Magic Thinking

On the face of it, this is going to sound like another political post about the web; but if you could bear with me, I'd like to discuss an observation I had recently, while reading reddit strings about Captain Marvel.  This isn't going to be about those strings, or Captain Marvel, I promise.

For some time now, we've been hearing about the "filter bubble."  TED started preaching it in the early 2010s with talks like this one.  Since, I continue to hear about the bubble, and how it is bad for us, whenever I listen to left-leaning podcasts.  I don't listen to right-leaning podcasts ever, so there's that bubble in evidence.  Supposedly.

The talk that I've linked builds a fear-mongering argument based on a few simple assumptions: that google choosing your search results based on your previous search results is bad (speculation); that this is worse than when journal editors chose what sort of news you got on television, because those editors had ethics (delusion); and that bias and prejudice in humans ought to cease following old patterns because a technological breakthrough produced the internet (magic thinking).

Ditch these assumptions and what you have is business as usual.

Google is only doing what television, radio, magazines and newspapers have done in their turn: determine what content you like and sell products according to what persons liked that content.  The only difference is that google is more precise ... but the guy in 1949 who only read trade magazines about cars never saw an advertisement for women's dresses.

Journal editors with "ethics" were called "unemployed."  We only have this nonsense belief in editors because of an endless stream of Hollywood films going back to the 1930s that envisioned the hero newspaper editor and reporter who cracked the case and saved the innocent.  I can give you a quality list of such movies if you'd like.  They're fun, but they're not real life.

And finally, the internet.  That magic thing that some folks still think exists to solve all our problems.  Uh huh.  But 2013 was a long, long time ago.  There are less and less people like this now, most of them dyed-in-the-wool liberals who still believe that if we elect the RIGHT politician, all our problems will be solved.  Ahem, *choke.*

Getting to the point.  Of late, the last couple of years or so, I've adjusted my thinking.  It starts with my looking at a page of commentors griping about something or defending something, just like I know all of you have.  We've all watched a sordid, reprehensible video on youtube, the sort that makes us doubt the validity of human intelligence as a theory, only to drop down the comments and find that every single person commenting agrees 100% with the video.

Rabidly agrees.

And there's the comments section, waiting for me to throw my 2 cents in ... and I don't.  I could say something.  I know what to say.  But there's no point in saying it because no one in that bubble will remotely hear it.  It is a waste of my time.

I'd like to believe there's an argument to be made for stemming the tide against the odiious garbage that is everywhere, that it is an Emersonian imperative for the good man to do something ... but in truth making a comment on the internet is not "doing something."  That is also magic thinking.

I'll suspend where I think all of it is going and talk instead about this blog, Dungeons & Dragons and the gaming community in general.  Because this applies as much to all three as it does to the worst toxic garbage on the internet.

Why should you, dear reader, upon wading through the vitriol of my post on Brie Larson (just as acidic as I could dish it out), feel any reason to comment?  If you agree, it's fine; and if you disagree, you and I both know I'm not going to change my opinion just because you tell me to.  We don't know that because we've talked to each other or gotten to know each other, but because we have already been here, thousands of times, with the whole internet.

I'm just a madman.  Watch the madman dance, but don't bother to tell the madman to stop dancing.

I write a deconstruction about 5th Edition; this is like an open comment to every page about 5th Edition simultaneously.  I may change some minds, but I doubt it.  Mostly, I'm clarifying the thinking of people who already know there's a problem with the system.  I'm not making headway against the believers, who are convinced that any problems they're having with the system is the fault of a DM, a player, the internet, their own intelligence or gawd knows what else they've invented to justify that the system is brilliant and ~ if possessed of flaws ~ is ten times better than any other system.  Or 4 times, or 1.1 times, or whatever ratio they pick.

They're not going to comment here about it, because they know I'm not going to change my mind, though I'm clearly wrong and I just don't get it.  So why bother?  Even if they did, they'd frame their comment is such personalized drudge that I'd delete it for failing to make itself comprehensible in English.

We can make this same observation about the whole community and anyone in it.  We've been compelled to embrace the viewpoint that your bubble is made of stone and my energy isn't up to breaking into it, while quietly renovating the walls of our bubble with a moat and inside wall of bricks.

Understand, I'm not offering a solution.  A solution would suggest that any of this behaviour is "wrong."

This behaviour is normal.  In the real world, you don't actually give a shit about your toxic neighbor except where your personal space is violated by loud music, errant pets, overhanging tree branches and late parties on Thursday nights.  People wrote thousands of years ago (Juvenal, Aristotle) that having a positive relationship with your neighbors was a good idea, but no one listened then and no one cares now.  No one is chiding you for keeping inside your "property bubble."

Nor do you care what work Judy or Chris or Tina are doing, except that its not done so you can do your work or that they won't stop talking about it.  You don't care that the guy who sells you food from the food truck has a wife and kids or that the Starbucks kid has graduated from the 11th grade.  Maybe one of these says something that makes them sound like "your kind of person," so you build a relationship where you shoot the shit with them between breaks or on slow rainy days by the truck, but the truth is your life doesn't need that many of your kind.  A few is nice.  When it starts to cost you too much time, you start going to a different food truck.

And no one cares!  No one says, "Hey, you're retreating into a bubble, ignoring that food truck guy."  No one says anything.  They do it too.

I love the wonder of the internet being reduced to the wan
hopefulness of throwing message-bottles into the ocean.  You're
right.  "Someone" might.  Of course, I know the names of
several people who will read this, so it feels less like "sharing"
and more like having something of interest to say.

But it's the internet, screams some shrill voice, magically thinking that because it is big and new and everyone is hooked up that this is automatically a good thing.  Hooking people up in the past has mostly produced war, disease, famine and death ... you know, the four horsemen.  Mongols inventing the stirrup, Gutenberg starting the ideology wars in Europe with the printing press, shipbuilding and navigation setting off the murder of natives with colonization and predation of property.  Great technologies, bringing people together ... close enough to kill each other.

We're lucky we can't reach each other physically through this thing.  Though I'm sure that will be a technology to happen eventually; instead of eugenics, Star Trek should have talked about the Transporter Wars.  Those were the real bad years.

So go easy on the internet.  Flame wars don't solve anything.  Let them think they're right.  It's all going to get sorted out on the streets eventually, with or without the internet.  The real problems began with the decimation of western towns as manufacturing moved to the Third World, in the 1960s.  That's the one that is choking America and much of the world right now, from both ends.  And that happened years and years before the internet did.

I'm sorry.  I lied.  It turned out to be political after all.

You know, I'm not to be trusted.