Digital Crowding

The Internet is now a little more than two decades old (far more actually, but I’m thinking of its widespread adoption). Of late, it’s abundantly clear that, in addition to being a wholesale change in the way information is disseminated and gathered and how business is conducted, we’re running live social experiments bearing psychological influence, some subtle, some invasive, much like the introduction of other media such as radio, cinema, and TV back in the day. About six years ago, psychologists coined the term digital crowding, which I just discovered, referring to an oppressive sense of knowing too much about people, which in turn provokes antisocial reactions. In effect, it’s part of the Dark Side of social media (trolling and comments sections being other examples), one of numerous live social experiments.

I’ve given voice to this oppressive knowing-too-much on occasion by wondering why, for instance, I know anything — largely against my will, mind you — about the Kardashians and Jenners. This is not the sole domain of celebrities and reality TV folks but indeed anyone who tends to overshare online, typically via social media such as Facebook, less typically in the celebrity news media. Think of digital crowding as the equivalent of seeing something you would really prefer not to have seen, something no amount of figurative eye bleach can erase, something that now simply resides in your mind forever. It’s the bell that can’t be unrung. The crowding aspect is that now everyone’s dirty laundry is getting aired simultaneously, creating pushback and defensive postures.

One might recognize in this the familiar complaint of Too Much Information (TMI), except that the information in question is not the discomfiting stuff such as personal hygiene, medical conditions, or sexual behaviors. Rather, it’s an unexpected over-awareness of everyone’s daily minutiae as news of it presses for attention and penetrates our defenses. Add it to the déluge that is causing some of us to adopt information avoidance.

The Toothpaste Effect

Even before I begin, you must know what the title means. It’s the proliferation of options that induces dread in the toothpaste aisle of the store. Paste or gel? Tartar control or extra whitening? Plain, mint, cinnamon, or bubble gum? The matrix of combinations is enough to reduce the typical shopper to a quivering state of high anxiety lest the wrong toothpaste be bought. Oh, how I long for the days when choices ran solely between plain Crest and Colgate. I can’t say whether the toothpaste effect originated with oral hygiene. A similarly bewildering host of choices confronts shoppers in the soft drink aisle. Foodstuffs seem especially prone to brand fragmentation. Woe be the retailer forced to shelve all 38 Heinz products on this page. (True, some are just different packaging of the same basic item, but still.)

Purveyors of alcoholic beverages are on the bandwagon, too. I rather like the bygone cliché of the cowboy/gunslinger riding off the range, swinging into the saloon, and ordering simply “whisky.” Nowadays, even a poorly stocked bar is certain to have a dozen or so whiskys (see this big brand list, which doesn’t include sub-brands or craft distillers.) Then come all the varieties of schnapps, rum, and vodka, each brand further fragmented with infusions and flavorings of every imaginable type. Some truly weird ones are found here. Who knew that these spirits were simply blank canvases awaiting the master distiller’s crazy inventiveness?

/rant on

What really gets my bile flowing on this issue, however, is the venerable Lays potato chip. Seriously, Frito-Lay, what are you thinking? You arguably perfected the potato chip, much like McDonald’s perfected the French fry. (Both are fried potato, interestingly.) Further, you have a timeless, unbeatable slogan: “betcha can’t eat just one.” The plain, salted chip, the “Classic” of the Lays brand, cannot be improved upon and is a staple comfort food. Yet you have succumbed to the toothpaste effect and gone haywire with flavorings (I won’t even countenance the Wavy, Poppables, Kettle-Cooked, Ruffles, and STAX varieties). For variety’s sake, I’d be content with a barbecue chip, maybe even salt & vinegar, but you’ve piled on past the point of ridiculousness:

• cheddar & sour cream (a favorite of mine)
• Chile limón
• deli style
• dill pickle
• flamin’ hot
• honey barbecue
• limón
• pico de gallo
• salt & vinegar (not to my taste)
• sour cream & onion (a good alternative)
• sweet Southern heat barbecue
• Southern biscuits & gravy
• Tapatío (salsa picante)

Unstable Ground

I finished Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods (1995). He saved the best part of the book, an examination of Egyptian megalithic sites, for the final chapters and held back his final conclusion — more conjecture, really — for the tail end. The possible explanation Hancock offers for the destruction and/or disappearance of a supposed civilization long predating the Egyptian dynasties, the subject of the entire book, is earth-crust displacement, a theory developed by Charles Hapgood relating to polar shifts. Long story short, evidence demonstrates that the Antarctic continent used to be 2,000 miles away from the South Pole (about 30° from the pole) in a temperate zone and may have been, according to Hancock, the home of a seafaring civilization that had traveled and mapped the Earth. It’s now buried under ice. I find the explanation plausible, but I wonder how much the science and research has progressed since the publication of Fingerprints. I have not yet picked up Magicians of the Gods (2015) to read Hancock’s update but will get to it eventually.

Without having studied the science, several competing scenarios exist regarding how the Earth’s crust, the lithosphere, might drift, shift, or move over the asthenosphere. First, it’s worth recognizing that the Earth’s rotational axis defines the two poles, which are near but not coincident with magnetic north and south. Axial shifts are figured in relation to the crust, not the entire planet (crust and interior). From a purely geometric perspective, I could well imagine the crust and interior rotating as different speeds, but since we lack more than theoretical knowledge of the Earth’s liquid interior (the inner core is reputedly solid), only the solid portions at the surface of the sphere offer a useful frame of reference. The liquid surfaces (oceans, seas) obviously flow, too, but are also understood primarily in relation to the solid crust both below and above sea level.

The crust could wander slowly and continuously, shift all at once, or some combination of both. If all at once, the inciting event might be a sudden change in magnetic stresses that breaks the entire lithosphere loose or perhaps a gigantic meteor hit that knocks the planet as a whole off its rotational axis. Either would be catastrophic for living things that are suddenly moved into a substantially different climate. Although spacing of such events is unpredictable and irregular, occurring in geological time, Hancock assembles considerable evidence to conclude that the most recent such occurrence was probably about 12,000 BCE at the conclusion of the last glacial maximum or ice age. This would have been well within the time humans existed on Earth but long enough ago in our prehistory that human memory systems record events only as unreliable myth and legend. They are also recorded in stone, but we have yet to decipher their messages fully other than to demonstrate that significant scientific knowledge of astronomy and engineering was once possessed by mankind but was lost until redeveloped during the last couple of centuries.

Moths to the Flame

So we’re back at it: bombing places halfway around the world for having the indignity to be at war and fighting it the wrong way. While a legitimate argument exists regarding a human rights violation requiring a response, that is not AFAIK the principal concern or interpretation of events. Rather, it’s about 45 being “presidential” for having ordered missile strikes. It must have been irresistible, with all the flashy metaphorical buttons demanding to be pushed at the first opportunity. I’m disappointed that his pacifist rhetoric prior to the election was merely oppositional, seeking only to score points against Obama. Although I haven’t absorbed a great deal of the media coverage, what I’ve seen squarely refuses to let a crisis go to waste. Indeed, as geopolitics and military escapades go, we’re like moths to the flame. The most reprehensible media response was MSNBC anchor Brian Williams waxing rhapsodic about the beauty of the missiles as they lit up the air. How many screw-ups does this guy get?

Lessons learned during the 20th century that warfare is not just a messy, unfortunate affair but downright ugly, destructive, pointless, and self-defeating are unjustifiably forgotten. I guess it can’t be helped: it’s nympho-warmaking. We can’t stop ourselves; gotta have it. Consequences be damned. How many screw-ups do we get?

At least Keith Olbermann, the current king of righteous media indignation, had the good sense to put things in their proper context and condemn our actions (as I do). He also accused the military strike of being a stunt, which calls into question whether the provocation was a false flag operation. That’s what Putin is reported as saying. Personally, I cannot take a position on the matter, being at the mercy of the media and unable to gather any first-hand information. Doubts and disillusionment over what’s transpired and the endless spin cycle plague me. There will never be closure.

Bloodless Wars

First, a few reminders:

• The United States has been in an undeclared state of war for 15 years, the longest in U.S. history and long enough that young people today can say legitimately, “we’ve always been at war with Oceania.” The wars encompass the entirety of both terms of the Obama Administration.
• The inciting events were attacks on U.S. soil carried out on September 11, 2001 (popularly, 9/11), which remain shrouded in controversy and conspiracy despite the official narrative assigning patsy blame to al-Qaida operating in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• On the heels of the attacks, the Bush Administration commenced a propaganda campaign to sell invasion and regime change in those two countries and, over widespread public protest, went ahead and launched preemptive wars, ostensibly because an existential threat existed with respect to weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) possessed by Iraq in particular.
• The propaganda campaign has since been revealed to have been cooked up and untrue, yet it buffaloed a lot of people into believing (even to this day) that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11.
• Our preemptive wars succeeded quickly in toppling governments and capturing (and executing) their leaders but immediately got bogged down securing a peace that never came.
• Even with an embarrassing mismatch of force, periodic troop surges and draw downs, trillions of dollars wasted spent prosecuting the wars, and incredible, pointless loss of life (especially on the opposing sides), our objective in the Middle East (other than the oil, stupid!) has never been clear. The prospect of final withdrawal is nowhere on the horizon.

Continuous war — declared or merely waged — has been true of the U.S. my whole life, though one would be hard pressed to argue that it truly represents an immediate threat to U.S. citizens except to those unlucky enough to be deployed in war zones. Still, the monkey-on-the-back is passed from administration to administration. One might hope, based on campaign rhetoric, that the new executive (45) might recognize continuous war as the hot potato it is and dispense with it, but the proposed federal budget, with its $52 billion increase in military spending (+10% over 2016), suggests otherwise. Meanwhile, attention has been turned away from true existential threats that have been bandied about in the public sphere for at least a decade: global warming and climate change leading to Near-Term Extinction (NTE). Proximal threats, largely imagined, have absorbed all our available attention, and depending on whom one polls, our worst fears have already been realized.

The 20th and 21st centuries (so far) have been a series of “hot” wars (as distinguished from the so-called Cold War). Indeed, there has scarcely been a time when the U.S. has not been actively engaged fighting phantoms. If the Cold War was a bloodless, ideological war to stem the nonexistent spread of communism, we have adopted and coopted the language of wartime to launch various rhetorical wars. First was LBJ’s War on Poverty, the only “war” aimed at truly helping people. Nixon got into the act with his War on Drugs, which was punitive. Reagan expanded the War on Drugs, which became the War on Crime. Clinton increased the punitive character of the War on Crime by instituting mandatory minimum sentencing, which had the side effect of establishing what some call the prison-industrial complex, inflating the incarceration rate of Americans to the point that the U.S. is now ranked second in the world behind the Seychelles (!), a ranking far, far higher than any other industrialized nation.

If U.S. authoritarians hadn’t found enough people to punish or sought to convince the public that threats exist on all sides, requiring constant vigilance and a massive security apparatus including military, civil police, and intelligence services comprised of 16 separate agencies (of which we know), Bush coined and declared the War on Terror aimed at punishing those foreign and domestic who dare challenge U.S. hegemony in all things. It’s not called a national security state for nuthin’, folks. I aver that the rhetorical War on Poverty has inverted and now become a War on the Poverty-Stricken. De facto debtors’ prisons have reappeared, predatory lending has become commonplace, and income inequality grows more exaggerated with every passing year, leaving behind large segments of the U.S. population as income and wealth pool in an ever-shrinking number of hands. Admittedly, the trend is global.

At some point, perhaps in the 1960s when The Establishment (or more simply, The Man) became a thing to oppose, the actual Establishment must have decided it was high time to circle the wagons and protect its privileges, essentially going to war with (against, really) the people. Now five decades on, holders of wealth and power demonstrate disdain for those outside their tiny circle, and our the government can no longer be said with a straight face to be of, by, and for the people (paraphrasing the last line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address). Rather, the government has been hijacked and turned into something abominable. Yet the people are strangely complicit, having allowed history to creep along with social justice in marked retreat. True threats do indeed exist, though not the ones that receive the lion’s share of attention. I surmise that, as with geopolitics, the U.S. government has brought into being an enemy and conflict that bodes not well for its legitimacy. Which collapse occurs first is anyone’s guess.