THE PROBLEM WITH FREE SPEECH

April 9th, 2021

”If you can make a trend, you can make it true.” – Renee Diresta

There is a lot of dialogue around free speech.  There always has been.  But there does not seem to be any discussion about one particular sub-category of free speech:

repeated speech.

Before we parse and tie these two concepts, its fundamental to think about another concept:

The word ‘obvious’

The word obvious is defined as ‘easily perceived or understood; clear, self-evident, or apparent’

What is more interesting is the implications of the etymology.  From the late 16^th century in the sense ‘frequently encountered,’ from the Latin phrase ‘ob viam’ meaning ‘in the way’.

We might spend a moment thinking of things that are frequently encountered that fall into the negative category of ‘in the way’.   Many people  would probably agree that digital advertising fits nicely into this category.  Because of the addictive nature of screen technology, it provides an attention portal through which companies can bombard someone’s consciousness with ads for a particular product or service.  How many times do we see an ad before clicking on it?  If encountered enough times, the probability of clicking on that add goes up and up.

Any person or company that can outspend the competition on the battle front of digital advertising will win, simply because their product become –literally- the obvious choice.  It’s important to note the insidious connotation this phrase has.  The Obvious Choice, is not necessarily the best choice, though this is exactly what the phrase means in our current cultural parlance.  It goes to figure that if the obvious choice were always the best choice or the right choice, we would all be living much better lives and presumably we would not bicker and whine at each other.  But this counter-intuitive concept is, appropriately enough, not too obvious. This is why the meme “common sense is not so common” evokes the hypocritical response of general agreement and head-nodding from all alike.

So we return to the concept of free speech versus it’s potentially insidious subcategory: repeated speech.

Is it ethical to control someone’s attention for self-aggrandizement?  Phrased this way, it’s reminiscent of a kind of slavery.  But we can flip this situation and ask: what if the influence achieved through such attention benefits the person whose attention has been hijacked?  Any self-respecting writer or creative of any type is playing this game.  

A sizable percentage of the people who have something to say over and over are convinced that their message will help the people it’s directed towards.  The Tinkered Thinking platform certainly fits this bill.

And such a notion seems to be at the heart of thinkers like Seth Godin who approaches the concept of ‘marketing’ with an overwhelming sense of generosity.  The concept of generosity itself is very interesting if picked apart.  At it’s heart, generosity is simply what you can generate for others.  Now what if that generated item can be instantly mass-produced, replicated and spread across the globe?

On the other side of the spectrum we might identify the concept of a Ponzi scheme as the antithesis to this generosity.  These schemes are generally regarded as entities that take advantage of lots of people for the aggrandizement of a very select few.  Though this loose definition also seems to reference most large corporations and even individual writers.  A Ponzi scheme, however results in some clear detriment to the many, and this is ideally not the aim of a writer or solitary creative.

The phrase ‘getting the word out’ is an essential act that comes up with any business or venture.  But what does this mean?  This is essentially invoking that subcategory of free speech that we’re referring to here as repeated speech.  Many businesses that ‘succeed’ in a financial sense do not necessarily add positive value to people’s lives but they can succeed because the ability to ‘get the word out’ has been hypercharged with a new efficient connection to money via the relative affordability and speed of digital advertising.  Like a large corporate structure that is reminiscent of a pyramid, this advertising ability presents a phenomenal power to direct or redirect a huge amount of human attention and resource at the turn of a dime, or as fast or slow as the person making the decisions at the top chooses.

“Goebbels defined radio as the main instrument of his propaganda policy, and Germany began broadcasting across the border to Czechoslovakia's 3.5m German speakers almost as soon as the Nazis came to power.” – The Guardian

The Nazi’s rose to power, not just because of free speech, but because of this insidious subcategory of free speech,  repeated speech.  The radio was the technology that they legally leveraged to replicate their message in the minds of millions at a speed that had little comparison in the past.  It is eerie to think about the political scandal from a few years ago involving Facebook, the Russians and the election in the United States.  Regardless of the veracity of such claims involving these institutions, what is more important is that the potential utility of Facebook as a technology is identical to the use of radio in the late 1930’s.  It provides instant, widespread replication of message for those who know how to use it and afford it.

It’s worth it to point out that Hitler rose to power in a democracy, a fact that is perhaps is not repeated enough.  It wasn’t a coup.

The tension between democracy and fascism becomes particularly poignant here.  The word tension, does, after all come from the Latin meaning to ‘stretch, or strain’.  In the late 1930’s we have a perfect example of a democracy stretching and straining towards fascism.  Another important point is looking at the word fascism.  This word is thrown around so often as to require a ‘sit-down-and-understand-the-word-that-you-are-saying’ moment.  Fascism comes from ‘fasces’ meaning a bundle of rods or sticks.  In Ancient Rome such a tightly bound bundle of sticks had an ax head mounted on the end and was carried around as a symbol of magisterial power.  If it doesn’t seem clear how this connects, we need only think of that bundle of sticks as a bundle of people which form the governmental entity that the magistrate or emperor oversees.   Strangely, such an image is reminiscent of a democracy, which is composed of many people.  The only crucial distinction is how decisions are made.

In a fascist regime, this decision making power is relegated to a tiny, tiny majority, often a single person.  In a democracy, this decision making party is theoretically allocated to the majority people.

But the majority in the case of democracies is a blatant problem.  51% percent is hardly a majority and it’s incredibly worrisome that decisions are achieved with such division.  If this laughable metric isn’t clear just consider this thought experiment:  What does a 51/49 majority decision look like between just two people?  In order for two people to be in enough agreement to work towards a common goal or task, there has to be a much higher majority opinion than 51/49, so why doesn’t the same apply when we scale up decision making to include hundreds of millions of people?  The tiniest requirement for majority does not ensure the best decision is being made.  It only ensures that after the decision is made, you will have a very divided set of people, a good half who are opposed to the new course of action. 

We may look at the current sphere of aggressive conversation and ask the question: how often does logic prevail in a lover’s quarrel?    The pessimistic and impulsive answer is ‘never’, but this is not necessarily true.  Often, if two people are able to let their emotions settle in solitude, there is a higher probability that a more productive conversation will take place when such people reengage on that contentious issue.  And here’s an interesting question for that situation:  what if one party in this two person dialogue simply repeats the same thing over and over?  Is progress made?  No.

We can zoom out to the larger picture and ask the same question of warring political parties: do they every achieve anything together by merely repeating the same things at each other?

Such stalemate is incredibly stressful, not just on a political level, but also on a personal level.  Few things in modern society are more uncomfortable than going home to a silent home full of tension.  We can think of a truly toxic relationship where one party does not even realize how bad the situation they find themselves in really is.  Such individuals often experience a sort of post traumatic shock at the magnitude of their past situation when they finally find an exit from that situation.  Can we find a link between the perpetuation of such toxic relationships and the superior linguistic abilities that the inflicting party might have?  Such an inflicting party might just need to repeat the same thing over and over in order to get the victim in such a relationship to believe things that are very counter-productive to their own health.  We call this gaslighting.  If you tell someone they are crazy enough times, there’s good chance they’ll eventually start to believe it.

This might seem ridiculous or unlikely to someone who has never experienced or witnessed such a situation, but we need only run a simple thought experiment:

What would happen if you were placed in maximum security lockdown with no contact with the outside world and the only experience you were subjected to is a loud speaker that repeats ‘you are crazy’. 

Even IF some people imagine that they might have the mental strength to put up with this forever, which is highly unlikely, no one would disagree that this is a terrible situation that would probably have a fairly negative effect on someone’s psychology.

Fascism is simultaneously more seductive and efficient than democracy for a similar reason:  decisions are made much faster and new and potentially progressive changes seem to take place at a speed that is very refreshing compared to the stalemated snail pace that democracy usually has.

Pivoting via a decision in the moment is much easier and faster when you don’t have to organize the vote of a group of people.  Any group larger than one automatically has a higher probability of taking longer to reach a consensus, and it’s usually a lukewarm, diluted plan which strangely seems to undermine the efficacy and efficiency of any given strategy. 

With these elements in place, it seems like the 51/49 majority tendency creates an open door for fascism if any ambitious individual can leverage a new technology to repeat their message and candidacy with greater proliferation than all other candidates.  As we can see with the rise of the Nazi regime, it’s imperative for the ambitious entity to continue using the new technology to leverage a message so that it continues to proliferate and soak into the public imagination.  We might imagine some kind of inflection point where the aggregated personal fear of most individuals initiates a culture of silence and inaction in the face of bewildering change initiated by the government.

How does democracy safeguard itself from encasing itself in this fearful, self-built cocoon that quickly gives rise to the evil butterfly of fascism?

While the United States has been referred to as the ‘American Experiment’ since it’s inception, its funny how little experimenting there has been over the years with the touted plasticity of that government.

We might wonder delightfully what would happen to the American system if a requirement of 85% majority of the popular opinion suddenly became a standard.   What if, in tandem to this, there was also a restriction on repeated speech?  This is often limply batted about as a cap on financial contributions, but we might imagine in today’s highly digitized society, being able to come up with reliable metrics for how much time each candidate and main political idea gets with regards to a population that is impregnated with smartphones and screens.  This might sound like an invasion of privacy, but isn’t it already an invasion of one’s attentional privacy to firebomb someone’s social media and internet browsing with targeted ads and messages?  It’s somewhat akin to Coca-Cola coming into your house unannounced and plastering your walls with Coca-Cola advertising that you cannot remove.  How would that not be an invasion of privacy?  And yet that is exactly where we are.  Except to a larger extent.  Corporate entities are plastering every moment of your screen life, whether home or not with such influences.  

To explore the 85% majority a little further, it’s obvious to predict that everyone would balk at such an idea saying that the government would go into a freeze and potentially be permanently stalemated.  But such people may forget what the mounting stress of a governmental freeze would do.  This occurrence would be a super concentrated version of the slow pace that democracy already has.  And if the need for progress is strong, it’s simply not possible for such a circumstance to perpetuate for very long.  Freezes simply never last.  But usually things return to the same conditions after the thaw. 

There is a chance that each party could eventually see this as an opportunity to become a super party, but this IS what the nation state is already trying to do.   Freedom, whether for the individual or the populace is a tricky idea, and living a satisfied life always requires certain parameters in order to live by and feel productive.   Perhaps, in order for democracy to be more efficient and active in a productive direction, it needs new parameters in order to foster the  move.  

While everyone bickers about the meaning, uses and borders of free speech, it’ll be those who understand the power of repeated speech who will have the highest probability of making decisions, both big and small.

CATCH THE BEAT

April 8th, 2021

A streak of productivity feels fantastic.  We often wary to admit it, but it’s right up there with the best of life.  But unlike a shot of sugar or even fulfilling company, a streak of productivity can be a difficult thing to come by.  The formula is either a fluke, or something complex, or elusively simple.  But when it’s happening, when you’re in the flow, you know it.  Something about the quality of one’s attention changes, it’s as though there’s a subtle rhythm despite how dynamic and varied the work might be.  So, when you’ve lost it, and you need it back, how do you catch the beat?

The metaphor might be more literal than it seems at first.  Creatives of all types have personal rituals to help them get into the zone so that they can produce.  The fact that there aren’t any real similarities between these rituals other than the fact that they are repeated tells us something important:  the core utility is in the reputation itself.  With rituals, and with habits, we are creating a kind of beat that exists through time.  Our repeated behavior is a heartbeat extrapolated to a larger scale, one of days and weeks.

So when caught in the doldrums of laziness, the task isn’t so much to wait for the right conditions, but to create them.  But jumping straight into the creative work isn’t necessarily ideal nor effective.  If it was, that’s what we’d do every time, but it’s just not that easy.  Instead, we can get the ball rolling with something mindless, but something that nonetheless primes the mind to get in gear.

Brushing teeth or putting on a seatbelt is a mindless and autonomous gesture that happens without thought because both are primed by their previous activities: getting out of bed, and opening the car door, which are also mindless.  Habits and ritual behaviour strings together within the mind, one triggering the other, and such mindless rituals can be used to trigger more complex behavior, like sitting down for a long session of writing or coding.

The task here, which is often referred to vaguely as ‘motivation’ isn’t so much an attempt to catch a lost beat as much as it is to try and create a beat, which creates a rhythm for the mind to lose itself in.

PIÑATA

April 7th, 2021

It’s very unusual for someone to sit down and write an entire book in one sitting.  And even the people who can pull this off can’t necessarily repeat the feat.  It’s a fluke, it’s a grand slam, it’s the exception that proves the rule about how books get written: you have to take a lot of swings at it.  

Tinkered Thinking engages in the same kind of practice.  There are perennial topics that weave in and out of episodes, and in some sense, the fairly sizeable output of Tinkered Thinking is an attempt to take as many swings as possible at such topics despite how tired, behind or uninformed, or ineloquent. 

When it comes to this universe that we seem to be inside of and somehow simultaneously a part of, it’s a bit of a piñata.  We’re not sure what it is, much like being blindfolded, and we’re not sure what exactly is inside of it, much like ourselves and all this matter that we as blobs of some of that matter seem to find ourselves surrounded by.  And we keep taking swings at it.  To figure out what it is, how it works and how to be a part of it.

Everything is like this.  At first we saw stars ad animals and characters of myth, and then we envisioned the world as the center of the universe, and then with another swing we displaced ourselves and finally came up with a heliocentric model of the solar system.  Who knows what another swing will reveal about the cosmos with just the right aim.

This process is learning.  When confronted with a new subject, you take a guess about what you’re looking at.  It’s like swinging at a piñata.  You might miss, so you come up with another idea and test it.  Perhaps there’s contact, and some candy spills out.  But the process is never ending.  Even when it seems like this or that subject has been exhausted and knocked out of the sky, there’s always another piñata to swing at.

It’s piñatas all the way up.

LEARNING & EFFORT

April 6th, 2021

When pursuing a new topic, learning is always more difficult in the beginning.  But why?  The results of learning on any given topic are asymptotic, or rather, there might be more nuance to discover as you go but overall there’s less to actually learn, so wouldn’t it be harder to uncover that nuance which becomes increasingly harder to find?  Masters of a craft might argue for the opposite, but such people likely have an unrealistic view of the beginning of their journey, considering it was likely long, long ago and blessed with the sort of luck that is often phrased as ‘interest’ or ‘natural inclination.’  The fact is, for the great majority of people, learning something new is hard, especially at the start.

In the beginning the subjective experience of learning is confusion, which is far from comfortable.  Confusion, in a learning context, often produces anxiety, doubt and a sense of paralysis.  In fact, the early parts of the learning process might have more to do with emotional regulation than it has to do with acquiring a knowledge of the topic’s parts and how they relate.

Confusion arises when there is a lack of correlation and understanding arises when correlation gives way to revealed causation.

A lack of correlation has everything to do with where attention is being allocated.  Or rather, in the beginning, learning is hard because you don’t know what’s important to pay attention to and what’s not.  You’ll notice that a real expert in any topic is really quick to dive in or dismiss a particular aspect of the field when it’s brought up.  Of course, this might be a sign of hubris when an expert dismisses something that actually turns out to be important, but someone who is truly excellent in their field is generally going to be very quick to figure out what actually deserves more attention, and this is a process that grows with competence while learning.  

In the beginning you don’t know what to pay attention to.  After some exposure, you think you’ve got an idea about what to focus on.  And after time you’re quick to determine if some avenue of investigation is likely to be an unproductive rabbit hole that merely wastes more time than it’s worth.

Learning is the process of fine-tuning the application of effort.  It’s an evolutionary process that seeks to make the that use of effort more efficient.  Notice how this applies to people who stop learning.  They are often stuck, doing the same thing over and over, expending the same exact sort of effort over and over, when learning could unlock a better way that takes less effort.  But of course the learning itself almost always requires a bit more effort than the status quo: it’s a short term increase in hurt and effort for a long term benefit. That is, of course, if you know what to pay attention to as you go.

KNOW THYSELF 101

April 5th, 2021

It’s said that at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, there was an inscription that read “Know Thyself”.  It’s powerful command, one that seems to encapsulate so much of what it means to be a thing alive that experiences this world.  It carries a weight that seems to invoke the sense that to know one’s self is to somehow know what life is.  The two are inextricably linked.  There is so much more to a person than merely their personal preferences, which might be the most superficial interpretation of the Delphic axiom, but it might not be a bad place to get started.

In fact, something as mundane and ordinary as personal preferences might be the only place to start on the quest to know yourself.  Kids are fairly enthusiastic on this point.  They pout at the brussel sprouts and grow wide eyed at the chocolate ice cream.  I like this.  I don’t like that.  But of course, this kind of preference is pretty rudimentary compared to an individual decades older who marvels at the delicious preparation of brussel sprouts while having dinner at a fancy restaurant and doesn’t pass up on the chocolate soufflé either.  It perhaps gets a bit deeper when someone understands the neurochemistry behind these experiences and why we might desire one so much more over another.

However, what such preferences really constitute within the topic of knowing yourself is that they comprise a pattern.  Notice the connection to habits.  As it’s been said before, we are what we repeatedly do.  Preferences fall into the same rubric, they describe what we will probably gravitate to again, and again.

Pattern recognition is the first part of learning.  The next part is to understand the pattern so well that it can be manipulated for a particular effect.  A practical example helps.

Say you have a lot of work to get tone today.  One thing that often pops up just when we are getting close to starting this work is a pang of hunger.  The self-deceptive logic is familiar to everyone: eating is important.  You need fuel to get things done right?  Plus the sensation of hunger itself is distracting, annoying really.  Wouldn’t it be best just to get this pressing issue out of the way by taking a little time to eat first?  

This is part of a pattern of experience that we are all familiar with, and it’s got some lies laced into it. Fact is, for the modern human, you almost certainly have plenty of ‘fuel’ to get your work done. Hunger might be a signal that blood sugar is low, but it is in no way an indication that your resources for energy are depleted.  Only when you’re hungry and you can quite literally see the contour of most of your bones and the definition between every muscle can you then perhaps say that hunger is an indicator that resources for energy are low.  For the most part, hunger is just timed response of ghrelin, which is a hormone that creates the feeling of hunger.  Ghrelin doesn’t have too much correlation to blood glucose levels.  It’s controlled mostly by how much eating has occurred in the last few days, the frequency and the amount.

If you think about it, it would be pretty silly for us to evolve hunger in response to low energy levels, as though we need the energy in food to go do things.  In fact, the exact opposite makes more sense.  Evolution has primed us with a system that gives us access to more energy when there’s no food around because there’s a practical necessity to get up and go look for food, which is of course, going to take some energy to accomplish.  Once that food thing is satisfied, there’s little evolutionary need to get up and get going.  Again, it’s the opposite.  The food has been procured.  Now it’s time to sit back and relax and pack on the pounds.  Hence the modern term “food coma”  

Now here’s a question.  When someone is going through that self-deceptive internal logic about why it’s important to eat before getting to work, why doesn’t the thought about a food coma come up?  This is understanding the pattern on a deeper level, and the path to manipulating it is only one easy step away: its the realization that eating would actually be very counter productive and make the likelihood of getting anything done lower, than if the hunger I just grudgingly ignored and all attempts are made to dive right into the work at hand.

The productivity world is all about these sorts of ‘hacks’.  But they aren’t really hacks at all.  Such things are simply part of the human pattern understood with enough depth to manipulate that pattern toward larger goals.

The tragic thing about something as simple as what to eat, when to eat, and it’s impact on other parts of life is that many, many people go their whole life without discovering such practical manipulations.  Most people are directed by the whim and will of their impulses and the way those impulses conflict with external obligations, like work and family.  

Of course there is a universe of depth beyond such simple and pragmatic examples, such as knowing what you are like outside of your own pattern.  As Robert Sapolsky once wrote “Know thyself, especially in differing circumstances.”