I recently finished writing a book. It’s called “Cavemen with smartphones: how evolution shaped history and finance” and I consider it my baby.
I’ve been writing it for the last two years, and because I want it to succeed, I tried to optimise the marketing material. As such, I wrote three different versions of the book blurb over the course of a month, and I decided to go about it in a very scientific way to choose what the best elements were. Ultimately, I’m neutral to what blurbs, titles and covers go on the book as long as it sells copies.
Theoretically speaking, if there was evidence to support that putting Barbie on the cover would help me sell to my target audience, I’d have no qualms whatsoever of doing it. So, I decided to use public opinion to decide on what elements to include in the outer packaging of the book. Unbeknownst to me, through this decision I’d get to feel like the most hated man on Earth for a day!
There’s this system by Amazon called the “Mechanical Turk”. It’s so called after a nineteenth century chess playing contraption, where a chess grandmaster would go inside of a robot-like thing and he would pretend to be the machine. For many years the machine toured around Europe and the Americas, beating some of the luminaries of the age such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Everyone was amazed by the chess playing prowess of the machine, and thought it to be the future of technology.
Obviously, this was just a scam to earn money, but Amazon took this concept of performing duties that machines are still not quite designed to do, and they created a website around it. Via the Mechanical Turk website, you can hire people for pennies to perform one simple task for you, and then hopefully you get a better answer than an algorithm.
I decided to use these three blurbs, and have people decide on the best elements of each one, and then merge then into a single super blurb. I put up the task and within minutes I ended up getting two hundred and fifty answers to my request. But, because it was the first time I’d ever used the system, I organized the task badly and a good portion of what I got was unusable. About seventy of the answer that I got were absolute garbage as I ended up getting a lot of probably computer-generated responses and I also got answers from people who clearly barely spoke any English whatsoever.
Needless to say, that I got angry because every single answer cost me money. Yet I had a way out, given that you have the ability to reject low quality answers and not pay them. So, not wanting to wade through the garbage that I’d accidentally produced, I created too harsh of an automatic rule, and eliminated people who had answered it in a very short amount of time; I took the average words per minute that a human can read and made a guesstimate from there.
However, it turns out that many people can actually read much faster than the average. Thus, I pissed off close to a hundred people with my automatic elimination. Over the next few hours I got about fifty emails, and I kind of felt like a politician who had said something horrible because, minute after minute after minute, the emails just kept coming from people who were complaining about the fact that I accidentally eliminated them from payments. I was fully at fault here: mea culpa. And I spent a good portion of that day and the next trying to solve the issue.
Yet this whole debacle got me thinking though. The internet and the real world are not aligned with each other; they’re not compatible realms. Our psychology, our political institutions, our everyday life is not designed to cope with the power of the internet.
In the grand scheme of things, this was fifty people in a relatively unknown site and it’s a thoroughly inconsequential tale. Yet getting the ire of dozens of people definitely doesn’t feel like a small matter, and it made me think of the power of the faceless mass of humanity. Nowadays, in the political arena, these large groups of internet denizens are being used as a very real threat to keep your ideas in line with those of the majority. The implicit threat is this: Say whatever we want you to say, or thousands of people will crash into your life and will try to make it a living hell, possibly even attacking your livelihood in the process.
I say this whilst being somewhat concerned about my own writing career, not because I say anything particularly controversial in the book. But because I said certain truths that may rub people the wrong way – even if they are well sourced. Because of this unfettered power of the web, people who are far less opinionated than me, like YouTube’s most subscribed to channel PewDiePie, get a tsunami of hate and are branded as racist bigots for no real reason.
More often than not, you have the mainstream media attacking him; simply because he represents a change from the status quo. All of a sudden, it’s people, with a camera and an opinion, who have a voice that is not beholden to the whims of the moneyed elite, and as a consequence, he is somewhat dangerous to the powers that be. I think this is because our institutions, our real world is not designed for the power that one can summon by pressing a button. At the time of writing, he has a potential audience of 78 MILLION people. Just for context, if he were a country, he’d be in the top 10% most populated countries on Earth, and he is essentially just a man in a room.
Some billion-dollar companies could only hope to have such a massive audience. But that is precisely why he marks himself as a target. If he were so inclined, he has enough clout to create very real change in the world. He could harness the power of decentralised entities and he could wield it both for good and for ill.
It’s precisely this influence that can unbalance the natural equilibrium of the real world, and it can happen quite on accident as well. For example, there was a story a while back of a sunflower field where it used to be the case that as a side business some farmers sold photography rights to random people to be allowed in their fields and take pictures. However, in recent times, hundreds, if not thousands of people turned up after seeing the advertisement.
Over the course of a handful of hours, the fields got absolutely trampled, trashed and ruined beyond repair. Prompting the owners to say that the fields were closed forever and nobody would ever be invited in again. So, again, I don’t think our real world, whether legal system, whether our mail inboxes, whether our psychology are designed to cope with the power of the internet.
The point still stands that we have it, and we need it, which presents a certain dilemma. And I think that a solution that will start happening is that people will balkanize into their own communities. This already occurs to a certain extent with filter bubbles, but I think people will willingly sever certain means of communication with the outside world because the interactions with the wider whole are far too nasty and volatile to work.
As a consequence, people will still be connected to the worldwide web, but it will be on a more personal level. It will be far less random, and more peer to peer. We are beginning to see the first signs nowadays with people choosing dumber phones instead of smartphones. You know the type, the ones that were popular in the early 2000’s, and have since become associated as disposable phones for drug dealers. However, nowadays you’re starting to see important businessman with them. This happens mainly because if they were to use a smartphone they would get consumed by social media, news and many other distractions, quickly becoming an information overflow.
Hence, the philosophical choice, the rational choice, then becomes to voluntarily limit the extent to which you interact with the internet world. I genuinely don’t see how we will be able to cope with the vast interconnectedness if we don’t do something of the sort because the internet has a way of destroying intimacy and beauty. Say for example, imagine you discovered this lovely coffee shop: it’s small, out of the way, it has the right atmosphere and, as a consequence of the great service, you decide to give them a good review.
Then someone sees this amazing review, and tells his friends about it via one of these review sites, and then the ball gets rolling. After a certain amount of time, this quiet coffee shop, hidden away in the corner, becomes the centre of attention of the community and, what drew you to it gets destroyed in the process.
Therefore, I think not everything should be shared; not because it’s without merit, but precisely because it has a more important meaning that somehow gets eroded the second it comes online. This is the dirty secret of the web, when you like, share and subscribe you often destroy the very thing you wanted to capture.
But at the risk of intense amounts of hypocrisy and a smidge of irony that is the thought with which I’ll leave you for this week, and I’ll ask you to like, share and subscribe. 😉
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My book, Cavemen with Smartphones comes out mid-January, let me know if you’d like to be on the advance copy review team.