The Unprofessional Boy #19
Hello, I am —as promised— back with another post theorizing the game mindset and its application to ideas (two of n, the first of which can be found here.)
A first preliminary comment: I received some interesting feedback about my “forest” analogy for media, associating it with Yancey Strickler’s The Dark Forest of the Internet— I had read it previously, but I hadn’t made the connection; perhaps the language bled into my writing a little bit. In any case, here is how I’d bring in Strickler’s concept of the Dark Forest: in my framework, the Internet as a whole is a forest— therefore, I would see what Strickler refers to in his essay as “dark forests” as zones impossible to see from the outside which exploration into is difficult. What comes to mind most readily here is this scene in The Lion King:
It’s not perfect, but I’d call the landscape here the Internet, and the elephant graveyard a Dark Forest— somewhere dark, secluded, inaccessible, wherein accepted behavior is to some degree deviant from the norm. Ultimately, it’s just a metaphor for the general concept —the specifics of what the geography describing these imagined spaces is only useful in that it helps to understand them— but I thought I’d address it here for completeness’ sake, and because it’s an angle I hadn’t considered that clarified my thinking on the issue. I’d also like to note that I think there’s a lot of opportunity in those spaces, and that there aren’t enough tools for extracting value from them; consider it, perhaps, a request for product:
Before I digress any further (I don’t want to drag this on longer than necessary, but I do want to do it right,) let’s get started.
Part Four: The Tools of the Trade
A technique for clearing a pathway through a Medium Forest is an application of the tools (numbers, words, etc.) (which are composed of sounds and images) to get through a medium in the most efficient manner; there are a number of different ways to be particularly good at this:
Expenditure of pre-existing capital (bringing a chainsaw to an axe fight)
A better understanding of the medium (having a better map than your competitors)
Unusual persistence (self-explanatory)
Greater familiarity with the tools (relevant experience, making that axe hit harder)
In the medium of reality television, broadly speaking, those who are most successful at getting the message across are those who are legible: those with a given brand. Gordon Ramsay presents himself as a cleansing force, for example; Kim Kardashian as an unwitting beneficiary of wealth and fame— whether these one-line summaries are accurate is irrelevant. Success in this arena is awarded through legibility, in the reduction of intermediate preventative steps. Short words are simple; short sentences win; to be summarizable is to have a damn good strategy. Because of this, reality television manifests as condensed narrative: easily digestible packaging for raw idea.
To adopt Tim Urban’s terminology from The Great Battle of Fire and Light : each of us has a Primitive Mind and a Higher Mind. (Similarly, we each have a good, rational chap and a monkey in our heads, and we have a “brain” and a “gut.”) All ideas are intelligible by the Higher Mind, which judges them; only some make any sense at all to the Primitive Mind, which also carries significant weight. The simplicity (really, distillation) of reality television is why it’s called low-brow: a greater percentage of idea-hosts’ ideas in the medium are understandable to the Primitive Mind than in almost any other medium. The trend is more transparent, but it exists elsewhere, disguised beneath a presentation of pretension, sophistication, and flair.
A parting thought regarding skill with the tools we use: words, being a basic unit of modern-day communication, have one relevant and notable quality: there are perfect ways to use them. I don’t know that humans can find those ways, but I do think we instinctively know they exist— there’s a reason why the “true name,” the Word, traditionally holds such power.
In many ways, a brand is an attempt to find a true name of a given idea, to refine the Tool that a word constitute into the ultimate brush-breaking weapon: to most effectively clear a pathway through media and transmit a given idea with an incredible amount of force.
But why, if you’re not a corporation, do you want a “personal brand—” why would that concept exist, if there’s no currency to compete for? We can answer that question more easily, it turns out, by generalizing into a slightly bigger medium which preserves the core concepts so distilled in reality television. Let’s switch back to that landscape we were looking at earlier, to see what’s really behind the fight for the Pridelands.
Part Five: The Internet’s Explosive Chemistry
If the tool is the catalyst, and interactions with the medium are reactants, there remains one question: what is the product of these explorations into the wilderness? In addition to the knowledge exported from medium to medium, I think there’s a common factor: social capital.
Most people don’t come into conflict traveling through these forests, harvesting social capital, because it’s fun; most fight because it’s productive, and it’s productive because social capital can be zero-sum. This is, of course, not always the case —the Internet can be approached with the intent of playing positive-sum games— but it often applies if you’re trying to travel the same pathways, or if you run up against each other in a clearing, each eyeing each-other’s collected stock of clout.
I think the usual arguments —anonymity, etc.— in the prevalence of harassment, abuse, etc. on the Internet all apply to an extent, especially in private. I think the main reason when it happens visibly, in public, though, is simple: the Internet is a fucking big forest, and everyone who thinks it’s zero-sum wants to control as much of it as possible. It’s my contention that if YA hadn’t been the most popular genre for the last decade(-plus?) it wouldn’t be a nightmare of a community. Those elements would still exist, sure— but the biggest offenders and perpetuators of zero-sum mindsets (rent-seekers, grifters, etc.) would move on to the next-most-valuable target. It seems to me that academia is a squabbling mess —partially— because there’s a limited set of prestiged positions and journal publications. It’s not limited to a given medium: bad actors move to wherever they can get the most for being a bad actor. Right now, to many people, that looks like social media.
The above clip leaves you asking one question: what’s the prize? It’s answered later in the episode:
Priority class registration in Greendale community college is junk, until you realize what you can do with it, and how scarce those options are if you don’t have it. Social capital is a valuable product not because it necessarily carries import in and of itself, but because it is a type of power, and therefore it is fungible, convertible.
From my second entry in this series:
“The nuance comes in the ruleset; from the win condition; from power; from capital…variance of behavior in games…is driven by the differing forms of capital.”
On the Internet, it is wildly easy to do something people want, and therefore create social capital; this is part of why it’s addictive, and why people care so much about its rules. This is why attribution is deemed necessary, why certain people whine when that’s not enforced, and why the concept of “information theft” holds any meaning. (Compare: any medium where you need to “cite your sources.”)
This holds true all across the Game of Ideas; in this mindset, words are weapons and benign tool use is treated as preparation for attack. It results from the incentive—
—of becoming a higher tier of player.
Part Six: Ideas, The War Games I
When a Player A with tremendous social capital sounds the “everyone, attack Player B’s behavior” horn, Player A’s disciples may follow suit out of sincere belief, but they’re also doing it as part of a concerted scrabble towards getting a turn on the horn.
Here are two troupes transporting their hard-earned resources down a forest floor pathway, an event saved from becoming hostile via the efforts of heroic maybe-conscientious, also-taking-residuals-from-the-colony-stock-of-food ants.
If either side wanted to attack —if they thought they could come out ahead— they would; they don’t unless it’s a good strategy. I think that’s why it can look so weird to see someone with stocks of social capital having it out with someone very little: it looks irrational. There’s no advantage to it. That’s why tiers of player tend to fight among themselves, but they all seize the opportunity to be willing hosts for a parasitic idea: there’s possible positive-sum extraction possible.
One primary question remains, then, as we zoom outwards, leaving behind the biggest forest to think as generally as possible about the entire Game: is it actually, applicably useful to win?