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Cult of the aggregate | |||
Pretty sure it is a tech thing | |||
Desire to crunch data | |||
But data is unstructured, incoherent and imperfect | |||
It is noise | |||
Imagine sitting in a crowded theatres in the intermission, recording all the Hubbub and extracting a singles canonical meaning from it | |||
Extracting signal from noise is the same | |||
But if we don't do it the hubbub is just noise | |||
We say “we have cognitive biases and they inform our reactions” well no shit | |||
To extract signal from noise is to filter, limit compress and selectively amplify on the predication that there is a signal. | |||
It is to deliberately bias | |||
Bias is what creates meaning. | |||
There is local meaning - maybe - based on local interactions and echo chambers but these are informal, incomplete, and impossible to delimit | |||
So central figures extrapolated from random noise: growth. The intention behind expressed electoral preference. Average wages. Why the stock market went up. *That* the stock market went to day - these are spectral figures. They are ghosts, gods, monsters and devils. They are no more real than religions, just because they are the product of “science" and "techne" | |||
We have some convenient proxies: in an election, a manifesto. Did every voter read the party's manifesto? No? Did everyone who did subscribe to every line in it? Almost certainly no. Did *anyone* subscribe to every line. By no means certain. So can we legimately under uniform support for manifesto? Only by dint of the convention that those who vote support a manifesto. But even that convention is a spectre. | |||
But yet we draw battle lines and attack basis our own invented signals. Trans activists right for the rights of fragile vulnerable androgynous teen-age elfen dolphins as if all trans-identifying people are like that. Gender critical activists fight against middle-aged male sex-offenders operating under cover, if all trans people are like that. | |||
Yet such a patently ludicrous argument animates the public square. This is no more real than vampires fighting werewolves. Why do we take it anymore seriously. | |||
Hence the delamination: the online world is a world of extruded ghoulish signals aggregated from the unfiltered noise of discourse. The offline world — can we call it the offworld? — is a world of bilateral conversations, one on one. A world of shades, nuance, detail, richness, complexity's and — for the most part — civility. | |||
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