The above article helped to solidify a few ideas I had been working on into something more or less coherent.  But when I started properly joining the dots, the realisation they led to disturbed a little.  We all know the world is changing, and this change is being led largely by changes in the Internet, technology, etc, as well as cultural and political forces.  But mostly the Internet right now.  Specifically in the way we use it, and the way it is becoming a place for us to live as social animals.

Ten years ago the Internet was a very different place.  You went to a web page to look at it, and to get information from it.  That was all.  Maybe you bought something. These days we go to websites to use them – there are things we can do on them, and in some places we can leave a lasting mark.  Some of them, like Facebook, are becoming a lot more than just a service or a playground.  They’re becoming places where we extend ourselves.

Here’s a map of all Facebook accounts and the connections between them:

Click to Embiggen

Our personalities, and social reaches, are expanding.  Never before have you been able to tell something to hundreds of people you know all in one go, for free.  To show your family pictures of your vacation you used to have to email them all to everyone – now you can just share them. With this comes online honesty – children used to be at risk in online chat rooms where anonymity ruled.  Now anonymity is a scarce, and widely mistrusted, online commodity.

As our online presence becomes more social and more connected it becomes easier for us to communicate to a wide audience, and to socialize much more widely.  In case you don’t know the numbers, it’s taken Facebook six years to grow from a small college network to 550 million users worldwide.  That’s a twelfth of the planet, connected by a single network, and run by a single company that knows more about each and every member than most parents know about their own kids.

I’m not going to preach about monopolies or Big Brother.  Far from it.  This is how the world is changing, and if you think it’s going fast now, just wait. As I explained in the article 5 Technologies That Will Lead to the Singularity, computing power is growing at an increasing rate.  Lagging only slightly behind that is what we can do with all that power.

The exponential growth of computing power available, comparing it to various animals.

I’d like to stress that what we’re seeing is only the beginning.  Zuckerberg seems to think so as well. There are limitations, but these will be overcome.  Facebook, and what it represents, is just an embryonic form of what it will become.  Before I get onto my actual point, this quote:

We are running our social lives over the Internet, an infrastructure that was not designed for that purpose, and we must be aware of the distortions it creates or we will be distorted by them.

I mentioned previously that Facebook knew a lot about us.  That means a lot of money, in the hands of good or evil. Facebook does it’s best to use it only in ways that are not harmful or invasive, and hopefully in ways that at worst will see us spend a few bucks or waste a few hours (a day, in the case of those who play Farmville). Sometimes they get it wrong, but we’ve turned out to be pretty forgiving. What it also means is that people have a new way to sell us things, and we are eating that shit up.

We’re not just buying the shit.  We’re picking it up with our hands and smearing it all over the place.  Most people don’t like ads, or pass them on, but some people do.  Some ads, like the Old Spice commercials, are hilarious and make you want to share them.  We tell our friends about them, quote them, turn them into memes.  That’s fine, but we will need to develop the same kind of immunity to it as we have against detergent ads soon, or we’ll end up like Idiocracy with fewer dick jokes.

Pictured: Dick Joke

Hell, I know I wanted to go out and buy some Old Spice after watching that guy.  But big advertising companies aren’t the only ones who are using this new media as a sales platform.  Individual professionals, entrepreneurs and the garden-variety soap-box loons you thought were normal people before you friended them are doing it too.

This is Samantha Laura Kaye, a girl I knew in University who went on to work in hair and makeup styling, and do a little bit of modeling and promoting from what I can tell.  She’s doing a damn fine job of it, as well.  In a short time her website’s undergone an impressive overhaul, and every few days I hear about a new hair serum or a mobile massage parlor on Facebook.

Now, her website isn’t everyone’s taste – especially if you’re not into makeup, fashion photo shoots, hairstyles, or scantily-clad models playing prison rules soccer while showing gratuitous underboob (sigh… here).  My point is she’s using the channels most of us use to make our friends’ profile pictures say I heart cock to promote her business, and sell herself as a personality on the side.

Now, this handsome devil is Craig Vine, another casual acquaintance of mine.  He also has a blog, The Bloody Cabaggatory. But Craig isn’t selling stuff.  He is making money from the ads on the side, but it’s mostly for his own and his audiences’ entertainment.  But what happens on his blog isn’t important.  What is important is that he uses things like Facebook, Twitter, and a whole host of social media services most of us don’t use, to distribute his writings.

He’s pushing an agenda.  As scattered and off-sides as it is, he’s selling a personality too.  But the people with blogs aren’t the only ones who are selling stuff through Facebook, because you’re doing it too.

Being socially successful, it seems to me, is the end result of coming out on top in the majority of a series of transactions. I’m not trying to sound like a sociopath here, but think about it. Some people just play well with others, and others want them around.  Some of it might be the genetic lottery, but I know a lot of unattractive people who have a lot of friends.

It’s the nub of my little theory here that social success means playing your cards right, making the most of what you’ve got in terms of looks, personality and phallic humour to win friends and influence people.  It’s not directly related to selling, but when you communicate more with a lot of people because you want to, and you have an engaging personality, you are going to thrive. Being able to sell your personality like a product, on any level, is a good skill to have.

But Facebook has its own rules. As the third largest country on Earth by population, it already has guidelines and famous faux-pas like you can find on sites like failbook.com: Don’t have an open divorce on Facebook.  Don’t put your sex life on Facebook, or anywhere near it if you have more than one sex life.  Learn how it works before you post lurid details about your latest conquest all over your best friend’s wall, and for God’s sake, stop clicking on these:

These are a lot like the things we call ‘manners’ or common sense, but are totally alien to someone who has never used Facebook. They were not a part of our culture in our parents’ generation, but they are in it now, and to our children it will be hard to imagine a world where that wasn’t the case.

Being able to communicate yourself well, make people laugh or command an audience, socially or for business, have always been valuable skills. With the growth both in size and complexity of our online lives, they will become more vital than ever.  When a good portion of your connection with humanity is shared data, you better make yours as good as it can be.

There is no escape, except at a high cost.  You can say that you don’t want to use Facebook for anything but sending the odd message.  You can ignore Farmville and all the links people post and invitations they send you.  But there’ll come a subtle point where non-involvement edges you out of the network you rely on.  If you’ve ever kept yourself out of the loop for a while, you tend to fade away from the group’s consciousness.  You don’t call them, they won’t call you.

The same goes for social media.  We have a choice: participate, and get used to the idea that large portions of your previously private life are now in the public domain, or skip out and risk alienation. Those aren’t the extremes yet, but I already see a world in which virtual interactions hold just as much weight as those in real life.  And I think it’ll be here before we have either the technology or the maturity to pull it off.

The Pretty/Rich Theory

This one is fairly common, and I’m sure most of you have come to this conclusion as well.  To begin, I present the following argument:

It is based on the premise that in most modern cultures the main reason for choosing a mate, for both sexes, has shifted over the last century.  A hundred years ago it made sense for all people of money to marry money, thereby enhancing their families’ total wealth and position.  However, around that time it started to change, for half of us.

All of a sudden it wasn’t so important for men to marry into status, even if they had money.  Because there were so many people with money running around – it was the twenties, and you could marry whomever you damn-well liked.  It stood to reason, though, that because women weren’t really expected to work, that it was in their favour to marry someone who was rich, or likely to become rich (by virtue of being successful or inheriting).

Men, on the other hand, didn’t have to worry about their partners’ families’ money anymore, and so they started to tend more towards marrying women they found attractive.  This usually meant hot.  The end result was a generation (our parents, if you’re anywhere around generation X or Y) where you have wealthy families with hot moms, making hot babies.  The hotness is compounded if the hot children aren’t actually related to the ugly rich dad.

This tradition continues today, with a new generation of beautiful rich girls with greater access to the best beauticians, hairdressers, beauty products, clothes, and cosmetic surgery, if they want to go there.  They also will be under more pressure to look better, and to find a well-off husband.

So if you think she married you for your money, she probably did.

In a tangentially-related corner, a study recently showed that men are looking more or less the same as their ‘caveman ancestors’, but women are actually getting more attractive. They do say, however, that it’s a result of a shift in breeding strategies, which is what I started talking about in the first place. There is even some stuff about genes in there.

You get attractive lower and middle-class people as well, naturally, but I think that if anyone bothered to do a study they’d find that there is a disproportionate percentage of attractive women in the upper-middle to upper classes.  That, in a nutshell, is The Pretty/Rich Theory.

So where am I going with this? By extrapolating from there, and by assuming that a few things will stay more or less constant for the next fifty years or so, we can come to a prediction.  First, those things are that the primary ‘breeding strategies’ for both sexes will remain stable, and that we will still be using money in 2060.

Barring nuclear war or the discovery of free, clean energy and the abolition of wealth, chicks with enough of the good genes will always figure out at a young age that it’s more fun to hang out with guys who drive hot cars, than guys who have to borrow the Volvo.

As technology advances, and certain laws disappear, we will begin to see wide scale availability of genetic engineering.  As soon as it is legal it will be expensive, and initially targeted at removing birth defects and inherited diseases from infants.  But as time progresses and it gets cheaper to tinker with your genes, people will start to give their babies higher cheekbones, bolder chins, slimmer hips, and so on, attempting to approach an idealised beauty in one form or another.

These forms, as the freedom to alter the appearance of ones’ children grows, might diverge vastly from the norm, or rich people may end up all looking like Angelina Jolie.  Personally, I’d go more in this direction:

My point is that it will be available, but only at a cost – even late into our childrens’ lifetimes. But what good is only being able to change your kids’ genes?  People that concerned with beauty usually want a bit of it for themselves.  And that’s where nanotechnology comes in.

Now, I’m no expert, but there is every reason to believe that it will be possible in the future to build smart organic cells or nanobots that can course through the human body, altering selective DNA as they go. This would allow us to change our appearance over the course of a few days or weeks (probably not without risk).  It could also, in theory, allow us to live forever.

What this will mean is an increasing physical difference between the haves and the have-nots.  I’m not talking about Morlocks and Eloi here, just enough of a difference that you can tell if someone has the money or not.  The rest will remain homely for at least another century.

Your Host

Norman Conquest

You obviously haven’t seen this quote on your iGoogle page:

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone” – John Maynard Keynes

Keynes was an economist.  Specifically, he was the economist, the one we blame for Keynesian economics, (adopted by the US to combat the great depression); something we’re seeing a bit more of these days. In the form of government bailouts.  Yes I know that’s not all there is to it.

He’s one of the people behind ‘capitalism’ as we know and love it today.  And he knew what he was talking about.

I like to use the following example borrowed from something called Game Theory, part of which describes how we act towards each other when resources are limited.

Consider a fishing community living on a large lake. The lake provides enough fish for the villagers, and some extra for them to sell and make a small profit.  However, the villagers are aware that if everyone keeps fishing as much as they like, soon there will be no fish, and that would be the worst possible outcome for everyone. Also, those who do not have the resources to catch a large number per day are disadvantaged right now.

So they agree to a quota: you are only allowed to take enough fish to feed your family, and as many again to sell, per day.  This sounds sensible, and if everyone abides by it the village will prosper.

However, people respond to incentives.  If everyone else is abiding by the rules, but I can break them and not get caught, my family will be more prosperous than the others.  So I break the rules.  But I’m not the only one this bright idea has occurred to.

If some people break the rules, others will be disadvantaged, and there will be an unequal sharing of wealth. The resource will also be depleted more rapidly.  If everyone breaks the rules, we’re back to square one, and soon everyone in the village will die or move off.  And if others are breaking the rules, there’s no incentive for me not to.

This is essentially what free-market Capitalism allows.  Of course, with regulation you can stop the scumbags from over-fishing the lake, but that becomes another problem.  How much freedom do you allow?

Now, I’m not a socialist.  I appreciate the finer things that my money can buy. But capitalism is not your friend. It exists by keeping the vast majority of the world’s population in economic bondage, through debt, as well as value and wage inequality.

If you have a professional or semi-professional degree, and a stable job with a good company, you are probably in the 97th percentile on the world income curve.  That means that 96% of the world earns less money than you. And unless you own large stretches of property in Dubai, and fly out on the weekends to play golf there, you probably aren’t in the 98th percentile. That’s how unequal it is.  It isn’t so obvious from this graphic (which is very old), but you get the idea.

World Income Distribution

Capitalism created this situation, and in my opinion it is impossible to fix without the drastic re-allocation of wealth, or the abolishment of debt-based currency altogether, neither of which are workable.  All of our money is created out of debt, or promises from the government.  The interest on this debt is repaid with your tax money.  It’s a very long route, but money created at the top, tends to stay at the top, with only debt trickling down.

(For information on a model for a resource-based economy instead, see The Venus Project)

The net effect of this is that we work our entire lives for companies which extract far more value from us than they return to us in the form of wages.  Think about it: if you make a product that is worth $10, and the company pays you $5 for your time $3 for materials and sells it for $10, who’s getting the better deal here?

Not you.  If you had the resources and ability you could make it for $3 and your time and sell it for $10, but you can’t. The company controls that power, so you have no choice but to sell your labour at a discount in return for a wage. You are creating more value than you are being paid for, unless you work for yourself.

This is the socialists’ gripe with capitalism, in a nutshell. On paper it is also a very valid argument. What confuses me are the numbers from the article ‘Quarter of People Say Capitalism Fatally Flawed‘ published on Reuters this morning.  Only a quarter? In fact, even more in the United States – even though the average American is in quite a lot of debt, and works a nine-to-five for less money than they’re ‘worth’.

Capitalism is not your friend.  It exists because people believe it is good for everyone to have free access to resources, if they have the money, which they can ‘earn’ through their hard work.  But that is the lie. It exists because of that last 2% of people. It exists because for every dollar you earn, they earn two, and they didn’t have to do any work for it.

Who are they?  They are the ones who have put themselves in a position to benefit from capitalism, not to serve it.  The ones who own the vast majority of the income-producing assets on the planet – and they could probably fit into a small town.

I’m not telling you to go out and get angry and protest outside the G20.  I’m telling you to have an informed opinion about how this money stuff works, because it is the leash used to control you.

If capitalism is only working for 2% of the population, and you’re not in it, why do you think it’s working?  Apparently 11-13% of those polled thought it was just fine, thanks. 27% thought it was fatally flawed and needed to be replaced, and the rest couldn’t give a shit.

This means that the vast majority of people support a system designed to control their lives and keep them from living to their full potential from the day they were born, to the day they die.  Retirement is no escape. As long as you need to think about where your next paycheck is coming from, you can never be free to pursue all that which makes you happy.

So tell me: why only a quarter?

Your Host

Norman Conquest