8 ms·

The Reaction Economy

70 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gsatic 4y ago
Hurricanes can't be controlled. You just have to learn to spot when they are emerging and get out of the way. Would be nice to have social media weather report/farmer almanac for the region, esp if you are planting crops and stuff and don't want entire fields to get wiped out.
- nine_k 4y ago
  I like the approach, but I'm afraid the analogy should be different. It's less like a hurricane, originating from relatively predictable areas and affecting a relatively confined area at any given moment. It's more like an epidemic / pandemic event, an outbreak of a memetic virus, with poorly predictable sources, and with area of effect growing and shrinking fast and in in more chaotic ways. You can walk away from a hurricane. But to get protection from a pandemic, you rather need to take a vaccine, and also, sadly, limit the breadth of your contacts with strangers. The latter is basically the "social cooling" <https://www.socialcooling.com/ https://www.socialcooling.com/>, buttoning-up or severing of social media interactions, visible for like last decade.
- unsignednoop 4y ago
  Hurricanes can absolutely be controlled we just don’t have the tech yet
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    ... so they can't? Hurricanes have a lot of energy. In theory we could expend all Earth's currently accessible resources to try controlling them. Barring some impossible to predict breakthroughs we cannot control hurricanes. Just like we (meatbags) cannot travel to other solar systems.
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      It's probably easier to prevent them from forming in the first place, for example by somehow decreasing the surface water temperature in some areas. No idea how to actually do that though.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        This happens all the time naturally. For example dust from the Saraha reduces the amount of hurricanes. The problem here that's like putting a bandaid on a laceration, the hurricane is the effect of a complex system and not a causation. By blocking it you're allowing that energy to remain in the system and have all kinds of other potentially terrible side effects.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to the point where we could say, “Six hours less radio in Indonesia next week or there will be a great falling off in literary attention.” Or, “We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week.” Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world. (p. 28) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
  - sdwr 4y ago
    What a GD visionary.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20230223064011/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/william-davies/the-reaction-economy https://web.archive.org/web/20230223064011/https://www.lrb.c...
blitzar 4y ago
A Reaction Piece reacting to the Reaction Economy, Reaction Videos, Reaction Tweets and Reaction TikToks. Now on the 47th level of reactions of reactions is me reacting to it.
- j_crick 4y ago
  Maybe I’m just too dense, but I had that impression about this essay too. It’s just that I was reading and reading and reading it, and at some point it started to resemble a twitch streamer that spends about an hour reading patch notes to a game while peppering every sentence with ahhhs, ummmms and well maybeeeeeees without culminating in anything.
williamcotton 4y ago
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessary to embrace it. To listen to the radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the “closure” or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we related ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servomechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock. (p. 46) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
Is this a new phenomenon? How does it differ from court gossip in victorian times or outcry over things like muckrake journalism?
- TuringTest 4y ago
  > How does it differ? By the speed of light at which messages are transmitted.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Scale and immediacy. So yes it’s an extremely new thing and why we are struggling so much with it.
simmerup 4y ago
Could have done with being more concise and pointed. But the framing of people like Trump, Tate and Boris being catalysts for creating reaction chains that everyone feeds off of is going to stick with me. The ending is great: > ‘ Forgiveness is unique in being a reaction which breaks the chain, making a fresh start possible. It has been observed, of late, that there is a deficit of forgiveness in ‘cancel culture’ and the reputational attacks that thrive in the reaction economy. But digital platforms are anti-forgiveness machines by design. The broader question is how any of us – but especially children and young people – can become comfortable with our own freedom, our own spontaneity, against the backdrop of surveillance capitalism, which is the real condition of the reaction economy.’ It took me a long time to understand the value of forgiveness and come to terms with how horrible people just continue to exist. It almost came with maturity. Will the internet reaction machine mature enough to allow forgiveness?
- password11 4y ago
  Anonymity is the forgiveness of the internet machine. > The broader question is how any of us – but especially children and young people – can become comfortable with our own freedom, our own spontaneity, against the backdrop of surveillance capitalism, which is the real condition of the reaction economy Separate digital identities from real ones. Edit 2: I originally had a much longer discussion about WWII and forgiveness but edited it out and did not indicate that I edited. Basically, I made a mistake, I take full responsibility, although you will bear the consequences.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Anonymity isn't forgiveness, it's simply avoiding consequence. Forgiveness is a real world social transaction that can only be granted to real world identities, which presupposes an awareness on the part of the offending person and a willingness to change their behavior. >Sure von Braun worked for the enemy, but the U.S. needed his expertise and therefore gave him amnesty. Same for Unit 741, Hirohito, etc. in Japan. The US didn't forgive Von Braun and Japanese scientists, they simply chose to look the other way out of expediency, because the evils of the Axis had become a commodity for the Allies. That's a subtle but important distinction.
powerbroker 4y ago
I have, of late, been responding, to inflammatory stuff, with this: "meh".

70 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Hurricanes can't be controlled. You just have to learn to spot when they are emerging and get out of the way. Would be nice to have social media weather report/farmer almanac for the region, esp if you are planting crops and stuff and don't want entire fields to get wiped out.

nine_k 4y ago
I like the approach, but I'm afraid the analogy should be different. It's less like a hurricane, originating from relatively predictable areas and affecting a relatively confined area at any given moment. It's more like an epidemic / pandemic event, an outbreak of a memetic virus, with poorly predictable sources, and with area of effect growing and shrinking fast and in in more chaotic ways. You can walk away from a hurricane. But to get protection from a pandemic, you rather need to take a vaccine, and also, sadly, limit the breadth of your contacts with strangers. The latter is basically the "social cooling" <https://www.socialcooling.com/ https://www.socialcooling.com/>, buttoning-up or severing of social media interactions, visible for like last decade.
unsignednoop 4y ago
Hurricanes can absolutely be controlled we just don’t have the tech yet
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  ... so they can't? Hurricanes have a lot of energy. In theory we could expend all Earth's currently accessible resources to try controlling them. Barring some impossible to predict breakthroughs we cannot control hurricanes. Just like we (meatbags) cannot travel to other solar systems.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    It's probably easier to prevent them from forming in the first place, for example by somehow decreasing the surface water temperature in some areas. No idea how to actually do that though.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      This happens all the time naturally. For example dust from the Saraha reduces the amount of hurricanes. The problem here that's like putting a bandaid on a laceration, the hurricane is the effect of a complex system and not a causation. By blocking it you're allowing that energy to remain in the system and have all kinds of other potentially terrible side effects.
williamcotton 4y ago
We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to the point where we could say, “Six hours less radio in Indonesia next week or there will be a great falling off in literary attention.” Or, “We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week.” Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world. (p. 28) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
- sdwr 4y ago
  What a GD visionary.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20230223064011/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/william-davies/the-reaction-economy https://web.archive.org/web/20230223064011/https://www.lrb.c...

blitzar 4y ago

A Reaction Piece reacting to the Reaction Economy, Reaction Videos, Reaction Tweets and Reaction TikToks. Now on the 47th level of reactions of reactions is me reacting to it.

j_crick 4y ago
Maybe I’m just too dense, but I had that impression about this essay too. It’s just that I was reading and reading and reading it, and at some point it started to resemble a twitch streamer that spends about an hour reading patch notes to a game while peppering every sentence with ahhhs, ummmms and well maybeeeeeees without culminating in anything.

williamcotton 4y ago

To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessary to embrace it. To listen to the radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the “closure” or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we related ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servomechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock. (p. 46) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

Is this a new phenomenon? How does it differ from court gossip in victorian times or outcry over things like muckrake journalism?

TuringTest 4y ago
> How does it differ? By the speed of light at which messages are transmitted.
nemo44x 4y ago
Scale and immediacy. So yes it’s an extremely new thing and why we are struggling so much with it.

simmerup 4y ago

Could have done with being more concise and pointed. But the framing of people like Trump, Tate and Boris being catalysts for creating reaction chains that everyone feeds off of is going to stick with me. The ending is great: > ‘ Forgiveness is unique in being a reaction which breaks the chain, making a fresh start possible. It has been observed, of late, that there is a deficit of forgiveness in ‘cancel culture’ and the reputational attacks that thrive in the reaction economy. But digital platforms are anti-forgiveness machines by design. The broader question is how any of us – but especially children and young people – can become comfortable with our own freedom, our own spontaneity, against the backdrop of surveillance capitalism, which is the real condition of the reaction economy.’ It took me a long time to understand the value of forgiveness and come to terms with how horrible people just continue to exist. It almost came with maturity. Will the internet reaction machine mature enough to allow forgiveness?

password11 4y ago
Anonymity is the forgiveness of the internet machine. > The broader question is how any of us – but especially children and young people – can become comfortable with our own freedom, our own spontaneity, against the backdrop of surveillance capitalism, which is the real condition of the reaction economy Separate digital identities from real ones. Edit 2: I originally had a much longer discussion about WWII and forgiveness but edited it out and did not indicate that I edited. Basically, I made a mistake, I take full responsibility, although you will bear the consequences.
- krapp 4y ago
  Anonymity isn't forgiveness, it's simply avoiding consequence. Forgiveness is a real world social transaction that can only be granted to real world identities, which presupposes an awareness on the part of the offending person and a willingness to change their behavior. >Sure von Braun worked for the enemy, but the U.S. needed his expertise and therefore gave him amnesty. Same for Unit 741, Hirohito, etc. in Japan. The US didn't forgive Von Braun and Japanese scientists, they simply chose to look the other way out of expediency, because the evils of the Axis had become a commodity for the Allies. That's a subtle but important distinction.

powerbroker 4y ago

I have, of late, been responding, to inflammatory stuff, with this: "meh".