Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (2008)
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
After 8 hours of coding, meetings, and emails, I am done. I'm up for physical activity. But no way am I contributing to open source or doing anything cognitively challenging.
When they grew into the corporate world you were expected to be there before your boss and stay until after your boss left, finishing any last minute work before the next morning. Weekend work and long travel days were common.
Going back even further, I heard stories and saw photos about my ancestors struggling to secure enough food to eat every year. Black and white photos of what was left of their dirt-floored houses. Every day was work and worry about securing basics for survival of the family farm.
So if your job is a clean 8 hours of desk work with some meetings and e-mails mixed in, I’d say it’s actually less demanding than what was expected years ago.
The percentage of single-earner households was also higher back then. Having a wife who handled the domestic front lessened the load on the people working demanding corporate jobs. Nowadays it's common for both of the couple to have that type of job.
And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper.
Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature. That kind of proves my point.
I mean, you should also do this when you work a corporate job. I work as a team lead in my org, and outside office hours unless something is actively on fire, I am not responding to anything. If I see a Slack notification, I'll check it, and if it's something that absolutely 100% needs me and I'm able and not already committed, sure, I'll jump on. But anything short of that, nope. 9AM Monday I'm on it.
> And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper.
Also this is categorically not true. In tons of bigger, older corporations, there are more paper pushers than there have ever been. Academia too. Administrative jobs have been growing for decades now, absolutely ballooning in corporate America. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber covers this in hilarious and tragic detail.
That's already a mental tax that previous generations never had.
> In tons of bigger, older corporations, there are more paper pushers than there have ever been.
Consider the qualifications needed to land those jobs today. The amount of posturing, scrapping, backstabbing, and drama that goes into them. Bullshit jobs surely drain cognitive surplus.
Personally, I'll never willingly enter an on call channel ever again. Nearly every night there was some thing i had to read and understand while i was in the middle of deep thought or creativity. Sometimes when they start they'll ping endlessly for hours. It's as if this dead claw of work is reaching in and eating away at my brain.
Why? Are you on-call?
It takes me no effort to ignore work Slack notifications, because I don't open my work laptop until it's time to work. This seems obvious to me, yet many people complain about being distracted by their notifications, so I wonder what they are doing differently, and why.
I know some people do the work phone thing and more power to them, but for me, I found it grating and irritating to have to have two handsets on me.
That being said, while my email and Slack access are shared to my personal phone, again, unless something is actively on fire, I don't answer, and, in those rare instances, it's always appreciated by my leadership is a favor I'm doing them, not an expected/demanded part of my job. I don't think that's an unreasonable way to do things.
A lot of those jobs remain unchanged, with a college degree now required as essentially an empty gatekeeping step.
> Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature.
This is simply untrue. Huge numbers of data entry and switchboard style jobs have disappeared due to automation. Just grab "9 to 5" and see how much paperwork went into jobs before computers.
TBF back into the 1970s most of the F500 company CEOs had only high school degrees.
Almost every human group I've ever encountered has been prolific in the production of art. I think you may be confusing a certain conception of culture with culture itself, in a way that ensures certain social classes will seem more artistic than others, which I believe to be false.
Edit: changed is to was because it's no longer grey.
So one downvote is enough, it seems.
But almost all of that author's recent comments are dead, so maybe what I'm seeing instead is someone who's shadowbanned.
And the points on a post are not displayed to anyone but the one who posted the comment.
It's easy to misinterpret because posts that attract heavy downvoting also tend to attract flagging.
So all the grey means is that someone downvoted it, once, before anyone upvoted it. That happens - someone reads it (or misreads it), decides it's wrong or offensive or whatever, and downvotes. That happens rather often, even to completely innocent posts. Usually it self-corrects after a bit, as others decide that there's no reason for the post to be downvoted and therefore upvote it.
Also, there is lots of research showing that subsistence farmers actually worked both fewer days, as well as fewer hours, compared to the modern standard.
8+ hours workdays are not natural in any way, they were introduced through the industrial revolution.
This is true, those social expectations are in place. But I think it's worth noting that it generally doesn't happen this way in practice. Even though women have entered education and the work force, often in higher numbers than men, they are still doing much more additional unpaid labour than men in every country in the world [0].
Would it be fair to say that women have experienced the effects we're talking about to a greater degree?
0: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Compare with vodka consumption in Russia, e.g. see this paper for alcohol's astonishing effect on Russian society: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The history of human civilization is told through an ever-shifting lense. A lot of the modern problems have always been there, they just weren't seen as problems, there were no names for them or people hid it better. So if I hear such a claim, I need a good citation. Sure there are many reports of the bad situations in early industrialized cities. But how many reports of rural places that starved before had not been written because there was no one there to witness it? Cities did surely create their own breed of problems, there is no denying that, but cities also increased the visibility on problems that had existed elswhere as well.
(here we are, 14 years later than the book; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim?)
Fortunately that capture is mostly voluntary: nothing but loss of mod-cons prevents anyone from descending from the platforms* of the eloi and seeking the caverns of the morlocks.
Then awa tae the hill to the lee and the rocks
Ere I own a usurper I'll crouch with the fox
I think it's freed economic surplus that does this. If you have enough money to buy an electric car, you fund future electric car development. If you have enough money to buy a ticket on a rocket ship, you fund future rocket ship development.
The problem with cognitive surplus is it needs something to aim at. If there's nothing new being invented or pursued, it reverts to attention: better marketing, nicer recruitment, etc etc, that just increase competitiveness within an established field. That's all nice, but it doesn't unlock progress that would obsolete human effort or polluting methods, or anything technoutopian like that.
But this also varies from societys and the things they value. From hear-say collective thinking is ubiquituous in the Chinese society with Chinese people shaking their heads in disbelieve when we talk about individualism.
It's also worth noting that individualism was the credo of last 30? years of education in the western hemisphere.
I think Wikipedia is an obvious example. The vast majority of its content and edits comes from enthusiastic amateurs who have other fulltime jobs unrelated to writing encyclopedias. A bunch of humans' "surplus free time" continuously adds/improves Wikipedia. (E.g. even the most prolific Wikipedia editor has a day job at US Customs & Border Protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt)
Another example that's underappreciated is the massive amount of amateur Youtube videos spreading knowledge (especially the DIY tutorials, building projects, repairing cars/homes/appliances, testing products, etc). I compare that social dissemination phenomenon to the famous "monkeys learning from other monkeys on how to wash potatos" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
Most of those Youtube videos are also created by people who have fulltime jobs so they expend their cognitive surplus recording content that can be valuable.
This HN website of user comments and and Stack Overflow answers are also the product of cognitive surplus enabled by the so-called read+write Web 2.0.
The early Linux development in 1990s could be argued as cognitive surplus because it was a collaboration of unpaid volunteer effort. That may have changed because I think I saw statistics saying most contributions now come from paid employees of corporations.
Linux is just a major example but you could argue than any popular open source project that's mostly unpaid volunteers has the potential to change the world. E.g. OpenStreetMap.
That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so good, because they curate very strictly (many say overly strictly). Also Hacker News curates discussion quite heavily to make it very much better than most other forums. That is very laborious and involves both peer review and central review and all kinds of algorithms and software tooling.
There are some new innovations like X community notes that have come out of research work.
I have participated in forums since the BBS era and can see a lot of repeating negative patterns that basically all discussion platforms just trip on, over and over. Whoever creates a service with a comments section should be aware...
> ...biggest bottleneck is curation
Yes and: I conluded ~1989 that curation was biggest value-add. A surplus of information ("infoglut" h/t BYTE Magazine) creates a scarcity of intepretation.
Source: Was a "thread blaster" on CompuServe. Ran hub for modest niche BBS network. aka "Sysadmin". Spent most of my time moderating, filtering, summarizing, intepretting, operations, etc. Basically proto-journalism.
Every day, I'm flabberghasted that social media forfeited that job/roll to recommenders. Algorithmic hate machines vs curation. Completely misses the point. Is proactively harming people and society. For the banality of mere profits.
> ...X community notes
A welcome innovation. Delighted it seems to be working. Very surprised it happened during Musk's reign.
Would appreciate any links, cites about communite notes, if you have them handy. TIA.
Interesting graphical tools exist nowadays to navigate the citation web and I guess one could try to backpropagate from this paper by Twitter employees, (Wojcik 2022):: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723
Example navigation tool: https://www.connectedpapers.com/main/f983a4e27b457a502fba322...
I’ve been thinking of the MAGA movement using this framework (though I hadn’t seen this great little essay before). A lot of its adherents are older people who have retired and have a lot of free time. Many of them grew up in an age of going to concerts and other mass events, (though I don’t think Woodstock actually changed the world). Many of the events can be “joined” in a slightly less passive way than merely watching TV, but are similar in that a set of professionals produce it and then you basically attend or watch.
Also it is participatory, and is not just older people, so people can jump in and use the same sense of spectacle to be seen as well. Q is a good example, but there are many.
Another is the anti vaxer movement which arose at a time when people were not financially desperate but had a lot of free time.
Regardless of what you think of these phenomena, one cannot deny that they have “changed the world in the interim”.
I used to be an unalloyed fan (and was trying to work towards) of a future of universal unemployment: a utopian future where robots do all the work, the marginal cost of manufacturing is nil, and humans just do what they like: write bad poetry, hang out, etc. I never anticipated that such a Star Trek world free of wants would still have political movements.
Also, don't think that the 1% of your "friends" are the 99%. I remember seeing a post a while ago that pointed out that, mathematically, the average person on Facebook has far fewer friends than their friends have. While that seems paradoxical (maybe even impossible), the reason for this is that, if you think of "number of friends" as a bell curve, people with tons of friends on the right side of the curve, by definition, show up as friends of many more people than folks further to the left of the curve. If you're one of these "other people", you might think "Gosh, my have friends on average have many more friends than I have, I must be a loser", when in reality you could be just in the middle of the bell curve (or even substantially to the right of the bell curve) in terms of number of friends. That is, the average person (or, again, even significantly above average) is basically comparing themselves to all of these "superconnectors".
Of course, that happens in lots of other places in social media (the only videos on TikTok etc. that get up voted are the guy that speaks 32 languages or the mogul skier that can do a triple back flip...), I really like the "on average you have fewer friends than your friends" example because it is a simple yet very unintuitive consequence of graph math.
Pre-MAGA you saw these effects everywhere, and they were often satirized. Just look at the dynamics of the "Boca Vista" retirement village from Seinfeld where Jerry's parents live. Many episodes were built around the completely inane battles they would have (e.g. the condo association election) with the subtext being that they all had enough time to spend on these pointless minutiae. Heck, I'll shine the spotlight on myself - I think I'd be pretty embarrassed if I calculated how much time I spent writing HN comments...
This is one reason I'm extremely skeptical of the "Basic Income people" who think that if we all had the security of basic income then we'd be happy sitting around writing poetry and taking pottery classes. To be clear, there are plenty of other reasons basic income may or may not be a good idea, but if you look through the course of history, giving lots of people loads of free time without any guiding principles or direction has tended not to end well.
You'd be guilt/tripped and pressured by your well meaning peers.
And the only upper limit on how much charity we can give is the number of hours we have free. This spirals out of control in some groups (e.g. some religious charitable organisations or orders)
The animal rights charity here has very different volunteers than a religious charity which has very different employees than you find at Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity stores here.
> unhoused people who can only stay in the shelter if they work at the store.
I believe that doesn't exist here in New Zealand. It worry be very difficult to run a charity that way here because employees and tenants have very strong legal rights. I don't know how you could structure it to work - maybe a religious organisation with homeless members of that religion?
(a little like the principle that one should encourage one's sales force to take up expensive hobbies and acquisitions: keeping them hungry for the next commission)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idle_hands_are_the_devil%27s_...
> Proverbs 16:27 may have inspired St. Jerome to write in the late 4th century: fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum, or “engage in some occupation, so that the devil may always find you busy.” This was later repeated by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, which was probably the source of its popularity.
that said, cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39160811
I'd like to think we could make the economy wither* away, but maybe a prereq is that we have to figure out how to educate (in the savoir-vivre sense) everyone first?
* compare the last line of https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-economic-organization-of-a-... :
> On 12th April, with the arrival of elements of the 30th U.S. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age of plenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organisation and activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort.
(I'm trying to keep this non-political, but one troubling aspect of "every want" seems to be that some primates are not happy unless they are certain other primates are unhappy; cf the roots of 1984 on the playing fields of St Cyprian's, as revealed in Such, Such Were the Joys)
Edit: occupying people harmlessly is also a major theme of Brave New World, although to be frank this supposed dystopia fails to be dystopic to me, as tortured creative souls always have the option to go to the islands...
A world without wants has been tried in mice several times, with disturbing results [1].
Human brain is a device for overcoming limitations. It gives a distinct advantage in an environment where there are many limitations worth overcoming. In a world order without wants, some of this energy will be spent on undermining that same order, as a way to entertain oneself, and as a part of the never-ending quest to try new things.
In Star Trek, we don't see much of the utopian society back on Earth; we see people who face a ton of problems, including a real risk of death. Humanity needs wants, needs problems to solve, and will seek them, ideally by expanding its habitat and having a frontier, but it also is good at finding and fighting imaginary problems, like a house cat playing with toy or imaginary mice, be it computer games or conspiracy theories.
[1]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopi...
"As new generations reached adulthood, many couldn’t find mates, or places in the social order—the mouse equivalent of a spouse and a job. "
MAGA is not a collaborative or creative endeavor. It is very much run from the top, with one singular figurehead & is subject to his whims. It is all designed around the idea of consumption, be it tweets, cable news, hats made in China, etc.
I did make your point in my comment: `Many of the events can be “joined” in a slightly less passive way than merely watching TV, but are similar in that a set of professionals produce it and then you basically attend or watch.' This is in line with Shirky's description of watching TV, and the baby boomers (of which he is apparently one) grew up steeped in that culture.
However I do think there's more to it, and mentioned that other groups have sprung up to ride on its coattails, which can form a positive feedback loop if they get any traction. I don't know if I'd strain his metaphor or example and call them competing shows or what. They are of course further examples of these professionally and centrally managed entertainment events.
What I think is more important is the "fanfic" culture, which has long been heralded by the "new forms of collaboration" advocates of the 90s and 00s as the predecessor culture of participation and collaboration and which itself has become huge with cosplay, Twilight fanfic morphing into 50 Shades of grey, etc. In the MAGA universe, Q is a perfect example of that, as are the people who plaster their homes with signs, make memes and artwork, and other, often deeper, engagement.
And looping all this back to the comment to which I was replying: harry potter or Marvel fandom may have some significant revenue impact, but hardly really changes the world, while the MAGA case fits the requested "changing the world in the interim".
Even better, someone to look up to. Someone that will lead them.
In honor of your request (which I agree with), I'll leave it at that.
If I were living in the first century, I'd probably try directing them to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frogs_Who_Desired_a_King
As someone living in the twenty-first century, it'd be tempting to suggest they grow a pair and respond to their insignificance in a vast and uncaring universe by imposing their own meaning on their own lives, but it doesn't take much reflection to realise that, as natural followers are unlikely to read even Kierkegaard, the message would likely be much better received by sticking to tradition and its frogs.
Free speech is a cherished right, but like other great power, comes with great responsibility. It has been abused over several decades to brainwash a significant portion of the population that their desire for a king is normal and right.
I don't have a solution to this problem but it vexes me that any conversation about the topic today is impossible because "absolutists" refuse to acknowledge that any problem exists with their ideology.
1. People with a lot of free time on their hands.
2. Those same people not feeling they have accessible ways to spend their energy on something meaningful, rewarding, and socially esteemed.
If people are prevented from feeling actualized and valued, and they have the time to dwell on it, they will burn down the walls for even a tiny shred of chance that the resulting cinders will leave room for a future society that gives them a better chance.
I think Gamergate, 4chan, MAGA, Christian millennialist, doomsday preppers, all of that, has this as the fundamental throughline. We have a whole lot of younger and older men in the US who feel like society has taken away their means of generating esteem, and all they've been given in return is distracting videogames.
Now, whether or not they are correct in their belief is a separate question. But many do believe that, and that belief fuels a lot of the unrest we see in the US. I can't tell you how many Trump supporters I've talked to over the years that voted for him specifically because is a bull in a China shop. They knew he was chaos walking, and they wanted him to tear down institutions. They didn't think he'd be a good President. They wanted a bad President to break the system.
Again, whether they would actually be happier in a world where our cultural institutions have been shattered is a separate question. But they believe it, which reflects something about how little they think our current institutions value them.
It might be worthwhile to look at ways that some people fit your two criteria might head to contributing (e.g. writing Wikipedia pages or answering questions on the web site of the local national park) rather than tearing down.
4chan is a good example of user creation though! Didn't think of that.
I don't think you can talk about group behavior without being political. Whether discuss politics is partisan is sort of a different point, which I accept.
> It might be worthwhile to look at ways that some people fit your two criteria might head to contributing (e.g. writing Wikipedia pages or answering questions on the web site of the local national park) rather than tearing down.
I think by definition, that doesn't fit my two criteria. If someone feels they have meaningful ways to contribute to collective enterprises like Wikipedia or their local national park, then they aren't falling prey to my second point.
It's when people have energy but no perceived outlet that trouble brews.
I think the positive way to spin my observation is to say, "OK, there are people that are falling into this trap. How can we help them avoid that?" How can we give people productive avenues to reach meaning and social esteem? But it's very hard to do that because it is often perceived as reducing their agency when you try to help them.
I guess we could —slightly less problematically— provide generative AI claques?
Producing require motivation, while consumption is passive. It doesn't seem guaranteed to me that people will be motivated in their free time in the way that will result in Wikipedia. In fact, it seems that leveraging passivity is probably more valuable. For example, the way TikTok gets people to rate videos is a byproduct of passive consumption - it requires no motivation at all.
This article also flies in the face of the normal attribution of 90% lurkers, 9% up voters, 1% creators [1]. I don't see any trends moving those numbers in the short term. Even a "sharing" action is in the 9% bucket.
So I share the skepticism against this idea. I don't see free time shifting away from passive consumption to content production anytime soon.
1. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/
The thesis is still interesting, and I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Not every piece of writing is meant to function as an academic thesis.
Then also before the rise of television there was enormously popular radio dramas that probably took up about the same amount of the average American's time as TV in the 30's and the 40's. So if this all represents an explosion of social surplus, I would argue that surplus existed in the US way before TV.
Radio, on the other hand, seems like it may have done similar numbers to those of TV. But I'd be interested how different those modes of consumption were in practice. Certainly some people watch TV in the background, and some people listen to the radio while doing nothing else, but I would bet the rate of watching TV while doing nothing else was far higher than that of radio.
That explains the shift in younger audiences from Facebook/YouTube to Twitter/TikTok.
Gin, television, and social surplus, or, “looking for the mouse” (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29198951 - Nov 2021 (16 comments)
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174410 - April 2008 (55 comments)
I just read Stolen Focus 2022, a book that talks about the downside of social media. But I got a little bit disenchanted with the second half.
Is Cognitive Surplus a good book? What else comes in your mind?
Thank you.
From Wikipedia:
> In Amusing, Postman argued that by expressing ideas through visual imagery, television reduces politics, news, history and other serious topics to entertainment. He worried that culture would decline if the people became an audience and their public business a "vaudeville act". He also argued that television is destroying the "serious and rational public conversation" that was sustained for centuries by the printing press. Rather than the restricted information in George Orwell's 1984, he claimed the flow of distraction we experience is akin to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Books are really changing my life, and the best suggestions come from this website! Great books are amazing, it's sad now people focuses on pics and funny videos. I hope my friends read more.
- Amusing Ourselves to Death
- Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
Thank!
I very much enjoyed reading his blog back in the day, as well as his book. I would be interested in reading his takes on more current matters.
I did a gin tasting at the Portobello distillery and they give you an approximation of the historic gin palace gin. It’s not something you want to drink twice.
Which, while not exactly craft beer, was perhaps the nearest approximation to what we now call craft that you'd be likely to encounter in late 20th century London.
--snip-- She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." --snip--
That made me laugh.