Monthly Archives: September 2020

Tired of Reality? Take 2 Full-Strength Schitt’s Creeks

“Schitt’s Creek” stormed the Emmys by winning awards in every comedy series category — a new record. It was co-creators Dan and Eugene Levy’s gift to the world: a warm bowl of hot cultural soup, brimming with life-affirming values, acceptance and big-hearted Canadian corniness.

It was the perfect entertainment solution to an imperfect time. It was good for what ails us.

It’s not the first time we’ve turned to entertainment for comfort. In fact, if there is anything as predictable as death and taxes, it’s that during times of trial, we need to be entertained.

There is a direct correlation between feel-good fantasy and feeling-shitty reality. The worse things get, the more we want to escape it.

But the ways we choose to be entertained have changed. And maybe — just maybe — the media channels we’re looking to for our entertainment are adding to the problem. 

The Immersiveness of Media

A medium’s ability to distract us from reality depends on how much it removes us from that reality.

Our media channels have historically been quite separate from the real world. Each channel offered its own opportunity to escape. But as the technology we rely on to be entertained has become more capable of doing multiple things, that escape from the real world has become more difficult.

Books, for example, require a cognitive commitment unlike any other form of entertainment. When we read a book, we — in effect — enter into a co-work partnership with the author. Our brains have to pick up where theirs left off, and we together build a fictional world to which we can escape. 

As the science of interpreting our brain’s behavior has advanced, we have discovered that our brains actually change while we read.

Maryanne Wolf explains in her book, “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain”: “Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. . . . Our ancestors’ invention could come about only because of the human brain’s extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain’s ability to be reshaped by experience.”

Even movies, which dramatically lowered the bar for the cognitive commitments they ask by supplying content specifically designed for two of our senses, do so by immersing us in a dedicated single-purpose environment. The distraction of the real world is locked outside the theater doors.

But today’s entertainment media platforms not only live in the real world, they are the very same platforms we use to function in said world. They are our laptops, our tablets, our phones and our connected TVs.

It’s hard to ignore that world when the flotsam and jetsam of reality is constantly bumping into us. And that brings us to the problem of the multitasking myth.

Multitasking Anxiety

The problem is not so much that we can’t escape from the real world for a brief reprise in a fictional one. It’s that we don’t want to. 

Even if we’re watching our entertainment in our home theater room on a big screen, the odds are very good that we have a small screen in our hands at the same time. We mistakenly believe we can successfully multitask, and our mental health is paying the price for that mistake.

Research has found that trying to multitask brings on a toxic mix of social anxiety, depression, a lessening of our ability to focus attention, and a sociopsychological impairment that impacts our ability to have rewarding relationships. 

When we use the same technology to be entertained that we use to stay on top of our social networks we fall prey to the fear of missing out.

It’s called Internet Communication Disorder, and it’s an addictive need to continually scroll through Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and our other social media platforms. It’s these same platforms that are feeding us a constant stream of the very things we’re looking to escape from. 

It may be that laughter is the best medicine, but the efficacy of that medicine is wholly dependent on where we get our laughs.

The ability for entertainment to smooth the jagged edges of reality depend on our being able to shift our minds off the track that leads to chronic anxiety and depression — and successfully escape into a fictional kinder, gentler, funnier world.

For entertainment to be a beneficial distraction, we first have to mentally disengage from the real world, and then fully engage in the fictional one.

That doesn’t work nearly as well when our entertainment delivery channel also happens to be the same addictive channel that is constantly tempting us to tiptoe through the anxiety-strewn landscape that is our social media feed. 

In other words, before going to “Schitt’s Creek,” unpack your other shit and leave it behind. I guarantee it will be waiting for you when you get back.

Why The World is Conspiring Against Us

With all the other things 2020 will go down in history for, it has also proven to be a high-water mark for conspiracy theories. And that shouldn’t surprise us. Science has proven that when the going get tough, the paranoid get weirder. Add to this the craziness multiplier effect of social media, and it’s no wonder that 2020 has given us a bumper crop of batshit crazy. 

As chronicled for you, my dear reader, I kicked over my own little hornet’s nest of conspiracy craziness a few weeks ago. I started with probing a little COVID anti-vaxxing lunacy right here in my home and native land, Canada.The next thing I knew, the QAnoners were lurching out of the woodwork like the coming of the zombie apocalypse.

I have since run for cover.

But as I was running, I noticed two things. One, most of the people sharing the theories were from the right side of the political spectrum. And two, while they’ve probably always been inclined to indulge in conspiratorial thinking, it seems (anecdotally, anyway) that it’s getting worse.

So I decided to dig a little deeper to find the answers to two questions: Why them, and why now?

Let’s start with why them?

My Facebook experience started with the people I grew up with in a small town in Alberta. It’s hard to imagine a more conservative place. The primary industries are oil, gas and farming. Cowboys — real cowboys wearing real Levi jeans — still saunter down Main Street. This was the first place in Western Canada to elect a representative whose goal was to take Western Canada out of a liberal (and Eastern intellectual elitist)—dominated confederation. If you wanted to find the equivalent of Trumpism in Canada, you’d stand a damn good chance of finding it in this part of Alberta. 

So I wondered: What is about conservatives, especially from the extreme right side of conservatism, that make them more susceptible to spreading conspiracy theories?

It turns out it’s not just the extreme right that believes in conspiracies. According to one study, those on the extreme right or left are more apt to believe in conspiracies. It’s just that it happens more often on the right.

And that could be explained by looking at the types of personalities who tend to believe in conspiracies. According to a 2017 analysis of U.S. data by Daniel Freeman and Richard Bentall, over a quarter of the American population are convinced that “there is a conspiracy behind many things in the world.” 

Not surprisingly, when you dig down to the roots of these beliefs, it comes down to a crippling lack of trust, closely tying those ideas to paranoia. Freeman and Bentall noted, “Unfounded conspiracy beliefs and paranoid ideas are both forms of excessive mistrust that may be corrosive at both an individual and societal level.”

So, if one out of every four people in the U.S. (and apparently a notable percentage of Canadians) lean this way, what are these people like? It turns out there are a cluster of personality traits  likely to lead to belief in conspiracy theories.  

First, these people tend to be anxious about things in general. They have a lower level of education and are typically in the bottom half of income ranges. More than anything, they feel disenfranchised and that the control that once kept their world on track has been lost. 

Because of this, they feel victimized by a powerful elite. They have a high “BS receptivity.” And they believe that only they and a small minority of the like-minded know the real truth. In this way, they gain back some of the individual control they feel they’ve lost.

Given the above, you could perhaps understand why, during the Obama years, conspiracy theorists tended to lean to the right. But if anything, there are more conspiratorial conservatives then ever after almost four years of Trump. Those in power were put there by people who don’t trust those in power. So that brings us to the second question: Why now?

Obviously, it’s been a crappy year that has cranked up everybody’s anxiety level. But the conspiracy wave was already well-established when COVID-19 came along. And that wave started when Republicans (and hard right-wing politicians worldwide) decided to embrace populism as a strategy. 

The only way a populist politician can win is by dividing the populace. Populism is – by its nature – antagonistic in nature. There needs to be an enemy, and that enemy is always on the other side of the political divide. As Ezra Klein points out in his book  “Why We’re Polarized,” population density and the U.S. Electoral College system makes populism a pretty effective strategy for the right.

This is why Republicans are actually stoking the conspiracy fires, including outright endorsement of the QAnon-sense. Amazing as it seems, Republicans are like Rocky Balboa: Even when they win, they seem able to continue being the underdog. 

The core that has been whipped up by populism keeps shadow boxing with their avowed enemy: the liberal elite. This political weaponization of conspiracy theories continues to find a willing audience who eagerly amplify it through social media. There is some evidence to show that extreme conservatives are more willing that embrace conspiracies than extreme liberals, but the biggest problem is that there is a highly effective conspiracy machine continually pumping out right-targeted theories.

It seems there were plenty of conspiracies theories making the rounds well before now. The shitstorm that became known as the year 2020 is simply adding fuel to an already raging fire.

Why Technology May Not Save Us

We are a clever race. We’re not as smart as we think we are, but we are pretty damn smart. We are the only race who has managed to forcibly shift the eternal cycles of nature for our own benefit. We have bent the world to our will. And look how that’s turning out for us.

For the last 10,000 years our cleverness has set us apart from all other species on earth. For the last 1000 years, the pace of that cleverness has accelerated. In the last 100 years, it has been advancing at breakneck speed. Our tools and ingenuity have dramatically reshaped our lives. our everyday is full of stuff we couldn’t imagine just a few short decades ago.

That’s a trend that’s hard to ignore. And because of that, we could be excused for thinking the same may be true going forward. When it comes to thinking about technology, we tend to do so from a glass half full perspective. It’s worked for us in the past. It will work for us in the future. There is no problem too big that our own technological prowess cannot solve.

But maybe it won’t. Maybe – just maybe – we’re dealing with another type of problem now to which technology is not well suited as a solution. And here are 3 reasons why.

The Unintended Consequences Problem

Technology solutions focus on the proximate rather than the distal – which is a fancy way of saying that technology always deals with the task at hand. Being technology, these solutions usually come from an engineer’s perspective, and engineers don’t do well with nuance. Complicated they can deal with. Complexity is another matter.

I wrote about this before when I wondered why tech companies tend to be confused by ethics. It’s because ethics falls into a category of problems known as a wicked problem. Racial injustice is another wicked problem. So is climate change. All of these things are complex and messy. Their dependence on collective human behavior makes them so. Engineers don’t like wicked problems, because they are by definition concretely non-solvable. They are also hotbeds of unintended consequences.

In Collapse, anthropologist Jared Diamond’s 2005 exploration of failed societies, past and present, Diamond notes that when we look forward, we tend to cling to technology as a way to dodge impending doom. But he notes, “underlying this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow onwards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems.”

And there’s the rub. For every proximate solution it provides, technology has a nasty habit of unleashing scads of unintended new problems. Internal combustion engines, mechanized agriculture and social media come to mind immediately as just three examples. The more complex the context of the problem, the more likely it is that the solution will come with unintended consequences.

The 90 Day Problem

Going hand in hand with the unintended consequence problem is the 90 Day problem. This is a port-over from the corporate world, where management tends to focus on problems that can be solved in 90 days. This comes from a human desire to link cause and effect. It’s why we have to-do lists. We like to get shit done.

Some of the problems we’re dealing with now – like climate change – won’t be solved in 90 days. They won’t be solved in 90 weeks or even 90 months. Being wicked problems, they will probably never be solved completely. If we’re very, very, very lucky and we start acting immediately and with unprecedented effort, we might be seeing some significant progress in 90 years.

This is the inconvenient truth of these problems. The consequences are impacting us today but the payoff for tackling them is – even if we do it correctly – sometime far in the future, possibly beyond the horizon of our own lifetimes. We humans don’t do well with those kinds of timelines.

The Alfred E. Neuman Problem

The final problem with relying on technology is that we think of it as a silver bullet. The alternative is a huge amount of personal sacrifice and effort with no guarantee of success. So, it’s easier just to put our faith in technology and say, “What, Me Worry?” like Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman. It’s much easier to shift the onus for us surviving our own future to some nameless, faceless geek somewhere who’s working their way towards their “Eureka” moment.

While that may be convenient and reassuring, it’s not very realistic. I believe the past few years – and certainly the past few months – have shown us that all of us have to make some very significant changes in our lives and be prepared to rethink what we thought our future might be. At the very least, it means voting for leadership committed to fixing problems rather than ignoring them in favor of the status quo.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think technology is going to save our ass this time.

The Fickle Fate of Memes

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Attributed to Andy Warhol

If your name is Karen, I’m sorry. The internet has not been kind to you over the past 2 years. You’re probably to the point where you hesitate before you tell people your name. And it’s not your fault that your name has meme-famous for being synonymous with bitchy white privilege.

The odds are that you’re a nice person. I know several Karens and not one of them is a “Karen.” On the other hand, I do know a few “Karen”s (as my Facebook adventure from last week makes clear) and not one of them is named Karen.

But that’s the way memes roll. You’re not at the wheel. The trolling masses have claimed your fate and you just have to go along for the ride. That’s true for Karen, where there doesn’t seem to be an actual “Karen” to which the meme can be attributed. But it’s also true when the meme starts with an actual person – like Rebecca Black.

Remember Rebecca Black? No?  I’ll jog your memory –

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today it is Friday, Friday (partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

Rebecca Black

Yes, that Rebecca Black – star of “Friday”, which for many years was the most hated video in YouTube history (it still ranks at number 15 according to Wikipedia).

Admit it, when you remembered Rebecca Black, you did not do so fondly. But you know nothing about Rebecca Black. Memes seldom come bundled with a back story. So here are a few facts about Friday you didn’t know.

  • Black didn’t write the song. It was written by two LA music producers
  • Black was 13 at the time the video was shot
  • She had no input into the production or the heavy use of Autotune on her vocals
  • She didn’t see the video or hear the final version of the song before it was posted to YouTube

Although Black was put front and center into the onslaught of negativity the video produced, she had very little to do with the finished product. She was just a 13-year-old girl who was hoping to become a professional singer. And suddenly, she was one of the most hated and ridiculed people in the world. The trolls came out in force. And, unsurprisingly, they were merciless. But then mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon. Billboard and Time magazines, CNN, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and more all heaped ridicule on Black.

That’s a lot for any 13-year-old to handle.  To understand the impact a meme can have, take 11 minutes to watch the video above about Black from Vice. Black seems to have emerged from the experience as a pretty well-adjusted 22-year-old who is still hoping to turn the fame she got into a positive. She is – more than anything – just trying to regain control of her own story.

The fame Rebecca Black found may have turned out to be of the caustic kind when she found it, but at least she was looking for it. Ghyslain Raza never asked for it and never wanted it. He became a meme by accident.

Ghyslain who? Allow your memory to be jogged once again. You probably know Raza better as the Star Wars Kid.

In 2002, Ghyslain Raza was a shy 14-year-old from Quebec who liked to make videos. One of those videos was shot in the school AV room while Raza was “goofing around,” wielding a makeshift light saber he made from a golf ball retriever. That video fell into the hands of a classmate, who – with all the restraint middle schoolers are known for – promptly posted it online. Soon, a torrent of cyber bullying was unleashed on Raza as views climbed into the tens of millions.

The online comments were hurtful enough. More than a few commenters suggested that Raza commit suicide. Some offered to help. But it was no better for Razain in his real life. He had to change schools when what few friends he had evaporated. At the new school, it got worse, “In the common room, students climbed onto tabletops to insult me.”

Imagine for a moment yourself being 14 and dealing with this. Hell, imagine it at the age you are now. Life would be hell. It certainly was for Raza. In an interview with a Canadian news magazine, he said, “No matter how hard I tried to ignore people telling me to commit suicide, I couldn’t help but feel worthless, like my life wasn’t worth living.”

Both Black and Raza survived their ordeals. Aleksey Varner wasn’t so lucky. The over-the-top video resume he made in 2006, Impossible is Nothing, also became a meme when it was posted online without his permission. Actor Michael Cera was one of the many who did a parody. Like Black and Raza, Vayner battled to get his life back. He lost that battle in 2013. He died from a heart attack that a relative has said was brought on by an overdose of medication.

In our culture, online seems to equal open season. Everyone –  even celebrities that should know better – seem to think it’s okay to parody, ridicule, bully or even threaten death. What we conveniently forget is that there is a very real person with very real feelings on the other side of the meme. No one deserves that kind of fame.

Even if their name is Karen.

The Day My Facebook Bubble Popped

I learned this past week just how ideologically homogenous my Facebook bubble usually is. Politically, I lean left of center. Almost all the people in my bubble are the same.

Said bubble has been built from the people I have met in the past 40 years or so. Most of these people are in marketing, digital media or tech. I seldom see anything in my feed I don’t agree with — at least to some extent.

But before all that, I grew up in a small town in a very right-wing part of Alberta, Canada. Last summer, I went to my 40-year high-school reunion. Many of my fellow graduates stayed close to our hometown for those 40 years. Some are farmers. Many work in the oil and gas industry. Most of them would fall somewhere to the right of where I sit in my beliefs and political leanings.

At the reunion, we did what people do at such things — we reconnected. Which in today’s world meant we friended each other on Facebook. What I didn’t realize at the time is that I had started a sort of sociological experiment. I had poked a conservative pin into my liberal social media bubble.

Soon, I started to see posts that were definitely coming from outside my typical bubble. But most of them fell into the “we can agree to disagree” camp of political debate. My new Facebook friends and I might not see eye-to-eye on certain things, but hell — you are good people, I’m good people, we can all live together in this big ideological tent.

On May 1, 2020, things began to change. That was when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that 1,500 models of “assault-style” weapons would be classified as prohibited, effective immediately. This came after Gabriel Wortman killed 22 people in Nova Scotia, making it Canada’s deadliest shooting spree. Now, suddenly posts I didn’t politically agree with were hitting a very sensitive raw nerve. Still, I kept my mouth shut. I believed arguing on Facebook was pointless.

Through everything that’s happened in the four months since (it seems like four decades), I have resisted commenting when I see posts I don’t agree with. I know how pointless it is. I realize that I am never going to change anyone’s mind through a comment on a Facebook post.

I understand this is just an expression of free speech, and we are all constitutionally entitled to exercise it. I stuck with the Facebook rule I imposed for myself — keep scrolling and bite your tongue. Don’t engage.

I broke that rule last week. One particular post did it. This post implied that with a COVID-19 survival rate of almost 100%, why did we need a vaccine? I knew better, but I couldn’t help it.

I engaged. It was limited engagement to begin with. I posted a quick comment suggesting that with 800,000 (and counting) already gone, saving hundreds of thousands of lives might be a pretty good reason. Right or left, I couldn’t fathom anyone arguing with that.

I was wrong. Oh my God, was I wrong. My little comment unleashed a social media shit storm. Anti-vaxxing screeds, mind-control plots via China, government conspiracies to artificially over-count the death toll and calling out the sheer stupidity of people wearing face masks proliferated in the comment string for the next five days. I watched the comment string grow in stunned disbelief. I had never seen this side of Facebook before.

Or had I? Perhaps the left-leaning posts I am used are just as conspiratorial, but I don’t realize it because I happen to agree with them. I hope not, but perspective does strange things to our grasp of the things we believe to be true. Are we all — right or left — just exercising our right to free speech through a new platform? And — if we are — who am I to object?

Free speech is held up by Mark Zuckerberg and others as hallowed ground in the social-media universe. In a speech last fall at Georgetown University, Zuckerberg said: “The ability to speak freely has been central in the fight for democracy worldwide.”

It’s hard to argue that. The ability to publicly disagree with the government or any other holder of power over you is much better than any alternative. And the drafters of the U.S. Bill of Rights agreed. Freedom of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment. But the authors of that amendment — perhaps presciently — never defined exactly what constituted free speech. Maybe they knew it would be a moving target.

Over the history of the First Amendment, it has been left to the courts to decide what the exceptions would be.

In general, it has tightened the definitions around one area — what types of expression constitute a “clear and present danger” to others.  Currently, unless you’re specifically asking someone to break the law in the very near future, you’re protected under the First Amendment.

But is there a bigger picture here —one very specific to social media? Yes, legally in the U.S. (or Canada), you can post almost anything on Facebook.

Certainly, taking a stand against face masks and vaccines would qualify as free speech. But it’s not only the law that keeps society functioning. Most of the credit for that falls to social norms.

Social norms are the unwritten laws that govern much of our behavior. They are the “soft guard rails” of society that nudge us back on track when we veer off-course. They rely on us conforming to behaviors accepted by the majority.

If you agree with social norms, there is little nudging required. But if you happen to disagree with them, your willingness to follow them depends on how many others also disagree with them.

Famed sociologist Mark Granovetter showed in his Threshold Models of Collective Behavior that there can be tipping points in groups. If there are enough people who disagree with a social norm, it will create a cascade that can lead to a revolt against the norm.

Prior to social media, the thresholds for this type of behavior were quite high. Even if some of us were quick to act anti-socially, we were generally acting alone.

Most of us felt we needed a substantial number of like-minded people before we were willing to upend a social norm. And when our groups were determined geographically and comprised of ideologically diverse members, this was generally sufficient to keep things on track.

But your social-media feed dramatically lowers this threshold.

Suddenly, all you see are supporting posts of like-minded people. It seems that everyone agrees with you. Emboldened, you are more likely to go against social norms.

The problem here is that social norms are generally there because they are in the best interests of the majority of the people in society. If you go against them, by refusing a vaccine or to wear a face mask,  thereby allowing a disease to spread, you endanger others. Perhaps it doesn’t meet the legal definition of “imminent lawlessness,” but it does present a “clear and present danger.”

That’s a long explanation of why I broke my rule about arguing on Facebook.

Did I change anyone’s mind? No. But I did notice that the person who made the original post has changed their settings, so I don’t see the political ones anymore. I just see posts about grandkids and puppies.

Maybe it’s better that way.