by Ben Atlas on 02.21.2010.10:38am
I have been thinking about Jaron Lanier’s “mob switch” concept. The fundamental component of any big or small clan always includes a designated group or an individual to hate inside and outside of the clan. So any group requires the internalize hate as part of the membership package. This is a big dilemma for me because I believe that the human need to be part of a group is our prime evolutionary instinct. Can you be part of any group without the negative component, without the hate? Perhaps hate and mobs are inseparable. I can’t think of an example that goes against this theory and I am saddened by this. Here is the original quote:
“Humans, like many other species, Lanier says, have a cognitive switch that permits us to be individuals or members of a mob. Once we enter the confines of what Lanier calls a clan, even a virtual clan, it possesses dynamics that appeal to the basest instincts within us. Technology evolves but human nature remains constant. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history because human beings married the newly minted tools of efficient state bureaucracies and industrial slaughter with the dark impulses that have existed since the dawn of the human species
“You become hypersensitive to the pecking order and to your sense of social status,” Lanier said of these virtual clans. “There is almost always the designated loser in your own group and the designated external enemy. There is the enemy below and the enemy afar. There become two classes of disenfranchised people. You enter into a constant obligation to defend your status which is always being contested. It is time-consuming to become a member of one of these things. I see a lot of designs on line that bring this out. There is a recognizable sequence, whether it is pianos, poodles or jihad; you see people forming into these clans. It is playing with fire. There are plenty of examples of evil in human history that did not involve this effect, such as Jack the Ripper, who worked alone. But most of the really bad examples of human behavior in history involve invoking this clan dynamic. No particular sort of person is immune to it. Geeks are no more immune to it than Germans or Russians or Japanese or Mongolians. It is part of our nature. It can be woken up without any leadership structure or politics. It happens. It is part of us. There is a switch inside of us waiting to be turned. And people can learn to manipulate the switch in others.”
Jaron speaks about this in the video interview by Guardian.
by Ben Atlas on 02.20.2010.12:38pm
The Internet culture is in crisis. Jewish blogs are stuck. A dignified livelihood is a challenge. Why? In one sentence, when a culture becomes derivative, it mines and depletes its own legacy. I started thinking about this topic when I read this paragraph in Jaron Lanier’s new book:
“It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
Marshall McLuhan declared that “medium is the message”. What he meant was that a new form of expression, i.e. alphabet, writing, print, TV, etc., changes our brain wiring, tastes and values so radically that medium itself is the central cultural event. Inevitably at a dawn of every novel form of expression, a new medium is awkwardly used to reprocess the old, the bleak task comparable to translating poetry into a foreign language. This is the DJ stage where the Internet finds itself at the current moment. The old tunes are remixed, republished, relinked to a new beat, literally and figuratively no new music is created. Occasionally a new app is written for the legacy proprietary code instead of a new OS.
On to the Jews cursed with the satirical task of amplifying a culture. Every potential convert to Judaism needs to be aware of these axioms:
- Marshall McLuhan spoke about the “rear view mirror” phenomena or the propensity of any culture to live in a utopia about its past. Jews amplify this tendency in the worst possible way. Most traditional Jewish communities are consumed with intense utopia and the deliberate subterfuge of history.
- A Rabbi is a DJ, never singing in its own voice and forever spinning someone else’s tracks. There is a derivative throwback tendency in every culture but again amplified by the Jews. The tribe castigated to the two thousand years of the survivalist epic. With the rare exceptions (i.e. kabbalah) the innovation is shut down, conformism is bred and encouraged. People who can’t contain or control their creative impulses are eventually expelled from the traditional Jewish communities.
- Every group on the face of the earth is defined by what this group is not. Jaron Lanier calls this the “mob switch”. Once again this is most sensitive component of the traditional Jewish culture. Although the potential converts are not specifically instructed about the importance of the boundary defining hate, eventually to successfully integrate in the communities they would have to internalize the intense feeling of hatred towards other Jewish groups and denominations, towards the declared heretics, goyim, real and imaginary antisemites, etc.
Now let’s compare the three “Jewish problems” to the Internet. The Internet is definitely not a utopian vision of the past. There is strong revolutionary current, especially in the communal rhetoric of the Open Source movement and the Web 2.0 social. Alas, after a decade, a new server side oligarchy emerged to control the scalable bits. Instead of empowering creativity, no longer under a centralized command, there is a deliberate and impoverishing push for the “free”, the collapse of the copyright boundaries, devaluation of the original unpaid authorship under the assault the ad supported aggregators. The DJ culture is absolutely the internet as we know it today. The disastrous anonymous comments culture and the combustible flame wars take the group/mob hate to the unprecedented levels on the Internet.
And what about the Wall St.? The financial services industry dominated by the derivative contracts became the most important part of the American GDP. There is an easy analogy to the Internet (or any derivatives dominated culture). People often complain that the stocks are the trading instruments removed from the real value of a company. An options contract or a credit default swap contract is like a tweet about a comment on a blog post that links to a different newspaper web site. Derivatives are comments removed from a productive culture, they don’t innovate, don’t create value and eventually pop. To slap a Dell label on a product engineered and fabricated in China is like linking to someone else’s content on a popular web site. Our religions, our ability to make a living and our “internet economy”, the trifecta, is overrun by the derivative thinking. We can no longer extract value from comments about the dried up wells and we can no longer destroy the remaining functioning artisan wells. We can no longer condemn people to the indignity of being replaced by the machines or the outsourced slaves. We can’t DJ, quote, link, mashup or re-aggregate our way from this crisis. You can quote me on that.
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by Ben Atlas on 02.15.2010.8:29am
Chris Hedges wrote a definitively best review of Jaron Lanier’s book. Truthdig – The Information Super-Sewer:
“The Internet has become one more tool hijacked by corporate interests to accelerate our cultural, political and economic decline. The great promise of the Internet, to open up dialogue, break down cultural barriers, promote democracy and unleash innovation and creativity, has been exposed as a scam. The Internet is dividing us into antagonistic clans, in which we chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies, while our creative work is handed for free to Web providers who use it as bait for advertising.
Ask journalists, photographers, musicians, cartoonists or artists what they think of the Web. Ask movie and film producers. Ask architects or engineers. The Web efficiently disseminates content, but it does not protect intellectual property rights. Writers and artists are increasingly unable to make a living. And technical professions are under heavy assault. Anything that can be digitized can and is being outsourced to countries such as India and China where wages are miserable and benefits nonexistent. Welcome to the new global serfdom where the only professions that pay a living wage are propaganda and corporate management.”
Jaron Lanier’s emphasis on a hive behavior is the theme expanded after he wrote the book. Here is the classic description of the Individual/Mob switch:
“Humans, like many other species, Lanier says, have a cognitive switch that permits us to be individuals or members of a mob. Once we enter the confines of what Lanier calls a clan, even a virtual clan, it possesses dynamics that appeal to the basest instincts within us. Technology evolves but human nature remains constant. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history because human beings married the newly minted tools of efficient state bureaucracies and industrial slaughter with the dark impulses that have existed since the dawn of the human species
“You become hypersensitive to the pecking order and to your sense of social status,” Lanier said of these virtual clans. “There is almost always the designated loser in your own group and the designated external enemy. There is the enemy below and the enemy afar. There become two classes of disenfranchised people. You enter into a constant obligation to defend your status which is always being contested. It is time-consuming to become a member of one of these things. I see a lot of designs on line that bring this out. There is a recognizable sequence, whether it is pianos, poodles or jihad; you see people forming into these clans. It is playing with fire. There are plenty of examples of evil in human history that did not involve this effect, such as Jack the Ripper, who worked alone. But most of the really bad examples of human behavior in history involve invoking this clan dynamic. No particular sort of person is immune to it. Geeks are no more immune to it than Germans or Russians or Japanese or Mongolians. It is part of our nature. It can be woken up without any leadership structure or politics. It happens. It is part of us. There is a switch inside of us waiting to be turned. And people can learn to manipulate the switch in others.”
There is an interesting critique of of James Surowiecki’ crowd adulation. I noticed that Web 2.0 hacks like to talk about tribes in a positive way but they ignore the dark side of a hive at their own peril. Or perhaps more cynically they promote the tribes and hives because they want to own and manage it.
by Ben Atlas on 01.20.2010.1:16pm
Scott Brown said yesterday in his acceptance speech:
“When I first started running, I asked for a lot of help, because I knew it was going to be me against the machine. I was wrong, it was all of us against the machine. And after tonight we have shown everyone that – now – you are the machine.”
What people are not talking about is that before the special election in Massachusetts there was a highly contested democratic primary and without exaggeration almost each of the 5-4 democrats who run against Martha Coakley could have beaten Scott Brown. So if you want to define a machine it’s not how it acts against the enemies, but how it functions internally. And one of the characteristics of a machine is the intricate mechanism that routinely promotes less deserving and less qualified leaders, whose qualification is their relationship to the other parts of the same machine, not to the world outside of the machine and not even to the stated function of the said mechanism. Over time this becomes the biggest threat to any machine, like all machines it breaks internally. You don’t have to search far for the examples, it’s Nancy Pelosi and even, gasp, George Bush. A religious clan is the most toxic illustration of this phenomenon.
by Ben Atlas on 12.17.2009.10:11pm
Prof. Robert Sapolsky grew up orthodox in Brooklyn; he rebelled against the religion when he was 14-15 and went on to become a Professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Stanford University. He received the MacArthur Fellowship genius grant in 1987. This is the long lecture on religion by Robert Sapolsky delivered at Stanford. Especially interesting is the definition of the Schizotypal personality, the latent variant Schizophrenia and the analogy with Tay-Sachs. The fascinating definition of the Metamagical Thinking. ►►►read more
by Ben Atlas on 12.16.2009.8:14pm
Chris Dixon paraphrases a quote from Clay Shirky:
“Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is why it is often very hard for people to conceptualize how these user generated sites work – there is no “average user” to imagine yourself as.”
I find this fascinating, a very wealthy or a very smart person in a group makes everyone statistically below average, even though the average doesn’t really exists.
Well, Seth already made this point (see my post Loic le Meur Interviews Seth Godin) about Al Gore, someone who is very uncharismatic, who “barrows” his charisma from the people. And now Zizek makes the same point by referencing the Chinese concept of “Shi”"
“Legitimacy, power or charisma. It is the position of the ruler, not the ruler himself, that holds the power. Therefore, analysis of the trends, the context, and the facts are essential for a real ruler… Is this not the first version of the insight, formulated by great European modern thinkers from Pascal to Marx, that people do not treat some person as a king because he is a king, but this person is a king because he is treated as one? Charisma is the “performative” result of symbolic social practices, not a natural (or spiritual) property of the person who exerts it.”
Albrecht Dürer. St. Paul, The Four Holy Men (detail),1526. Alte Pinakothek, Munich
On the subject of Fyodor Dostoyevsky versus the Grand Inquisitor in Seville. There is an amsuing and revealing quote in the interview Savoj Zizek gave to Ian Parker in 2003 (pdf):
“I remember when I was young I found Dostoyevsky always boring but I heard about and basically went to the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov Brothers. Even now I’m on the side of the Grand Inquisitor you know, which is why my hero is St Paul. He is totally disinterested in Christ as a person. You find almost none of this, Christ did that miracle, he did this, and this doesn’t bother St Paul. It’s only, Christ died, he arrives, and ok that was the event, now lets build the party and so on. Point two; he is external to the event. With the other apostles meeting, lets say in, 43, ten years after crucifixion, you can imagine then this nostalgic moment of having dinner, ‘do you remember how Christ asked me to pass him the salt’ ten years ago. None of that with St Paul, he is external, external, and this is why I’m with St Paul.”
Of course this is cute, but Zizek’s logic is flawed. Being external to an event allows you to created a myth that is far more powerful than a witness could ever produce. If you doubt this just ask a family member of a holy man near you (the man with the personal access to Christ must have been Judah). And Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was certainly not external, he was connected to Christ intensely. The horror that Dostoyevsky describes is that the Grand Inquisitor personifies Christ’s ethos, he becomes more “Christian” than the Christ himself and takes the Anno Domini to it’s tragic conclusion.
The image published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art
Human Stature of Liberty. 18,000 officers and soldiers at Camp Dodge in Des Moines
The BBC series The Century of the Self created by Adam Curtis, first screened in 2002. Top reason to watch the series:
- Probably the most significant TV documentary ever made.
- It sheds light on Sigmund Freud’s American nephew Edward Bernays who created PR as we know it.
- The rare video footage of Sigmund Freud.
- It explains the obscure but powerful undercurrents of the American and world history.
This is a film of unprecedented significance. I don’t think I ever watched a documentary that is so enlightening and far reaching. Truly life changing in a meaningful way. ►►►read more
I have been “sitting” on this link for a while. Perhaps now is the right time for an aspirational resolution and a small memorial to William Safire who founded a club that is really what true networking is all about. And it’s a pretty simple formula – you meet the same people regularly (decades) and you share meals and conversations. 
A Virtual Community is an Oxymoron
by Ben Atlas on 02.5.2010.10:30am
Every single thriving online forum is an outlet of a community or an interest that already exists off-line. People who like a certain team, etc. naturally extend the actual interest, a hobby into a virtual community. So the online forums are the reflections of the ideological, religious or national tribes. Online forums complement a niche but they never create a niche (some idiots who claim there are no communities online, they are blind to the fact that online communities only mirror real social and ideological groups).
The cutting edge ideas or the proverbial out of the box thinking gets little traction on the internet. People seek distraction and confirmation not an intellectual disturbance (I wrote about this in The Tension and Pretension of Blogging). This is by the way why I turned off the comments. I reflect about the eclectic mix that has no real life base and is not narrow enough to generate an uber abstract, pointless chatter. But the bottom line is that the people who imagine that they can reverse engineer a community from online into real life, they are delusional liers.