sometimes ridiculous is the best we can do."

I wish, rather than telling us to be more like China, Obama had told us to be more like Norway. Seems obvious who has better quality of life.

Taking my cue from Congress, I'm no longer going to just nod when I agree – however tepidly. I’m going to stand and applaud.

Cuba, that last holdout of communism, has the 2nd highest govt. spending as % of GDP. Only Iraq, our example of democracy, has higher.

Obama won't accept 2nd place, yet we're 10th in happiness, 11th in per capita GDP, and 33rd in education. Maybe he'll accept 3rd?

The universe is infinite AND expanding AND right here! If not mind boggling that seems at the very least mind jostling.

So, it turns out that it was Rahm Emanuel who was born in Kenya?

The biggest delusion of middle age is thinking that you won't have to change your life in the next decade just as much as you did at 20.

Today's biz idea: surf video web site, YouTubular.

Parents today worry about their children being bored in the same way that parents 100 years ago worried about their children being hungry.

"As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision." - Lofti Zadeh

I wonder whether they consider it a good or bad thing when employees at Jack in the Box think outside the box. 

Obama quickly tired of the Chinese president shrugging off all his challenges and queries with the quip, "The Hu Man is only Human."

34 of the 100 largest economies in the world are companies. A quarter of countries would not make Fortune 500 list (assuming sales ~ GDP)

I wonder if the Chinese will also add a 13th astrological sign. Already have a dragon and tiger. I vote for year of the panda.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." – MLK

I would like to find a really good personal trainer. And by really good, I mean someone who actually exercises for me.

Schwarzenegger says governorship cost him $200 million. Curiously, that's just a fraction of what it cost the state.

Her new year's resolutions became less demanding every year. This year it was simply to take down the Christmas lights. Eventually.

So, the earth is wobbling on its orbit and the 1st thing that concerns people is whether their horoscope has changed?

It's not so much 1 brain as many brain modules w/ different goals. Conflict is just a reminder that it's a small, primitive tribe up there.

About the same temp in Canada and San Diego this week. Only here it is 22 Celsius and there it was 22 Fahrenheit.

Presumably, awe is best in small doses. Awe-some is better than aw-ful.

Back from Coronado cooking up ideas on how to pull off a LBO of beach property by issuing junk bonds against my suburban home.

Will next generation pay security deposit, and then turn on utilities AND aesthetics? "Well yeah, I have electricity but no art or music.

Happy 1/11/11 day! There are 1's enough for everyone 1!

Honest to goodness graffiti seen here in Canada: "A Quiet, Peaceful Place." Canada, where even the vandals are polite.

In the 2,000 miles between San Diego and Corpus Cristi, there are 6,700 gun dealers. Along that stretch, Arizona is the easiest place to buy.

Saw a palm reader in downtown Vancouver. For an extra $20, he'll let you keep your gloves on so your hands stay warm while he does it.

If the Queen visited Canada, she'd only need one Canadian bill ... which she could then use as ID for cashing checks.

My nephew casually said, "It's hit and mystery." I would have corrected him but the way he said it actually makes more sense.

I think for my next career, it'd be fun to get into improvisational academia - just expounding theories w/o constraints of data or reason.

I think that flying could be really exciting. Especially if nobody had ever bothered to explain to you before how seat belts work.

Facebook values 500 million users at $50 billion, meaning 1 user = $100. I wonder if this will create a black market for false identities.

Initially baffled by the high prices, it took Ralph some time to realize that he'd stumbled into Cost'Mo instead.

I stepped outside and looked around. I couldn't see a flaw anywhere. It is a perfect day.

Oh boy. Here we go into the awkward 'tween stage of the century.

 http://twitter.com/#!/iamrondavison

What if Twitter & Facebook Were Revolutionary?

When we listened to just a few, we listened a long time. Politicians and pundits were expected to go on at length - speeches and programs of 30 to 60 minutes, essays and books that were hundreds of - or even a hundred thousand - words.

But today's model is less about spending time with a few respected voices than spending time with lots and lots of friends and friendly - or not so friendly - voices. Even if we double the time we spend collecting news and opinion, we have to fragment it over more and more people. This necessarily forces concision, forces us to condense our thoughts into fewer words. 

Brain cells continually communicate with each other, but they are very efficient at it. These cells tend to communicate by exception, minimizing the "I'm here" signal. The brain already burns an enormous amount of energy even with this minimalist model. This efficiency is the only way to allow billions of cells to be connected. 

Facebook status comments, tweets, and texts seem to be moving us towards this model of communication over a broader net of people - a truly distributed model that doesn't dispense long messages outwards from some central point (like radio or TV) but instead sends lots and lots of short messages between nodes, or people. This model is not about hierarchy; it is about connection. 

For centuries, the progression in the West has been towards dispersing power outwards rather than concentrating it in a few. It seems as though we are now rapidly evolving a communication and reporting model that supports this more than ever. 

Stay tuned: power follows the flow of information and communication. Our old institutions that place power at the top - from church and schools to governments and corporations - are going to rapidly evolve as the communication structures that hold them in place shift. In fact, they used to call this kind of thing revolutionary. This could get really interesting. 

Technology - the Opposite of Romance

From Yahoo:

A hacker attack Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter for hours, while Facebook experienced intermittent access problems.

According to comScore, Twitter had 20.1 million unique visitors in the United States in June, some 34 times the 593,000 a year earlier.

For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.

"I had to Google search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need," said Alison Koski, a New York public-relations manager. She added she felt "completely lost" without Twitter.

Now that is a rapid move from obscurity to "can't live without it." Technology adoption patterns may be moving in an opposite direction of romance over the course of a life: we are moving from long-term commitments to fleeting, intense relationships with our technology. Of course technology is not left heartbroken when we leave it behind - only the investors in it.