Happy Spring Forward Sunday, a socio-technical efficiency mod to the national clock/calendar. Once useful, energy efficiency the goal, it prolly costs more than it’s worth these days. Another of modern life’s pains in the ass, easier to tolerate than fix.
Spring Forward Sunday is a symptom of a larger problem. Things that used to work just don’t seem to work as well any more. Been to college lately? There was a time when a college degree opened doors, meant big things. Definitely did not mean you were automatically friends for life with the financial office.
This steady downward pressure is natural, by the way. Gravity. Aging. Change.
Lots of changes happen in tiny bits at a pace so slow you don’t notice. Ever so ( almost ) never often something big happens. And you know what? Most of us miss that big change too. We’re busy, we’re tired, we have our routines — we have our ways. Change is painful, we don’t like pain. When it hurts we go back to bed.
Sometimes life won’t let you sleep when you go back to bed. Recently, for me, life decided to interrupt with a medical emergency in the wee hours, an ambo ride to the ER, another longer ambo ride, sharp clean knives and excellent drugs. This Tuesday past found me trapped in a hospital bed, wired for NASA-esque telemetry, tethered to an IV pole. My only contact with the world was a gimped wifi and bare bones ( cost efficient!! ) hospital cable. It takes a cohort of special constraints to get me to watch CNN on a Tuesday night. This is bad.
Stuck in miserable circumstances I witnessed first hand, in real time, a miracle; the Michigan Miracle. When the earliest returns showed a Sanders lead I shrugged, random distributions do funny things in the Short Run. When Sanders was still ahead as the returns edged into double digits I sat up. CNN was suddenly interesting. Something was happening.
CNN commentary was reliably unhelpful. They had their patter down, business was still usual. Their sources and satellite up links and fat internet pipes detected no disturbances in the force. From my shitty hospital cable I saw the world change.
wednesday
In Florida Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton met for a debate in an hispanic forum, an event with unusually effective moderation assets. The candidates each delivered in their individual ways. Clinton has mastered the technical debate and she put on a clinic. She filibustered her clock, she parried questions with tolerable grace, fired off smothering final rejoinders to dampen Sanders applause lines, she applied audience management with the deft hand of an expert practitioner. Sanders innovated with hand gestures and shrugs to flag viewers to the Secretary’s rhetorical gamings. I noticed, CNN commentary did not. This was my first long look at his unique manner of engaging the questions, seeming almost to swallow and digest the incoming question before generating a response that rises from inside his torso, not from the top of his head.
End of the night the Florida audience rose to their feet to applaud … Senator Sanders. CNN didn’t notice. Change. What the fuck is going on?
thursday
The Republicans stage a debate of their own. Tonight Donald is New Donald, quiet, reasonable. This catches everyone off guard. CNN notices. They patter. One effect of quiet New Donald is that it shocks Ted Cruz into a moment of stunned silence. Wow. A miracle of a different color.
New Donald knows that something has happened. He saw it too. How that observation migrates across his unique brain cross wirings of Freudian id and life long privilege is a hard thing to estimate or articulate. I doubt even he could put it in words if for some reason he were so motivated but he sees what I’m seeing. Change.
friday
Secretary Clinton voluntarily praises the newly departed Nancy Reagan for Mrs Reagan’s efforts to bring the scourge of AIDS to the nation’s attention in the 1980’s. The statement is so wildly at odds with reality I’m surprised the Secret Service didn’t step in to shield her. What is happening? Secretary Clinton is bright, articulate, engaged in the world around her. She was bright, articulate, and engaged in the 1980’s too. She knows the score. She is distracted, she’s off her game. She sees change but, like me, doesn’t know wtf is happening. I’m in a hospital bed, she’s got a microphone in her face.
It’s pushing 7 pm local, CNN is getting ready to cover yet another Trump “speech” and I will look elsewhere for diversion. As I reach for the button they switch to a crowd scene from Chicago. Holy shit. There is a swirling mass of protesters inside the arena at the Trump site. Lots of protesters. An announcement, the “speech” is canceled. The show does not go on. Damn.
Something is happening. CNN talking resources are clueless. They are out of book, lost. They’ve long ago abandoned their primary skill, they no longer ask questions. Who is protesting? What are they protesting? The talkers don’t even ask the simple questions, the ones they can answer, the ones I can answer from my hospital bed. Are the protests organized? Kinda. There is no obvious hierarchy but there is some coordination, a sense of connection, which means a de facto organization. How is that happening? How do you de facto organize?
There it is.
How are they organized?
Now I know what has been happening.
Bernie Spring.
the Game today
The mass news communications Game delivers high bandwidth low cost information to a mass audience at efficient price points. It is hierarchical. Field operatives gather information at end points, push this info up to the central studio where it is abstracted and managed into broadcast format, pushed out onto the network and a mass audience of dedicated viewers. Producer, consumer.
event → reporter, camera → up link to studio → editing, condensing message → talking head → audience
Social media uses a different organizing structure, an inside out approach where nodes make connections, organize around other nodes, change contexts. Hierarchy requires a tight structure. It is efficient, but rigid. When it works it works quite well.
Networks are flexible, they can change, and adapt to change. Everyone can talk. This requires coordination but with built in tolerance this is manageable. Peers talk to peers.
user → user
Change has happened. This is not about one politician in one single campaign, it is about a lot more. It affects our lives in many ways that have nothing at all to do with politics. It is a part of life. This is a huge subject, a lifetime-big subject.
My original idea was to introduce the Change as presented by a couple of web articles I stumbled across this past week when the weak hospital wifi was doing its version of working. These articles stand out because they breath life into a tired and old format, the dreaded essay, using new ways of presenting the information payload we look for from the essay form. Two gems.
I’ll start here next time.