What Will Follow the Seventh Party Realignment?

Short answer: no one can know, and that's kind of unsettling.
Long answer: It will take a while for realignment to happen, especially because of the current status of the two parties. The last three major party systems have been two-party systems. It is the natural convergence point of a pure first-past-the-post system, and it tends to the coalition of disparate aims into single parties. Unfortunately, now we have three problems:

Problem 1: Establishment Republicans are not well liked by the wing (which is now the base). Bringing the wing into the base has been a disaster, and when your party can't get along, one faction or the other has to bring order, or you have to split. Look for the Establishment side to try to rewrite party bylaws, possibly to enable superdelegates in the Democrat style. Establishment-lite personalities like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio tend to do well in Congress, but as of 2016 are failing to capture the hearts of party members. If the Establishment types in power can manage to consolidate it, they will finally unite the party, at the cost of some voters. It seems unlikely that the Republicans will hold both chambers and the White House at any given time in the next two cycles.

Problem 2: What of the Radical Republicans? They have set the agenda for almost eight years, and if the party makes a lurch to the left, it is POSSIBLE there could be a schism in the GOP, resulting in a new party (the Tea Party?) which will flank the GOP as they move to the center on immigration and perhaps gay marriage and maybe maybe gun control.

Problem 3: What of the Bernie Bloc? The Democratic Party will almost certainly #UniteBlue in 2016 behind Hillary Clinton, but the left wing has been ignored for the last 16 years of Democratic administration. After Occupy, and in a less-than-emboldening economy, the social democracy / Basic Income / Socialist / Communist voting group appears to be swelling. The Democratic Party leadership has not yet shown itself to be fully committed to shutting the wing down (perhaps out of fear of a Trump Planet, perhaps because this group is newer than the Tea Party). If the Democrats can move to the left without losing enough campaign funding / moderate voters, they may be able to make nice for another couple of cycles. It remains to be seen as to whether they will.

In short: Expect a break in the GOP, either officially (new party) or with much greater GOP primary competition between "moderates" / Establishment candidates and "patriot" / Tea Party candidates. On the Democrat side, expect a leftward drift or the beginning of a similar schism.

The Seventh Party System And Bad Solidarity

The theory is that American political parties have realigned five or six times in our country's history, with the fifth realignment coming after the political fallout of the New Deal, which handed the White House to the same president in four separate elections, and re-elected his VP when he died in office (side note: if you do a Washington, DC tour soon, do not miss the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial). Arguments continue as to whether a sixth realignment occurred in the 60s or during the Reagan Administration, though personally I believe that sixth realignment occurred due to the effects of the Southern Strategy of Nixon's and Goldwater's presidential campaigns. (And should you choose to believe the "Suburban Strategy" variant of this historical narrative, it doesn't matter: it has the same result.) We are now clearly witnessing the beginning of another party realignment, which should be called the Seventh Party System when it's complete, in fairness to the debate as to the existence of the Sixth.

This realignment is coming to both parties, but unequally. The Republicans have it in the most serious way, with two outsiders (Trump and Cruz) dominating the 2016 landscape after the base rejected the establishment candidates, possibly as a reaction to Mitt Romney's failure in 2012. If the Sixth Party Realignment was a change in party values with regard to civil rights (the Democrats finished their long arc from their anti-abolition stance in the Third Party System to supporting the Civil Rights Movement, while the GOP picked up a large bloc of voters who were opposed to it), the Seventh Party System will be a result of the cognitive dissonance distilling upon the cloud grain of misplaced solidarity.

The anti-Obama strategy of the GOP from 2008 to present, and the grassroots efforts that accompanied it, in the form of the Tea Party Movement aligned the establishment with a mobile, reactionary base. The wing was now folded in. The values and tactics of what was once the fringe were now the domain of the base. Mobilizing the base meant moving to the right, not the center. Solidarity was intra-party, rather than among members of similar views, and moderate Republicans tended to leave the scene after ideological purity requirements became obvious to all involved.

On the other side of the fence, Democrats tended to open the tent doors wide after the Great Shellacking of 2010, and, unable to move the needle on anything significant after Obamacare, #UniteBlue became the watchword, weak as it was. The great grassroots movements of the left during this realignment phase have been Occupy Wall Street and the populist leftist rumblings of people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. These movements have tended to divide, rather than solidify the Democratic Party, and indeed we see a relatively bitter (for Dems that is) primary race between the establishment and the somewhat disenfranchised left wing because of it.

Both, if you think about it, have been cases of solidarity gone awry, and both cases have shown that party solidarity in the US is a drug with a serious risk of overdose.

There Are No More Frontiers (And That's A Little Scary)

Alaska's official state nickname is one of only two that doesn't follow the formula "The X State". It is called "The Last Frontier". (Not to be confused with Space, which is not a U.S. state, but is "the final frontier".) (The other is New Mexico, "Land of Enchantment".) (OK, done with parentheses, for the rest of the piece.) Unfortunately, the name no longer fits. The parts of Alaska that are going to be inhabited are already inhabited. There will be no Klondike v2.0. For that matter, much of the mountainous part of the rest of the country, though expanding in population, is no longer pushing tentacles of human settlement into the wilderness. The United States has reached something of an equilibrium.

"B'ars" are significantly less afraid of three-year-olds, though, so that's a bonus.
Image via Wikipedia.

That obviously bothers some people, like Peter Thiel, who started his career by created PayPal and is continuing it by creating controversy. His new, big, strange project is an artificial island in international waters, not regulated by US law (recent seasteading news). Thiel believes that minimal government will create a paradise, and this is the only viable way to make it happen. In other words: "It's 2012, where's my moon colony? Oh well, an artificial island works too."

The history of humanity seems to have had two phases: one where a young nation devises a new, better form of governance, and another where said nation does all kinds of crazy crap that tests the integrity of that form, causing some people to leave, colonize a new place, and start over at phase #1. We're neck-deep in phase #2, it seems. In the United States, this means you live in a place that is governed by entities who have a vested interest in keeping ideological conflict at a simmer—motivating the party bases—without allowing a full rolling boil. As long as the Fifth Party System remains in place, there will be no peace.

The BBC posted predictions for 2112 the other day, including one that surprised me quite a bit: That California would eventually secede from the Union. This struck me as two things: 1) unlikely and 2) unfortunately so. Now, I'm not one to argue for the secession of any part of the US, but it seems like we'd all be better off if there were some way for different ideological communities to engage in the level of self-governance they seek. California seems a very unlikely target for that for a number of reasons, but it's sort of sad that there's no way to vent the pressure of the ideological battle for dominance.

There's a saying regarding internet services: "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product." It seems clear that the same holds true for modern politics. If you're not receiving a subsidy, kickback, or special project, you're not a constituent. You're a flyer.

Handbills don't explore new frontiers.

Beat the Filter Bubble: News from Outside the Spotlight

Camila’s War

In a nation thousands of miles away, one that has, along with its neighbors, a history of despotic rulers, brutal coups, and ground-shaking political conflicts, a youth-led uprising is taking place against perceived injustices. The protests have been taking place for months now, and are beginning to spread to neighboring countries. The leader of these rebels against authority has given the federal government an ultimatum: he only has one chance to address their cause, at a meeting this Saturday.

That nation isn’t Libya, Syria, or Bahrain—it’s Chile. The charismatic leader is 23-year-old Camila Vallejo, president of the student government of the University of Chile, and the issue is nationalizing education. Her nemesis is Chilean president Sebastián Piñera, notable for being a right-of-center leader in a Latin America that is increasingly swinging to the left. Ms. Vallejo’s group demands nothing less than education [through post-secondary] that is “free, public, and of [high] quality”.

Camila Vallejo in German newspaper Die Zeit. CC-BY: Germán Póo-Camaño

And their protests prove they are serious. Over the last two months, students have converged on public squares in the capital, supported the Chilean labor movement’s strike, and visited neighboring Brazil to spark protests there and meet with Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. (Interestingly, Brazil does have public universities, but the protesters are demanding that the government double their investment in education.)

The group’s seriousness is matched only by its savvy. Ms. Vallejo, like so many revolutionaries these days, has a strong online presence. Her Twitter feed updates at least a few times every day, posts which have recently been accompanied by a black square where a profile picture should be—a show of solidarity with the loved ones of 16-year-old Manuel Gutiérrez, who was killed during the protests that accompanied the labor strike. Vallejo has over 200,000 followers.

Along with the support, of course, comes the resistance. Piñera for his part has repeatedly denounced the nationalization of education, indicating that he will never support it, which should no doubt make Saturday’s meeting very interesting. And Vallejo has informed authorities that her life has been threatened via Twitter, including one tweet that said, roughly translated, “We’re going to kill you like the bitch you are.”

Not everyone who opposes the student movement is quite that severe. La Tercera, a newspaper with wide circulation, published an opinion that the privatization of universities in Chile serves a purpose: to facilitate the explosive growth university attendance in the country, which currently sits atop the Latin American list for percentage of college-aged student currently engaging in studies. The free market, says the editorial, is the only engine that could have supported that growth.

Free-market solutions have been the hallmark of Piñera’s administration, and while they seemed popular at the time of his election, Mr. Piñera’s popularity has waned severely since taking office in March of last year. Popular or not, though, he is still in charge, which means something different in Chile, when has been largely stable and democratic since the strangely peaceful removal of military dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1990, than it would in Syria or Egypt.

The Arab Spring, in fact, may be an unfortunate backdrop for the educational protests, as Chile’s situation does not, in fact, involve widespread oppression, religious infighting, nor oil interests. A better comparison might be the anti-corruption movement in India, led by Anna Hazare, a man who has been called (admittedly in hyperbole) “a second Gandhi”. Hazare’s followers protested, non-violently, and when their leader was jailed, they watched with rapt attention as he began a hunger fast.

It may seem that these tactics of protest, normally reserved for the brutally oppressed, are unlikely to be useful for a movement like the one in Chile, over something as distant from life and liberty as free college tuition. It should be noted, then, that after a few days of Hazare’s hunger fast, India’s Parliament acquiesced, and have been working on meeting his demand: simply to close the loopholes on an already existing anti-corruption bill.

The Social Singularity

What if the world economy is actually a malevolent artificial intelligence? Get out your tinfoil hats for this one.

So, if there are three things I hate, they are: 1) "Glossy" or over-reaching futurism. 2) Conspiracy theories and 3) People thinking an idea is important because it came to them in a dream. You must all now know that I'm about to become what I hate. Three times. Today's adventure could have been entitled, "Why We Should All Be Running Around, Screaming, With Our Pants on Our Heads Part II", or "Watson for President". Let's start.

Part the First: "Stateware"
I've been reading James Gleick's "The Information", and am struck by the Difference Engine. I've heard of it before, but I finally get it through my thick skull this time that computers were not always intended to be electronic machines, and in fact the first computers designed were not. I don't know how many difference engines it would take to build a bare-bones CPU, but theoretically it could be done. It would also be really really slow and run on oceans of steam.

My next thought was this: really, you could build a computer out of anything that responds to a binary difference. People have made computers out of biological material, Lego, et cetera. You could even make a computer out of people, in fact. If you replaced transistors with human beings, and wires with human language, you could make a very interesting computational device indeed. It would be error-prone and slow, which would make any software you ran on it very likely to crash, unless you had enough redundancy and sufficiently fast communication.

I thought a lot about governments, laws, economies, etc. and decided that, in a certain light, these systems could be considered software. Laws are essentially algorithmic—I think it no coincidence that we refer to the "code of law". In a discussion on this matter with a friend, I referred to this type of software as "stateware".

Part the Second: A Brief Interlude on the Technological Singularity
Since the beginning of computational technology, scientists have raised the possibility that eventually machines may surpass humans at all "intelligence" related functions, quickly outstripping all of humanity's prowess and (in many cases) taking control of the world.

Frankly, we have no way to predict what will happen once one piece of software is created that rivals the intelligence of a human being, generally. As that software could then write software that is more intelligent than itself, the possibilities are unfathomable. This inability to see anything in the future is the reason the phenomenon is called the "technological singularity".

One of the things that makes the singularity so scary is that an intelligent machine may or may not have goals that match those of humanity. It may have a written-in goal that it takes to an extreme (converting the world into a paperclip factory is my favorite example), or it may take as a goal the propagation of artificial intelligences at the expense of human survival.

Part the Third: Paranoia
This part is primarily putting the other two parts together: if "stateware" is a thing, and if software can be built that eventually outgrows the control of its designers, then it seems clear that states and economies are destined to arrive at singularity status before computer software. Economies are already difficult to understand, and have no stated goals, so an economic singularity is almost a given.

States, however, are more interesting. The goals of the United States Constitution, arguably the operating system for US stateware, are "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". The Constitution was purposefully vague about the precedence and exact definitions of these goals.

At the time, of course, the hardware of the State was not fast enough for anyone to be concerned that any one of the goals would be given outsized importance, or that an exclusive definition of the wording would be settled upon. That is no longer the case. As the network of people inside the US has grown both in size and complexity, our capacity to produce more code (in the form of legislation, executive orders, and legal rulings) has exploded, creating a social software with unpredictable ramifications and unprecedented size.

The active coders here, the three branches of the government, are hobbled by design; the Founders didn't want any of them to control the coding process too much. This "un-agile" government doesn't have the power necessary to be fast enough to revise significant amounts of this code (just to create more), and the polarization of American politics is slowing the speed of government even further.

Beyond that, there is no guarantee that any elected official would want to revise US stateware. As politicians assume more power, it appears that the stateware co-opts their individual plans; those with reformist ideas are locked out of power, and those who make it through seem to change their minds.

Lastly, it doesn't seem like any small group of humans (even Congress is relatively small) can muster the cognitive power to steer this now-mammoth ship of state. The relations between organizations, lobbies, foreign powers, celebrities, systems, and economies are too complex. If the social singularity isn't here yet, it is howling at the door.

This all seems to drive to one point: we need AI assistance to manage the United States Government. I'm not suggesting we put things on auto-pilot, but we need machines that can make the connections we will inevitably fail to see. I don't believe the software exists yet, and this is a terrible realization to make.

The Tragedy of Tragedy

Just because something is sensational doesn't mean it's true.

After yesterday's tragic shooting in Tucson, which left six dead, including a nine-year-old and a federal judge, and several more wounded, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the media responded with its traditional tragedy two-step program: first, report the facts; second, try to explain why the event occurred.

The first step was generally respectful, as media reporting of tragedy usually is. The second step was occasionally disturbing in that many linked Sarah Palin's trigger-happy metaphors to the terrible outburst.

Let me be clear before I go any further: I find Palin's ideology, rhetoric, and image utterly execrable in every way. I cannot defend her early departure from Juneau, and find her and her family's opportunistic reality spotlight-hogging a frightening example of a possible future direction of American politics.

And while it's arguable that Arizona's hyper-conservative politics played a role in alleged shooter Jared Loughner's timing and target, it seems unlikely that they made him a crazed shooter.

Tucson Weekly has an interesting piece on Mr. Loughner's personal internet presence, which makes it pretty clear that he was likely to shoot and kill in one venue or another at some point in time. It also happens to be the case that his home was a short walk from the Safeway where the attack occurred.

The nature of the attack, Mr. Loughner's personality, and his previous communications seem to put this incident in the same category as the Columbine shootings, not the JFK assassination.

But this doesn't match the agenda of some commentators. It appears as though some wish the shooter had been able to be clearly tied to the admittedly ridiculous, extreme rhetoric that has become the stock of American political discourse. (egregious example) Upon examining the evidence, this appears not to be the case. The man had extreme, iconoclastic political beliefs, and appears to have been on a rampage, rather than a mission.

To ignore the evidence and provide a false connection to an unwanted person or ideology disrespects the memory of those who died in this terrible tragedy. There are enough valid arguments against Ms. Palin's stances; making specious accusations is unnecessary.

(Update: Fox News accuses "many on the American Left" of misusing the tragedy, and changed the headline of this story from 'Dems Blame Rhetoric for Shooting' to 'Tragedy Inspires Political "Cheap Shots"'. Stay classy, Fox.)

Conflictinator Alert - Veterans Day 2010

al-Google Veterans Day

So, here's a tempest in a teapot: Associated Content post about Google's Veterans Day logo that claims that the 'e' is actually a crescent of Islam. I'm not sure exactly where this ends, but it's possible the author actually believes the letter 'e' is a secret Muslim. Just to be safe, let's add everyone with an 'e' in their names to the No-Fly List.

Of course, when you bait the conflictinator trolls, they inevitably bite. HuffPo's response, of course, is to run with the AC author and claim that there's a widespread backlash about the logo. In their crazy, polarized view of the universe (perhaps fostered by spending too much time on the internet), the extreme right is one step away from besieging Mountain View with assault rifles, and maybe swastikas.

Way to contribute, guys.

All the President's Tax Cuts

Speaking of HuffPo, here's the title: White House Gives In On Tax Cuts. Here's the article (warning: contains serious hedging and low semantic density). Finding David Axelrod's statement that the president actually favors the extension of the tax cuts is hard, but finding anything that sounds like actually "giving in" is like playing Where's Waldo—with a Jackson Pollock painting.

Of course the Atlantic and a few other outlets took this, and ran with a "Obama gives in" type story.

The "Cite Your Source" Project

A little experiment.

As you might have been able to tell, I've been having difficulty finding time to blog this last week or so. (I'm working on other writing projects right now.) I've been thinking about The Problem of Information a lot, and I think I've come up with a short follow-up. It's a little social experiment, and I think it will be interesting to see if it catches on.

We all participate in online communities, whether it be in the comments section of a news website or blog, Twitter, or just on Facebook. A lot of our arguments work like discussion on major news outlets, including the citing of statistics and other supporting evidence without citing our sources.

As you well know, these stats are not necessarily true, but by in large those who agree (and many who disagree) with the point being made never question the factuality of this data.

I propose that we start. Right now. I know it will definitely make you annoying to people, but I would like to encourage everyone here to respond, at least once, to an online claim made without citing a valid source of evidence, with a polite request for citation.

It would be as simple as: "That's an interesting figure. Would you mind telling me where I can go to verify it?" or "I'm not saying I disagree with your point, but I'd like to know how I can verify that fact." You don't have to be outright contentious about it. In fact, it's probably better if you're not. People don't like having their comment or FB post ripped apart.

If everyone started requesting citation of valid sources even a few times a week, it would go a long way toward a healthier data culture. Thanks.

PS: This page will give you a web badge you can post if you like.

Truth, Or, Why We Should All Be Running Around, Screaming, With Our Pants On Our Heads

OK. This is the last post about Narratives and Narrative Engineering for a while. I really do want to touch on the other aspects, and this is going to be a pretty good note to leave on. Today's topic is: The crisis of believability in the Information Age. The groundwork: In order for information to be useful to an observer, it has to be true.

Humans are naturally driven to ascertain the truth value of propositions for themselves. Small children, when they're told something is hot, will often touch the object to be sure. After a few bad experiences, the child will learn to trust that when that particular speaker (be it a parent, sibling, or so forth) says that an object is hot, it is likely so. The human brain, a pattern recognizer, shifts the burden of proof from the individual to another, trusted, individual. This trust-based shift can extend to other entities—organizations, religious entities, and sources of information such as media outlets.

When two sources deliver conflicting information or opinions, we tend to side with a) the sources we have trusted frequently in the past and b) the sources that agree with our own existing viewpoints. But how do we choose what informational sources to trust in the first place? Here we find a gap worth exploring, but alas, I don't have a full range of studies to glean from to explain it. Suffice it to say that the actual truth value of propositions doesn't mean much in our perception of their truth.

Jonah Lehrer, who might actually be the most interesting blogger on the internet, wrote a feature for Wired's December 2009 issue called "Accept Defeat: the Neuroscience of Screwing Up". It's a tremendous piece about what it takes to be a good scientist, and well worth an entire reading. The part that interests me, however, is the bit where a brain scientist wired undergrads up and makes them watch videos of falling objects. There were two videos: one where the two, differently-sized objects fell at the same velocity, as they do in nature, and one where the larger object fell faster. The undergrads, who were unversed in physics, experienced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, something of a BS detector in the brain, when viewing the accurate video.

Physics majors, however, had the reverse experience. The mental error alert popped up while watching the inaccurate video. In both cases, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which suppresses memory, was also activated. The brain actively attempts to erase that which it perceives as impossible or incorrect.

As we are presented with information that we cannot confirm or deny ourselves, our biases work in combination with each other to accept and reject information and conclusions. Unfortunately for us, information needs to be true to be useful to the one receiving it, but this is not the case for the one delivering it. Some sources may (and very likely do) deliver up information that is intentionally misleading or untrue in order to further an ulterior purpose. Other sources adopt a stance because they believe it to be the morally correct one, or as a means to capture a segment of the content market.

For the most part, it appears we know this. We're aware that not all institutional media outlets are to be implicitly trusted. And, of course, as human beings, we're going to touch the burner to see if it's hot—and to build a worldview that will work as a shortcut to the discernment of burner temperature in the future. I see five these shortcuts frequently trusted by content consumers (and have fallen prey to some of them myself). Here they are, along with their shortcomings:

Triangulation. This method entails checking multiple reputable news sources, and believing what's reported by a large number of them. This will definitely cut some of the clutter, but not all, as can be seen from the curious story of "Jenny DryErase". Humor repository site "The Chive" ran 32 images of a young woman telling the story of the ridiculous work troubles that caused her to quit her job via whiteboard. Various newspapers (including some international outlets) ran the story as if it were true, apparently never bothering to fact-check it. I don't blame them—the images appeared to speak for themselves. The whole exercise turned out to be a hoax.

A fake, satirical Congressman, Rep. Jack Kimble, was made up by a blogger, and reported by a Washington Post blogger as if he were real. There are plenty of other examples of why we can't just triangulate our way to truth and happiness.

APCs. Similar to this is the "APCs" concept discussed by Craig Silverman on his media corrections blog, Regret the Error. The idea is that you can judge a source's validity by checking its Authority, Point of View, and Currency. The problem with this is the very same as the triangulation issue—supposedly authoritative, neutral, current outlets occasionally make major mistakes. Besides that, blogs and other features appended to major outlets (like blogs) trade on the authority of their parent brand, making it difficult to control those things for the expected level of quality. Further, since we identified above that we as people form our opinions based on other preconceived notions, the "authority" and "point-of-view" values are essentially unavailable to us.

Bias Stripping. This method is as it sounds—read the clearly biased news, then try to mentally remove the perceived bias from the story. Along with sharing in a few of the problems already discussed, there is this: While we're pretty good at removing extraneous, editorializing content while we're reading, a bigger problem arises when news sources omit information in order to maintain a narrative. For all his own biases, Jon Stewart illustrates this fairly well. (Note: long clip.)

Third Party Fact-Checkers. Politifact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes are great sites run, I believe, by people who are honestly trying to produce bias-free content. But, two things: no one is bias-free, so being harder on one person and softer on another is liable to occur, at least insofar as one contributor is concerned. Two: what sources do these sites consider trustworthy? We've just gone through the idea that you cannot ever really tell for sure.

Finding the Median Between Extremes. This is simple: you take a clearly biased source and another clearly biased, but opposing source, and split the difference. As it has been shown that bias is often a symptom of an unfounded belief, for this to work, you would have to assume that the bias of the two sources a) represented two points on a spectrum that contained all the possible representations of reality, the most accurate being located at the center, b) were nearly equidistant from that center, and c) were intentionally biased. If they were unintentionally biased, it seems unlikely that both outlets would be systemically and systematically biased in the same direction.

It seems incredibly unlikely that any major dichotomy available in the realm of public discourse contains all possible accurate representations of reality, especially the political Left-Right dichotomy in America. (DO NOT read this as an endorsement of any political viewpoint that eschews the Left vs. Right continuum.)

In short, there's nothing we can do to be sure that any relayed information is accurate. I would highly suggest reading primary sources to obtain accurate information. Primary sources (like the text of bills, speeches, laws, etc.) tend to be long and boring, though, so that means that our ability to be informed is limited by time and attention, which in many cases, is just as well served in other pursuits. My head is starting to hurt a little now, I'll be honest.

Cue the pants.

The Devil and Saul Alinsky

Today's post started out as a much smaller idea. You see, I was simply going to tell the story of how the Wikipedia page on grassroots radical Saul Alinsky is radically different from the page dedicated to his book, Rules For Radicals. As I started to develop this idea, however, it became clear that the Alinsky War was not so much an example of Narrative Engineering as a small part of a very specific and very large political narrative.

Narratives exist in the world around us, and explain that which is not easily explained. Religious narratives are the most identifiable, but there are loads of others. Some explain giant swaths of our existence—conspiracy theories and the like—whereas some focus on much smaller parts, like business management theories, or moms' shared consciousness about getting babies to sleep through the night. Living by a narrative does not mean that one is living by unprovable or unresearched principles, as you can see in economics. There are several different schools of macroeconomic thought, and all of them are well-researched, yet they contradict one another. No one current school of economic thought has a privileged position over the others, as it currently very difficult to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that any one is perfect. (And it is almost certain that none will ever be perfect.)

In the realm of American political dialogue, there appear to be two major narratives, produced by followers of the two major political parties. Note the use of the word "followers"—I would like to propose the idea that neither of these narratives is purely the result of party manipulation of news. Narratives only have vitality if people believe them, and those believers are the ones that propagate the story. Just as a language dies when no one speaks it anymore, a narrative dies when no one changes their lives because of what it suggests.

Now, back to Alinsky. As you are almost certainly aware, any non-banned user can edit any unprotected Wikipedia page. Heavily edited or controversial pages may be protected against edits, and issues with frequent editing and reversion (sometimes called "Edit Wars") are resolved by consensus. Alinsky's page itself is fairly standard-looking, focusing on his bio, accomplishments, ideology, and awards. It definitely makes him look good. Clicking forward to the page for Rules for Radicals, however, we get mostly a number of snippets, the first from one of the introductory pages of the book. Recently, that page referred to that quote (the "Lucifer quote") as the dedication of the book (it's clearly not—the dedication is a simple "For Irene"). More interesting than that, however, is the comment made by the Wikipedian that uploaded the quotation and called it a dedication. User "Bestbuilder" states:

I believe it is critical to understanding Saul Alinsky and his motives that his "Rules for Radicals" is dedicated to Lucifer, the first rebel. Many people who may think Alinsky is a noble person would certainly reconsider their admiration of a man who praises Satan.


Why is the book such a magnet for controversy? Well, for one, a college student named Hillary Rodham wrote her senior honors thesis at Wellesley about Alinsky. And for another, he was a community organizer in Chicago, and therefore his work influenced Barack Obama.

Alinsky and his book therefore form part of the major narrative of the right. Similarly, Halliburton's discussion page shows a number of left-leaning edits, as it plays (or has played) a role in the major narrative of the left. The interesting thing about these encyclopedia battles, to me at least, is that they show how people try to change reality to fit their view of it. That is, in The World Anyone Can Edit, the narrative doesn't only explain reality. The narrative replaces reality.

Narrative Engineering

Counterintuitively, this data age has both granted information its wish to be free, and made the facts more difficult to obtain and ascertain. The crafting of narratives to convince people of certain propositions is as old as humanity, but now there are more people doing it faster and more profusely.

As much as the Content Economy ad-men (and -women, and -bots) want your eyes, the Narrative Gurus want your heart and soul. The Engineers of Reality strive to convince us what is right, what is wrong, what is healthy and unhealthy, and what is cool, fun, boring, or painful. They need you to buy in, and they exist in all varieties and have varying methods of attack.

In this battle, we are the infantry: your average internet user. The advent of user ratings and comments allows for the war to take place over every blog post and product listing in the world, provided it’s online. The comments, of course, range from the inane to the insane, the trivial to the trenchant. And as users spam, troll, and flamebait, their mini-narratives begin to form a larger one.

From above, broadcasters build and propagate their own narratives. The political entertainment industry becomes the shaper of American thought, whether by furor, candor, or humor. As this situation progresses, people line up as footsoldiers of a particular narrative-creating general.

Sometimes, even those who are aware of the role of narrative-construction in our culture still have to choose to buy in to one or another narrative. There’s not much middle ground between, say, believing that high-fructose corn syrup is benign or malignant. Further, some aspects of our lives require this buy-in as the price of admission. Religions, social clubs, political parties, and employers frequently require some buy-in.

Narrative not only drives the future of culture, it alters the past. A good narrative engineer doesn’t just tell you how things are, he/she/it tells you how things used to be. There was a Golden Age, perhaps, or a Dark one. Events in the past are now malleable in the hands of those who make opinion.

Narrative Awareness

An increase can be seen, of course, in those who identify and decry the attempts made to reshape our past, present, and future. There is a lot of power in changing people’s minds, and this power is sought by so many people with so many motives and allegiances. As our awareness of rhetoric increases, the power of the narrative decreases.

Each of us has a weapon in the fight against the abuse of narrative to alter reality. We all have social networks. As we discover the narratives being used to distort the world our loved ones live in, we can use our intimate, personal trust to defeat the bullhorns trying to confuse them.

The only reliable documents these days are primary sources. That may not last.