The Story of Evil Marketing - A Conspiracy Theory for 2020

Ok folks, it's Conspiracy theory time.  

Long ago, Soros, The Koch Brothers, Davos, Qanon, the Knights Templar, whoever.... hired a company

EVILMARKETING .COM

This group was very very good at marketing. They had a process, evolved over time, that worked well, delivering quality product with a minimum of work on the client's part.  They made the person who hired them look good.

The process is simple... the customer supplies a few pieces of very important information, and then they go to work, show a version for approval, and then the product is given to the client for use.

Item #1 - Who do you want to listen to your message  - The Target Market
  Client:  The 99%, those who want to take our wealth and power

Item #2 - What are the top 3 messages you want them to remember
  Client:

Their neighbors are not like them

Their neighbors are stupid

Their neighbors are evil

Item #3 - What are signs we did our job so you can prove it to your boss? - Metrics
  Client:

Increased division

Increased violence

Ignoring us completely

Item #4 - What are your goals for this campaign? - Goals
  Client:

Divide the 99%
Divert attention from us
Social Media Profit

The team went away... and came up with a brilliant strategy to accomplish the goal.

They came up with a few simple phrases that sounded a bit odd, but contained different meanings, depending on the audience. Turns out, you can test this.... tell the phrase to a sample from each target market, and see how they interpret it. If the answers diverge, you're on the right track.... if the answers oppose, you've hit the mother load.

But that wasn't enough for Evil Marketing... they had a better idea, and had to explain it to the client.

In this campaign there are 2 phases, in phase 1 we'll spread specially crafted phrases. "Received Words" - These are phrases that have an obviously evil meaning, and a plausible good meaning. To help explain it, we'll use Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave as examples.

Alice is a well meaning person who will first use the phrase when talking with her friend Bob, who has heard it before and agrees. Alice and Bob now recognize each other as allies.

Alice them talks to Carol, who is unfamiliar with the phrase, and asks a few questions because it sounds a bit strange. Alice and Carol invest time so that Carol now understands the phrase in the same way as Alice.

Carol later talks to Dave, who also asks questions, but rejects the phrase because the evil meaning is too much for him to swallow. The seeds of resentment are sewn between Carol ad Dave.

Dave later talks to Elaine, who decides she agrees with the Good meaning.

Later Dave is talking to Fred, who agrees with Dave on the Evil Meaning

The client understood how little effort it would take to spread, and nodded in understanding

Phase 2 begins when a critical mass of people are reliably using the phrases we supplied.

Now that Alice, Bob, Carol, and Elaine have invested energy in the phrase, they are strongly oppose to changing it. The phrase practically defends itself from change and dilution.  Dave and Fred also share an understanding that the others are allies, with an easy to recognize flag.

You, and your associates now begin to use the Evil intent of the phrase to accomplish your goals.  Alice, Bob, Carol and Elaine now feel forced to support this new (to them) meaning. They are trapped.

Dave and Fred now think that the others support the Evil intent of the phrase. They are fooled.

So, as you can see... this campaign will be highly effective, dividing and distracting your target market with almost no cost.

The clients loved it, and would be happy to use Evil Marketing again. The Metrics are off the chart!

So that's the story, and here we are... in an country about to rip itself apart, where nobody at the top dares actually lead because admitting mistakes is political suicide, throwing these phrases at each other over and over and over, and expecting that eventually we'll get different results if we try hard enough.

It's as if the phrases all have a good message in them, trapped in an evil spell... if you change the words, you break the spell.

We all have to admit our mistakes because our leaders wont.

I'm just a cranky old white guy with both liberal and conservative views.... actually their neither... they are MY views of the world.
I am more than ready to change my views and admit fault while doing so, publicly. Our "leaders" can't do that.

Please stop using the phrases as given... change a word or two, eliminate the double meaning. Please also be willing to lead us out of this mess by admitting the mistakes of our side as you see them.

Let's all be adults, and snuff this conflict out before it destroys our country.

E Pluribus Unum - One of Many - United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

Leading edge science in the home shop?

I strongly suspect that there are some elegant and affordable experiments similar to the Cavendish experiment which could help prove Mike McCulloch's Quantized Inertia theory. 

If you were to use a servo to keep weights on a torsion balance stationary, you could measure the current required and have a very sensitive gravity balance.  The suspended weights and servo could all be soldered inside a copper pipe to all but eliminate drafts and electrostatic forces as noise sources.

A computer controlled linear stage could be used to log data, and to move the test masses external to the assembly and make many measurements over weeks or months of the forces with weights and different distances.

I hope to do this experiment in the next year or two.  I welcome anyone who cares to do it before or after me.

InterIlluminati version 0.001 alpha - The founding document

8/22/2018 02:23 AM - Sometimes you get an idea in your brain, and you don't want to lose it, because you think it's a good one, and might possibly change the world. This is one of those ideas, and it's happening in the middle of the night. You dear reader, are seeing it because my dear bride made me go to bed early enough that, unlike normally, I am not so exhausted I'm dreading the 5:00AM alarm that marks the end of sleep, and thus have a little bit of flexibility....   early to bed.... early to rise.... lets you make notes at 2:30AM... 8-)

I've developed many bad habits over my life, and have gotten into a rut.  I used to be a person ready to experiment and try things at the drop of a hat... now I'm too damned tired because of these habits.  This changes today! 

I'm going to attempt to discover these habits, or their symptoms, and correct them, with your support.

I believe we've all (on the internet, and society as a whole) have gotten into many bad habits, and hope that if we can collectively discover them, we can change them intentionally, and chose a new future.

A group of people of any size, can commit to a shared set of goals, an a shared identity.  We all have many such identities throughout our daily lives....  Child, friend, sibling, student, teacher, parent, partner, editor, writer, etc.   We have religious identities, the standard  "Religion":  Judiasim, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and the like...   the other religions: emacs, vi, Word, Wordperfect, Notepad++, etc...    Linux, windows, Mac, etc...    American, Canadian, Russian....   the point here is that we each have many identities.... and so it's very unlikely that any 2 people share all of them.... I'd go so far as to say with the possible exception of a few identical twins with very boring lives, no two people share all of their identities.

The revolutions in communication thoughout history, spoken language, oral histories, the written word, the printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, and now the internet, have in each step made it possible for the ideas of one person to be shared, and challenged by a wider community of peers.  Each step made it possible for ideas to persist across time with finer sets of detail, and nuance.

The rise of civilization over history has decreased the portion of time everyone has to work, in order to survive.  It now seems possible that with automation, it is possible that if fairly distributed, 20 hour work weeks might be a thing, or there will be many unemployed.... that choice has yet to be made.    (Let's not forget though, that civilizations do collapse, and we're not special.  There were factories making gears more than 2000 years ago, folks, about 1500 years before clockmakers started bring them back into production.)

So, we currently find ourselves, and even I, with all my bad habits, find myself in the situation where if we think about it, we have free time to devote to any task of our chosing.

I have free time on my commute to work, during which I can passively listen to Podcasts...  I used to have free time commuting on a train which allowed me to experiment with photography quite a bit.  I have free time after taking care of my family and friends, most of which I've been spending consuming Youtube and other social media. 

I've not spend all that "free" time wisely.  I hope to change that.  I hope to get other people who share some of my idenities to do the same, and push some projects forward.  I'm sure there are MANY good ones out there that could benefit just from my attention, as a passive listener or viewer, with occaisional (sp?) feedback.

*todo: Install Spell check in Wikipad
*todo: Clean up old todo flags out of this wiki

A little bit of forward planning and persistence can be surprisingly effective.... the further forward you think, the less actual work is required.

Let us choose a future we like, and push in that direction... spending less time watching mindless videos and chasing likes and venting our emotions (mostly dispair and frustration) to the world.

I wrote this on my Wikidpad, a wiki on my laptop, and will soon send it out to the world.... hopefully I've saved enough so I can sleep now.  Good night, fellow InterIlluminati  (Those of use who share the ideas first roughly outlined in this ver 0.001 alpha)

Mike Warot - 8/22/2018 03:07 AM

Self Valeting Cars

Imagine a car that can go find it's own parking spot, and return when you call it on your phone.

It could come get you if you need a ride, and are stuck at the office.

Imagine if ZIP cars could do this!

The future is cool again!

A Critique of modern discourse

A Metafilter story got me to writing about the problems with modern discourse as seen on the Internet. I thought I would spend some time refining and extending those thoughts here. By no means is this the definitive word on what's wrong with the internet, but I hope that a cogent summary might help fix things.

Time Pressure

1. First post phenomenon - On a site such as /., comments are sorted by default in the order they are received  This means that the first post gets the most feedback, and sets the tone for the rest of discussion. This results in a bunch of hasty, emotional, not well considered crap that then has to be moderated around in order to extract value.

2. 15 Minutes of fame. - Any post gets attention, and then gets pushed under by the oncoming store of other stories in 15 minutes, maybe a bit more if you're evil like Carmen Ortiz... but only a bit more. This means that any effort you do put into something isn't going to pay off much.

Text is Messy

3. Comments on a message board are usually undifferentiated text, sometimes with a bit of formatting. There is no easy way to tell visually what the meaning is without forcing oneself to read it all, and then start to draw out conclusions about structure, agreement/disagreement, etc.

Moderation is a kludge

4. Most moderation systems are a layer of code designed to filter out crap, and help extract some value from an otherwise overwhelming amount of undiluted text. Like spam filters, there are behaviors and techniques that get used to route around them.

  The most common form of moderation system is to have a ranking system (like/dislike), which turns commenting into a popularity contest. The funniest or most vocal viewpoints drown out everything else.

5. Popularity contests are 1 dimensional - There are lots of reasons someone might want to flag a post (which isn't quite granular enough for me, but you have to start somewhere)... agreeing with a post as "having value" is the standard here in the blue, but elsewhere it's a direct measure of the groupthink agreement. (/.  for example)

Wouldn't it be better to have multiple dimensions of ratings? Factual/wrong, Conservative/Liberal, Cheap/Expensive, True/Lie, etc.?  They wouldn't have to be the same set of things either, but it would be easier to code for lets say Funny, True, Insightful as separate (orthogonal) dimensions.

6. The missing half of Facebook - Facebook doesn't allow the inclusion of negative votes, so it's actually only 1/2 dimensional.

Anonymous people are assholes
7. Anonymity allows people to say things they'd not say in person. Remember the Id in Forbidden Planet?

So, how can we help fix it?
There are a number of strategies to be used to help fix this.

Use your blog more
The first is to blog more, and comment less. If you find yourself writing something in a comment that seems to be really insightful, make a more refined blog post out of it (linking back to the discussion for context). Blog posts are better than comments on someone else's site for a number of reasons:

• You own the post, and can tweak it later if necessary. This times into and builds your reputation internet-wide, instead of in on little corner of it, subject to whim.
• The post can be found later, as a stand-alone piece to be referenced, and can be more self-contained.
• Time pressure is less because blog posts can stay "popular" for years. A few hits per month done a few dozen times means you're always getting feedback and links.
• If you've already written about a particular view, link back to it, and perhaps tweak it a bit with improvements.

Build a better commenting system

Someone (me?) needs to come up with a better commenting/moderation system, that allows the multiple dimensional rating that I discussed above. It would be nice to discover visually how the arguments are inter-related about a given topic, to allow one to focus ones time better, and improve signal/(signal+noise) ratio.

Review your comments periodically

It would be good if we all where to re-read the things we've written with some distance of time, and get a better sense of ourselves. This can help us to all be better writers and readers.

Refinement #1 - Download Agent

My earlier post gave my first iteration of an idea... here is a refinement of it

The user should be able to install and/or choose a service to be their download agent. This agent would, regardless of location, have certain information the user might be willing to trade for downloads, and would handle the actual process of handing off data and doing the downloads.

The use of OpenID to authenticate things, and a VRMish way of treating the users data as the property of the user, would be one of the key functionalities to make this better than the current system of download managers installed by the vendor.

A User provided dowload service standard?

I have an idea, which I'll attempt to express in enough words to get the point across, hopefully to someone who can actually implement it.

The idea is simple... a shopping cart/download list service, with some optional social networking tools.

We often need to download some items from the internet, and sometimes later refer to them. When you deal with multiple computers, you often find yourself having to move files around, and/or re-download them multiple times for various installs, patches, etc.

What if we could do the equivalent of a shopping cart functionality, which is provided/provisioned by the USER. This would have some advantages to trade for added complexity:

• All downloads would get tracked in one place, per user, instead of per PC
• All downloads would happen across very high speed links (assuming a hosted service)
• Virus scanning could be built in
• Tagging and other forms of metadata could be added
• Source metadata could be automatically saved
• Registration data could be supplied via OpenID, or some other means, instead of filling out the same lead data over and over.
• Lower friction providing lead data might increase the quantity and quality provided to the site allowing downloads
• Rating and other social networking features could be added as well.

I'm sure that it's non-trivial to set this type of thing up... and a standard needs to be in place, with a canonical example. Who is interested in taking this ball forward?

The Big Problems

This is a list I've been working on... of problems which are big, and most people consider unsolveable... and I believe CAN be solved:

• Secure OS
• Sync
• Mesh Internet (related: Throttling, Price Tiers, Metering)
• DNS Security
• SMTP
• Spoofing/Authentication (possibly related: Context)
• Freedom/Censorship
• HTML/Markup

Now.. this list is pretty uninteligble as it sits, without the context and description of each of the problems, the attempted solutions to date, and a proposed new way of solving them... which will follow along in a series of blog posts... at least one per topic.

3 Tipping Points

Here are three big tipping points which determine much about the way we use the internet.

1. Secure operating systems
2. Mesh networking
3. Distributed content systems / sync gets solved

Fixing these may take 20 years... but I believe they can all be solved.

Secure Operating Systems

There is a big hole in the way we currently approach computer security. The user has no way to limit the actions of a program. They are forced to trust completely that each and every byte of code does no harm. To get around this hole, layers of firewalls, virus scanners, and support personell are thrown on top of the big hole in the side of the Titanic, with similar results.

You'll know you've got a secure OS when you can run ANY program, without fear. You'll be able to throw away your virus scanner... and the technicians will stop blaming the user for clicking on the wrong button.

Until this gets fixed, the insecurity of the ends, and the need to use maintenance staff as a bandaid will be used to justify filtering, censoring, and increasingly intrusive regulation of the internet.

Mesh networking

The internet is a very brittle tree, with few main branches, which is only reliable because of the heroic efforts of the staff of the various entities who work around problems. It's a bailing wire and duct tape affair, on a massive scale. It doesn't have to be this way.

It's possible to expand the address space, auto-assign addresses to everyone, and just get on with it... doing away with fixed IP addresses, etc. The woman who invented the protocol that makes all of our switches just work together has said so.

If we change the nature of the internet so that it actually can route around problems by itself, with the need for obscure and hard to configure protocols, it can get an order of magnitude faster, and reach into smaller crevases.

Adding wireless nodes into the mesh would make the final transition to a truely shared resource possible, with everyone chipping in to make things faster, every time they turn on their gear.

Distributed Content Systems / Sync gets solved

I'm a commuter, and have extensive experience with the woes of having multiple computers. You're always being forced to sync things, and resolve conflicts. You never seem to have the right stuff on the machine in front of you.

The promise of always on connectivity seems appealing, but doesn't actually solve the real problem, synchronization. In a single person, multiple machine environment, it's possible to us manual sync processes, with sufficient discipline... but any deviation will result in lost work.

When you scale sync problems up to groups, even a perfect file sync system (everyone sharing the same files on a server) has problems. The next problem is one of granularity of changes.

Google Wave solves this problem, by breaking up any set of changes into discreet chunks which can be broadcast and synchronized for any given number of users, across organizational bounds. There is a lot of code to be written to build upon this solution, but it will be worth it.

Summary

I've presented what I think are the 3 tipping points for the future. All of them require major changes to the code we use in order to be implemented, most of them bordering on "boil the ocean" level... but the costs will be worth it, in each case.

Thank you for your time and attention.

My first EgoVector

The latest ripple in blog-o-sphere is that of metadata, meta-tags, and FolkSonomy. The question falling out of things is what "tags" would you give to describe your own beliefs and orientations to others.

I'm a Mapper, so I read a ton of things, and they all sit in background processes, getting mulled about. Tonight a personal email (about encryption to "protect" HD video between own pieces of equipment and the monitor) stirred up a pretty strong set of emotions, so I listened to those emotions, and as a result I think I've found my first "tag". It's something I feel strongly about, and have been sorting out my feelings about for a long time.

I'm a LimitedCopyright, (like Lawrence Lessig) which is in the middle ground between PermanentCopyright, and InfoAnarchist. I believe that the founding fathers idea of a time-limited government enforced monopoly was a reasonable trade for a larger and enriched public domain.

So, there it is... my first IdentiTag (ewww... don't quite like that word, the hunt for a neologism commences)....

Some searching of Google finds that EgoVector is a better attempt at a Neologism for me, as well as better describing the concept.

A definition, to get the ball rolling:

EgoVector - The distillation of all of the thoughts and feelings of a single person, into a concretely specific tag (preferably a unique one - neologisms best) that can be referenced by all other participants in the FolkSonomy.

A good EgoVector serves to let the person involved (Ego) tell others how they are oriented about an issue. (direction -- Vector) If chosen well, there can even be a bit of Lakoff's "Framing" implied. A well chosen EgoVector will help you find others of a like mind on the issue.


Other EgoVectors for me might include:

PackRat, BrilliantImpatient, AuthorityIssues, FrustratedPerfectionist, etc...

But I'm defintely a LimitedCopyright !

Thanks to Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis, David Galbraith, Wikipedia and many others for the shoulders to stand on for this entry.