Was This Man A Fascist?

tl;dr

How many of us see this all the time? How many of us dread it? How many of our grandiose (and largely self-appointed) curators of culture gnash their teeth when, after honing their prose and citing their sources for weeks to write that perfect editorial, all they see is

too long;didn’t read

And the parents and educators moan in the same way when, instead of reading the Official and Sanctioned view of a given subject, whether it is the Bible or a first-year “Introduction to Economics”, their students supplement their reading assignments with trips to Wiki and 30 other websites. Professors, in frustration at losing the keys to the Halls of Learning, fling lies about Wikipedia and insult the web in general. “Anyone can put anything up on there,” they scoff. Once, after a professor of mine said this, I asked if he had ever looked at Wikipedia and how it worked, had seen the dedicated people editing and curating its content, or had looked at how Wiki cited sources, with links to the studies and data so we could go see for ourselves. He stared at me blankly for a moment and then started babbling something incoherent about how he only really used the internet for email. He didn’t know anything about Wikipedia, but he instinctively loathed it. Why? Because it breaks down the walls…it gives us, the reader/learner/user of information, the ability to create our own story from the pieces of evidence and data that can be presented.

It takes away their power to control the narrative.

Any piece of “knowledge” around is really a story about observations and thoughts about observations. In the past, newspapers, professors, and other curators of culture have controlled these stories. The Civil War was simply a series of experiences and events…what gives it meaning is a story we tell about it. Some people (most people, I hope) tell a story about a battle over slavery and the first true “culture wars” between racist and non-racist Americans, with President Lincoln as a hallowed hero. But other stories are told about Lincoln as a fascist who declared martial law, suspended habeas corpus, jailed journalists critical of his policies, and forced America into a type of economic and social subjugation worse than any slavery. Which story is “true”? Which is “false”? It really depends on what you think after you look at all the facts. I prefer a story of the movement toward social equality, but the other story is valid, in the sense that the events did occur. But which one you believe is largely an idealogical issue more than one of fact, and that’s where narratives can get you…they are guided by ideologies, and ideologies are pretty much all hokum, with no real evidence or reasoning behind them.

We make our own stories.

When we take in our data in small, bite-size (byte-size?) pieces, we start putting them together ourselves. We start taking the facts and observations, the bits and pieces we get from reading twelve articles, looking at pictures, and reading tweets, blog posts, etc., and make our own narratives, our own understanding of “truth”. And that really pisses people like professors and op-ed writers for the New York Times off. They want your entire view to be their view, not made up of bits and pieces from all over the place. They can’t control what you think if you do that. When you refuse to read their twelve-page piece on the Middle East or the Green movement, the don’t want you leaving after three paragraphs, fact-checking their claims, and cross-referencing what they say with eight other sources…they want you to think what they think. That’s why they wrote the piece in the first place. And when you go around looking things up and checking their sources, you don’t end up thinking what they want  you to think.

It’s not that we’re not paying attention, we’re just not paying attention to what they want us to.

Studies, articles, and tweets pop up all over, every day it seems, about how people of my generation, spoiled on TV, computers, and video games, have no attention-span, can’t focus, and have fragmented work ethics. This is not the case. We spend hours focused on the minutiae of our Twitter accounts, the apps on our phones, our contact lists. We spend months and years playing the same online video game, engaged in long-term goals that often take months to accomplish. We’re focused, we get the information, we know what we want to know…we just aren’t doing it like they want us to. So long as we get our information from dozens of sources, that information, that story about the world we call “knowledge” cannot be controlled.

Image by N'ayez pas peur !! La Fabrique de Blogs via Flickr

I have been having some fun with this site Empire Avenue. It’s one part economics game, one part social network, and one part social media metric. While that sounds very strange, in practice it’s one of those things that are easy to learn and difficult to master. The basic concept is simple…you set up an account, connect your social media feeds, and the system evaluates you along several lines…how many followers you have, how many posts, the quality of both your connections and your content. I’m not sure how they evaluate such things, and I have seen some truly bizarre evaluations of some people, but for the most part it seems to work pretty well.

Then, based on this evaluation, the system puts a value on you and some shares to sell. That’s right, you just went public as a corporation of you, and shares are for sale. You get a starting amount of the currency of the site (called Eaves), when you begin, and based on your activity on the site and on your connected sites, you earn money each day. When you start buying shares in people, you’ll start to receive returns on those investments each day as well.

That’s the premise, and it is, in its basis, incredibly simple. It’s surprising people didn’t think of this before. But as you get sucked in, there are a few things you pick up.

1. When trying to mention someone you need to use their ticker, not their name. Just like on twitter, or anything else, the parser looks for the trigger @ and then one word…on this site, a ticker name. My ticker is (e)NEALJANSONS, in case you would like to buy a few shares.

2. I don’t want to exchange blog endorsements, investments, likes, retweets, reblogs, or anything else. You shouldn’t, either. That crap ruins social media. It just turns into a bunch of idiots patting each other on the back…a lot of noise and no signal. If you are interested and willing to take the time, LOOK at my content. READ it. If you think it’s useful or interesting, then endorse it. I will extend you the same courtesy, and regardless of whether you endorsed and shared my content, if I like your stuff, I will endorse, like, tweet, share, and everything else. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

3. Your connections need to be to valid sites. That means your blogs need to lead to somewhere; I have seen more than one 404 page and blog not found.

4. If you are going to indulge in illegal substances, don’t put it in your bio or your timeline. I have actually seen a bio that said “Do nuthin but SMOKE WEED ALL DAY!!!” Now, I don’t know if this was meant in the descriptive (he does nothing but smoke weed all day) or the imperative (it is his demand that I do nothing but smoke weed all day) sense, but in either case it’s a bad idea to put this kind of thing in you bio. I know there is a strong case for legalization, and this is San Francisco, but once something is on the internet, it’s here forever. When you find yourself trying to get a job and your prospective employer googles you, this is what they will see. Just assume anything you write anywhere is going to be seen by your mother (or spouse, professor, client, or boss as appropriate).

5. Offer something of value. I have seen people write posts in the “Writing” community that simply said “buy me”. No capitalization, no punctuation…but worse than anything, the person didn’t engage, didn’t say anything of value. I saw another person whose twitter feed was simply the numbers 1-100. Needless to say, he didn’t have many followers, but that wasn’t his real goal…his goal was to get his tweet count up for Empire Avenue. Don’t do this, and don’t encourage it. It’s easy to get a bad reputation in this community…people do remember names and faces here.

Now get out there and buy and sell! GREED IS GOOD!

Related articles

• Empire Avenue it’s much more than a game! (martingysler.com)
• Empire Avenue, social capital and the value for brands (freshnetworks.com)
• Empire Avenue: Social stock exchange game or new metrics tool? (smartblogs.com)
• Finding influencers is more than just comparing their Klout score (martingysler.com)
• Have you Checked Out Empire Avenue? (chedean.com)

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All things said, this has been an adventure I don’t feel like reliving anytime soon.

How does everyone feel about this? On one hand, I am with the patients. I am quite tired of science and medicine happening behind the gilded walls of ivory towers and the process being dictated by donors (who more often than not are simply looking for a new product to sell us and have no interest in science or medicine per se). On the other hand, the overall public is ridiculously ignorant about real science and has a tendency to think that (like a movie) the most radical ideas possible that actually support what they think and can understand anyway are more likely to be true. This is why “Climategate” actually convinced people to stop believing in climate change, because people were more likely to believe a set of emails in casual language than to believe the mountains evidence and work on the issue. The reason is not necessarily that they are stupid, it’s that they are poorly prepared to critically think about scientific claims. In some cases, that is their fault, but in most cases it is the fault of an educational system that is more about churning out workers than it is about producing informed thinkers capable of seeing through advertising claims and the claims of politicians alike.

So shall we democratize science, by the sheer force of social technologies if the esteemed doctors won’t let us in? Would certainly give us more of a chance of telling them “no, we want the AIDS vaccine, that new kind of missile/superflu/death-ray can wait”. On the other hand, is the American public honestly capable of that much responsibility? I mean, look at what we have done with our people and resources…can we be trusted with science?