Gin, television, and social surplus, or, “looking for the mouse” (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Gin, television, and social surplus, or, “looking for the mouse” (2008)

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115 pointsnz16 comments

Great speech. There does seem to be an optimistic assumption here that more participation in media is always better. But from a 2021 viewpoint I would now add the discovery (through mass experiment) that there are some forms of participative media that are just as empty of value as, and far more toxic to society than, just letting people watch TV. So, as they say, “it’s complicated”.

Clay Shirky wrote a whole book about this - "Cognitive Surplus" (2011)

That key bit about the person-hours in Wikipedia always stuck in my head - 100 million hours to build wikipedia, versus 200 billion hours per year watching TV.

And when people panic about kids amount of screen time these days, I think 'well at least it involves making choices' - which link to click, which tweet to like, which bit of candy to crush etc. Whereas in the decades that our societies spent glued to tv, a handful of massively centralised outfits somewhere got the privilege of beaming their own curated stuff straight into millions of peoples faces. They chose the content and the schedule and millions of people just turned up every day and sat infront of it.

Broadcast TV is a really weird phenomenon, looking back on it from here.

I love this metaphor:

“The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. “

Are there any industries where documenting failure is incentivized? I could easily name a whole litany of things I've tried that didn't work (most recently: trying to use AWS security groups as a bad-actor mitigation technique), but when it's time-consuming enough to give a talk or blog about what I've had succeed, I can't imagine doing either about how I've failed.

I have several thoughts.

Was gilligan a genius? So many attempts to get off the island were completely hare brained, maybe only he could see it. Lovable sabotage can be an effective tool to help save an org from itself.

But the more important thought, I’m reminded of all the works of Luis von Ahn who was trying to capture this surplus. He had a talk talking about the number of hours spent playing soltaire, and used the unit of empire state buildings built and it was some staggering number of units. It was a very compelling idea about the same time as this article. It’s a shame so much of that surplus has gone towards solidifying several tech giants rather than more things like Gary’s Mod.

I've been fascinated by the ideas of this piece ever since I first read it, particularly by the idea that leisure time is something that many - or most - people actually have a hard time dealing with and integrating into their lives.

I wonder now what other "Wikipedia"-type projects have arisen since 2008 to serve as similar public goods. GitHub? Maybe YouTube, if you squint hard enough?

I think YouTube definitely qualifies, though the content hosted there is much more heterogeneous in quality and purpose. The how-to content alone is its own little wikipedia. Guided by videos, my mother is now diving into home-improvement projects that she would have relied on my dad for in previous decades. My dad has always been handy, but now he's learning to do things to professional standards instead of the improvised, jury-rigged way he's always done them.

StackOverflow et al.? I enjoy helping people in fields where I have relevant experience (it think I do!), eg with computer issues, and SOs gamification of that (and other community knowledge) makes it into something of a leisure time activity for me on occasions.

I take part in some FB groups (pottery related) in a similar way.

While some points in here might ring a little cynical today, I think the broader argument has proven true. The mega project I have been contributing my spare time and cognition to is inaturalist [0]. Despite it’s many flaws, it is impressive to see the depth and breadth of data available on it. It also serves the same public good that wikipedia does - building and delivering important knowledge that can change the world.

The projects that fit this social surplus model that are doing good are often happening quietly. Those that are negative uses of social surplus are loud. Don’t let that fool you into thinking good projects are less common or hopeless causes.

0. https://www.inaturalist.org/

Can you extrapolate on how you use iNaturalist? (I have it installed, have used it to id a few things, but haven’t really seen apparent what you’re describing. Would love to know more…)

Enjoyed reading this. As much as I feel guilty watching YouTube I do at least feel I am doing something slightly more proactive than watching legacy TV or streaming in that I’m having to search for stuff that solves a need for me at that time, or at least judge how effective the YT algorithm is. I’m lucky to have the BBC and value it as an impartial news organisation but I haven’t watched one of their (or ITV or others) programmes for at least 5 years, even on iPlayer. It’s all YouTube for me and I don’t begrudge the Premium subscription at all - it’s changed my life so much for the better.

In case not obvious I’m living on my own - I can see that normal TV viewing is more of a communal/social thing.

Good read.

This is from 2008 and hindsight is 20/20 but theres a couple of disturbing omissions that have started making themselves apparent.

The piece emphasizes how all of this "cogitive surplus" is going to promote sharing and in the hands of good actors that's fantastic.

E.g.

"Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring."

But now for the other side of the coin. What happens when the people providing and sharing content are _bad_ actors?

E.g.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

Further, you're always assuming the provided data is accurate. It mandates a level of trust with the data provider. Sure, there may not be much incentive to provide fake data to a simple crime map but this can change quite readily when commercial interests are involved or some coordinated group of malicious actors. My mind jumps to small business owners being 'brigaded' on Yelp and state funded troll farms.

One final piece that I found particularly disturbing.

"Media that's targeted at you but that doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for."

It's hard to argue that finding a niche for oneself is bad but I don't think that there are many intelligent people left that would argue media bubbles are a force for good. That's not to say the author would disagree but this is not an endorsement it seems to border on sympathetic.

I don't learn and grow from media that targets me. If anything it's antagonistic to that. Media that targets me makes me feel comfortable. It promotes narrative formation over reality testing.

Media not targeted for me, or that doesn't include me on the other hand, requires analysis. It requires comparison and contrast to my ideals and beliefs. It requires assessing why that media _doesn't_ target me and understanding who it's intended audience is and why _they_ consume it.

/rant

Felt the need to work on my writing this morning.

> What happens when the people providing the content are _bad_ actors?

Manipulation for economic gain, creating a sacrifice zone to be depleted, exhausted, and discarded like a landfill of souls.

He's saying that post-WWII society had a lot more free time. But this isn't true for people living in rural areas. Historically, many had more free time.[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/28q7l5/how_m...

The free time of people in rural areas is not quite as important, politically speaking, as the free time of people in cities. By the very nature of cities, people inside them can reach other people more readily and social movements will spread quicker in cities than in thinly populated areas.

So, in the earlier time when people in rural areas had a lot of free time they couldn't really do a lot with that free time in a political sense. But after industrialization caused a huge migration towards cities, some of the people took their newfound free time after WW2 and used it to rally people towards ideological causes. Obviously this is a threat to entrenched interests who don't want any new ideologies to gain momentum as they benefit from the status quo. The article makes the claim that by making mindless entertainment available to all, many of these ideological shifts were deprived of energy and this stabilized society somewhat.

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