“Threads”

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Meta’s new Twitter competitor is called “Threads”, the name deriving from ‘threads of conversation’.   (The use of the term in online discussion systems may owe something to its earlier use in operating system technology)

However, another connotation of the word “threads” seems appropriate for this particular product.   Marionettes–puppets–are manipulated via threads (OK, strings if you want) and controlled by a puppeteer.   They have no autonomy, they do what the puppeteer wants them to do.

Given that a lot of the support for Threads seems based on its promise of a ‘curated’ environment, this other meaning of the term fits quite well.   (See this post  for early examples of this curation in practice)

It has becomes more and more clear how much power devolves to those who control the communications environment, and how difficult it is to overcome this advantage. See my related posts:

Comm Check

The Rage of the Prince-Electors

Book Review: Year of Consent

Coal Mining Songs

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In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the
soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.

–George Orwell

Whatever the downsides of coal mining have been, Orwell was certainly correct about its importance to the building of our civilization.

And coal mining has also inspired an extraordinary number of good songs…indeed, coal seems almost up there with the sea as a source of musical inspiration.

Some of the songs that come to mind include…

Coal Tattoo, Billy Edd Wheeler

Dark as a Dungeon, Tennessee Ernie Ford

Coming of the Roads, Billy Edd Wheeler

The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore

Daddy’s Dinner Bucket, Ralph Stanley

Last Train from Poor Valley, Norman Blake

Paradise, John Prine

Coal Mining Man, The Roys

Others?

The White Queen’s Boast

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Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

One fashionable example: “Surgery, or even a simple incantation, can turn a man into a woman.” Presumably this works by sympathetic magic. Tiresias required a miracle from Hera

You can easily find other examples in which we are assured that the evidence of tradition or our eyes is all wrong. And I know a man who assured me that before he dies, technology will have advanced to the point where his mind can be downloaded into a computer.

How did we get here?

You might cite Chesterton’s famous non-quote “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything,” but the former happens a great deal and the shape our belief systems have taken seems unique.

Older fashions–for example, admitting spectral evidence–were shaped by the religious and scientific understandings of their era. A witch can strike at a distance; the murdered man’s body will bleed in the presence of his murderer, etc. (Ironically, earlier church canon law (1140) forbade belief in witchcraft.)

If you know something of the details of the technology and engineering that goes into the “pocket miracle” of having light appear when you flip a switch, you won’t mistake that for a miracle–and I hope we are appropriately grateful for all the invisible effort that goes into it.

But if you get used to “pocket miracles” (everybody has Dick Tracy’s “radio wristwatch” now) and don’t think about them, you risk not understanding their limits.

I think we have a science fiction culture. Or, if you like, a Willy Wonka culture of “pure imagination”. We can imagine anything. So many things have come true, why can’t they all?

SciFi&Fantasy isn’t our religion. But I think it informs the way we look at the world.

If you can dream it, you can have it. And if you can’t, you can blame somebody else’s dream for interfering.

The Guide laughed. “You are falling into their own error,” he said, “the change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught–an inability to disbelieve advertisements.

Interesting Discussions

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At Instapundit,   Glenn Reynolds highlights a comment and posts it for further discussion:

The comment:   “I get the feeling that our govt leaders and business leaders are sort of bored with keeping a great system and country running. They must do something transformative and sensational! Green! Pride! Equity! And so they wreck the system they were charged with running”

Glenn’s response:   “I think this desire for exceptional significance is an unfortunate hangover from the civil rights/Vietnam era, and I think the activism of that era was hangover jealousy of their parents’ generation’s World War II experience. Now it’s degenerated into causes that are basically fake.”

At Twitter, Claire Lehmann says:

“Catering to everyone’s exquisite emotional preferences in childhood & beyond has not created a generation of strong, healthy, productive individuals. It has created a generation of neotenic hairless pets whose only skill is taking selfies & ordering packages from Amazon.”

Related post at Quillette:   Harry Potter and rites of passage

At LinkedIn, some assertions about ‘digitization’ and ‘digital dinosaurs’ and subsequent discussion.   (I find all the current talk about ‘digitization’ to be kind of strange…all modern computers and the information systems based on them are digital, as were early mainframes, and, before them, punched card systems.) Note the comments by Bill Waddell, who used to comment at CB.

Society, Social Media, and Human Nature

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The Instagram Panopticon, at Quillette, discusses the way in which social media has encouraged people to carefully curate their self-presentations and to judge the self-presentations of others.

I think it is certainly true that new kinds of media can affect how people think, feel, and interact…and this effect is nothing new. Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s, wrote about the impact of radio:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

He didn’t like photography very much, either:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

But the focus on self-presentation and on evaluating the presentations of other goes back much further.   Consider, for example Russia’s ‘paper Facebook’ of the 19th century.   No computers and no telephones, but, among aristocrats and the well-off, visiting cards were   very important…and:

The cards, decorated with vignettes and lettering, were usually piled somewhere in the entrance hall of a rich house either on a coffee table or tucked behind the mirror; so when a guest was coming, while he waited for the servants to tell the host he’s got a visitor, the guest could assess the popularity and social ties of his host by looking at the cards.

The fashion mongers of the era flaunted each other with a set of business cards from famous and popular people, just as some people now flaunt how many Facebook stars they are friends with!

There were even bot-equivalents to increase one’s count of Likes:

Some people even paid the doormen in rich people’s houses for visiting cards of famous persons princes, counts, rich businessmen to tuck these cards behind their mirrors and make their guests believe they are sometimes visited by such ‘posh’ persons.

Going back even further, in one of Fielding’s novels a woman takes great pleasure in going through the visiting cards of people who called on her.   Again, similar to like-collecting on Instagram or Facebook, probably exactly the same dopamine hit.

So yes, changes in media do influence human perception and behavior…but we must be careful not to ascribe things to new media which are really human constants.