I’ve mostly been reading non-fiction lately.  Much of it from the pop science / contemporary social topics borderlands.  And I thought: I used to read a lot of this sort of books.  Why did I stop?  And then I came to Albert-László Barabási’s Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do, and I remembered why: It’s because of all the anecdotes.

40 pages into Bursts, Barabási has started, but not concluded, three separate anecdotal storylines: About some guy who documents his movements in case he’s suspected of terrorism, a gun salesman who stamps dollar bills for an online experiment, and a papal election in 1513(!)

And those are just the major storylines.  When Barabási introduces Einstein’s ideas about random motion, he does it by telling a story about Einstein.  Same with the researchers who build on these ideas in modern times.  A story.  Always a story.

Anecdotes can be useful.  Sometimes the best way to present an idea is with a story.  But, 40 pages in, I have only a vague guess about the idea Barabási wants to present: It has something to do with statistical patterns in the behavior of large groups of people.  Maybe. Which is really just what the subtitle says.

I wrote a rant about this sort of book in 2006: Snappy Title: How I Expanded A Moderately Original Idea Into 300 Pages of Misleading Anecdotes.  Rereading it is eerie.  It fits this book perfectly.

I’m sure there’s an interesting essay in here, hiding among the anecdotes.  But it’s suffocating.

Oh Malcolm Gladwell, what have you done?

When the amateurs broke down the information monopoly of the mainstream media, we were supposed to replace it with something better: A media reality not dominated by any one single ideological bias, where anyone, no matter who they were, could potentially be heard by everyone, as long as they had something reasonable to say.

Instead we got a world of closed-off information ecosystems, recycling their own views and interpretations without showing much interest in anyone elses.

Farhad Manjoo explains in True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society why that happened: Selective exposure and selective perception.  Given a choice, we’d rather not be confronted with strong arguments we don’t agree with.  Given a choice, we’d rather listen to the expert who tells us what we want to hear.  The internet gives us that choice.

Paradoxically, the amount of information available contributes to the problem.  Previously, conspiracy theories fed on lack of information.  You’d see the Kennedy assasination video, and fill in the blanks with your fantasies.  Today, we can easily seek out information that confirms our view, and ignore the rest.

As examples, Manjoo selects the Swift Boat Veterans, the 9/11 truthers, and the accusations of fraud in the 2004 U.S. election.  There are many more.  One thing he doesn’t do is actually tell us how to live in a post-fact society, as the subtitle says.  I don’t know either, but I suspect it falls in the same class of problems as over-eating.  We can’t trust our instincts, and must balance them with rules of thumb.

In Infotopia, Cass R. Sunstein argues that because deliberative groups are prone to groupthink, with people copying each other’s biases and worrying about status, they should compensate for those flaws by encouraging individual thinking and contrariness.

That’s well and good, but Sunstein gets there by way of prediction markets, which he holds up as a sort of ideal form of decision making, where people independently make bets that reflect the best of their knowledge. Prediction markets, he believes, are “uncannily” accurate.  We should be using them a lot.

Prediction markets are interesting (and fun!), but I’m skeptical about how useful they are.  They’re clearly good at gathering hidden information, but many of the areas Sunstein believes prediction markets would be good for, (such as the number of deaths from a new disease, or the likelihood of a “feared event” in the Middle East), are characterized by what Nassim Taleb calls wild randomness, the fourth quadrant.  Essentially, they’re unpredictable.

Sunstein doesn’t pretend that prediction markets always work, but he oversells them, treating them a bit like a magic eightball.  You can ask it almost anything – never mind why on earth it would know the answer.

His analogy with Hayek’s price theory is also flawed.  Market prices reflect something everyone’s an expert on: How much is this worth for me?  That’s not the case with wild randomness.   Perhaps prediction markets make better predictions than the alternatives, but that’s missing the point: If your plans for the future depend on our ability to predict it, you’re doing it wrong.

Where Jaron Lanier is a tech skeptic, who warns against the implicit digital maoism of Web 2.0, Clay Shirky is a tech evangelist, who praises social media for enabling entirely new forms of cooperation.  For some reason I like both.

That’s because their worldviews aren’t actually in conflict, they just deal with technology at different levels.  At least that’s how I read them.  Shirky looks at the amazing possibilities social media opens up here and now.  Lanier looks at the drawbacks, – and at the amazing possibilites we don’t have here and now, and haven’t even thought of yet.

Shirky’s argument is that social media lowers the transaction costs of group efforts, allowing people to find like-minded people and cooperate with them.  Traditionally, group effort required central coordination and formal hierarchies.  Organized effort required organizations.  Now it can be done with social media.

That’s mostly for the good, but the factors that reduce transaction costs for the opposition in Belarus and Iran, also reduce it for terrorists, conspiracy theorists and anorectics.  You get the bad with the good.  But Shirky mostly focuses on the good.

You can choose to see a conflict with skeptics like Lanier here, but we’re well past the “Internet – for or against?!!” debates of the 2000′s.  It’s not like we can turn the clock back.  This is the world we live in, and it’s not all black or all white.

When it comes to technology, I listen to both optimists and skeptics.  I agree more with the optimists, (how can you not be a technology optimist?), but I don’t like their religious fervor.  The best of the skeptics are not luddites, they’re people who, precisely because they know and love technology, don’t just blindly accept whatever some tech company throws their way.  They know that technology is accidental, not inevitable.  They know we have a choice in how we use it.

In You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier warns that Web 2.0 pushes people into behavioral patterns that reduce their individuality.  Technology is not neutral, and it never lets us express more than a fragment of our selves.  It is easy to reduce our idea of who we are, in order to conform to the demands and limitations of some technology.

Lanier also believes that the search for the highest possible meta, the aggregator of aggregators, becomes a form of collectivism.  There’s a strain of mysticism here, a dream of merging with the hive mind, seen as a higher level of being.  But crowds are not wise.  The best human qualities are reserved for individuals.

This sounds obvious, but this is not a book of platitudes.  What I find inspiring is how Lanier reminds us of the possibilities in technology, and how some of the technologies that impress us most today actually represent a lack of ambition.  We’re walking one path, but there are thousands other. Take a step side-ways.

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams.

Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and, soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.

The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.

The words in this book are written for people, not computers.

I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.

The preface to Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.

I begynnelsen var jorden fattig og blodig, og det var mørke over det store dyp.  Da sa entrepenøren: Bli lys!  Og det ble lys.

Johan Norberg har jobben å være markedsentusiast blant verdens mest utakknemlige kapitalister: Skandinavierne.  Vi har fått i pose og sekk.  Kapitalismen har gitt oss velstand, men vi har fått å beholde våre behagelige fordommer mot kapitalistene.  Det er som da de store studentkullene kom inn på universitetene: De svarte med å angripe samfunnsforholdene som gjorde at det i det hele tatt var mulig for vanlige ungdommer å ta høyere utdanning.

Sosialdemokratiet har mistet grunnen under føttene.  I dag, 1. mai, går de i tog litt som zombiene i Dawn of the Dead, som hjernedødt gjentar rutinene som en gang ga dem mening.

Norbergs Da mennesket skapte verden er et forsvarsskrift for skaperne: De som har skapt velstanden vi tar for gitt.  De som kommer til å spre denne velstanden til hele verden – hvis vi bare gir dem lov.  Å være sosialdemokrat i Norge er harmløst hykleri.  Å spre ideene globalt er en tragedie.

Å vedta et velferdssamfunn ut fra ingenting er meningsløst, for det finnes ingenting å fordele.  Først må skaperne kombinere sin kulturelle, politiske og økonomiske frihet til å finne opp og bygge alle tingene, alle markedsmekanismene.  Alt det fæle, skitne som har med penger å gjøre.

Deretter kan sosialdemokratene komme inn, og pynte litt på kaka mens de skjeller ut bakeren som lagde den.  Heldigvis liker bakeren å bake, og gjør det igjen, og igjen, og igjen.  Takk for det.

The drawback of reading ancient books is that the publishers fill them with academic junk.  Lines are numbered like they’re biblical verses, there are more pages of endnotes than there are in the text itself, and, before you can even get started, you’re expected to read a 100-page scholarly introduction.  God forbid anyone should read these texts without first being told exactly how they’re supposed to feel about them.

I think I know what Juvenal would say about that.  He’s a mean bastard.  He wrote 16 satires, or, as we would call them today, rants, just to tell us that everyone in Rome totally sucks.  All the men are closet homosexuals, and all the women whores.  And, like, once, he was invited for dinner to a rich guy, and was served bad food.  There’s no proper morals any more, and the youths are all doing reality TV nowadays, all with their rollerskates and their walkmans and their stepping on my goddam lawn.

The glory of Antiquity rubs off on anything that has survived the ages, but the truth is that Juvenal’s Satires are just the ramblings of some old misanthrope.  You can appreciate them for the clever way in which he whines, but it’s still whining.  I gave up half-way, fed up.  This is the age of internet flaming.  Juvenal is a good flamer, but I hope nobody takes the angriest thing I ever wrote online and preserve it for 2000 years, and publish it with endnotes and a long academic introduction.  Please don’t.

Trygdesnylterboken av Eskil Aasmul høres ut som en samfunnsrefsers oppgjør med samtiden, eventuelt en howto for latsabber, men dette er stort sett bare moro.

To trygdesnyltere som er ute etter å tyne staten for mest mulig penger snubler over den vanvittig hemmelige makten bak makten, og blir jaget av agenter opp i taket på nærmeste flyplass.  Der finner de en skjult verden av samfunnets utstøtte, som har degenerert til borgerkrig mellom femi-nazier og macho-nazier.

Det henger ikke sammen hele veien, men for det meste er dette voldsomt morsomt, og boken er aller best når den tar avstikkere fra handlingen, så som i historien til Homedalsbyen, og legenden om Trygdesnyltermannen.  Det er litt Terry Pratchett over det: Kjapt, konsist, spinnvilt, og med ideer under humoren.

Dette vil jeg ha mer av.  Ryktene sier at forfatteren har kommet seg ut av trygdetilværelsen, men vi kan håpe han finner tid til å skrive mer allikevel.  (Full disclosure: Jeg slo Aasmul 10-5 i foosball i dag.)

Boka er primært utgitt som gratis e-bok, på et forlag som passer godt til det konspiratoriske innholdet, men for de av oss som har et nostalgisk forhold til papirbøker har han også lagt den ut på Lulu.

Jeg har gått rundt med deja vu i forhold til tittelen på Aslak Nores Ekstremistan.  Det slo meg faktisk ikke at han hadde hentet den fra Nassim Taleb, mannen bak min favorittbok fra 2000-tallet, The Black Swan.  Jeg innrømmer det: Jeg er en fordomsfull snobb, som tenker at norske skribenter stort sett sitter og gruppeonanerer på ett eller annet kulturhus.  Inntil det motsatte er bevist.

Nore skriver at Norge er i endring, og kanskje er denne boken en del av den endringen, dette at nordmenn nå sitter og tenker på ting som tillitsdynamikk i flerkulturelle samfunn og evolusjonsbiologiske tilnærminger til rettsvesenet.  Ideer beveger seg kjappere, og vi blir mindre like.  Jeg sier ja takk til et slikt Norge, fordi det er mye bedre enn det forrige.

Og jeg sier ja takk til denne boken.  Den er ærlig og nyansert og fri for ekstreme forenklinger.  Ekstremistan er ikke et partsinnlegg fra en Kulturkriger i den bitre debatten vi alle kjenner og hater, men snarere et utgangspunkt for en ny debatt om det flerkulturelle Norge.

Boken overlapper delvis med Harald Eias serie Hjernevask i innhold og stil, og har blitt møtt med noe av den samme syrlige, nedlatende kritikken.  Den tonen er jeg så forbannet lei av.  Selvsagt er svarene Nore kommer med diskuterbare, i den grad han leverer noen svar. Men han leter på interessante steder. Hva i all verden er alternativet?

Jeg gir ikke helt opp fordommene mine om norske skribenter. Fordommer er gøy. Men det er enda gøyere å få dem motbevist.