One of the reasons that I have a sort of ambivalence to environmentalism as we know it, is because of my wariness of the alternative. To have a world that is free of the costs of industrialization of materials for the purposes of manufacturing is to have an economy leveraged on information tech. Of course there are other growing economies but most of our focus is on infotech; biotech not so much.
Part of the inevitable necesity of buying and selling in the digital world is the establishment of your presence. Right now there is not a good way of doing that, which is why we have all sorts of privacy concerns. The presence that you establish in cyberspace is distended and distributed and primarily out of your control. It is going to be quite some time before you will be able to control your cyberpresence, and until that combination of techologies, social conventions and laws coalesce, there are going to be myriad 'valid' ways in which you can be represented and approached. Nothing illustrates that quite as starkly as those thought experiments we use now to talk about privacy issues with regard to datamining. For example:
You did actually have that mid-life crisis and get divorced. At the child-custody hearing, your ex-spouse’s lawyer quotes a study showing that football-loving upper income Republicans are 27% more likely to beat their children than yoga-class-attending moderate Democrats, and the probability goes up another 8% if they ever bought a jersey featuring a defensive lineman. What’s more, several of the more influential people in your network of friends also fit angry-male patterns, taking the probability of abuse up another 13%. Because of the sound statistics behind such analyses, the judge listens.
What we have in social media and databases are a new mineral to mine, refine and sell as product. It is access to you. It is basically an attempt to commodify something that is practically infinite - human interest in other humans. When you look at a growing fraction of the entertainment business, you'll find that a nearly inexhaustible supply of energy and money is thrown at capturing the strange proclivities of celebrity. There seems no end of the trivialities that people will pay to know. For the most part these are silly and harmless but they are part and parcel of the same kind of basic human curiosity. And here in America we have a generation that's getting smarter and smarter at monetizing human curiosity.
If you think that Wall Street does nothing productive, imagine a world where 30% of the consumer economy was spent buying and selling the decendants of reality TV online, on mobile, in cars, at work, everywhere. Imagine every highschooler's senior project is trying for the first of 500 times to make a viral video about themselves. Imagine that the only way to instantly get a job is to become the kind of curiosity that is Ted Williams. Imagine that your 15 minutes of fame becomes your permanent resume.
--
It's difficult to tell people how long the long tail is. What I believe is that skill will overcome and that at some point in the future, the sort of value that only comes from discipline, dedication and wisdom will rule. But we are a long way from that, and we do not yet own our own reputations. There is a class of exploiters out there to be wary of, they have got our cognitive proclivities nailed. Their audiences will ultimately eat them alive, like Julian Assange's, but it's going to be a long and tragic road.
Recent Comments