The ‘Loser Edit’ That Awaits Us All

Starting to suspect my loser edit is just hundreds of time-lapsed hours reading HN.

If you tape someone for 24 hours and broadcast their 5 worst minutes, you can make anyone look like a loser.

Those shows also have "loser sound cues", when you can tell that the person is not doing well.

> Taken from the surveillance camera of the gas station where you bought a lottery ticket like a chump.

Of all the things, this is the least I'm worried about in the long term. Storing video is expensive and rarely makes sense for businesses beyond 30 days. I setup a 64 camera network for a client and 20TB of space stores about 15 days of footage. Sure, disk space is cheap but at over 1TB/day, 500TB/year would cost about $15k in just HDD and triple that if you want redundancy with proper maintenance. I'd find it hard to justify the ROI on everlasting storage unless the store's selling diamonds.

Even for a small mom and pop store with just 6-8 cams, it can be $2k/year just in cost of storage. Pretty sure they would rather spend that on inventory, marketing, or staffing.

My 2 cents...

There are many people running the US (Congress + Presidents + Supreme Court) who:

- Failed out of school

- Got fired

- Lost elections

- Had IRS problems

- Couldn't pay the rent

- Got cheated on

- Cheated on their spouse

- Had drug/weight/gambling/booze/sex/spending problems

What's the significant common denominator? They didn't dwell on a few minutes of failure.

This is just another name for "hindsight is 20/20", which is a facet of "confirmation bias". If you look back at the tape, you can pick out whatever shred of evidence that supports the already known conclusion, and ignore anything to the contrary. Confirmation bias is more general; it's not just about hindsight, but about seeing false associations anywhere due to cherry-picked observations.

Popular culture thrives on gleefully parading around the failures of others in a vicious 'They are just like us!' cycle that gives celebrity to people purely because we find them unbearable. We're all guilty of letting it in at some point; right from the first moment you laugh at watching a man get hit in the balls with a football.

Saying 'I don't pay attention to that' is simply not enough. Your lack of participation does nothing to solve the problem and like it or not, culture is not going away.

Engage and promote entertainment you find valuable. Engage and promote advertisers that fund things you believe in. Engage and contact advertisers that fund things you believe are detrimental to society.

And if you have something to say that you feel is important but is not supported by anything in popular culture, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE find a way to generate content so that the rest of us that want to back you can engage and promote your voice!

I think the appropriate term for this article is "overwrought"

Well that was strangely pessimistic...

>The winner edit, even in its artifice, is a gesture toward optimism, the expectation of rewards waiting for that better self. Whenever he or she shows up.

Shows up? I'm right here.

http://www.ihighfive.com/

I've never seen an email from them that I was glad I read. I appreciate they're facing a hard problem, but they really need to find a way to filter out low quality content or improve notification targeting.

I think the writer's points are clear enough that he shouldn't have to refer to the group of Bill Cosby's victims as an "army of accusers" to get through to the readers. Maybe I am wrong and this is a necessary step to demonstrating the overall thesis?

Isn't that just called rationalizing?

A few comments from the perspective of having worked in and around tech for over a quarter century, much of it involving data acquisition and analysis (largely industry, not government).

First: the "loser edit" isn't just about video, it's about any narrative -- text, images, audio, video -- and how it can be construed. There's a reason I've enshrined the infamous words of Cardinal Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac, on my G+ Profile: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

For an example I rather admire, see this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/15o08h/redditors...

Second: Sensors and storage are proliferating like mad. If earlier ages were largely notable for how much wasn't noted (as in: recorded in any fashion), the present age will be notable for how much that is noted is never accessed. How many hours of YouTube video are uploaded every minute?[1] Which means there's a tremendous trove available for mining.

Third: Search of non-textual data is becoming vastly more effective. Being able to first utilize metadata to restrict your search space helps, but as Google is demonstrating, the ability to describe video and search for it is pretty scary.

All of which means that the ability to collect, edit, and distribute a narrative which trashes any given individual, with their own writings, images, spoken word, and video, is tremendously high. We've been seeing that in the area of political discourse as a growing factor over the past decade or two: Declan McCullaghs false story of Al Gore's role in developing the Internet (Gore did play a significant role in establishing legislative support[2]), the Dean Scream ("In a nutshell, you are not seeing that Dean's speech fit the tone of the room."[3]), or in the past few weeks, John Travolta's "awkward" kiss[4] -- a single instant gives a much different view than the context in which it occurred.

Which is a point that media commentators have been making for a long time: that information devoid of context isn't meaningful. See Neal Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death[5]. Written in 1985, it includes a very Twitter-ish sounding description of randomly-arriving extremely short decontextualized texts -- the telegraph wire. There's a story behind the term "telegraphic".

And there's a fifth point as well: with a putatively comprehensive record, it's quite possible to either bluff or fabricate stories, with increased credibility. While that's a timeless tactic itself -- I believe it was during the second Presidential campaign in the United States, supporters of John Adams spread the rumor that Jefferson had died (or vice versa) -- it was a profoundly dirty campaign.[6] But with an archive, it's possible to claim, or fabricate, or construe a story that is very, very, very difficult to refute or combat.

And that's going to be a growing problem going forward.

________________________________

Notes:

1. It's 300 hours per minute: http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

2. "[F]ormer Vice-President Al Gore never claimed that he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way." http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

3. "Dean's Scream: Not What It Seemed" http://www.cbsnews.com/news/deans-scream-not-what-it-seemed/

4. http://fixyt.com/watch?v=bY9YMGM-hm

5. http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780143036531-1

6. http://www.lehrmaninstitute.org/history/1800.html