Dying dogs, democracy, spambots and the theory of everything

[Hillsy]

“Like in 3 seconds if you want to stop…” Then insert some obvious atrocity: Starvation, privation, war, foot AIDS, The Only Way is Essex, Child Soldiers, Cthulu, Max Clifford, and the continual fascination with watching ego-riddled talentless hate-targets wandering across television screens so we’ve got something to aim our screed at.

You’ve all seen them on Facebook, right? They always inexplicably have 14397 ‘likes’ from click-happy feck-sods, one of which is unfortunately your Facebook friend. Yes, they are annoying, Yes, it’s a modern day equivalent of a chain letter. Yes, it’s a sign of the processes evil uses to corrupt the world and everything in it. Yes, it’s….

Wait, go back one? Evil? Really?....OK, a slight exaggeration. But it is a clear indication of the human tendency towards efficiency over purity in many things. Machiavelli wasn’t an idiot. The idiom “The end justifies the means” wasn’t just vomited onto a page while chasing the dragon, or some other louche practise involving absinthe. It was an observation on court politics, writ large into a wider philosophy. And the key word in that is observation. Human’s prize efficiency. Evolution prizes efficiency. Hell, even the fundamental laws of the universe go crazy for that stuff. Efficiency means something works well, and better than before. Remember that – it’s crucial.

So what’s this got to do with liking a post about cute kittehs? Think back to the “Stop Kony” viral a while back. I read an article about it (disclaimer - this is really trimmed down): turns out the people behind the video were serial video makers and were also one arm of an evangelic group purporting to be recruiting young people as God’s footsoldiers. Their charity work appeared to be minimal as much of the money they seemed to make was being ploughed back into Groups documentary work and its running.

Kony 2012 was a marketing tool.

Now before you react too much, many things are marketing tools. The NSPCA adverts are: Look at this starving dog, give us money to help it. Yes they raise awareness, but they are also attempts to guilt trip us into it. The term Chuggers (Charity Muggers) has made the dictionary. Now I’m all for charity, and in some instances I almost like it more than tax (almost), and I’m a staunch left-y. The problem is marketing & Advertising works, and so it’s become as screwed up and ridiculous as Democracy…..

WOAH!!!!! Did I just say that? Yep. First, allow me to quote Churchill “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”…and I agree. The problem with Democracy is voting, and voting relies on sending a message from the party to the voter to sway them. OK, you say. Now look at everything that goes with that simple idea. There’s Plato’s hated Oration. A man is selected by his party partly based on his ability to articulate clearly. Fine, that just rules out the nervous, the stutterers and the crazy. The problem lies with two people saying the same thing, but one is far more skilled and charismatic than the other and gets all the votes. It shows we can be affected by Oration, which unfortunately means we will choose a slightly worse option if it’s better articulated. Someone can sell us something worse just because we understand/relate to it more.

Boom: you’ve got a game change in democracy, an arms race. No one can back down now – you HAVE to have at the very least a capable speaker. But it’s not just about speaking. Spin becomes part of it, making good things great and papering over bad things. Media investment, so the right message is going out to the public. Bilboards, posters, partisanism….it’s all one huge marketing process that democracy just got damn good at. They are selling you themselves in exchange for their vote. And it works! Why? Because Democracy has the flaw that one man lying believable can sound more appealing than someone telling the truth. If you don’t believe me ask yourself why someone doesn’t just stop….

There’s a pretty good comparison for that. Back in the early 90’s cigarette advertising was a massive thing on television. Huge. Sporting events in England were names after them (The Benson & Hedges Trophy, The Embassy world snooker championships). F1 cars were plastered with cigarette packet art. No company would let up in its advertising budget, and every year they got bigger, and bigger and bigger….Then they stopped. The TV ban came down and ownership of the familiar music from the Hamlet cigar adverts was handed back to Bach. But do you know what happened? The tobacco companies made the same amount of revenue, but their profits went up. Why? They didn’t need to outlay huge sums on advertising anymore because no one else was. Would they have done it themselves? No, because advertising works. Or rather a disparity between advertising budgets worked. And as long as there weren’t rules and regulations to prevent one company blowing a years profit on an advertising campaign and stealing market share, someone would do it. So everyone had to, or face marginalisation.

Now apply that thinking back to politics. If they all shook hands and agreed to all use the same language, speak the same truths, and stop the political spinning of marketing, how long before it all crept back in? A week? A month? The fact is someone would. Because it Works! Democracy has evolved, it has become a more efficient beast. All these tricks it has learned makes voters more likely to vote for one party compared to a party that doesn’t.

I’m banging on about this because it shows in the terms of something we naturally believe as truth and how it is has grown away from that original pure idea of the public choosing for itself, into something more efficient. Perhaps this is why politician’s credibility with the public is so low. Perhaps this is why so many people feel disenfranchised with their own governments….actually that’s unfair for me to make those comparisons as I simply don’t know for sure.

To swing this back full circle, liking the concept of clean water for all of Africa seems a pretty innocent thing compared to hoodwinking an entire nation and trying to warp democratic truth into a popularity contest. And in isolation that’s true. But it is a symbol of the new scourge of the world, the newest evolution in marketing. SEO

Search engine optimisation. The subtle, quiet brother of advertising. While Advertising itself is more in your face and omnipresent than ever on the net (Clickthrough pages on websites, adverts before youtube clips, banners and sidebars on nearly every funded website - It’s everywhere and its sooooo annoying!!!), SEO just means when you search, that’s what’s found first. Innocent, unobtrusive, quiet.

Wrong. All those spambots smashing forums across the web are there for SEO reasons. The endless lists on sites for everything just so a few key words and links can be found, entire markets opening for those skilled in SEO’s to make money, hell there’s probably even a degree you can take in it. The Google algorithm has trigged one of the most profound evolutions of the internet to date. The amount of effort required to keep up with, to compete with, those time and/or money rich companies will grow for the foreseeable future until blog stars like John Scalzi are being offered millions to drop the words “Nike: just do it” into every post for SEO reasons. Why, because it works, it works spectacularly well and brilliantly efficiently as all good maths does.

But all this is FINE! It’s the way of advertising, marketing, of corporations selling you something or idealogies preaching at you. I can accept that. Except it’s not, it’s now infected the world of the personal.

Advertising and marketing used to be obvious. It was on TV, or in shop windows. You could pause and fortify yourself against it. You weren’t suspicious because it was overt. Then someone found out you got much better results hiring someone to go door to door to talk to you. But acclimatise because it involved a door and a person and a clip board, it had rules. Anyone can empathise with the phrase “So what are you selling” so well now that it’s become a cliché. And still that’s ok.

Then someone found the internet and cranked up the background noise on the world. At the click of a button door to door salesmen for a hundred different companies could ambush you as you travel to the shops in cyber space. Constant unending assaults from adverts. And even then we’ve adapted to kind of focus on the centre of the page and look for the “click here to skip” link….and then came SEO.

He’s the problem: Firstly, it’s not overt. SEO can be subtle. A person can quite happily contribute to many, many sites and forums in a perfectly polite and pleasant manner, but just drop in reference and links to something as a matter of course. Don’t believe me? Look on this forum. Look how many people, almost subconsciously, write the name of their work in progress or something during a comment. Just look. I don’t even think it’s intentional half the time, it’s just a habit they’ve picked up from mimicking reviews and interviews from other authors.

Then there’s the problem of the internet itself. Friendships tend to be shallower, but more profligate. You have a handful of “real” friends in the flesh and tons of pleasant acquaintances online. It’s the nature of the social networks, and so you don’t expect to intimately know someone, which means all you need to do is show the veneer of civility, not be an ass, and no one minds too much if you happen to mention something repeatedly…..

Here, on the forums, I probably have the majority of my online social interactions, and yet the writing community has seen this incredible shift towards this sort of self promotion. Hell, there are seminars now about how to “drive traffic” to your blog by going on other peoples sites and chatting to people and commenting and linking and SEO and......It’s undeniable efficient. It undeniably works. But at the real depth of it, it’s marketing pure and simple.

The counter claim is that it can be a purely social interaction. No. Social interaction would be going on there without any links, not talking about a specific work in progress, not linking to your own site, and just e-mailing someone the website….if they ask. THAT is the purity of social interaction. No agenda but having fun. But that’s now a throwback, an appendix we’ve grown out of.

This isn’t a plea, but an observation. Unlike Machiavelli I’m not going to write a thesis on it. If I wanted to change it, I’m already too late. Self promotion works, unequivocally, and those of us who look yearningly at the purity behind the marketing are just caught in the gears of the evolution machine. We can’t go back. The arms race is well into its fifth lap and the only way to play is to grab a blog gun or a twitter grenade, and stride fearlessly onto the SEO battlefield……

....just remember: There's a reason why there are spambots selling handbags. There are reasons you're asked 40 times a day to like something in 3 seconds. And there's a reason people often put the title of their book, in caps, after the words "my book" on a forum post. Marketing evolution. But maybe if we keep in mind what we're gaining and what we're losing, we might be able to make the next evolution both efficient AND pure.


……Drink Coke……

[LurkingVirologist]

Nice post Hillsy. One minor quibble: evolution does not prize efficiency. It's all about relative fitness. The 'Red Queen' hypothesis. In fact, many successful organisms have gross inefficiencies that confer big relative advantages. Peacock feathers are a good example. Talk about wasting gobs of metabolic energy to make yourself an easy target. Another example: it's been estimated that up to 90% of HIV virions are non-infectious due to both the high mutation rate of the virus and it's unstable 'spike' proteins, but all those 'dead' virions provide great decoys for the few 'live' ones, so the swarm is able to succeed. It sounds like that was what you were getting at anyway, that an ever increasing amount of energy and resources are being expended to essentially maintain a status quo. As your cigarette example showed, nobody advertising was the same as everyone advertising, the former clearly far more efficient, but the latter the inevitable outcome. Evolution is a gawd-awful mess of a process, except when it works with stunning brilliance .