Differential Diagnosis (1)

On the hand, we have a setup that is pitched to the worst excesses of human depravity and groupthink. This is less a function of information overload, then targeted distribution of bias within a relatively-closed system:

our information ecosystem no longer assists us in reaching consensus. In fact, it structurally discourages it, and instead facilitates a dissensus of bespoke pseudo-realities. [Mediating Consent, R. DiResta]

Red team channel read by, consumed by, and indirectly funded by read team players. Blue team channel read by, consumed by, etc. So far, so facile, but not inaccurately so.

It is not hard to envision a corporate cultural shift and bifurcation that follows hard on the heels of this division. The choice is less Colgate or Crest by which to whiten one’s teeth, but red team brand v. blue team brand. This may not seem so much a consumer- or citizen-driven outcome as the strategic resolution of the Prisoner’s Dilemma imported into the Fortune 500. Who will first pull the pin on the grenade and accept that a full or nearly full share of half the market is more desirable than trying to strike the razor’s-edge equilibrium of messaging to two or more disparate groups who achieve self-definition by way of opposition to the outgroup Other? This is one way in which the choice fatigue dilemma solves itself.

2. Differential Diagnosis (2)

Over and above the internal fault-line fracturing, the other shoe falls via indiscriminate external authors of systemic threats. It may not matter whether these come clothed in ideologies espousing specific political or commercial ends, or embracing a hodgepodge of philosophically confused, but no-less-virulent strands of nihilism and destruction-as-entertainment. We did it to gain power or earn chits, we did it because we could, we did it because why not, we did it because we were bored (or more likely, I alone did it because I was bored).

The temptation to answer to complex risk with complex analysis occasions the parable of the eye for an eye making the whole world blind, especially when the party assigned with managing complex risk by way of undertaking complex analysis has its own designs on ubiquitous access to information and, if not actual control of, at least seamless penetration into, the channels by which information flows. Thereby, the parable of the canny fox guarding the henhouse. Have confidence that a whetted appetite may give way to predation (whereby protein labeled internal threat becomes a meal), and in the same breath have doubt that the appetite to protect against external threat - if for no other reason than to keep this good thing going - will suffice.

An archetype of garbage in/garbage out arises when the sum of known threats is calculated in a form of analysis that is impenetrable on its own terms. To wit:

Is it so irresponsible, then, to turn off every news feed and go about marshaling whatever energies may be marshaled into the idea of the Beautiful? Not so much out of hedonism or an aesthete’s self-satisfying ardor, but because tuning out and dropping out (exit) achieves a coherence and Hippocratic-oath salience that seems beyond the grasp of engagement (voice). Maybe, maybe not, but responsibility aside, it seems worthwhile to attend to the possibility that the Beautiful also exists in the futile absurd, which can be observed accidentally/in the breach or with a strange kind of intentionality that remains available to the faithless. But is that a kind of keeping faith or just a kind of keeping score? All rights reserved, and more after the commercial break . . .