Author Archives: ghotchkiss

The Magic of the Internet Through My Dad’s Eyes

“Would you rather lose a limb or never be able to access the Internet?” My daughter looked at me, waiting for my answer.

“Well?”

We were playing the game “Would You Rather” during a lull in the Christmas festivities. The whole point of the game is to pose two random and usually bizarre alternatives to choose from. Once you do, you see how others have answered. It’s a hard game to take seriously.

Except for this question. This one hit me like a hammer blow.

“I have to say I’d rather lose a limb.”

Wow. I would rather lose an arm or a leg than lose something I didn’t even know existed 20 years ago. That’s a pretty sobering thought. I am so dependent on this technical artifact that I value it more than parts of my own body.

During the same holiday season, my stepdad came to visit. He has two cherished possessions that are always with him. One is a pocketknife his father gave him. The other is an iPhone 3 that my sister gave him when she upgraded. Dad doesn’t do much on his phone. But what he does do is critically important to him. He texts his kids and he checks the weather. If you grew up on a farm on the Canadian prairies during the 1930’s, you literally lived and died according to the weather. So, for Dad, it’s magic of the highest sort to be able to know what the temperature is in the places where his favorite people live. We kids have added all our home locations to his weather app, as well as that of his sister-in-law. Dad checks the weather in Edmonton (Alberta), Calgary (Alberta), Kelowna (BC), Orillia (Ontario) and his hometown of Sundre (Alberta) constantly. It’s his way of keeping tabs on us when he can’t be with us.

I wonder what Dad would say if I asked him to choose between his iPhone and his right arm. I suspect he’d have to think about it. I do know the first thing I have to do when he comes to our place is set him up on our home wifi network.

It’s easy to talk about how Millennials or Gen-X’s are dependent on technology. But for me, it really strikes home when I watch people of my parent’s generation hold on to some aspect of technology for dear life because it enables them to do something so fundamentally important to them. They understand something we don’t. They understand what Arthur C. Clarke meant when he said,

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

To understand this, look for a moment through the eyes of my Dad when he was a child. He rode a horse to school – a tiny one room building that was heated with a wood stove. Its library consisted of two bookshelves on the back wall. A circle whose radius was defined by how far you could drive the wagon in a single day bound the world of which he was aware. That world consisted of several farms, the Eagle Hill Co-op store, the tiny town of Sundre, his school and the post office. The last was particularly important, because that’s where the packages you ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue (the Canadian equivalent of Sears Roebuck) would come.

It’s to this post office that my step-dad dragged his sleigh about 75 years ago. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was picking up his Christmas present. His mother, whose own paternal grandfather was a contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin, had saved milk money for several months to purchase a three-volume encyclopaedia for the home. Nobody else they knew had an encyclopaedia. Books were rare enough. But for Isobel (Buckman) Leckie, knowledge was an investment worth making. Those three books became the gift of a much bigger world for my Dad.

It’s easy to make fun of seniors for their simultaneous amazement of and bewilderment by technology. We chuckle when Dad does his third “weather round-up” of the day. We get frustrated when he can’t seem to understand how wifi works. But let’s put this in the context of the change he has seen in his life on this earth. This is not just an obsolete iPhone 3 that he holds in his hand. This is something for which the adjective “magical” seems apt.

Perhaps it’s even magic you’d pay an arm and a leg for.

Watson:2020 – America’s Self-Driving Presidency

Ken Jennings, the second most successful Jeopardy player of all time, has an IQ of 175. That makes him smarter than 99.9998615605% of everybody. If you put him in a city the size of Indianapolis, he’d probably be the smartest person there. In fact, in all of the US, statistics say there are only 443 people that would be smarter than Mr. Jennings.

And one machine. Let’s not forget IBM’s Watson whupped Jennings’ ass over two days, piling up $77,147 in winnings to Jennings $24,000. It wasn’t even close. Watson won by a factor of more than 3 to 1.

That’s why I think Watson should run for president in 2020. Bear with me.

Donald Trump’s IQ is probably in the 119 range (not 156 as he boasts – but then he also boasted that every woman who ever appeared on the Apprentice flirted with him). Of course we’ll never know. Like his tax returns, any actual evidence of his intelligence is unavailable. But let’s go with 119. That makes him smarter than 88.24% of the population, which isn’t bad, but it also isn’t great. According to Wikipedia, if that IQ estimate were correct, he would be the second dumbest president in history, slightly ahead of Gerald Ford. Here’s another way to think about it. If you were standing at a moderately busy bus stop, chances are somebody else waiting with you would be smarter than the President Elect of the United States.

Watson won Jeopardy in 2011. Since then, he’s become smarter, becoming an expert in health, law, real estate, finance, weather – even cooking. And when I say expert, I mean Watson knows more about those things than anyone alive.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has probably learned little in the last 5 years because, apparently, he doesn’t have time to read. But that’s okay, because he reaches the right decisions

“with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

In the President Elect’s mind, that also qualifies him to “wing it” with things like international relations, security risks, emerging world events, domestic crises and the other stuff on his daily to-do list. He has also decided that he doesn’t need his regular intelligence briefing, reiterating:

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years. Could be eight years — but eight years. I don’t need that.”

That’s right, the future leader of the free world is, “you know, like, a smart person.”

Now, President Watson could also decide to skip the briefing, but that’s because Watson can process 500 gigabytes – the equivalent of a million books – per second. Any analyst or advisor would be hard pressed to keep up.

Let’s talk about technology. Donald Trump doesn’t appear to know how to use a computer. His technical prowess seems to begin and end with midnight use of Twitter. To be fair, Hillary Clinton was also bamboozled by technology, as one errant email server showed all too clearly. But Watson is technology: and if you can follow this description from Wikipedia, apparently pretty impressive technology: “a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight-core processor, with four threads per core. In total, the system has 2,880 POWER7 processor threads and 16 terabytes of RAM.”

In a presidential debate, or, for that matter, a tweet, Watson can simultaneously retrieve from its onboard 16-terabyte memory, process, formulate and fact check. Presumably, unlike Trump, Watson could remember whether or not he said global warming was a hoax, how long ISIS has actually been around and whether he in fact had the world’s greatest memory. At the very least, Watson would know how to spell “unprecedented”

But let’s get down to the real question, whose digit do you want on the button: Trump’s “long and beautiful” fingers or Watson’s bionic thumb? Watson – who can instantly and rationally process terabytes of information to determine optimum alternatives – or Trump – who’s philosophy is that “it really doesn’t matter…as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of *ss.”

I know what you’re thinking – this is us finally surrendering to the machines. But at least it’s intelligence – even if it is artificial.

Note: In writing what I thought was satire, I found once again that fact is stranger than fiction. Somebody already thought of this 4 years ago: http://watson2016.com/

The Cathedral and Bazaar Cycle of Mar -Tech Innovation

Each year my friend Scott Brinker sits down to update his marketing technology landscape and each year he is amazed by the explosion of vendors he has to fit on a single slide. Last year’s version clocked in at 3874 Mar Tech solutions – almost twice as many as 2015. He started in 2011 with about 150 and it has effectively doubled with each iteration. While everyone has expected eventual consolidation this hasn’t happened to date.

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Scott’s Marketing Technology Landscape – 2016

Why?

For a possible answer, we can look at a fascinating study conducted by a UCLA team looking at the fossil record of cars. Since 1896, there is a reliable record of the introduction of new automobile makes and models. In essence, this creates a “fossil” record, similar to biology, where we can look at the evolution of a technology over an extended time period. In this case, the researchers were looking to isolate the factors that led to the greatest introduction of new models and the discontinuation of old models. When many new models were being introduced, the evolution of the automotive technology accelerated. The researchers wanted to see if this pace of evolution was tied to strength of the economy, changes in oil prices or the number of other cards on the market. What they found was that competition in the marketplace played a bigger role in the variety of car models than either economic growth or oil prices.

However, these periods of rapid innovation didn’t last forever. Inevitably, there was a period of consolidation, where the major manufacturers focused on a few models to increase profitability. It’s a lot more profitable to produce a popular model with relatively few changes over a long period of time.

Once again, we have an oscillation or wave happening.

What is interesting about this is that these periods of rapid innovation always come from an open market with many competitors – exactly what is happening in marketing technology right now. That is because open markets always drive more innovation than can be achieved within hierarchal organizations. As Eric Raymond showed in his brilliant essay on the open source movement – The Cathedral and the Bazaar – the evolutionary forces of a distributed open market (or “Bazaar”) always trump vertical integration (“Cathedrals”) when it comes to spinning off fresh ideas.

In their book “Creative Destruction,” authors Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan show that organizations (cathedrals) tend to favor incremental innovation with occasional forays into substantial innovation. But markets (bazaars) unleash transformational innovation. The unpredictability and risk increases by a factor of ten as you go from one version of innovation to the other, but so do the rewards. Innovation in markets grow on a logarithmic scale. It’s why some players – like Tesla and Google – have espoused the open-source “Bazaar” approach in areas like sustainable transportation and artificial intelligence where rapid innovation is essential.

There is another critical factor at play here as well. The market/bazaar, being ruthless, quickly culls the competitors down to those that have the best market potential. This explosion of innovation and the subsequent winnowing need a brutally competitive market environment – a rugged landscape in evolutionary terms. Organizations/Cathedrals are reluctant to pull the plug on losers as they fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy and loss aversion. Markets/bazaars operate like nature – “red in tooth and claw” – with a brutal efficiency in dispatching the less fit.

After this explosion of innovation and the subsequent purge, there is a period of consolidation where the biggest players benefit. Let’s call this the Cathedral phase. Here, operational efficiency takes over, looking for greater profitability. Here, market tested innovation is acquired by the largest organizations and systematically incorporated into a replicable template that allows for scalability. Here, the Cathedral model does what it excels at, maximizing profits. Of course, there is a trade off. Innovation withers and dies in this environment, leading to eventual stagnation, which triggers the need for break out innovation all over again.

Will marketing technology follow the Cathedral/Bazaar pattern? In his last landscape, Scott mentioned that rather than coalescing around an “a small oligopoly of platform providers competing for that starring role” the Mar-Tech ecosystem seems to be embedding plug and play compatibility allowing for a longer “Bazaar” phase. Perhaps, with the elimination of market friction, we’re getting to a point where profitability can be uncoupled from the need for scale. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how many mar-tech vendors end up on the 2017 version of Scott’s slide.

 

 

 

 

Back to the Coffee House: Has Journalism Gone Full Circle?

First, let’s consider two facts about Facebook that ran in Mediapost in the last two weeks. The first:

“A full 65% of people find their next destination through friends and family on Facebook.”

Let’s take this out of the context of just looking for your next travel destination. Let’s think about it in terms of a risky decision. Choosing somewhere to go on a vacation is a big decision. There’s a lot riding on it. Other than the expense, there’s also your personal experience. The fact that 2 out of 3 people chose Facebook as the platform upon which to make that decision is rather amazing when you think about it. It shows just how pervasive and influential Facebook as become.

Now, the next fact:

“Facebook users are two-and-a-half times more likely to read fake news fed through the social network than news from reputable news publishers.”

There’s really no reason to elaborate on the above – ‘nuff said. It’s pretty clear that Facebook has emerged at the dominant public space in our lives. It is perhaps the most important platform in our culture today for forming beliefs and opinions.

Sorry Mark Zuckerberg, but not matter what you may have said in the past about not being a media outlet, you can’t duck this responsibility. If our public opinions are formed on your private property that is a unimaginably powerful platform then – as Spidey’s Uncle Ben said (or the French National Convention of 1793; depending on whom you’re prefer to quote as a source) – “With great power comes great responsibility.” If you provide a platform and an audience to news providers – fake or real, you are, ipso facto, a media outlet.

But Facebook is more than just an outlet. It is also the forum where news is digested and shared. It is both a gristmill and a cauldron where beliefs are formed and opinions expressed. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, although the previous occurrence was in a different time and a very different place. It actually contributed directly to the birth of modern journalism – which is, ironically – under threat from this latest evolution of news.

If you were an average citizen London in 1700 your sources for news were limited. First of all, there was a very good chance that you were illiterate, so reading the news wasn’t an option. The official channel for the news of the realm was royal proclamations read out by town criers. Unfortunately, this wasn’t so much news as whatever the ruling monarch felt like proclaiming.

There was another reality of life in London – if you drank the water it could possibly kill you. You could drink beer in a pub – which most did – or if you preferred to stay sober you could drink coffee. Starting in the mid 1600’s coffee houses started to pop up all over London. It wasn’t the quality of the coffee that made these public spaces all the rage. It was the forum they provided for the sharing of news. Each new arrival was greeted with, “Your servant, sir. What news have you?” Pamphlets, journals, broadsheets and newsletters from independent (a.k.a “non-royal”) publishers were read aloud, digested and debated. Given the class-bound society of London, coffee houses were remarkably democratic. “Pre-eminence of place none here should mind,” proclaimed the Rules and Orders of the Coffee-House (1674), “but take the next fit seat he can find.” Lords, fishmongers, baronets, barristers, butchers and shoe-blacks could and did all share the same table. The coffee houses of London made a huge contribution to our current notion of media as a public trust, with all that entails.

In a 2011 article the Economist made the same parallel between coffee houses and digitally mediated news. In it, they foreshadowed a dramatic shift in our concept of news:

“The internet is making news more participatory, social, diverse and partisan, reviving the discursive ethos of the era before mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics.”

The last line was prescient. Seismic disruption has fundamentally torn the political and societal landscape asunder. But I have a different take on the “discursive ethos” of news consumption. I assume the Economist used this phrase to mean a verbal interchange of thought related to the news. But that doesn’t happen on Facebook. There is no thought and there is little discourse. The share button is hit before there is any chance to digest the news, let alone vet it for accuracy. This is a much different atmosphere of the coffee house. There is a dynamic that happens when our beliefs are called on the mat in a public forum. It is here where beliefs may be altered but they can never change in a vacuum. The coffee house provided the ideal forum for the challenging of beliefs. As mentioned, it was perhaps the most heterogeneous forum in all of England at the time. Most of all it was an atmosphere infused with physicality and human interaction – a melting pot of somatic feedback. Debate was civil but passionate. There was a dynamic totally missing from it’s online equivalent. The rules and realities of the 18th century coffee house forced thoughtfulness and diverse perspectives upon the discourse. Facebook allows you to do an end run around it as you hit your share button.

The Calcification of a Columnist

First: the Caveat. I’m old and grumpy. That is self-evident. There is no need to remind me.

But even with this truth established, the fact is that I’ve noticed a trend. Increasingly, when I come to write this column, I get depressed. The more I look for a topic to write about, the more my mood spirals downward.

I’ve been writing for Mediapost for over 12 years now. Together, between the Search Insider and Online Spin, that’s close to 600 columns. Many – if not most – of those have been focused on the intersection between technology and human behavior. I’m fascinated by what happens when evolved instincts meet technological disruption.

When I started this gig I was mostly optimistic. I was amazed by the possibilities and – somewhat naively it turns out – believed it would make us better. Unlimited access to information, the ability to connect with anyone – anywhere, new ways to reach beyond the limits of our own DNA; how could this not make humans amazing?

Why, then, do we seem to be going backwards? What I didn’t realize at the time is that technology is like a magnifying glass. Yes, it can make the good of human nature better, but it can also make the bad worse. Not only that, but Technology also has a nasty habit of throwing in unintended consequences; little gotchas we never saw coming that have massive moral implications. Disruption can be a good thing, but it can also rip things apart in a thrice that took centuries of careful and thoughtful building to put in place. Black Swans have little regard for ethics or morality.

I have always said that technology doesn’t change behaviors. It enables behaviors. When it comes to the things that matter, our innate instincts and beliefs, we are not perceptibly different than our distant ancestors were. We are driven by the same drives. Increasingly, as I look at how we use the outcomes of science and innovation to pursue these objectives, I realize that while it can enable love, courage and compassion, technology can also engender more hate, racism and misogyny. It makes us better while it also makes us worse. We are becoming caricatures of ourselves.

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Everett Rogers, 1962

Everett Rogers plotted the diffusion of technology through the masses on a bell curve and divided us up into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. The categorization was defined by our acceptance of innovation. Inevitably, then, there would be a correlation between that acceptance and our sense of optimism about the possibilities of technology. Early adopters would naturally see how technology would enable us to be better. But, as diffusion rolls through the curve we would eventually hit those for which technology is just there – another entitlement, a factor of our environment, oxygen. There is no special magic or promise here. Technology simply is.

So, to recap, I’m old and grumpy. As I started to write yet another column I was submerged in a wave of weariness.   I have to admit – I have been emotionally beat up by the last few years. I’m tired of writing about how technology is making us stupider, lazier and less tolerant when it should be making us great.

But another thing usually comes with age: perspective. This isn’t the first time that humans and disruptive technology have crossed paths. That’s been the story of our existence. Perhaps we should zoom out a bit from our current situation. Let’s set aside for a moment our navel gazing about fake news, click bait, viral hatred, connected xenophobia and erosion of public trusts. Let’s look at the bigger picture.

History isn’t sketched in straight lines. History is plotted on a curve. Correction. History is plotted in a series of waves. We are constantly correcting course. Disruption tends to swing a pendulum one way until a gathering of opposing force swings it the other way. It takes us awhile to absorb disruption, but we do – eventually.

I suspect if I were writing this in 1785 I’d be disheartened by the industrial blight that was enveloping the world. Then, like now, technology was plotting a new course for us. But in this case, we have the advantage of hindsight to put things in perspective. Consider this one fact: between 1200 and 1600 the life span of a British noble didn’t go up by even a single year. But, between 1800 and today, life expectancy for white males in the West doubled from thirty eight years to seventy six. Technology made that possible.

stevenpinker2Technology, when viewed on a longer timeline, has also made us better. If you doubt that, read psychologist and author Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature.” His exhaustively researched and reasoned book leads you to the inescapable conclusion that we are better now than we ever have been. We are less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than at any time in history. Technology also made that possible.

It’s okay to be frustrated by the squandering of the promise of technology. But it’s not okay to just shrug and move on. You are the opposing force that can cause the pendulum to change direction. Because, in the end, it’s not technology that makes us better. It’s how we choose to use that technology.

 

 

 

The Mindful Democracy Manifesto

 

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Winston Churchill

Call it the Frog in Boiling Water Syndrome. It happens when creeping changes in our environment reach a disruptive tipping point that triggers massive change – or – sometimes – a dead frog. I think we’re going through one such scenario now. In this case, the boiling water may be technology and the frog may be democracy.

As I said in Online Spin last week, the network effects of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory may be yet another unintended consequence of technology.

I walked through the dynamics I believe lay behind the election last week in some detail. This week, I want to focus more on the impact of technology on democratic elections in general. In particular, I wanted to explore the network effects of technology, the spread of information and sweeping populist movements like we saw on November 8th.

In an ideal world, access to information should be the bedrock of effective democracy. Ironically, however, now that we have more access than ever that bedrock is being chipped away. There has been a lot of finger pointing at the dissemination of fake news on Facebook, but that’s just symptomatic of a bigger ill. The real problem is the filter bubbles and echo chambers that formed on social networks. And they formed because friction has been eliminated. The way we were informed in this election looked very different from that in elections past.

Information is now spread more through emergent social networks than through editorially controlled media channels. That makes it subject to unintended network effects. Because the friction of central control has been largely eliminated, the spread of information relies on the rules of emergence: the aggregated and amplified behaviors of the individual agents.

When it comes to predicting behaviors of individual human agents, our best bet is placed on the innate behaviors that lie below the threshold of rational thought. Up to now, social conformity was a huge factor. And that rallying point of that social conformity was largely formed and defined by information coming from the mainstream media. The trend of that information over the past several decades has been to the left end of the ideological spectrum. Political correctness is one clear example of this evolving trend.

But in this past election, there was a shift in individual behavior thanks to the elimination of friction in the spread of information – away from social conformity and towards other primal behaviors. Xenophobia is one such behavior. Much as some of us hate to admit it, we’re all xenophobic to some degree. Humans naturally choose familiar over foreign. It’s an evolved survival trait. And, as American economist Thomas Schelling showed in 1971, it doesn’t take a very high degree of xenophobia to lead to significant segregation. He showed that even people who only have a mild preference to be with people like themselves (about 33%) would, given the ability to move wherever they wished, lead to highly segregated neighborhoods. Imagine then the segregation that happens when friction is essentially removed from social networks. You don’t have to be a racist to want to be with people who agree with you. Liberals are definitely guilty of the same bias.

What happened in the election of 2016 were the final death throes of the mythical Homo Politicus – the fiction of the rational voter. Just like Homo Economicus – who predeceased him/her thanks to the ground breaking work of psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman – much as we might believe we make rational voting choices, we are all a primal basket of cognitive biases. And these biases were fed a steady stream of misinformation and questionable factoids thanks to our homogenized social connections.

This was not just a right wing trend. The left was equally guilty. Emergent networks formed and headed in diametrically opposed directions. In the middle, unfortunately, was the future of the country and – perhaps – democracy. Because, with the elimination of information distributional friction, we have to ask the question, “What will democracy become?” I have an idea, but I’ll warn you, it’s not a particularly attractive one.

If we look at democracy in the context of an emergent network, we can reasonably predict a few things. If the behaviors of the individual agents are not uniform – if half always turn left and half always turn right – that dynamic tension will set up an oscillation. The network will go through opposing phases. The higher the tension, the bigger the amplitude and the more rapid the frequency of those oscillations. The country will continually veer right and then veer left.

Because those voting decisions are driven more by primal reactions than rational thought, votes will become less about the optimal future of the country and more about revenge on the winner of the previous election. As the elimination of friction in information distribution accelerates, we will increasingly be subject to the threshold mob effect I described in my last column.

So, is democracy dead? Perhaps. At a minimum, it is debilitated. At the beginning of the column, I quoted Winston Churchill. Here is another quote from Churchill:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

We are incredibly reluctant to toy with the idea of democracy. It is perhaps the most cherished ideal we cling to in the Western World. But if democracy is the mechanism for a never-ending oscillation of retribution, perhaps we should be brave enough to consider alternatives. In that spirit, I put forward the following:

Mindful Democracy.

The best antidote to irrationality is mindfulness – forcing our Prefrontal cortex to kick in and lift us above our primal urges. But how do we encourage mindfulness in a democratic context? How do we break out of our social filter bubbles and echo chambers?

What if we made the right to vote contingent on awareness? What if you had to take a test before you cast your vote? The objective of the test is simple: how aware were you not only of your candidate’s position and policies but – more importantly – that of the other side? You don’t have to agree with the other side’s position; you just have to be aware of it. Your awareness score would then be assigned as a weight to your vote. The higher your level of awareness, the more your vote would count.

I know I’m tiptoeing on the edge of sacrilege here, but consider it a straw man. I’ve been hesitating in going public with this, but I’ve been thinking about it for some time and I’m not so sure it’s worse than the increasingly shaky democratic status quo we currently have. It’s equally fair to the right and left. It encourages mindfulness. It breaks down echo chambers.

It’s worth thinking about.

Mobs, Filter Bubbles and Democracy

You know I love to ask “why”? And last Tuesday provided me with the mother of all “whys”. I know there will be a lot of digital ink shed on this – but I just can’t help myself.

So..why?

Eight years ago, on Mediapost, I wrote that we had seen a new type of democracy. I still think I was right. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had just seen one side of a more complex phenomenon. Tuesday we saw another side. And we’re still reeling from it.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this. Trump’s ascendancy is following the same playbook as Brexit, Marine Le Pen’s right winged attack in France and Rodrigo Duterte’s recent win for the presidency of the Philippines. Behind all these things, there are a few factors at play. Together, they combine to create a new social phenomenon. And, when combined with traditional democratic vehicles, they can cause bad things to happen to good people.

The FYF (F*&k You Factor)

Michael Moore absolutely nailed what happened Tuesday night, even providing a state-by-state, vote-by-vote breakdown of what went down – but he did it back in July. And he did it because he and Trump are both masters of the FYF. Just like you can’t bullshit a bullshitter – you can’t propagandize a propagandist. Trump had borrowed a page out of Moore’s playbook and Moore could see it coming a mile away.

The FYF requires two things – fear and anger. Anger comes from the fear. Typically, it’s fear of – and anger about – something you feel is beyond your control. This inevitably leads to a need to blame someone or something. The FYF master first creates the enemy, and then gives you a way to say FY to them. In Moore’s words, “The Outsider, Donald Trump, has arrived to clean house! You don’t have to agree with him! You don’t even have to like him! He is your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you!”

What Michael Moore knew – and what the rest of us would figure out too late – was that for half the US, this wasn’t a vote for president. This was a vote for destruction. The more outrageous that Trump seemed, the more destructive he would be. Whether it was intentional or note, Trump’s genius was in turning Clinton’s competence into a liability. He succeeded in turning this into a simple yes or no choice – vote for the Washington you know – and hate – or blow it up.

The Threshold Factor

The FYF provides the core – the power base. Trump’s core was angry white men. But then you have to extend beyond this core. That’s where mob mentality comes in.

In 1978, Mark Granovetter wrote a landmark paper on threshold models of behavior. I’ll summarize. Let’s say you have two choices of behavior. One is to adhere to social and behavioral norms. Let’s call this the status quo option. The other is to do something you wouldn’t normally do, like defy your government – let’s call this the F*&k You option. Which option you choose is based on a risk/reward calculation.

What Granovetter realized is that predicting the behavior of a group isn’t a binary model – it’s a spectrum. In any group of people, you are going to have a range of risk/reward thresholds to get over to go from one behavioral alternative to the other. Being social animals, Granovetter theorized the deciding factor was the number of other people we need to see who are also willing to choose option 2 – saying F*&k you. The more people willing to make that choice, the lower the risk that you’ll be singled out for your behavior. Some people don’t need anyone – they are the instigators. Let’s give them a “0”. Other people may never join the mob mentality, even if everyone else is. We’ll give them a “100.” In between you have all the rest, ranging from 1 to 99.

The instigators start the reaction. Depending on the distribution of thresholds, if there are enough 1, 2, 3’s and so forth, the bandwagon effect happens quickly, spreading through the group. It isn’t until you hit a threshold gap that the chain reaction stops. For example, if you have a small group of 1’s, 2’s and 3’s, but the next lowest threshold is 10, the movement may be stopped in its tracks.

Network Effects and Filter Bubbles

None of what I’ve described so far is new. People have always been angry and mobs have always formed. What is new, however, is the nature of this particular mob.

As you probably deduced, the threshold model is one of network effects. It depends on finding others who share similar views. It you can aggregate a critical mass of low thresholds; you can trigger bigger bandwagon effects – maybe even big enough to jump threshold gaps.

Up to now, Granovetter’s Threshold model was constrained by geography. You had to have enough low threshold people in physical space to start the chain reaction. But we live in a different world. Now, you can have a groups of 0s, 1s and 2s living in Spokane, Washington, Pickensville, Alabama, and Marianna, Florida and they can all be connected online. When this happens, we have a new phenomenon – the Filter Bubble.

One thing we learned this election was how effective filter bubbles were. I have a little over 440 connections in Facebook. In the months and weeks leading up to the election, I saw almost no support for Trump in my feed. I agreed ideologically with the posts of almost everyone in my network. I suspect I’m not alone. I am sure Trump supporters had equally homogeneous feedback from their respective networks. This put us in what we call a filter bubble. In the geographically unrestricted network of online connections, our network nodes tend to be rather homogeneous ideologically.

Think about what this does to Granovetter’s threshold model. We fall into the false illusion that everyone thinks the same way we do. This reduces threshold gaps and accelerates momentum for non-typical options. It tips the balance away from risk and towards reward.

A New Face of Democracy

I believe these three factors set the stage for Donald Trump. I also believe they are threatening to turn democracy into never ending cycle of left vs. right backlashes. I want to explore this some more, but given that I’ve already egregiously exceeded my typical word count for Online Spin, we’ll have to pick up the thread next week.

Survival of the Fittest Revisited

I’ve used the phrase Survival of the fittest in columns in the past. One of these columns ran again last week and sparked a debate that played out in the comment section. It reminded me that this is one of those phrases that everyone uses but not everyone knows what it means. In fact, it’s meaning when used in evolution has morphed over time into something never intended by at least one of it’s early adopters.

When I say “survival of the fittest” you may think that translates to survival of the strongest or fastest or biggest or smartest. But that was never how Mr. Darwin intended it.

The phrase itself didn’t originate with Charles Darwin. It never appeared in the original edition of On the Origin of Species. It came from the British polymath Herbert Spencer, who used the term in 1864 in Principles of Biology. Darwin did approve of it; however, and adopted it in subsequent editions of his book.

For Darwin, the phrase was intended to mean “better designed for an immediate, local environment.” The use of the term “fit” may be leading to the confusion here. We use fit to mean physical superiority. This is where the “faster, bigger, stronger” interpretation came from. But Darwin meant a better “fit” with the environment. The difference is crucial.

Herbert Spencer’s use of the term is probably closer to how it is commonly interpreted today. Spencer applied the concept of evolutionary competition to everything he saw, including economics and sociology. If you follow the phrase’s lineage down this path, we see how the idea of physical superiority became intertwined with the concept of fitness. Unfortunately, this interpretation led to the ethically murky waters of Social Darwinism and cutthroat competition.

Why this semantic lesson of the day? Because I think there’s something important here that serves as a lesson in volatile times. Survival of the fittest is a phrase that’s seldom used by scientists today. Darwin intended it to be a substitute for natural selection, but we now know that the survival of species has little to do with survival between individuals and much more to do with the ability to adapt to sudden changes in the environment or expand into under utilized ecological niches. Those that can pivot quickest to take advantage of environmental opportunities and recover from catastrophic external factors are the ones that will flourish. Survival is not about physical superiority, but rather about adaptability.

When we stick with Darwin’s intended meaning, we discover two amazing things: 1) Physical superiority depends to some extent on a stable playing field; and, 2) The more dynamic the environment, the more important adaptability becomes.

In stable environments where little changes from day to day, natural selection tends to build scale in terms of strength and size. But this building of physical superiority is tied to that environment. The scaling is done on the scaffolding on a stable ecosystem. When that ecosystem changes dramatically (think an asteroid slamming into the earth) the physical advantages that were formed in the previous era can become disadvantages in the new one (think dinosaurs).

In environments where change accelerates, adaptability trumps all. And it’s very rare to see adaptability and scale come in the same package. One is usually sacrificed for the other.

America, You’re Great (But You Might Be Surprised Why)

The first time I went to Washington D.C. I was struck by the extreme polarity I saw there. That day, the Tea Party was staging a demonstration against Obamacare on the Mall in front of the Capitol building. But this wasn’t the only event happening. The Mall was jammed with gatherings of all types – from all political angles: the right, the ultra-right and left, the rich and poor, the eager and entitled, the sage and stupid. The discourse was loud, passionate and boisterous. It was – in a word – chaos.

That chaotic polarity is, of course, defining the current election. After the second presidential debate, commentator Bob Schieffer said, with a mixture of incredulity and disgust, “How have we come to this?” The presidential debates may have hit a new low in presidential decorum, but if you dig deep enough, there is something great here.

Really.

A recent PR campaign has asked Canadians to tweet why America is great. I’m going to do it in a column instead.

You’re great because you argue loudly, passionately and boisterously. You air out ideologies in a very messy and public way. You amplify the bejeezus out of the good and the bad of human nature and then put them both in a cage match to battle it out in broad daylight. You do this knowing there will be no clear winner of this battle, but you hope and trust that the scales will tip in the right direction. There is no other country I know of that has the guts to do this in quite the way you do.

You personally may not agree with Donald Trump, but there are many that do. He is giving voice to the feelings and frustrations of a sizable chunk of the US population. And as much I personally don’t like how he’s doing it, the fact is he is doing it. Your country, your constitution and your political system has allowed a man like this to take a shot at the highest office of the land by questioning and attacking many things that many Americans hold to be inviolable. It’s scary as hell, but I have to admire you for letting it play out the way it has and trusting that eventually the process will prevail. And it has for 240 years. Candidates and elections and campaign rhetoric will all eventually disappear- but the process – your process – has always prevailed.

The polarization of the US is nothing new. It defines you. For a quick history lesson, watch The Best of Enemies on Netflix; a documentary on the televised debates of William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal clashing on left vs. right during the 1968 Nixon vs. Humphreys vs. Wallace election. What started as an intellectual dual ended with Buckley threatening to smash Vidal’s face in after being called a neo-proto-Nazi on live TV.

If you look at the US from the outside, you swear that the whole mess is going to end up in a fiery wreck. But you’ve been here before. Many times. And somehow, the resiliency of who you are and how you conduct business wins out. You careen towards disaster but you always seem to swerve at the last minute and emerge stronger than before.

I honestly don’t know how you do it. As a polite, cautious Canadian, I stand simultaneously in awe and abject terror of how you operate. You defy the physics of what should be.

You’re fundamentally, gloriously flawed..but you are unquestionably resilient. You are an amazing example of emergence. You, in the words of Nassim Nicolas Taleb – are Antifragile:

“beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

You are discordant, divided and dysfunctional and somehow you’re still the most powerful and successful nation on the planet. I suspect you got there not in spite of your flaws, but because of them.

Perhaps you’re embarrassed by the current election cycle. I understand that. It has been called “unprecedented” many, many times by many, many commentators. And that may be true, but I would say it’s unprecedented only in the vigor and volume of the candidates (or, to be frank, one candidate). The boundaries of what is permissible have been pushed forcefully out. It may not be what certain constituents think is proper, but it is probably an accurate reflection of the diverse moods of the nation and, as such, it needs to be heard. You are a country of many opinions – often diametrically opposed. The US’s unique brand of democracy has had to stretch to it’s limits to accurately capture the dynamics of a nation in flux.

I don’t know what will happen November 8th. I do know that whatever happens, you will have gone through the fire yet again. You will emerge. You will do what needs to be done. And I suspect that, once again, you’ll be the stronger for it.

You’ve got a Friend in Me – Our Changing Relationship with A.I.

Since Siri first stepped into our lives in 2011, we’re being introduced to more and more digital assistants. We’ve met Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s Google Now. We know them, but do we love them?

Apparently, it’s important that we bond with said digital assistants and snappy comebacks appear to be the surest path to our hearts. So, if you ask Siri if she has a boyfriend, she might respond with, “Why? So we can get ice cream together, and listen to music, and travel across galaxies, only to have it end in slammed doors, heartbreak and loneliness? Sure, where do I sign up?” It seems to know a smart-assed digital assistant is to love her – but just be prepared for that love to be unrequited.

Not to be outdone, Google is also brushing up on its witty repartee for it’s new Digital Assistant – thanks to some recruits from the Onion and Pixar. A recent Mediapost article said that Google had just assembled a team of writers from those two sources – tapping the Onion for caustic sarcasm and Pixar for a gentler, more human touch.

But can we really be friends with a machine, even if it is funny?

Microsoft thinks so. They’ve unveiled a new chatbot in China called Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). Xiaoice takes on the persona of a 17 year old girl that responds to questions like “How would you like others to comment on you when you die one day?” with the plaintiff “The world would not be much different without me.” Perhaps this isn’t as clever as Siri’s comebacks, but there’s an important difference: Siri’s responses were specifically scripted to respond to anticipated question; while Xiaoice actually talks with you by using true artificial intelligence and linguistic processing.

In a public test on WeChat, Xiaoice received 1.5 million chat group invitations in just 72 hours. As of earlier this year, she had had more than 10 billion conversations. In a blog post, Xiaoice’s “father”, Yongdong Wang, head of the Microsoft Application and Services Group East Asia, said, “Many see Xiaoice as a partner and friend, and are willing to confide in her just as they do with their human friends. Xiaoice is teaching us what makes a relationship feel human, and hinting at a new goal for artificial intelligence: not just analyzing databases and driving cars, but making people happier.”

When we think of digital assistants, we naturally think of the advantages that machines have over humans: unlimited memory, access to the entire web, vastly superior number crunching skills and much faster processing speeds. This has led to “cognitive offloading” – humans transferring certain mental processing tasks to machines. We now trust Google more than our own memory for retrieving information – just as we trust calculators more than our own limited mathematical abilities. But there should be some things that humans are just better at. Being human, for instance. We should be more empathetic – better able to connect with other people. A machine shouldn’t “get us” better than our spouse or best friend.

For now, that’s probably still true. But what if you don’t have a spouse, or even a best friend? Is having a virtual friend better than nothing at all? Recent studies have shown that robotic pets seem to ease loneliness with isolated seniors. More research is needed, but it’s not really surprising to learn that a warm, affectionate robot is better than nothing at all. What was surprising was that in one study, seniors preferred a robotic dog to the real thing.

The question remains, however: Can we truly have a relationship with a machine? Can we feel friendship – or even love – when we know that the machine can’t do the same? This goes beyond the high-tech flirtation of discovering Siri’s or Google’s “easter egg” responses to something more fundamental. It’s touching on what appears to be happening in China, where millions are making a chatbot their personal confident. I suspect there are more than a few lonely Chinese who would consider Xiaoice their best friend.

And – on many levels – that scares the hell out of me.