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October 25, 2007
Social systems need antibodies
Social media needs antibodies: I'd like to bump up these few paragraphs from Stan Schroeder discussing how counterproductive it is that the distributed Techmeme editorial board is publicizing an unsubstantiated rumor about Podtech. Memeorandum, and later Techmeme, were initially very successful at quickly highlighting stories than the slower and older media channels did not address. They still are, in fact... Gabe Rivera's work is still very useful to me, day in and day out. But the fatal flaw in the approach is due to treating news as a mechanical system, with fixed inputs and processes, rather than a learning, organic system which will evolve with time. When there's a multitude of decisionmakers in a system, they'll react to the system itself, and the nature of the system will change over time. Henry Ford was successful in making an automation system for mechanical processes; Karl Marx failed utterly when he tried to apply the same planning style to economic processes. A sheet metal crimper can't change its mind with time, but each individual worker certainy can. When Techmeme started becoming influential it naturally became the target of PR campaigns and opaque lobbying. Memeorandum was even more swift in becoming coopted by non-transparent political campaigns. Once Google became important it became the target of hidden motives too... most searches today reveal commercial endeavors rather than actual knowledge. Going back even further, email was quite a bit more useful before it became universal and the target of spammers. Decentralized decisionmakers will react to changing conditions, and so social systems need built-in evolution mechanisms so the process can evolve as the participants varied motivations evolve. Organic design is a much harder problem than static design. I don't have the answer, unfortunately, but I do agree with Stan that we need some way to weed the unsubstantiated rumormongering out of Techmeme, or whatever will succeed it as the best current news-harvesting system.
Posted by JohnDowdell at October 25, 2007 07:38 AM
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Comments
Interesting post!
I appreciate the idea of news as an ecosystem. Very cybernetic. Did you read any Gregory Bateson? He would call it a 'mind'. Not just a 'hive mind' (which implies a strict hierarchy of 'queen', drones and workers), but a decentralised, learning organism with the ability to remember and forget, stimulate and respond, one where there is no control, only influence.
Yes, you don't have the answer. Neither do I, and neither can any individual. The 'answer' is evolution, and the big joke with evolution is that it is never done until every 'species' is extinct. 'Survival of the fittest' does not mean 'for ever', it's only ever temporary. There is no singular 'answer', there is only a plurarity of strategies, each at different stages in their survival trajectory.
When you say "we need some way to weed the unsubstantiated rumormongering out of Techmeme, or whatever will succeed it as the best current news-harvesting system" - the key point is 'whatever will succeed it', and by implication, whatever will succeed whatever will succeed it, and so on recursively. Yes we need it, and we'll get it.
There will never be a 'perfect' solution, only one which is most fit for the job for the vast majority of users. Eventually it will get 'gamed' and superceded. Orkut->SixDegrees->Friendster->MySpace->Facebook->??? That's evolution, or as James Joyce said "when we get our Republic, I'll have to be against it".
One thing I like about your blog, jd, is the way you also draw attention to Adobe's competition, not just as 'thoroughly evil and worthless', but as alternatives which may have something valuable to offer, strategies for survival that we can benefit from. Long may that continue!
Sadly, you spout the undigested 'FoxNews/CNN' fallacy that Marxism promotes centralised economic planning as its main goal. That would be Stalin you're thinking of. One might wonder about how on earth you came to mix them up... Perhaps you've fallen for the unsubstantiated rumormongering endemic in other media.
Marx spent most of his time and energy documenting the barbarism (e.g. Bhopal) and economic contradictions (e.g. price-fixing) of capitalism. He spent very little time constructing a plan for a clearly defined alternative society. In his view, the structure and 'planning' of the society is supposed to come 'from below', precisely as a result of 'reacting to changing conditions'. In that sense, the Soviet system was strictly anti-Marxist (as many commentators on the left have pointed out). The failure of centralised economic planning is not a failure on Marx's part, if anything, it's a vindication of (or at least evidence to support) his hypothesis that greater democratisation is inevitable in the long term.
So... How about letting a little of your sober pluraristic approach slip into your offhand ideological pronouncements too? ;) OK, now back to the topic...
The question is whether those who systematically 'game the system' (such as spammers, spin doctors, pirates and black-marketeers) are just doing their democratic duty to shape and mould the collective 'mind', to sharpen our perceptions of the conditions we live under.
In the short term, the answer must be 'no, they're a bloody nuisance, and something must be done', but I believe we also have to take the long view and see some of these 'negative' influences as part of an ebb and flow which drives us to switch tools, and adopt new media which suffer less from these particular hacks, hopefully as we tend towards a better society and a more inclusive and meaningful culture.
As Sylvia S. Tognetti wrote in a blog post from the post-normal times last year:
"I suspect that the problem is not so much with markets as it is with an economic system that is based on principles reminiscent of an outdated concept of Social Darwinism that fails to recognize that natural selection acts on *populations* rather than on individuals. This has little to do with how scientists currently understand evolution, but seems to have retained a hold on popular beliefs and ways of thinking. "
The rest of the post is here:
http://www.postnormaltimes.net/blog/archives/2006/06/katoomba.html
Posted by: Brennan Young at October 27, 2007 04:11 AM