Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Throughout the western world new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.
We can't properly see what is happening because these systems are operating in very different areas - from consumerism, to the management of your own body, to predicting future crimes, and even trying to stabilise the global financial system - as well as in politics.
But taken together the cumulative effect is that of a giant refrigerator that freezes us, and those who govern us, into a state of immobility, perpetually repeating the past and terrified of change and the future.
What Amazon and many other companies began to do in the late 1990s was build up a giant world of the past on their computer servers. A historical universe that is constantly mined to find new ways of giving back to you today what you liked yesterday - with variations.
Interestingly, one of the first people to criticise these kind of “recommender systems” for their unintended effect on society was Patti Maes who had invented RINGO. She said that the inevitable effect is to narrow and simplify your experience - leading people to get stuck in a static, ever-narrowing version of themselves.
Stuck in the endless you-loop. Just like with ELIZA
But like so much of the modern digital world - these new systems are very abstract. And there is little to see that happens apart from endless fingers on keyboards. So it's difficult to bring these effects into any kind of real focus.
Last year - in a live show I did with Massive Attack - I tried to evoke this new world. I used a song from the 1980s called "Bela Lugosi's dead" - which I love because it has a very powerful feel of repetition. The audience were surrounded by 11 twenty-five foot high screens.
I'm not sure how successfully I did it - but I was trying to show how your past is continually being replayed back to you - like a modern ghost. And it means we stand still unable to move forwards. Like a story that's got stuck.
Being Powerful Distorts People's Perception of Time
With all the extra time they imagine they have, CEOs tend to experience less stress than those lower down the ladder.
JOE PINSKERJUL 24 2014, 7:53 AM ET
Maria Konnikova, writing in the New York Times, made the point recently that there’s much more to poverty than just a shortage of money. Being poor, she said, brings with it other abstract deficits, most notably a lack of time. She quoted Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist and the author the book Scarcity: “The biggest mistake we make about scarcity is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.”
Saying time is scarce seems imprecise, given that each day, no one has more than 24 hours. But what can change from person to person, and what shapes the way we map out our days, is our subjective perception of time—how quickly it passes and how much of it we think we have.
A new study out of the University of California at Berkeley examined how the perception of time can be distorted by being in a position of power. With the help of hundreds of people, the study’s authors found that the more power people have, the more time they feel they have available in their lives. The researchers primed some subjects for feelings of either power or powerlessness by assigning them to the role of either boss or employee in a mock task of solving brain teasers. The bosses were told they’d be making decisions about which puzzles to solve and how to divvy up the highly-sought-after candy prize at the end of the exercise. Once primed, the subjects filled out surveys that revealed their perceptions of time availability.
The reason powerful people feel they have an abundance of time, the study goes on to say, is that their feelings of control over many aspects of their lives spill over onto their sense of time—which jibes with previous studies that looked at the ties between power and perception. One 2009 study found that powerful people whose luck, in the experiment, depended on a favorable die roll more frequently preferred to roll the die themselves than to let others do it for them—suggesting that to some extent they felt the outcome was in their hands. And another study, published in 2010, suggested that people in power tend to underestimate how much time it’ll take to complete a task.
The Berkeley study concluded that an increase in the perception of available time leads powerful people to be, on the whole, less stressed. The flip side of this is that the powerless feel the pressure of time’s inexorable march, and research has found that poverty-related concerns like being short on time can lead people to make worse decisions.
This lack of pressure is not the only reason why feeling powerful can lead to a financially favorable outcome. Another new study, this one out of the University of Southern California, found that feelings of power led people to make more responsible long-run decisions. When faced with a choice like receiving $100 now or $150 in a year, just about everyone—powerful and otherwise—engages in what’s called “temporal discounting”: They undervalue the additional $50 simply because it’s so far out on the horizon.
It’s often advantageous to delay gratification, and, according to the study, that’s what many powerful people do, because they’re more aware of the needs of their future selves. For that reason, the study found, they're also more likely to put money into savings. Perhaps this is because people in power have an easier time seeing that they’ll still be in a powerful, stable position well into the future.
Another way of inducing people to delay gratification is to show them computer-generated renderings of what they’ll look like in the future, but the amount of effort required to Photoshop realistic images of your future self probably would be better channeled toward attaining some sort of actual power.
lucky » Fri Aug 01, 2014 7:03 am wrote:Reading thro' my post I realised that i contradicted a thought that has been nagging at me for a long while , which is that time as we perceive it is speeding up (this is form conversations with my contemperies) - but is that because as we get older its just one of those things that happens? I swear a week can go by and it feels like a couple of days sometimes. However if the environment,culture, music etc is stagnant then it becomes hard to measure time against anything so I suppose it's dependent on the individual. Even technology appears to have hit a plateau - each new phone is much the same as the one that came out 2-3 years ago (I get upgraded every 2 years and the only difference is a larger screen), tee vee's are all big and cheap (funny that - mass hypnosis? or should i get my foil hat). Aircraft that could fly us round the world in a matter of hours - where are they, just same old birds, just a bit biggger
It reminds me of the true story of when the patent office in Victorian times was seriously considering on closing down as it was sure that anything that could have been invented had already been done so.
Is this the master plan to bring the population down to 500m - death thro' boredom?
I think it's been mentioned here that time is perceived to slow down when one processes new things, and is perceived to speed up when one's life is monotonous and routinized.
82_28 » Wed Feb 27, 2013 7:53 pm wrote:Besides photos of people using payphones there are no photos of "can you believe we used to wear shit like that?"
kelley » Sun Feb 23, 2014 9:54 pm wrote:http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/epistemic-panic-and-problem-life
EPISTEMIC PANIC AND THE PROBLEM OF LIFE
By Josephine Berry Slater, 13 February 2014
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests