We get rewarded by hearts, likes, thumbs-up — and we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth.
A few years before The Social Dilemma came out, my writing included the quote below from a former Facebook exec featured in that film. Do you think just repeatedly telling people, “Hey, you should read this amazing article” would be an effective tool for problem solving?
Of course not
So why are you relying on this doc that draws more attention to the problem but does nothing to solve it?
By all means, spread the word . . .
But when given the opportunity to act on those concerns in an impactful way, and you don’t even try (or have a single question to clarify what isn’t clear): Just how concerned could you be?
And if you think you’re making progress because of ever-increasing attention to your concerns:
I suggest you reconsider
For telling undeniable truth for 20 years:
I’ve been practically spit on for following principles those same people promote on a daily basis. I wrote and produced a documentary to address such behavior, but in the last two years — I’ve seen savagery beyond anything that inspired it.
That behavior has history going back to emailing chain-letter lies long before social media took over.
Social media just turbocharged the torturing of truth.
The Social Dilemma is a broader look at the problem, but there’s nothing more destructive than the poison of politics — and through that cancer you can better expose the rest.
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on
That quote’s been around in various forms for over 300 years (evidently the original being from 1710):
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.
I know the feeling — all too well
Searching “Social Dilemma” delivers no shortage of concern about the state of society — but ask ’em to do anything to address those concerns that takes time & effort to think through:
What gives?
“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” . . . Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. . . .
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.”
The idea is to act on the information.
Well how do we do that? . . .
I suggest you start with the guy who was 6 years ahead of The Social Dilemma — and I wasn’t out to just draw attention to the problem, I designed my doc as a tool to deal with it.
I may be a nobody — but this nobody was way ahead of everybody.
A rare response of reasonableness on Twitter (or anywhere, for that matter):
Your documentary was ahead of its time
Years ahead of a doc that was “viewed in 38,000,000 homes within the first 28 days of release.” Educational and enjoyable — and accomplished absolutely nothing.
I could have told ’em that before they wrote one word.
Conventional efforts with no specificity that’s personal — don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at making a dent in today’s trench warfare before armies of unreachables.
And therein lies the rub
How many zeros you think would drop off that number if their doc drilled into all of America?
With Surgical Specificity That Cuts to the Bone
America is out to reshape tomorrow by reacting to today.
Like you did the day before
I’m explaining how we got here in the first place. It’s impossible to solve problems when you refuse to recognize the role you played in creating and/or exacerbating them.
“We . . . want it now, and if it makes money now, it’s a good idea. But . . . if the things we’re doing are going to mess up the future, it wasn’t a good idea. Don’t deal on the moment. Take the long-term look at things.”
— The Dust Bowl
Dealing on the Moment
Is What America Does Best
Arrival is a movie that makes you think — and that’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Their efforts to develop a conduit of communication is in striking contrast to how we talk to each other today. With the word “HUMAN” written on a whiteboard, they were able to build on that by seeing patterns in indecipherable symbols.
We have the most sophisticated communication tools in history — and we can’t even talk to each other in the same language.
Instead of listening and learning — slinging snippets of certitude has become America’s pastime. We’ve created a knee-jerk nation where discernment is derided and negligence is in vogue. What was beyond the pale in the past is now perfectly acceptable.
There was a time when adults acted their age. Those days are long gone — as the internet and the cable clans paved the way for the onslaught of the utterly absurd.
We’re in perennial pursuit of ideologies — warfare waged with:
opinions lightly adopted but firmly held . . . forged from a combination of ignorance, dishonesty, and fashion
— Life at the Bottom
The Yellow Brick Road is the path of America’s pursuits — and how systematic oversimplification has taken over to the point where inconvenient correlations are condemned as convoluted.
And any attempt to have a conversation on issues that clearly call for careful consideration — is hijacked by baseless beliefs beaten into your brain as bedrock fact.
From decades of being increasingly accommodating of liars aligned with your interests:
You kept lowering the bar
And Now There is No Bar
We’re well beyond “disagreement” in America — this is madness (countless millions miserably failing to follow even the most fundamental methods of how understanding works).
You make it nearly impossible to put a pinprick through the envelope of intransigence encasing your brain.
Unlike most of America
I Don’t Have Situational Rules
So I see crap with crystal clear clarity:
To conform to fact
We must agree that it was watermelon and consider what it means: Maybe nothing, maybe everything. But you pollute the debate when you won’t even acknowledge the irrefutable.
Worse than that — you poison your purpose:
On that front — and this one
Debunking the WMD delusion & Trayvon tale is a conduit for showing how this nation systematically derails debate.
“Everybody believed Iraq had WMD” is not a valid argument any more than “armed only with Skittles.” By the way — how many of you know what Trayvon actually looked like?
It’s not the kid on People magazine I assure you.
I’m not interested in defending Zimmerman — my aim is to expose the irrational behavior of blindly defending Martin and the damage you did by doing so.
And to claim that Iraq WMD wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t land on the moon. As I wrote and produced the most exhaustive doc ever done on WMD, I would know.
The second you shun evidence that doesn’t fit the narrative you want — you have contaminated your judgment. How quickly you come to your conclusions — and what you’re willing to ignore to solidify them:
That is the underlying message of my efforts.
This — doesn’t get it done . . .
It didn’t make a dent
And I would have bet my life that it wouldn’t.
But instead of giving me a shot after such efforts have repeatedly failed, your big idea is to spread the word about something that predictably had no chance and never will.
by the way
It’s not that difficult to be succinct when you deliver no detail that hits home — and hard! Same goes for lucid when the line is linear.
The problems that plague America are interrelated — and anything short of addressing that is going nowhere.
In reference to its opening image on . . .
I wrote the following
Half the country is with me on this — and I just lost the other half. Had I started with the image below — it would be the opposite half.
Think about that for a moment . . .
People really don’t listen.
People are just either not that interested in what you’re saying, or they are too focused on their own agenda. It’s ridiculous to see two people acting like they can’t really hear each other — by choice.
In “The Significance Principle,” authors Les Carter and Jim Underwood posit that we should listen past where the other person has finished. We should even pause before answering. Let them get their point, their story, their compliment, and even their criticism out. Completely. . . .
The ability to hear is a gift. The willingness to listen is a choice.”
— Mike Greene, Why you should first seek to understand — before trying to be understood
In other words
Don’t shake your head. I’m not done yet. Wait till you hear the whole thing so you can . . . understand this now . . .
My Cousin Vinny is maybe the most hilariously educational movie ever — and this scene is at the core of our culture’s communication divide:
At the core of why my efforts don’t compute — is that my mission is not driven by changing your values, but rather the manner in which you pursue them.
I don’t even want to be part of the debate — I just want honest debate.
My aim is to illustrate how emotion runs roughshod over reason when your interests are at stake. Whether or not we share some of those interests is immaterial to my purpose.
Whatever your line of work
I’m betting you can relate to the bit below:
It’s always the bad apples that poison the waters of possibility — and incredibly, we’ve created a culture that caters to such kind.
Even in my tiny world of work, the waste I have witnessed is staggering.
What the powers that be in most companies don’t get — is that you create more conflict in cultures that go to excessive lengths to avoid it. It’s just that the conflict is concealed in subtleties that disguise mounting frustration and waste.
While you put out your PR and pretend this undercurrent of crap doesn’t exist. Who hasn’t had to put up with some jackass on the job?
Some degree of that just comes with the territory, but in my industry of IT — there has been an undeniable trend of tolerating what would have been totally unacceptable in the past.
And lo and behold . . .
same trend happening here
If you wanna start solving problems instead of perpetuating them — it’s gotta get ugly:
Or as ol’ Bill perfectly put it
As for my ban that turned out to be temporary:
One afternoon errand and Full Experience at a Brazilian steakhouse later, I had a perfect day:
Propelled by my morning mission to say something about being banned from Twitter for “failing” to meet the “conversation” requirements where Crap is King.
Far from being angry about being shut out as usual in one way or another: I didn’t lose one minute of sleep over it (and forgot all about it by morning).
I didn’t need time to know it was a blessing in disguise. From a lifetime of practice, I already knew. Like I said long ago:
I like to think of myself as a connoisseur on silver linings
On my appeal . . .
Telling Twitter that their platform is a cesspool of certitude that’s help destroy what real conversation looks like:
I didn’t expect to be reinstated.
They showed a helluva lot more humanity than I’m used to.
I respect that they weren’t petty by taking offense to my honesty. And because they provided their reasoning with some specificity, I understand exactly what happened.
I wasn’t doing anything different than I normally do — but a batch of Tweets I replied to had a bunch of people mentioned in them. I got a bit greedy and got flagged for it.
I’m glad it happened
Had I not been reinstated — I could have used my primary account and backed off a bit, but I wasn’t going to bother. I was done and relieved.
Rather than stop entirely, I came up with a way to continue my cause on a strictly limited basis:
5 x 5 Rule
5 minutes, 5 times a day: Using the phone timer for a hard stop.
I wouldn’t blame ya for not believing anyone would hold to that. But if you stick around to see that this is a systematic process in the first place:
Designed by someone who’s almost entirely severed himself from social media and quit watching the cable clans 11 years ago:
It starts to paint a picture
But you see one pixel of that picture and you’ve already framed it.
At the time of the foundation for all that followed — this poster was on the wall in my high school’s vocational building — and I’d walk by it every day on my quest that consumed me.
The school didn’t make a habit out of promoting the latest movies — there was a reason why this particular one was showcased.
Above all else
I believe that reason is right here in the ending (particularly the line below).
You see us as you want to see us — in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions
And yet — our country has become increasingly crippled over the years — because of seeing people in the “simplest terms” and “most convenient definitions”
All that aside . . .
Who doesn’t love the ending of The Breakfast Club?
My generation got off easy
All we were called to do was weigh information — but even that was too much of a burden.
As we got more, we became less.
Connoisseur of Silver Linings
The Original Version
Being banned from Twitter would be a bummer for most, but it was a blessing in disguise for me. I’m not giving up on my idea, but I’ve seen enough to know that this platform is not the place for me — and it never was. I didn’t even consider getting an account until a friend suggested it for spreading the word on my documentary.
But if people really wanted the truth, I wouldn’t need the doc in the first place.
Predictably, the contempt for the truth back then was tame compared to now. You can’t even imagine the mountain of spectacularly stupid shit I have seen over two decades.
Yeah, you see in the opposition — but I see it everywhere!
If only you’d laid it all out exactly as I like it — then I’d abide by the principles I preach
Is that how it works?
That’s about the size of it. I guess I figured that if you didn’t understand something — you’d try this on for size, but I’m old-fashioned that way:
Funny how there’s always an excuse
Back in the day — there was no website with an array of illustrations to gripe about. I was just sharing Trillion Dollar Tube to all these fine folks flaunting their badge of beliefs so F.A.I.R.
Showing a modicum of courtesy for a 5-minute excerpt doesn’t seem like much to ask such bastions of virtue. But without watching one second — self-satisfied scorn was your gold standard for gleefully gutting the truth.
And why mess with tradition?
One voice began to echo through the night. One voice raised in song. The song was terribly out of tune — but sung with great enthusiasm.
One voice became two — and two became three.
— Admiral McRaven
Ah, the pooh-poohers of possibility:
Forever on the front lines of lowering the bar while I’m trying to raise it — you’ve been a constant companion almost all my life.
Where would I be without you?
Remember that guitar in a museum in Tennessee
And the nameplate on the glass brought back twenty melodies
And the scratches on the face
Told of all the times he fell
Singin’ every story he could tell . . .
It was as if they had looked at all the possibilities Rock had to offer, and built their music out of only the best parts . . . Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers made music like the last of the true believers. They gave back to their audience what they took from Rock & Roll themselves . . . the best of everything.
Sounds like a good way to build a country — but that’s me.
The best of everything: Imagine
Yeah, yeah, yeah — I know it would never be like “the best” above or even close. But come on! We could at least do something in that spirit, couldn’t we?
I can see that each side makes more sense on some things:
Why can’t you?
Like many alternatives, however, it was psychologically impossible. Character is fate, as the Greeks believed. Germans were schooled in winning objectives by force, unschooled in adjustment. They could not bring themselves to forgo aggrandizement even at the risk of defeat.
— Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly
Unschooled in Adjustment
I’m in IT and my inbox gets flooded with auto-generated opportunities — along with receiving emails and calls from people with roles that just don’t jibe with my experience.
It would be unthinkable to be rude to recruiters who don’t deliver what aligns with my interests. I chose to put myself out there — so being bombarded by people doing their jobs just comes with the territory.
Same goes for social media
We all have something to say — and we made a choice to put ourselves out there. We also have a choice in how we handle what we receive. To be sure, in our Crap Is King culture — crap is coming your way most of the time.
But when it comes to a complicated message about America’s decline over 30 years in the Gutter Games of Government.
Are you telling me you can’t discern between routine Tweets and this?
On the title and imagery alone . . .
I’d know this guy doesn’t do routine. And if someone’s got something of significance to say that no one else sees — do you really care how it came your way?
Or is there is another reason why you take pleasure in instantly firing back with rapid-fire ridicule?
Countless millions clamoring for critical thinking and ideas every day — and yet this is the attitude I’m almost invariably met with:
“Oh my God!” . . .
This guy’s sending me to his site that requires time and effort to think things through.
You mean we can’t just solve problems by endlessly Tweeting about them and congratulating ourselves for our commitment to the cause?
The solution to this problem is more truth, not less
No, it’s not
You cannot forever beat something into the ground and think that will magically make a dent someday. And even if by some miracle it does, wouldn’t you want to know if you could have cut out years or even decades had you been smart about it?
If you lose elections and laws — then fight to win back the former so you can reinstate the latter: Wouldn’t you want to know how you could have avoided it all in the first place?
Imagine if you had listened to the person telling you all along.
At the core of why my efforts don’t compute — is that my mission is not driven by changing your values, but rather the manner in which you pursue them.
How can you expect anyone to admit when they’re wrong if you won’t? And every time you allow emotion to run roughshod over reason, you further calcify habits at the other end of the spectrum from these:
Rather than assert that all opinions are equal, students in seminar learn to judge opinions on the basis of the reasons given for those opinions.
Nobody ever had to explain that to me. I’m sure you all feel the same:
And yet here we are
[W]e must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it . . .
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
In a nation that incessantly blames and complains (seemingly for sport) — no one’s taking responsibility for anything. The ever-rising ocean of partisan pettiness is gluttony under the guise of concern.
If you want to start solving problems, first you need to clear the clutter that’s crippled this country. To do that, you don’t go after everything, you go after one thing that ties to everything.
As in the biggest and most costly lie in modern history.
But everyone’s wrapped up within their wheelhouse — operating under umbrellas of interests that don’t account for complexities outside of them.
Just picking the “root cause” that works for you doesn’t get it done. You’ve gotta look at interconnected causes across the board.
And this
Is where my Clear the Clutter framework comes in:
To the uneducated, abstract ideas are unfamiliar; so is the detachment that is necessary to discover a truth out of one’s own knowledge and mental effort. The uneducated person views life in an intensely personal way — he knows only what he sees, hears or touches and what he is told by friends. As the unknown sage puts it, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
But more than ever
Even the most educated minds act in an uneducated manner in service of their interests — and do catastrophic damage by doing so.
It astounds me that some of the most brilliant minds in the world seem incapable of correlating how “unrelated” issues impact one another. The most harmful pollution on the planet is noise — narrative that drowns out sensible discussion.
You could blame those who amplify that deafening noise with delight — or be smart by not doing dumb things that drive the narrative in the first place.
It’s like committing unforced errors in tennis then blaming your opponent for capitalizing on them. In politics, they’re often cheating the system in the process (and I’ve got plenty to say about that).
But when you put stupidity on a silver platter, what do you expect in a culture that doesn’t play by the rules?
You could cry foul — or realize how you shouldn’t have made the mistake from the start.
Learning
Pursuing aims in ways that predictably damage your cause is bad enough. But once the outcome becomes clear, it’s beyond belief that you refuse to reflect on your methods.
Even if you’re right and have the best of intentions: If you’re not smart in making your moves, you can exponentially worsen the problem you’re addressing — along with seemingly unrelated ones.
And already have — again and again . . .
True folly, Tuchman found, is generally recognized as counterproductive in its own time, and not merely in hindsight. In Tuchman’s template, true folly only ensues when a clear alternative path of action was available and ruled out.
How do we make people realize they’ve been lied to? You have to knock down one small pillar that’s easier to reach.
The people who Tweeted those lines I combined from a conversation I came across — had no idea that they perfectly captured the principle of my Clear the Clutter plan.
I’ve got the perfect pillar
One man with a cult-like following unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
As I’ve been in the trenches battling hermetically sealed minds for decades, that’s saying something. There’s a practically impenetrable wall that shields him from scrutiny, but I have a way around that.
All I need is the right sort who sees through the prism of problem solving, not politics. But it seems I’d have a better chance at winning the lottery than locating such a liberated soul.
What would you call someone who shoots their mouth off without addressing the evidence — but banks on their fabricated reputation to create the impression that they did?
This Professional Know-It-All (PKIA for short) is worshipped as some kind of saint-like Sherlock Holmes:
Never mind he peddled partisan hackery on that lie of world-altering consequence — flagrantly ignoring irrefutable evidence of mathematical certainty.
And lo and behold, he has a habit of toeing the party line: All of which flies in the face of the principles upon which he’s put on a pedestal.
But who needs scruples when you’ve got an army of apologists to absolve you of anything that doesn’t comply with the PKIA Program.
By applying the very principles upon which he’s put on pedestal — I can demonstrably prove he’s nowhere near the man he claims to be. “Demonstrably” — that word used to be mean something. But many things that once meant something, now mean nothing.
But in a culture that would read 10,000 Tweets before you’d read 10 pages, I don’t fit the formula worthy of consideration.
Never mind your formula created this clusterf#$% in the first place:
People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar — and I’m not and never have been familiar.
— Michael Burry, The Big Short
From decades of derision for telling undeniable truth (practically spit on for following principles those same people promote on a daily basis):
You’d be think being banned for “failing” to meet the “conversation” requirements where Crap is King would infuriate me.
Negative, Ghost Rider
“The pattern is full — [of shit]”
Believe it or not . . .
From a lifetime of calling out a culture that increasingly values bullshit as currency, you can’t imagine the beauty I’ve seen in my efforts to shed light on ugliness.
Thanks to some of the brightest and kindest this world has to offer, I’m at peace from the pursuit of my ideas that we continue to shape in ways I could never do without a caliber of individuals like that.
I’ve always been lucky finding gold in forgotten goodness.
That idea didn’t pan out on Twitter — but they came up with these nifty sayings for a reason.
America is Unschooled in Adjustment, I’m Not
I took one form of that idea as far as I could take it, but the original form of that communication tool is making good progress:
A web application I developed the pilot for a few years ago.
Twitter was an afterthought — and it seems SETI has a better chance out there than the life I’m looking for down here.
I’ve always hated Twitter and when I’m done doing what I gotta do — I’m never goin’ back. Until then, I’m sending out a certain set of messages looking for intelligent life (fiercely independent thinkers who want to solve problems — not endlessly talk about them).
Think of my signals as a poor man’s SETI:
I’ve got an idea — and it’s got teeth
Going by the galaxies filled with rock stars of reasoning across the social media universe — I should have no shortage of people eager to examine my idea and discuss how we could improve on it and proceed.
You tell me where those people are — and I’ll gladly send out my signals to them.
I don’t want to bother anybody — I’m just looking for a caliber of individuals I can’t find. You may not be that caliber — but you could be if you chose to be.
If you’re not interested in hearing me out and having meaningful conversation — we have nothing to talk about and I wish you well. I’d just ask that you block me and politely move along.
What I have in mind could turn the tide. I’ve already done all the work — I just need a little help in having it land in the right hands.
If you’re game, please contact me through the site or email Anchor.Press.gg@gmail.com, as I no longer respond to Tweets or superficial fragments of any kind.
I’ve made it pretty clear what I’m looking for — in one line alone:
I’m not looking for followers — I’m looking for leaders . . .
Sending out signals with my poor man’s SETI didn’t deliver, and maybe the app won’t either.
But since it’s partly being developed as a learning tool to advance in my web development skills, I can’t lose.
It’s all part of the design
Einstein borrowed from the one below:
The worth of man lies not in the truth which he possesses, or believes that he possesses, but in the honest endeavor which he puts forth to secure that truth; for not by the possession of, but by the search after, truth, are his powers enlarged, wherein, alone, consists his ever-increasing perfection. Possession fosters content, indolence, and pride.
— Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Remember what it was like to be uplifted by the genuine spirit of America? Maybe it wasn’t as real as I imagined it to be — but that authenticity is worlds away from where we are now.
One Voice Became Two 