Personal data stored in banks/ISPs/FB/Google etc are taken at gun point and used for population scale psychological warfare.
Kissinger(World Order)/Niall Ferguson(Square and the Tower)/Graham Allison(Thucydides Trap)/Moises Naim(End of Power) say networks of power are more and more unstable similar to 1914.
To maintain stability they(irrespective of ideology) keep pandering to their fan clubs and therefore get more and more inflexible.
Small triggers turn into national and then international conflict between major powers.
Kissenger's reasons -
1 The international economic system has become global the political structure of the world has remained based on the nation-state.
2. Acquiescing in the proliferation of nuclear weapons far beyond the Cold War club, so multiplying the possibilities of nuclear confrontation.
3. The new realm of cyberspace, in which asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between powers
The last time it took 30 years 1914-1945, after about 100 years of peace between the world powers, for everyone to take a breath and reboot to happen.
This time around the reboot should be much quicker. The nukes will get dropped faster, because thanks to tech all the major powers can do serious damage to each other very fast as soon as things escalate beyond control.
WWII gets all the press, but a WWI scenario seems much more likely and tragic.
WWII had an active aggressor.
WWI was just a chain reaction of alliances acting out their obligations. I had a nightmare about trench warfare and the futility of it all just the other day.
A weird situation though is that socially we're closer to the 1920's-30's, whereas geopolitically it's much more like the 1900's-10's. Weird how history repeats itself, never quite the same, and I won't fall for numerology, and yet. Here we are.
Dominic Cummings, Steve Bannon, Olavo de Carvalho, Amit Shah, endless number of similar clones in EU...just amazing to watch what kind of people are getting propped up by the attention economy.
Cummings shares some qualities with the rest of that list, but he’s not a nationalist if you believe his extensive blogging.
Although he is comfortable using the language of nationalism, which perhaps amounts to the same thing practically.
I’m also not sure how right wing he really is. He seems fairly liberal in his own views on immigration, race and so on. Although again, he panders to those with different views.
I don’t agree with Cummings on many things, but I don’t think it’s fair to put him in a list with those other names.
I stand to be corrected. It’s possible I misunderstand him. He’s hard to misunderstand.
I have had experience with someone who wanted to do this and it didn't go well. A subject matter expert wanted to be team leader because that's what he thought career progress was. Within a few weeks the team collapsed.
Creativity, unconventional thinking, hyperfocus etc is required as support to conventional leaders more than in being leaders. It's not just about improving communication. You have to be much more social, political, be good at handling stress, people have to want to work for you etc and you have to do it competing against experienced people for who that stuff is natural.
The way ahead maybe to think up a role that fits your strengths and then pitch it to higher ups, more than trying to fit into roles that are conventional. Just remember that conventional roles haven't been designed with your strengths in mind.
About 8 years ago, I was put in charge of a small internal project (a custom test harness). The project itself went very well - it’s still adding value and being used. However, I made some significant leadership mistakes (which I don’t want to go into detail on here).
So I appreciate that there’s a lot at stake, that my natural abilities can’t and won’t suffice, and that I’m starting with a sizeable deficit. Autism is a developmental disorder—perhaps even a disability—but I believe that with the right help, enough hard work and determination, an attitude of wanting to serve others, and enough natural ability in another area of strength that could stand-in where I’m naturally weak, I could learn enough to lead — perhaps even enough to do so successfully as a project leader.
Ideally (and impossibly, I know), I’d love to have a very patient coach to spend months or years with me explaining things. But next-best would be information dense resources on leadership written for high-functioning people with autism/asperger’s. I’m hoping something like that exists.
Temple Grandin does talks about this stuff but it's more along the lines of awareness raising. Join that mailing list...might be a good place to find people that are trying the same thing.
Ironically where I worked, the person had it easy getting the Leadership position. They too had serious experience, expertise in a subject, had produced products that had benefited the company. So upper mgmt approved it despite internal objections being raised about interpersonal comms, a track record of dealing badly with others in stressful situations etc. They actually made the person report to me, because I had some experience managing the person in the past and I said no. Told the person what issues would arise, which resulted in a HR complaint against me. My case to mgmt was simple - if you guys think this is going to work, you need someone who is psychologically knowledgable about the condition for the person to report to. That's the healthiest option and we all knew there was no one around like that. So they made an even bigger mistake of giving the person a team and not having to report to anyone. It blew up in dramatic fashion and I did get an apology from the person later for mistaking what my point had been.
You have to be clear about what leadership is and why you fit. The answer shouldn't be well thats the next rung I see on the org chart.
Very interesting article, thanks for posting! I've thought about this a lot in the context of online communities (IRC channels, old-style forums and "old-style" games where people can host their own servers, and you get to know "the regulars"). I think the "clan" or "community" idea in some online games really makes them into "third places". I used to play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory a lot. The key point in the game is that while of course people were better than others, it only took 5 or 6 hours of play to level up to the highest point you could be. Most servers saved xp points between connects, so while it may take a new player on the server 5 or 6 hours to level up to stuff like faster reloading, there is no massive difference between what some players have access to and what others have access to - you don't accumulate weapons or items or skins, nor can you buy them. This means that the game is very heavily (somewhat luck) egalitarian in that some people have more skills than others, but everyone has an equal opportunity to gain those skills.
Newer online games like Overwatch (which I play more now) have distroyed this community spirit. The normal mode of playing is no longer that one joins a server full of regulars, rather, you're matched up with random people. You can play with specific people, but it's weird to randomly friend request someone after the length of a game (20 minutes or less). The mitigating factor is that you can choose to "stay as a team" if you enjoyed your 20 minutes, and it'll group the people who select that together. After playing more games in this group, you might start chatting ("fancy another game?" or "you did great in that!" etc.) and then add each other as friends. But it's not the same as hanging out.
Old games were more like going to your local running club every week. New games are like going to a different fun-run in a different part of town each week, and then maybe someone asks you to to run with them again at one of the fun-runs, but there's a very low chance of that happening and it's kinda weird.
Chat servers/channels/whatever that allow off-topic discussion seem to be the go-to "third place" online now. HN and Reddit are too large to qualify in a meaningful sense for the majority of users.
i have a pet theory that matchmaking in team games, and the destruction of “placefulness“ in-game, has contributed to the widespread experience of increased toxicity in these communities. it’s magnified the online disinhibition effect, as the consequences are now even more diffuse. probably the same percentage of jerks, but you can’t get your friend who runs the server to ban them.
discord servers seem to have filled the niche, to some extent, as each server can develop its own norms. i’m hoping that OW2 takes the opportunity to address this design problem in-game, via guilds, clans, or tournaments, something along those lines.
Good points about familiarity and regularity. There is a lot of scope to improve online spaces by bringing those elements in. And maybe getting rid of/reducing - infinite scroll addictive news streams + upvotes/likes/retweet/counter stuff which I guess distracts everyone from connecting.
If you are interested in Third Place stuff, Howard Shultz talks about how that philosophy is behind the success of Starbucks much more than the coffee :)
Skimming the article, and in particular after reading "Oldenburg's characteristics", I feel it misses what I'd guess would be the core characteristic of a third place: choice. Home and work are places where you have to be[0]. The "third place" is somewhere you choose to be.
--
[0] - Not technically, but the costs of not being there are generally too high to give one any realistic choice in the matter.
Once upon a time I worked at a Video host for news and other content publishing companies. They track (and in many cases decide) what you watch as you jump from site to site.
They know exactly what kind of people (personality trait wise) will keep clicking the next vid recommended. They actively seek out these personality trait combos and hit them with the right vids. And then ads.
It's very sophisticated because their player is embedded on so many sites spanning so much different type of content that profiling people becomes almost automatic. And also hooked into all the ad networks which have their own profiling data. The only reason we haven't reached mind control abilities yet is Psychology/Neuroscience as fields are still very young and are playing catch up - as in what do you do after you identify an addict, a sociopath, a psychopath? It's easier to identify (and trigger certain behaviors) than it is known what should be done, that is in the interest of the individual and society in all cases.
Its much more clear what benefits the corporation. "Keep showing the person with issues stuff because hey its free revenue"
For example, they know triggering/negative content energizes people more than positive content. And the most "energized" people will keep producing more content to feed into the machine that keeps the addicts coming back. So the system automatically has a selection bias for certain content producers and content types.
In many cases, in different parts of the world, what can be done even after you identify bad actors/people with issues etc is limited because capacity to do it doesn't exist. There are more cops per 100K people than there are shrinks by a large factor. So the response of society to negative content that triggers misguided behavior is almost always Violence or some form of taking away peoples rights.
Monetization also sets up this game, where if you (content producer/advertiser/distributor etc) don't cash in on a money making pattern some one else will. So lots of people in the ecosystem get trapped there and don't see ways out.
But as the public begins to realize the consequences of all this targeting/profiling, on kids, on the workforce, on consumers, on the defense establishment, on politics, on journalism etc liability questions are snowballing.
Depends on size of the project. They do it often actually. Sometimes after they have decided to move internal maintainers/teams elsewhere, or don't have budgets to support the project anymore, or the company strategy has changed etc
That's when they suddenly develop a great affection for the "community" and "giving back" :)
In large orgs it can be a costly process for large codebases. Requires a bunch of planning. Large codebases (sometimes with code from acquisitions/different source control systems/clients/sold off divisions etc) are full of all kinds of stuff (stolen code, proprietary code licensed from others, non attributed open source stuff, server passwords, user data etc etc) that no one knows anything about. All that needs to be checked sometimes by a large number of tech people and then legal teams to make sure no one gets sued.
To be honest, everyone has an agenda. So when BBC is critical of ISRO then it is not propaganda, it is just racial bias.
But what these fake news outlets(which include leading mainstream media of India) do is they blame opposition for everything.
A bridge had collapsed in Mumbai due to BJP govt alloting it 1 Rupee for maintenance for that year and all channels were "questioning" the previous congress CM.
"Built during Congress time 45yrs ago. It collapsed! Massive corruption suspected"
They didn't say that BJP spent 1 Re for maintenance.
They find a way to blame opposition about everything. Even now, although economy is screwed BJP wants to polarise the country by "throwing out infiltrators", their genius idea is of making all 130crore people stand in line to prove that they're Indian nationals and their parents are Indian born. So basically everyone needs to give documents of their parents from the 80s!
And when opposition questions it BJP Media says "Opposition doing fear mongering! Owaisi spreading deep hatred!" They literally name opposition leaders and say anything they want to suit BJP agenda
I agree everyone has an agenda but if they are all just playing the same move - Tit for Tat - provoke-react then what happens? Nothing. Stalemate.
Someone has to use some imagination and change the way they play the game. Right now, one day propaganda of one side wins and another day propaganda of another side wins. Its a trap.
John le Carré had a good quote, cant remember in which book, which went something like -
There are always some people in the population, who if you invite into a group want to control it, and if you kick them out treat the group as a conspiring enemy.
Personal data stored in banks/ISPs/FB/Google etc are taken at gun point and used for population scale psychological warfare.
Kissinger(World Order)/Niall Ferguson(Square and the Tower)/Graham Allison(Thucydides Trap)/Moises Naim(End of Power) say networks of power are more and more unstable similar to 1914.
To maintain stability they(irrespective of ideology) keep pandering to their fan clubs and therefore get more and more inflexible.
Small triggers turn into national and then international conflict between major powers.
Kissenger's reasons - 1 The international economic system has become global the political structure of the world has remained based on the nation-state. 2. Acquiescing in the proliferation of nuclear weapons far beyond the Cold War club, so multiplying the possibilities of nuclear confrontation. 3. The new realm of cyberspace, in which asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between powers
The last time it took 30 years 1914-1945, after about 100 years of peace between the world powers, for everyone to take a breath and reboot to happen.
This time around the reboot should be much quicker. The nukes will get dropped faster, because thanks to tech all the major powers can do serious damage to each other very fast as soon as things escalate beyond control.