The Ignorance of Crowds: Week Notes #30
It’s been a bit of a week, hasn’t it? A combination of returning to work and then all the stuff going on out there…..
Last week I wrote about grifting. And how consumer value - especially in the digital space - really isn’t a priority for the companies who own and operate alot of the services we now use. Right on cue, some changes were announced at Meta. I’m not going to bother going into those here and now, because people like Ed Zitron and Anil Dash are doing a far better job of it than I ever could. It’s fucked though. And more than a little bit scary.
I don’t have a link to it, but I read a tweet (on Bluesky) which said something along the lines of ‘how did all these tech bros spend so much time with science fiction growing up and end up ignoring all the bits about tolerance and identity and instead leant so heavily towards all the bits about autocracy and corruption and the collapse of society’. It’s a good point, isnt it?
I also talked a bit last week about Netflix. The first week of January in the UK sees the return of Traitors to our screens. It’s really good telly. From the perspective of the industry and media - it bucks a lot of the trends we’re seeing with streaming. Whilst the BBC is uniquely able to decouple itself to some extent from the strains of delivering live audiences, it has elected to schedule the show in a way which creates talkability and an ‘appointment to view’. Richard Osman was on the money in his assessment of the show in an edition of The Rest is Enterainment. It’s a show we like in spite of it’s format, not because of it’s format. I’m surprised it’s made it back for a third series, if I’m honest. I had the same concern when series 2 launched. I worried that it might struggle to maintain the type of impact it made in series one now that people knew what to expect and one would assume the contestants might enter the game with an idea of how they could merchandise themselves to best effect.
Like all reality TV - the more established it gets, the more the contestants begin to understand the grammar of the show and the ‘etiquette’ as well as the rules. I had an idea that you might play the game again in series two with all the same players from series one. How would people decide between ‘traitor and faithful’, then?
Having said this I’m always startled at how native the contestants go and how quickly they seem to start taking everything so personally. They forget it’s a game. It is a great example of just how bad people are at making decisions too. Especially in committee form. In a recent episode, one of the contestants aired a slight suspicion of a fellow contestant. This resulted in the rest of the group electing to ‘evict’ that contestant from the competition, despite there being little suspiscion that the person involved was ‘a traitor’. This kind of ‘social diffusion’ is fascinating on a small scale within the confines of a TV programme, but ultimately horrifying within the context of a group like a countries electorate. People love to over-estimate how much individual agency they have in contexts like this. We underestimate just how important social proof is to our decision making. This can lead groups to make some really really bad decisions.
Reading
Finished Ali Smith’s Gliff and started Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. May have inadvertently gone from one dystopian novel to another. Not exactly what I need at the moment.
Spent a lot of time with Russell Davies’ brilliant Honda APG entry. Its such a good bit of world building.
Spending time with the various ‘year ahead’ type stuff that gets published in Campaign and WARC and the like. I wrote a presentation on the topic of the ‘way ahead for Media Strategy’ for a client last year - I might repurpose that content here. It was a very pretty deck and the points it makes are good, I think. Increasingly, I like to approach my working output like I treat my larder and fridge. I’m reluctant to get a single use out of something. You’ve got to be recycling, upcycling, refreshing….
Watching
The Traitors, The Agency and Skeleton Crew.
Started American Primeval. Found it thoroughly depressing. I appreciate the American Frontier was more than likely a very brutal and violent place, but I’m not sure - what with everything going on in the world - that I need to be bashed over the head with it. I hope that the violence and intensity of the first episode gives way to something more character orientated.
Suckered into a lot of Youtube food and recipe videos. Made a banging onion gravy for sunday lunch though, so all that scrolling paid off this time.
Doing
Back to work and back to the to-do list. I feel a little smug in that this Christmas my approach to ‘temporal discounting’ paid off. Present day Tom came back to a manageable to-do list, with my past self bearing the brunt of it. I would have kicked the can down the road in years gone by, so suggest this represents progress of sorts. Work is busy with lots of live projects needing attention. Feel like I’ll have some good stuff to look back on come summer time.
Golf has been impossible due to weather in UK this week. Need to swing a club. Have some important fixtures in next few weeks.
Went to OMA for lunch with Nick. Joyous. Glad we slipped in during a quiet service in January. More than lived up to the hype and had several plates of food that i’d happily go back for.
