There are fewer conspiracies than theorists think, but you should still listen carefully to them

Being online for the last 15 years, and having a strong (if sceptical) fascination with conspiracy theories I've run into quite a few over the years.

Many are clearly and obviously ridiculous on the face of them, while others somehow suddenly turn from "ridiculous paranoid fantasy" into "boring history" in the public consciousness - usually (and oddly) without ever passing through the stage of "important and shocking revelation" in-between.

Obviously these days (after years of the X Files and similar cultural touchstones) "conspiracy theory" is a loaded and negative label, and most people instinctively disregard anything described as such. However, I think this is somewhat unfair - there are more conspiracies out there than people typically realise, and they've often played a much larger role in shaping the world than most people give them credit for, even starting wars, bringing down presidents and contributing to the maiming or deaths of hundreds of innocent citizens.

In addition to the "obviously idiotic" and the "obvious-with-hindsight", I believe there is a class of conspiracy theories which - while incomplete and mis-attributed - still conceal a nugget of truth and worthwhile insight, as long as you disregard their more fanciful claims.

As an example, with the rise in filtering systems and various countries' attempts to filter the net, the meme is gaining strength that these are simply cynical excuses by authoritarian governments to restrict their citizens' freedom, and censor the public discourse.

These concerns are persuasive in that they recognise the problems with such systems - that once in place they only tend to ratchet tighter, and that people will accept any amount of change as long as it's introduced in small enough increments. However, systems like censorship (and by extension even really huge conspiracy theories like the idea of the so-called New World Order - an internationalist/globalist conspiracy to dissolve national boundaries and unite the world under one global government) wouldn't necessarily even require a conscious conspiracy.

These trends (if they exist) aren't some Machiavellian super-conspiracy implemented by a smoky room full of the rich and powerful - they're simply the emergent behaviour of lots and lots of different people, all following their own, parochial agendas, who find themselves (often quite unconsciously, or inadvertently) all pushing society in a similar direction.

Returning to net censorship, what happens is that one short-sighted government puts a filtering system in place to filter out "unambiguously evil" content like child pornography, and then later on that mechanism is inherited by later governments, who have their own ideas about what's considered ban-worthy.

Successive governments only encroach on freedom a tiny bit from the previous government, but every time someone complains you get people shouting down dissenters on the grounds "it's only a trivial change, so why are you getting so bent out of shape about it?", or the ever-popular "Yeah, but X is evil - how can you not want X filtered out?" (where X is "terrorism", "hate speech", "child pornography" or the current bête noire.

The other important part of this process is that it's a ratchet effect. Almost no government - short of massive upheaval like a revolution or regime-change - is going to ease off on the filtering, because firstly there's no political capital in doing so, and secondly it would make them look soft on terrorism/paedophilia/whatever the current reason is.

So you have a mechanism where controls ratchet ever-tighter, it's practically impossible to ever loosen them short of a major social upheaval, each step is such a tiny one that people can't emotionally appreciate the importance of resisting it, and anyone who does resist is easily dismissed as reacting disproportionately, or being actively in favour of terrorists, or paedophilia, or whatever the excuse du jour is for "just tightening restrictions a little bit, just this once".

Importantly, and this can't be said enough, this doesn't even require a Machiavellian conspiracy or a particularly authoritarian government behind it - it can happen simply by lots of honest but short-sighted people of good conscience just doing what they think is for the greatest good... but if allowed to run unchecked (and as previously indicated, it's hard to check it without looking like a lunatic or conspiracy theorist) it still ends up in a more restrictive, less free, more authoritarian state in the end.

Project this trend far enough ahead (a few decades is usually enough, although sometimes as little as one will do) and you can quite easily get from an open, successful democratic society to an authoritarian police-state with no large or jarring social upheavals required.

This is exactly why it's so vitally important to never, ever grant any additional powers to any government unless they're absolutely unarguably necessary, and even then grant them for a limited span of time, and never, ever renew them unless there's a proven requirement to do so (ie, never renew because it's the default position to keep the law on the books, as was arguably the case with the PATRIOT Act renewal in 2005/2006).

Plenty of people instinctively recognise themes and trends like these, but a common cognitive illusion called an overactive sense of external agency (PDF warning) causes them to mistake simple but counter-intuitive emergent behaviour for a conscious, intentional conspiracy. This makes them easy to dismiss as paranoid or crazy, and makes it easy for others to dismiss both them and any legitimate trend they've identified (an example of the Association Fallacy, also known as damning by association).

Clearly I'm not suggesting that all (or even most) conspiracy theories are realistic, accurate or plausible. However, if you run across one it's always worth making an effort to separate out the What and the How from the Who and the Why, and seeing if the processes and effects it describes have any validity on their own.

If someone tells you that a concerted cabal of international bankers and financiers are attempting to bring together and integrate the disparate economies of the world, dissolving national sovereignty and bring the world to heel under one world government made up of shape-changing lizards, you can safely laugh at the lizards.

However, shorn of its intentional (and sensationalist) nature, there is a distinct trend towards economic and political integration in international politics, the advent of the internet and international trade deals have inadvertently acted to make national boundaries progressively more porous, and increasing geopolitical integration necessarily reduces national sovereignty somewhat.

When you put it like that it's boring and mundane, but wild-eyed, crazy-haired conspiracy theorists have been pointing out the What of it since the 70s or 80s, and - vaccinated against listening by their kook-like presentation and the cultural stereotype of the "crazy conspiracy theorist" - most of us still aren't even consciously aware it's going on.

I find that extremely interesting, although I ascribe to it no particular group, agenda or intent.

Your Kids Aren't Lazy; They're Just Smarter Than You

There's a recurring theme in the media, and in conversations with members of older generations, and it goes something like this:

"Kids these days have no concentration span. They're always Twittering or texting or instant messaging, and they're always playing these loud, flashy computer games instead of settling down to listen to the radio or read a good book. Computer games and the internet are ruining our kids minds! Won't someone think of the children?"

Oddly enough, these criticisms are often associated with complaints that "kids will spend all hours of the day on the bloody internet or playing these damned games, instead of going outside and climbing trees or riding their bikes", although nobody seems to see the inherent contradiction there.

In a nutshell it's this: surely if these kids really had poor attention spans they'd get bored of the game in short order and move onto something else? And if they lacked the ability for delayed gratification how would they manage to spend hours unlocking every achievement in Soul Calibur or grinding for loot on World of Warcraft?

I've been thinking for a while that much of the perceived "reduction in attention span" is merely kids getting bored with an activity that has inadequate input bandwidth to satisfy them.

For example, my grandparents could sit and listen to the radio with their eyes shut for hours on end, but the pathetically slow drip... drip... drip of information through the radio would rapidly drive me to distraction. Even my parents have trouble doing this - they usually listen to the radio while also doing other things, like household chores or driving.

Likewise, my parents can sit and watch TV for hours on end, but even this eventually bores me - being forced into passively watching and waiting for programmes to get to the point or adverts to finish leaves my brain with too much spare capacity - I either start to over-analyse the content of the show and get annoyed by the perceived agenda, or I start to get fidgety and end up picking up a book or going and doing something more engaging.

Conversely I can browse the web, program or play computer games for hours on end, and observation of most younger people will bear out that this is the norm, rather than the exception. The problem here is clearly not attention-span, or I'd rapidly get bored of surfing or gaming just as I get bored of the radio or TV.

The problem here is that with radio and TV the rate information comes to me is slower, and is determined by an external source - the broadcaster.

Conversely, when I'm playing a game or surfing the web the information-flow is limited only by my ability to absorb it. Result: my attention is fully engaged, I don't get fidgety or bored, and I'm happy indefinitely.

Books are another telling case: personally I love reading, and most "short attention span" kids I know who have a good reading-speed can still sit and read books (surely the least instantly-gratifying and most boring-looking of all media) indefinitely. Their reading-speed matches or exceeds their information-absorption rate, so they're happy.

On the other hand, even "normal" kids I know who have a slow reading-speed get bored and restless after only minutes of reading - even though their information-absorption rate is low, it's still higher than their reading-speed can provide, so they get bored.

I've noticed this in my grandparents, parents and myself, and I'm just past 30. I'd be frankly gob-smacked if this didn't apply to kids who'd only grown up in a world of globally-networked computers, millions of channels, the web at their fingertips and ever-increasing amounts of data to sift through.

It also raises questions about the sudden and questionable upsurge in diagnoses of low-grade ADHD and related disorders in young people over the last few years. Although in the more serious cases these are undoubtedly very real disorders, it's entirely possible that at the lower end much of what the older generation (and psycho-pharmaceuticals industry) perceive as pathological behaviour is simply plain old frustrated boredom in minds adapted to faster and better information-processing than they're capable of.

In summary, I suspect this phenomenon has little to do with "short attention spans", and everything to do with old media (still largely aimed at the older generations) appearing frustratingly slow and boring to ever-more-agile minds raised in our ever-more-information-rich society.

If this is true, this phenomenon could actually be a good thing - our brains are getting faster and better at information-processing, so things which seemed fun to our slower, less-capable ancestors now seem un-stimulating, or no better than momentary diversions.

However, generations who found crocheting or games of "tag" or charades the most amazingly fun experience in their lives now have to watch kids try their cherished childhood hobbies before discarding them as boring, trivial or simplistic.

It's therefore understandable that they find it a lot more comforting to automatically decide there's something wrong with kids today (a refrain that echoes down through the generations)... rather than realise that their own brains are by comparison so poor at information-processing that activities that were stimulating to them as children are just too simple for kids these days.

So piracy is killing the music and movie industries?

The MPAA and RIAA (and their various non-USA equivalents) are famous for claiming that piracy (tapes, DVDs, digital downloads, etc) are "killing the [music/movie] industry".

Apart from the fact that these industry bodies (with a strong vested interest) have been claiming this ever since the introduction of 8-track tapes in the 1960s (and yet still the MPAA/RIAA lurch onward, living hand-to-mouth in their luxury penthouses, and somehow barely scraping by with continuing exponential growth ever since they first started making these claims), there's another problem with their claim:

The very day our culture stops producing popular music, television, news reports, novels, movies or art I will agree that "something needs to be done", about the expectation of free access, and would support instituting some sort of internet-wide micropayments system.

In fact, scratch "stops producing", and replace it with "noticeably slows production of". In fact, screw it all; scratch even that and instead substitute "stops continually increasing production of popular music, television, news reports, novels, movies or art".

Until then, commentary like this is simply worrying the sky will fall because you don't have the wit or imagination to develop new business models not based around repressive monopolies and artificial scarcity.

We had music as a species for long before we had trade bodies like the MPAA and RIAA around, and we'll have music long afterwards, too. The only difference is that in those times there wasn't an enormous, fat, unnecessary middle-man sat square between the artist and the audience, raking in cash hand over fist from both sides.^[1]

If newspapers start to die because they can't afford to give away their on-line content for free then they'll stop doing it, people's expectations will change, and they'll start paying for subscriptions.

Although I hate to sound like a (big-L) Libertarian, the market will sort this one out just fine if left to its own devices.

Claims that "music/movies" or "news" will die are really worries about the deaths of "the RIAA/MPAA" or "some news organs unable to adapt to the changing conditions".

Obviously, however, the thought that bloated dinosaurs who refuse to adapt to the technological advancement of our species might go extinct doesn't really bother people.

Hansom cab drivers were pretty pissed off at the idea of the motor-car, but they didn't form industry bodies and try to ban cars or trains. And now - a hundred or more years a later - aren't we really fucking glad they didn't?

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Footnotes

[1] And although we didn't have movies for anything like as long, ever-cheaper video recording equipment, the increasing popularity of sites like Youtube and the ability of even basic modern desktop computers to create high-quality special effects shows that even high-quality movies aren't out of reach of the talented amateur.

Lifecycle of a meme

A recent discussion on reddit prompted me to sketch out the stages of an internet meme's lifecycle.

Lest there be any confusion, I'm talking here about internet memes - LOLcats, Soviet Russia jokes and the like, not about memes in the more general sense of the word.

As far as I can see, all memes go through this lifecycle:

1. Meme is born. Almost nobody understands it, and it's barely funny even when you do.
2. Meme gets adopted by a specific social group. Meme now serves as a shibboleth indicating membership of the group, and encourages feelings of belonging and "insidership" whenever it's encountered. At this stage, the meme is usually either utterly baffling or hilarious, depending on whether or not you're an insider in that social group.
3. Meme becomes mainstream - everyone is using it at every opportunity, and - its use as a shibboleth negated - it gradually gets stale from overuse. Meme is hilarious to newcomers, but increasingly sterile and boring to older users.
4. Meme effectively dies - people using it are generally downmodded or castigated for trying for "easy" posts. Importantly, it can still be funny even at this stage if it's used particularly well... however, 99% of the uses at this point are people trying to cash in on easy karma - the kind of people who tell the same jokes for years without realising that the 17th time you hear it, it's no longer funny.
5. Meme is effectively dead, but may experience rare and infrequent resurrection in particularly deserving cases. Generally these uses get applauded, because nobody wants to risk approbation for posting stale memes unless they're really sure this is a perfect opportunity for it - one that's literally too good to miss.

Importantly, by stage 5 the meme starts once again to be funny, because it's once again serving as a shibboleth... though this time instead of showing how advanced and up-to-date the poster is, it instead serves to indicate his membership in the "old guard" of whatever social group it's posted to - "I've been around here so long I remember when this was funny", it quietly indicates to other old-timers and well-educated newbies alike.

Engines of reason

Initially we as acted as individuals - what we understood of reality was what we experienced and determined for ourselves. There was no understanding or appreciation of the world outside our direct experience.

Later we developed language, and what we understood of reality was formed from our own perceptions and conclusions, influenced by the perceptions and conclusions of our family and social group (family, clan, village, etc).

Next we developed the printing press, and mass-media. These allowed centralised governments and organisations to accumulate and weigh information and experiences and broadcast them to the populace. We still held our own council on personal or local matters, but since we rarely (if ever) knew anyone who had experienced such events outside our local region, we largely received all our knowledge and understanding of the outside world from centralised authority - governments, news media organisations, etc.

Finally, with the advent of the web we're enabling anyone to publish their personal experiences, in a way that anyone else in the world can then receive. No longer do we simply not have access to information, nor do we receive distilled, refined, potentially biased information from one or a few sources. Now we're capable in theory of hearing every point of view from every participant in an event, untainted by anything but their personal, arbitrary biases.

We are still receiving information on a global scale, but for the first time it's potentially all primary evidence, untainted and unfiltered by a single agenda or point of view.

The trouble with this is that brains, personalities, cultures and institutions long-accustomed to received wisdom now have to compare, contrast, weigh and discern the trustworthiness of multiple conflicting points of view for themselves. For the first time since our pre-linguistic ancestors you - and only you - are primarily responsible for determining truth from falsehood, and for the first time in history you have to do so on a global scale, involving events of which you have no direct experience.

To be clear: this is hard. Many people instinctively reject the terrifying uncertainty and extra effort, instead abdicating their personal responsibility and fleeing to any source of comforting certainty they can find. This explains why even in these supposedly scientific and rational times people still subscribe to superstitions or religions, or simplistic, fundamentalist philosophies, or blindly consume and believe opinionated but provably-biased sources like political leaders, charismatic thinkers or biased news organisations.

So it's a double-edged sword - for the first time in history we have access to primary evidence about events in the world, rather than receiving conclusions from a central source along with only what secondary or tertiary evidence supports them. However, in doing so the one thing we've noticed is that the channels we've relied-upon up till now are biased, agenda-laden and incomplete.

Obviously in an ideal world everyone could be relied-upon to train their bullshit-filters and research and determine the truth for themselves. However, given the newness of the current situation we can't rely upon this any time soon. Likewise, given both the sheer volume of information and humanity's propensity for laziness and satisficing, we'll likely never be able to rely on the majority of people doing this for every single issue they hold an opinion on.

So what's a species to do? We've turned on the firehose of knowledge, and it's shown that the traditional channels of received wisdom are unreliable, but many people find it impractically hard to drink from it.

There are three choices here:

• We could allow the majority of people to reject their responsibilities and abdicate their reasoning processes to others of unknown reliability... though this is the kind of thing that leads to fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism and cultural and scientific stagnation.
• Alternatively, we could encourage people to distrust authority and try to decide for themselves... though even if we win, if the effort of self-determination is too great we risk merely leaving people floundering in a morass of equally-likely-looking alternatives (I believe this is a primary cause of baseless, unproven but trendy philosophies like excessive cultural relativism - if you're lost in a sea of indistinguishable alternatives, it's flattering and tempting to believe there is no difference in their correctness).
• Lastly, we can make an effort to formalise and simplify the process of determining reliability and truth - striving to create democratic, transparent mechanisms where objective truth is determined and rewarded, and falsehood or erroneous information is discarded... lowering the bar to individual decision-making, but avoiding unilateral assumption of authority by a single (or small group of) agendas.

Stupid as it may seem, I believe this is the ultimate destination towards which sites like reddit or Wikipedia are slowly converging - people post evidence, assertions or facts, those facts are discussed, weighed and put in context, and (so the theory goes) accuracy and factual truth is ascertained by exposing the process to a large enough consensus.

It doesn't always work - many of these early attempts suffer from a poor mechanism, or attract a community who vote based on their prejudices rather than rational argument, or end up balkanised in one or more isolated areas of parochial groupthink.

However, the first heavier-than-air aircraft didn't work too well either, and here we are a few decades later flying around the planet faster than the sun. As a species we're still only a few years into what may be a decades- or centuries-long process - one which could change the very foundations of (and mechanism by which we determine) what we understand as factual reality.

People love to rag on social news sites, discussion forums and sites like Wikipedia for what amounts to failing to have already achieved perfection. I prefer to salute them for what they are - hesitant, often blind, stumbling baby-steps towards solving a problem many people don't yet even realise exists.