Of course people were text messaging and using cell phones in America before 2005; I mean that 2005 is, ±2 years, when they became part of the culture—they became de rigeur, text messaging services began popping up, they became incorporated with ‘Web 2.0’, teenage girls would spend all their time messaging each other, etc.↩︎

On the complexity of natural languages: ASCII—what most English is written in—is specifiable in a page or two; other popular European languages take only a few more pages. Alphabetic scripts like the Korean hangul are similarly compactly specified (although hangul’s syllable composition means that Unicode has to specify a large alphabet—although clearly and definitely finite—of 11,172 syllables).

In contrast, the desire of the Unicode developers to include Chinese/Japanese ideograms (limited to ‘only’ 20,940 in Unicode 1.0, some of which were not real) meant that by The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0, the standard ran to 1,472 pages—at which point complete printed editions stopped. Unicode 6.0 (so as to not require an extraordinary number of bits to write such ideograms) tried to hold the line at 75,960—resulting in a multi-decade festering controversy known as Han unification. Said controversy has also encouraged the creation of many other encodings (Wikipedia lists 8 or 9). An outsider might conclude that the complexity of the Unicode solution and the failure of any competitors to defeat it in CJKV usage or phenomenon like “character amnesia” are indications that the writing systems really truly are not simpatico with digital representation. (I will mention in passing that O’Reilly’s—a publisher known for concision and good technical writing—has published a book on working with CJKV text, CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition, which runs 912 pages.) One fascinating example of the problems caused is a method for registering bank accounts employed by ‘one-click fraud’ operators; from “Dissecting One Click Frauds”:

Fraudulent bank accounts can be obtained for prices going between 30,000 and 50,000 JPY [ref: “Black market yamamoto web”] from the black market…it is relatively easy to set up fraudulent accounts by taking advantage of the Japanese writing system. Bank accounts internally use a phonetic alphabet (katakana), different from the characters used for most names and nouns (kanji). It is thus possible to create ambiguous account names. For instance, both the “Baking Club of Shirai City” and “Shiraishi Mitsuko” (a person’s name) are pronounced exactly the same, and thus would have the same account holder information. By registering as a non-profit organization, the fraudster may easily bypass most identity checks, and subsequently set up fraudulent transfers using the individual name instead. Creating an account in this fashion would cost much less than 50,000 JPY.

Some people like to relativistically argue that all natural languages are equally complex and such comparisons are meaningless or ignorant (or racist). This is false. Children learn different natural languages at different rates (eg. Danish vs Croatian); this has real effects on their education (why are Estonia & Finland—with highly similar languages & regular spelling—ranked so high on PISA, when the wealthier & healthier Swedish-speaking Finnish minority has lower scores?). To demonstrate with grammatical gender; English has very little gender and when an Anglophone learns French, the male/female genders and associated differences in spelling & endings may strike him as superfluous complexity. He’s right. The gender rules, and specifically memorizing what gender each and every word is, are arbitrary and convey no meaning. They are random—a compression algorithm would choke on them.

And we can run a thought experiment (no need to appeal explicitly to algorithmic information theory); imagine a French Prime which is like French but where there is a second gender system with, say, 20 different genders (and accompanying spelling & endings), and for each of the 50,000 words in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, a random number generator decides what gender it is. By definition, the output of the RNG is unpredictable & uncompressible. All a Francophone can do is memorize 50,000 gender indications if they are to speak proper French Prime. Surely French Prime is more complex than French—all a French Prime speaker has to do is blissfully forget how many thousands of vigesimal genders he memorized. (If this is not intuitively convincing, then let the number of genders go to the 140 of Tuyuca, or 50,000, or however many words there are in a language; the gender rules would be monstrously complex, with no simplification anywhere in the language.)↩︎

See also Wallace on Tracy Austin.↩︎

Consider Paul Graham’s essay “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”:

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school….

…Nerds don’t realize this. They don’t realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don’t realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that’s why they’re good at it. Likewise, popular isn’t just something you are or you aren’t, but something you make yourself.

Henry Farrell (“For Every New Geek Culture, A Geek Hierarchy”), discussing Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, agrees with Shirky & me that the Internet is lowering the cost of small groups and hence encouraging their use, but disagrees that they can be replacements for the larger groups:

Thus, for example, when impoverished academics sneer at the ‘vulgar’ taste of rich people, they are semi-consciously trying to improve the exchange rate between the kind of cultural capital that they have lots of (‘good taste’ as they themselves define it) and the kind of economic capital that rich people have lots of (money).

This helps us think better about status relationships among groups. You can think of groups as providing their members with cultural, social and (sometimes) economic capital. But some groups provide more valuable capital than others. This is to say that the kinds of capital that they produce can be exchanged for other kinds of capital more readily than the kinds of capital produced by other groups. Members of the group of elite World of Warcraft players, for example, is going to have much greater difficulty in exchanging their status capital for economic capital than members of the group of elite golf players (no matter how good a Night Elf Rogue you are, you are unlikely to make millions from endorsements). Similarly, as Clay says, you are unlikely to get written up in the New York Times…I suspect that there are three major effects [of cheap groups]…Second—when the chaos settles down into some kind of relative stability, there will be [major] changes to the terms of exchange. Some groups will come out much better than they had been in the past, and some groups much worse off. The coming of the Internet has improved the relative status of many forms of geek culture—sites like BoingBoing play a very important cultural role. Similarly, the Internet has allowed the netroots to challenge and partially displace existing groups (such as the DLC) in the internal pecking order of Democratic politics. Note however that this isn’t an escape from cultural hierarchy; it’s a re-ordering of existing hierarchies of exchange. This re-ordering may often have attractive features (more possibilities may be more open to a wider variety of individuals than in the pre-existing order), but it’s not fundamentally different in kind to what went before…In the new world that technology has liberated, everyone can, in effect, create their own status hierarchies, where they (because of their mastery of caterpillar-fuzz counting, one-dimensional chess, Chinese Scrabble or whatever) are at or near the top. People can opt out of status races where they are likely to lose, and opt in to status races that they are likely to win. Given a near infinity of possible status hierarchies, they can choose the ones that they do well in. But this argument presupposes that these different possible status hierarchies are disconnected from each other. The empirics seem to me to tell a different story. People are aware not only of their status within particular groups, but of the relative status of different groups. Expansions in the number of groups doesn’t lead the members of those new groups to abandon efforts to figure out the terms of exchange between the groups, or to stop pushing for terms of exchange that privilege their group’s cultural or social capital vis-a-vis that of others. Precisely the opposite is true. For every new geek culture, there is a Geek Hierarchy.

…Clay may reasonably be more interested in what’s happening in WoW than in professional golf, and get happiness from the fact that he’s a good WoW player. But he may also find that it is difficult to turn his WoW prowess into other kinds of capital. If he wants to organize a tournament of first rank WoW players to raise money for his favorite charity, he will almost certainly raise far less money than if he were able to recruit first rate professional golfers. The proliferation of new groups may complicate games over relative status, but it surely doesn’t displace them.

“My life sucked when I was fifteen. I was a nobody in the real world. However, once I was able to create my own character in an online universe, I could be anything or anyone and progress in the game became immediate and instantly gratifying. Achieving success in the real world is a very arduous, long, and sometimes risky process. It is hard to explain to a teenage boy that he might have to wait a decade before he will stop feeling so insecure about his place in life.” —The Waygook Effect on an “Estimated 1.9 Million Koreans With an Internet Addiction”. Western-style schooling (universal mandatory age-segregated institutions) seems almost calculated to intensify this adolescent suffering; see also Lord of the Flies, John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, & Paul Graham’s “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”.↩︎

Japan is again our example. Spike Japan examined the decline of karaoke, and linked it out to the ‘atomized society’ by way of time surveys of Japanese citizens showing extraordinary declines in activities like ‘talking with family’, ‘playing sports’, and even declines in activities like ‘caring for the elderly’.↩︎

Consider “The Rise of the New Global Elite”, The Atlantic, whose author editorializes:

What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition-and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

Not by national gross of course, which is meaningful only to governments, but per capita; that is, on the day-to-day basis we live in, the metric that actually matters.↩︎

Although any nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ (where everyone watched the same handful of shows on the same 3 TV networks at the same time after dinner…) should be tempered by the fact that so many people try desperately to escape it for a subculture.↩︎

pg 90; as cited in “Michael Kroger, Overcoming Irony: The Creative and Destructive Forces of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke”↩︎

The participants in the Biosphere 2 experiment come out having lost weight and improved their health thanks to their nutritious (traditional) diet and daily agricultural labor; but it’s striking that they report their mental health to so improved; from section 7.7 (“Humans as Participants in Closed Ecological Systems”) of “Living In Space: Results From Biosphere 2’s Initial Closure, An Early Testbed For Closed Ecological Systems On Mars”, Nelson & Dempster1996 (the former was a participant):

…A somewhat subtle but important result of the two year closure experiment relates to the human dimension of living in a small biospheric system. As mentioned, the design of Biosphere 2 was motivated in part by the recognition that creating a place of beauty was important as the system is not only functional life support but effectively “the world” for the crew for the time that it is inhabited. Each of the eight biospherians of Mission One reported a heightening of awareness of their connection to this world. It is so small that every action is seen to have an impact—for better or worse—on its functioning. There are no “anonymous” actions—the feedback loops are virtually instantaneous. Nor can one mistake that an action in one part of the system will not have consequences elsewhere.

In a paper written while still experiencing the reality of life inside Biosphere 2 (Nelson and Alling, 1993), two of its crew expressed it thus:

Our personal experience during the past nineteen months within this closed system has been extremely satisfying. Living as an integral component in our small world, both responsible for maintaining it and benefiting from its support, has been as rewarding as it has been challenging. It has changed our perspectives on the role of humans in all closed systems, whether they be artificial systems like Biosphere 2 or natural closed systems like Biosphere 1, our Earth’s biosphere. We participate in a partnership with our biosphere to enhance its well-being by using our own resources, as well as by calling on an extensive network of scientists and engineers on the outside and employing technologies designed to assist in creating desired environmental conditions. There is a new harmony in this effort because our daily experience confirms the fact that we rely on the life systems for survival, and at the same time, the ecological systems depend on our efforts to maximize production and sustain overall health. In a small closed ecological system the equation ‘our biosphere’s health equals our health’ becomes dramatically evident.

Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control (1989), Langdon Winner↩︎

Activist Julian Assange, “Sat 16 Jun2007: Everyone and no one wants to save the world”

You must satisfy your invariant instincts or you will be at odds with your own character. It is only when we are not at odds with our basic makeup that we can find life meaningful. To exercise your instinct for saving the world, requires saving what you perceive to be the world. Being modern, educated and worldly, the world you perceive is immense and this is disempowering compared to the valley world of your ancestors where your feelings were forged and where saving 10 people saved 10% of the “world”’s population.

Here lays the difficulty in actualising your character. Your perception is of a world so vast that that you can not envisage your actions making a meaningful difference.

“A History of Violence”: Edge Master Class2011↩︎

We can expand out this argument more formally. Social ‘status’, whatever that is (like time, it is hard to define but it is vital and everyone understands it), is often considered a positional good: “products and services whose value is mostly (if not exclusively) a function of their ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to substitutes.” If we think of it as a bookshelf, we can see that if we move one book to the leftmost spot, we force rightwards all the other books. The shelf may not be full, in which case it’s possible for us to move all the books leftwards, but not very much and we quickly use up the gaps. If we want to move the books even more leftwards, there’s nothing we can do but destroy the bookcase entirely. This is unlike many other goods like economic wealth—we can always ‘grow the pie higher’, as it were. This futility makes social status seem like a zero-sum game—all we can do is shuffle status around, and not increase it, unlike regular economic scenarios which can be and often are positive-sum games. But at least status is not a negative-sum game—right? This is an important question because status influences all sorts of important things that one would be hard-pressed to buy, like increased longevity (civil service rank, and Nobel prizes if not Oscars)

One interesting aspect of money is that while we often use it as a synonym for utility in discussions of utilitarianism (“Omega offers you a choice between one box and two boxes; the first has a thousand dollars in it…”), this is not true. Money is a very good approximation for utility, in small amounts, but as the amounts increase, each additional increase represents less utility for the owner. Your first million dollars makes a huge difference to your happiness, your second million not so much, and so on. Probably Bill Gates didn’t think about fluctuations of even hundreds of millions in his net worth. So when this detail comes up we say things like ‘utility is logarithmic in wealth’ to express the idea that each dollar is worth fewer utilons than the previous dollar. (See also scope insensitivity and the Weber-Fechner law.) What the diminishing returns mean is that you can change the net happiness/utility of a population by simply moving dollars around. However, you could not change the net dollars just by moving dollars around!

To work out a tedious example: imagine we have $1000 and 100 people and the utility per dollar is your basic natural log. If we gave all $1000 to one person, then that person has 1 × ln(1000) = 6.9 utilons and everyone else has no dollars & negative infinity utilons (they’re very unhappy at possessing nothing), for a net total of negative infinity utilons; if we are a little fairer and give everyone $1 and then the remaining $900 to one person, he has 1 × ln(991) = 6.8 and everyone else 99 × ln(1) = 0 for a net total of 6.8 utilons. If we now give everyone $5, and the remaining $500 to one person, he has 1 × ln(505) = 6.225 and everyone else 99 × ln(5) = 159.34 for a net total of 165.56—quite an improvement! Carrying this out to the logical conclusion of everyone getting equal amounts ($10), we find our net total has become 100 × ln(10) = 230.26, and this is as high as it’s possible to get our little population.

As it happens, there’s a lot of evidence that peoples’ utility functions are logarithmic in wealth, and general global evidence that economic inequality makes people unhappy and this is a major factor in why the Japanese or Scandinavians are happier than Americans, even if they are poorer by many metrics (see for example the Easterlin paradox). Applying this simplistic model to policy recommendations in the real world is a little difficult because economic inequality may contribute to economic growth via pooling wealth in a few hands (one might point to Gates’s mega-philanthropy) and preserving incentives to work like a dog (inasmuch as the usual mechanisms for reducing economic inequality involve forms of progressive taxation and redistribution), and economic growth means in the future there may be even more wealth to distribute which could justify foregoing utility increases at the present moment.

Now we go back to status. We already outlined how money can be superior to status; and we just saw how, to maximize utility at any particular time, we want to redistribute money. We can’t simply say ‘utility is logarithmic’ in status because there are no ‘status-ons’ we can redistribute like ‘utilons’ or ‘dollars’ (although analogues have been proposed, like SF author Cory Doctorow’s post-scarcity society running on “Whuffies”), because status is more ordinal than cardinal. (The common distinction in our language emphasizes that money is not status: ‘arriviste’, ‘kip’, ‘nouveau riche’/‘new money’, ‘parvenu’, ‘social climber’, ‘upstart’, etc. One can try to buy status by donations to institutions frequented by the rich, but it will cost a bundle.) What we can try to do is imagine comparing situations with more or less kinds of status, and ask how they differ in total utility.

Imagine our 100 people again, and imagine they have 1 or 2 kinds of status to choose from. We could call them ‘scientific’ or ‘artistic’ status—the scientists don’t care if they are ranked 50 out of the artists or if they are ranked al the way at the top at 100, but they do care if they are the 10 rather than 1 scientist, and vice-versa. Further, let’s say it’s possible for a person to change their mind. Given this set up, it’s pretty clear that none of them is worse off for there being a second kind of status, since they can pick whichever status they have more of. If a person discovers he’s the artist ranked #5 but scientist ranked #6, he can switch his personal identity to “artist” and be better off; if the reverse or he is equal, well, he’s no worse off than before. Since he is as well off or more well off under the scenario with 2 kinds of status, he would prefer a system in which there are 2 kinds of status. If you ask him whether he would favor three kinds of status, the same logic applies: if he’s higher on that third one than either of the two, he will switch and be better off, else he will not switch and not be any worse off. And so on. This works nicely with logarithmic discounting: we split our original 1–100 ranking into 50–100 and a second 50–100, and the sums improve: sum (map log ([50..100] ++ [50..100])) → 438.35, which is larger than sum (map log [1..100]) → 363.74.

One might object that this argument cooks the books by covertly introducing entirely new bookcases and then exclaiming “now there’s more room to shift books leftwards, because I can put half my books in the left half of the original bookcase and the other half in the left half of this new bookcase! Amazing!” One is saying the right calculation is sum (map log ([1..50] ++ [1..50])) → 297.

In a way, we are arguing about something pretty profound: how do status hierarchies interact in the real world? If a subculture splits off, do they create their own hierarchy where the top dog is as important as the top dog in the other hierarchy? Does Hayao Miyazaki derive as much utility from being the greatest living anime director as, say, Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese derives from his own directing status? Wired notes that there are 604,174 Wikipedia articles on living people compared to ~7 billion living people, suggesting “notable” people are roughly 1 in 10,000. Modern life seems to creak along well, as far as fame goes, which suggests to me that notability could be further distributed.

My own belief is that these subcultures start top-down, not bottom up, because no one knows everything. If this is so, the arguments carry through, and since we cannot redistribute status itself, we must do the next best thing: we must create or permit as many kinds of status as people desire. Knowing this, the wise man empties his heart of scorn for others and refrains from judgment.

In the northern ocean there is a fish, called the k’un, I do not know how many thousand li in size. This k’un changes into a bird, called the p’eng. Its back is I do not know how many thousand li in breadth. When it is moved, it flies, its wings obscuring the sky like clouds.

…A cicada and a young dove laughed, saying, “Now, when I fly with all my might, ’tis as much as I can do to get from tree to tree. And sometimes I do not reach, but fall to the ground midway. What then can be the use of going up ninety thousand li to start for the south?”…a lake sparrow laughed, and said: “Pray, what may that creature be going to do? I rise but a few yards in the air and settle down again, after flying around among the reeds. That is as much as any one would want to fly. Now, wherever can this creature be going to?” Such, indeed, is the difference between small and great.

…Small knowledge has not the compass of great knowledge any more than a short year has the length of a long year. How can we tell that this is so? The fungus plant of a morning knows not the alternation of day and night. The cicada knows not the alternation of spring and autumn. Theirs are short years. But in the south of Ch’u there is a mingling (tree) whose spring and autumn are each of five hundred years’ duration. And in former days there was a large tree which had a spring and autumn each of eight thousand years. Yet, P’eng Tsu is known for reaching a great age and is still, alas! an object of envy to all! —chapter 1 of the Chuang-tzu.

It’s something of a mystery why monogamy has thrived over the last millennium—why not allow polygyny, polyandry, both (polygamy) or even full blown polyamory? Why restrict freedom in this regard, restrict it so viciously that society is willing to kill over it? One explanation I find appealing suggests that marriage—sex—may be an example of societies encouraging the formation of more-optimal multiple hierarchies of status as opposed to a single one. To very broadly generalize, those alternatives seem to boil down to polygyny (polyandry being very rare) and polygyny seems to correlate with societies where there are few ways to status but violence & hunting, while monogamy encourages males to engage in economic competition for mates; relevant is Roy Baumeister’s2010 Is There Anything Good About Men? (summary), and especially Henrich2012’s review, “The puzzle of monogamous marriage” (emphasis added):

The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favour more polygynous marriages. Yet, monogamous marriage has spread across Europe, and more recently across the globe, even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. Here, we develop and explore the hypothesis that the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects-promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. These predictions are tested using converging lines of evidence from across the human sciences.

This point does not seem to be original to me. Eric S. Raymond in “Sex Tips For Geeks: How To Be Sexy” advises the lovelorn geek to acquire:

Social status. Now this is where it gets interesting—because women can detect this even when you aren’t in a context where it’s obvious. Being an alpha male in some status hierarchy changes your body language, your sex-hormone levels, and the smell of your sweat. Women home in on men with these traits something fierce—ask any rock star.

Cathy: “Or ask Eric. His recent notoriety has definitely increased the amount of female attention he gets– even from me.”

But it isn’t that important to a woman’s receptors exactly what the status hierarchy is. It could be anything from the neighborhood bowling league up to the government of a world superpower. Or it could be the developer community of a well-known program. What she smells is success, not the specific kind of success. In fact this effect is so important in human behavior that males actually form all kinds of odd status hierarchies just so they can have a shot at being top of the heap, even when they know in advance that top-of-the-heap won’t convey much in the way of power or wealth reward. Clubs and organized hobbies are like this. The hacker culture itself was purely like this until the late 1990s. At bottom, these are all instinctively founded on sexual-selection games.

For example, the 2011 study “Modeling Users’ Activity on Twitter Networks: Validation of Dunbar’s Number” looked at >380 million tweets forming >25 million conversations, yielding an overall social network of >1.7 million users. They look at a sort of averaged metric of who users reply to:

…This quantity corresponds to the average weight per outgoing edge of each individual where T represents the time window for data aggregation. We measure this quantity in our data set as shown in Figure 2A. The data shows that this quantity reaches a maximum between 100 and 200 friends, in agreement with Dunbar’s prediction (see figure 2A). This finding suggests that even though modern social networks help us to log all the people with whom we meet and interact, they are unable to overcome the biological and physical constraints that limit stable social relations. In Figure 2B, we plot k_i^out the number of reciprocated connections, as a function of the number of the in-degree. k_i^out saturates between 200 and 300 even though the number of incoming connections continues to increase. This saturation indicates that after this point the system is in a new regime; new connections can be reciprocated, but at a much smaller rate than before. This can be accounted for by spurious exchanges we make with some contacts with whom we do not maintain an active relationship.

A 2011 brain-imaging study (“Online social network size is reflected in human brain structure”; BBC coverage) finds more direct correlations:

…The degree to which individuals participate in these networks varies substantially for reasons that are unclear. Here, we show a biological basis for such variability by demonstrating that quantitative variation in the number of friends an individual declares on a web-based social networking service reliably predicted grey matter density in the right superior temporal sulcus, left middle temporal gyrus and entorhinal cortex. Such regions have been previously implicated in social perception and associative memory, respectively. We further show that variability in the size of such online friendship networks was [statistically-]significantly correlated with the size of more intimate real-world social groups. However, the brain regions we identified were specifically associated with online social network size, whereas the grey matter density of the amygdala was correlated both with online and real-world social network sizes. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that the size of an individual’s online social network is closely linked to focal brain structure implicated in social cognition.

Skilled blue-collar workers often take great pride on their work and seem satisfied with their lives, to the extent of exciting envy from white-collar workers (eg. Office Space, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work). A long section from Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System rings true to me:

The special anxiety of the high proles is fear about loss or reduction of status: you’re proud to be a master carpenter, and you want the world to understand clearly the difference between you and a laborer. The special anxiety of the mid-proles is fear of losing the job. And of the low proles, the gnawing perception that you’re probably never going to make enough or earn enough freedom to have and do the things you want. The kind of jobs high-prole people do tempt them to insist that they are really “professionals,” like “sanitation men” in a large city. A mail carrier tells Studs Terkel why he likes his work: “They always say, ‘Here comes the mailman.’ . . . I feel it is one of the most respected professions there is throughout the nation.” Prole women who go into nursing never tire of asserting how professional they are, and the same is true of their daughters who become air stewardesses, a favorite high-prole occupation. Although Army officers, because they are all terrified of the boss, are probably more middle-class than high-prole, they seem the lower the more they insist that they are “professionals”, and since their disgrace in Vietnam, and their subsequent anxiety about their social standing, that insistence has grown more mechanical. An Army wife says, “Some like to speak of doctors, lawyers, etc., as professionals. All [Army] officers are professionals.” And then, a notable deviation from logic: “Who could be more professional than the man who has dedicated his whole life to the defense of his country?”

But high proles are quite smart, or at least shrewd. Because often their work is not closely supervised, they have pride and a conviction of independence, and they feel some contempt for those who have not made it as far as they have. They are, as the sociologist E. E. LeMasters calls them and titles his book, Blue-Collar Aristocrats (1975), and their disdain for the middle class is like the aristocrat’s from the other direction. One high prole says: “If my boy wants to wear a goddamn necktie all his life and bow and scrape to some boss, that’s his right, but by God he should also have the right to earn an honest living with his hands if that is what he likes.” Like other aristocrats, says LeMasters, these “have gone to the top of their social world and need not expend time or energy on ‘social climbing.’” They are aristocratic in other ways, like their devotion to gambling and their fondness for deer hunting. Indeed, the antlers with which they decorate their interiors give their dwellings in that respect a resemblance to the lodges of the Scottish peerage. The high prole resembles the aristocrat too, as Ortega y Gasset notes, in “his propensity to make out of games and sports the central occupation of his life,” as well as in his unromantic attitude toward women. Since they’re not consumed with worry about choosing the correct status emblems, these people can be remarkably relaxed and unself-conscious. They can do, say, wear, and look like pretty much anything they want without undue feelings of shame, which belong to their betters, the middle class, shame being largely a bourgeois feeling. John Calvin, observes Jilly Cooper, is the prophet of the middle class, while Karl Marx is the prophet of the proles, even if most of them don’t know it.

…High proles are nice. It’s down among the mid and low proles that features some might find offensive begin to show themselves. These are the people who feel bitter about their work, often because they are closely supervised and regulated and generally treated like wayward children. “It’s just like the Army,” says an autoassembly-plant worker. “No, it’s worse …. You just about need a pass to piss.” Andrew Levison, author of The Working-Class Majority (1974), invites us to imagine what it would be like to be under the constant eye of a foreman, “a figure who has absolutely no counterpart in middle-class society. Salaried professionals do often have people above them, but it is impossible to imagine professors or executives being required to bring a doctor’s note if they are absent a day or having to justify the number of trips they take to the bathroom.” Mid and low proles are perceived to be so because they perform the role of the victims in that “coercive utilization of man by man” that Veblen found so objectionable. (Imposing the coercion, instead of having it imposed on you, is the prerogative of the more fortunate: managers, teachers, writers, journalists, clergy, film directors.) The degree of supervision, indeed, is often a more eloquent class indicator than mere income, which suggests that the whole class system is more a recognition of the value of freedom than a proclamation of the value of sheer cash. The degree to which your work is overseen by a superior suggests your real class more accurately than the amount you take home from it. Thus the reason why a high-school teacher is “lower” than a tenured university professor. The teacher is obliged to file weekly “lesson plans” with a principal superintendent, or “curriculum coordinator,” thus acknowledging subservience. The professor, on the other hand, reports to no one, and his class is thus higher, even though the teacher may be smarter, better-mannered and richer. (It is in public schools, the postal service, and police departments that we meet terms like supervisor and inspector: the prole hunter will need to know no more.) One is a mid or low prole if one’s servitude is constantly emphasized. Occupational class depends very largely on doing work for which the consequences of error or failure are distant or remote, or better, invisible, rather than immediately apparent to a superior and thus instantly humiliating to the performer…Constantly demeaned at work, the lower sorts of proles suffer from poor morale. As one woman worker says, “Most of us . . . have jobs that are too small for our spirit.” A taxi driver in St. Louis defended the Vietnam War by saying, “We can’t be a pitiful, helpless giant. We gotta show ’em we’re number one.” “Are you number one?” Studs Terkel asked him. Pause. “I’m number nothin’,” he said.

“The power of lonely: What we do better without other people around” by Leon Neyfakh, The Boston Globe (2011-03-06)

And it [solitude] can have some counterintuitive effects: Adam Waytz in the Harvard psychology department, one of Cacioppo’s former students, recently completed a study indicating that people who are socially connected with others can have a hard time identifying with people who are more distant from them. Spending a certain amount of time alone, the study suggests, can make us less closed off from others and more capable of empathy—in other words, better social animals.

This raises an interesting thought. What is more destructive of empathy than stress—or fear?↩︎

Or, as has been attributed to Thomas Carlyle (Michael J Dee, Conclusions 1917): “the ultimate question between man and man is ‘Can I kill thee, or canst thou kill me?’”↩︎

Neyfakh2011:

Burum found that the participants who had been told the person behind them was doing a different task—namely, identifying sounds rather than looking at pictures—did a better job of remembering the pictures. In other words, they formed more solid memories when they believed they were the only ones doing the task.

…Burum offers two possible theories to explain what she and Gilbert found in the study. The first invokes a well-known concept from social psychology called “social loafing”, which says that people tend not to try as hard if they think they can rely on others to pick up their slack. (If two people are pulling a rope, for example, neither will pull quite as hard as they would if they were pulling it alone.) But Burum leans toward a different explanation, which is that sharing an experience with someone is inherently distracting, because it compels us to expend energy on imagining what the other person is going through and how they’re reacting to it.

“People tend to engage quite automatically with thinking about the minds of other people”, Burum said in an interview. “We’re multitasking when we’re with other people in a way that we’re not when we just have an experience by ourselves.”

Perhaps this explains why seeing a movie alone feels so radically different than seeing it with friends: Sitting there in the theater with nobody next to you, you’re not wondering what anyone else thinks of it; you’re not anticipating the discussion that you’ll be having about it on the way home. All your mental energy can be directed at what’s happening on the screen.

To quote again Neyfakh2011:

Teenagers, especially, whose personalities have not yet fully formed, have been shown to benefit from time spent apart from others, in part because it allows for a kind of introspection—and freedom from self-consciousness—that strengthens their sense of identity. Reed Larson, a professor of human development at the University of Illinois, conducted a study in the 1990s in which adolescents outfitted with beepers were prompted at irregular intervals to write down answers to questions about who they were with, what they were doing, and how they were feeling. Perhaps not surprisingly, he found that when the teens in his sample were alone, they reported feeling a lot less self-conscious. “They want to be in their bedrooms because they want to get away from the gaze of other people”, he said.

The teenagers weren’t necessarily happier when they were alone; adolescence, after all, can be a particularly tough time to be separated from the group. But Larson found something interesting: On average, the kids in his sample felt better after they spent some time alone than they did before. Furthermore, he found that kids who spent between 25 and 45% of their nonclass time alone tended to have more positive emotions over the course of the week-long study than their more socially active peers, were more successful in school and were less likely to self-report depression.

This is a nice example of “Algernon’s law”, which is the ‘no free lunch’ principle applied to biology and evolution. The stress responses gear the body up for freeze-fight-or-flight and provide other physiological boosts; so then why hasn’t evolution made this high-performance state the default setting? Because it comes at the nasty price of one’s long-term health.↩︎

Ian & Joel Gold, “Tweet Me Nice”, The Edge Annual Question—2010: how is the Internet changing the way you think?:

We come at last to madness. Psychiatry has known for decades that the megalopolis—indeed a city of any size—breeds psychosis. In particular, schizophrenia, the paradigm of a purely biological mental illness, becomes more prevalent as city size increases, even when the city is hardly more than a village. And this is the case not because mental illness in general becomes more common in cities; nor is it true that people who are psychotic tend to drift toward cities or stay in them. In creating much larger social groups for ourselves, ranging from true friends to near-strangers, could we be laying the ground for a pathogenic virtual city in which psychosis will be on the rise? Or will Facebook and Twitter draw us closer to friends in Aristotle’s sense who can act as psychic prophylaxis against the madness-making power of others? Whatever the effects of the Internet on our inner lives, it seems clear that in changing the structure of our outer lives—the lives intertwined with those of others—the Internet is likely to be a more potent shaper of our minds than we have begun to imagine.

Poetic enough; here are some hard numbers about the risk factor of cities from a European analysis of schizophrenia (“Family history, place and season of birth as risk factors for schizophrenia in Denmark: a replication and reanalysis”): a capitol increases your schizophrenia risk by 230% (more than twice!); living in its suburbs ameliorates the risk down to 173%; a city with >100,000 inhabitants brings it down ‘merely’ to 158%, and so on down to a small city of 10–20,000 with an risk increase of 122%. (These numbers are adjusted for the usual risks like parental age, gender, and family history, but apparently not for IQ or socioeconomic status; in other words, the risk probably comes from a gene-environment interaction which gives rise to schizophrenia.) A 2010 meta-analysis of 20 population surveys found a weaker general association & a stronger one for depression. Causality as always remains unclear: schizophrenia is highly heritable and methods more sophisticated than adjusting for family history suggest the causality may be reverse & cities attract families prone to schizophrenia (Sariaslan et al 2014). It is a vexed topic but still interesting.

It’s interesting to note that of the persecutory, religious, grandiose, and somatic varieties of ‘delusions’, it is persecutory that has increased over the 20^th century in America; of those varieties, which is the one you would expect to be encouraged by urban environments & crowds?

If we look at it the other way, we would expect natural settings to foster healing or at least mental performance; and that is indeed what we find:

The former [field study] included wilderness backpacking and nonwilderness vacation conditions, as well as a control condition in which participants continued with their daily routines. The latter had urban environment, natural environment, and passive relaxation conditions. Multimethod assessments of restoration consisted of self-reports of affective states, cognitive performance, and, in the latter study, physiological measures. Convergent self-report and performance results obtained in both studies offer evidence of greater restorative effects arising from experiences in nature.

One fMRI study found increased amygdala activity in city-dwellers when stressed during puzzle-solving; those merely raised in a city showed effects too in another region related to the amygdala (mainstream coverage). Natural lighting has show many benefits in hospitals and schools, which is an interesting commentary on the insides of all the buildings in cities. Or consider Taylor2009 (New York Times), experimentally verifying survey results:

17 children 7 to 12 years old professionally diagnosed with ADHD experienced each of three environments-a city park and two other well-kept urban settings-via individually guided 20-minute walks. Environments were experienced 1 week apart, with randomized assignment to treatment order. After each walk, concentration was measured using Digit Span Backwards…Children with ADHD concentrated better after the walk in the park than after the downtown walk (p = 0.0229) or the neighborhood walk (p = 0.0072). Effect sizes were substantial (d = 0.52 and 0.77, respectively) and comparable to those reported for recent formulations of methylphenidate.

Even small amounts of nature help; Taylor et al 2002 “Views of nature and self-discipline: evidence from inner city children” found highly [statistically-]significant improvements in scores of concentration & self-discipline in girls randomly assigned to public housing with just a few trees rather than none, following up earlier studies that found benefits to concentration in similar randomized high-rise public housing. (An interesting corollary to the previously cited survey is that a later analysis of the same data by the same authors found that the children “tended to have milder symptoms if they regularly played in a green and open environment (such as a soccer field or expansive lawn) rather than in a green space with lots of trees or an indoor or built outdoor setting” (Science Daily description). Berman et al 2008 (“The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting With Nature”) found working memory & attention scores improved more after a 50 minute walk in a park than in the surrounding city. Further reading:

• “The mental and physical health outcomes of green exercise”, Pretty et al 2005

• “Associations of neighbourhood greenness with physical and mental health: do walking, social coherence and local social interaction explain the relationships?”, Sugiyama et al 2008

• “What is the best dose of nature and green exercise for improving mental health? A multi-study [meta-]analysis”, Barton & Pretty2010

• “Does participating in physical activity in outdoor natural environments have a greater effect on physical and mental wellbeing than physical activity indoors? A systematic review”, Coon et al 2011

• “Exercise-, nature- and socially interactive-based initiatives improve mood and self-esteem in the clinical population”, Barton et al 2012

• “Interacting with nature improves cognition and affect for individuals with depression”, Bergman et al 2012

• “Would You Be Happier Living in a Greener Urban Area? A Fixed-Effects Analysis of Panel Data”, White et al 2013

• “Longitudinal Effects on Mental Health of Moving to Greener and Less Green Urban Areas” Alcock et al 2013

• “Exposure to Neighborhood Green Space and Mental Health: Evidence from the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin”, Beyer et al 2014

• “The Relative Benefits of Green Versus Lean Office Space: Three Field Experiments”, Nieuwenhuis et al 2014

• “Linking Student Performance in Massachusetts Elementary Schools with the ‘Greenness’ of School Surroundings Using Remote Sensing”, Wu et al 2014

• “The physiological effects of Shinrin-yoku (taking in the forest atmosphere or forest bathing): evidence from field experiments in 24 forests across Japan”, Park et al 2009 / “Physiological effects of forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, in Takayama village mountain area”, Kondo et al 2013

• “Effect of Greening Vacant Land on Mental Health of Community-Dwelling Adults: A Cluster Randomized Trial”, South et al 2018

• “Effects of Public Green Space on Acute Psychophysiological Stress Response: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence”, Mygind et al 2019

One thinks of the African veldt and “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”.)↩︎

Cochran et al 2000 suggests:

Seasonal and geographic variations of mental illness similarly suggest infectious causation. Schizophrenia and severe depression disorders are about 10% more frequent among babies born during winter and spring, when respiratory infections tend to be more common [83, 84]. The geographic association of mental illness with degree of urban residency predates 20^th-century society and coincides with high density living situations regardless of the specific details of the situation; the association between urban life and mental illness thus accords well with infectious causation [85, 86].

I am unable to find any sources for this, or quotes pre-2010; it is likely apocryphal. Nevertheless.↩︎

I am also reminded of some things anime directory Kazuya Tsurumaki said in 2001 (echoing Hideaki Anno—who incidentally voice-acted Jiro in The Wind Rises (coincidence?)—commenting on his own father and the Eva character Gendo Ikari):

Tsurumaki told the Otakon panel, “Honestly speaking, I’m very happy that Americans like my work, but the Eva TV series and movies, Kare Kano, and FLCL are basically made for the Japanese audiences. So when I hear that they are being well received by American audiences, I feel very happy; but at the same time I feel a little awkward.” When PULP asked him what he meant by that, Tsurumaki said, “For example, in Eva, I thought Shinji’s character would only be understood by Japanese fans of this generation. But I was very happy—or actually, shocked—to find out that his kind of character is also understood by Americans.” I appreciated the director’s implied vote of confidence in us, but wondered whether the oft-remarked-upon Japanese sense of cultural singularism was strong enough to cancel out the universal fact of youth disaffection, let alone the worldwide reporting on incidents such as the murders at Columbine…Most of the Gainax shows are also targeted, Tsurumaki said, for an audience “that tends to be rather weak and has problems with their family”—and the directors at Gainax are those kind of people. “A lot of families in Japan a generation ago—and perhaps even now—had fathers that were workaholics and never home. They were out of their children’s’ lives. My own father was like that, and I hardly ever got to associate with him until quite recently. I’m the same sort of person as Hideaki Anno. That probably influences the type of anime I create.”

Civilization itself is questionable; Neolithic farmers were much worse off than their hunter-gatherer counterparts, ridden with disease and with lower nutritional standards, and sedentary villages are associated with reduced liberty.↩︎

“Samurai go soft: Japan’s preference for hardware over software is fading”, The Economist:

Japan has long made popular video-game software—just ask the Mario Brothers. Yet its computer makers have done little to foster independent software businesses. On the contrary, by bundling programs free with machines, they taught customers that software was of little value, says Kazuyuki Motohashi of the University of Tokyo. They also locked customers in, making it costly and cumbersome to switch to rivals…Since 2008 Japanese software firms have lost 20% of their market value, even as software firms elsewhere grew by 15%. In software spending relative to GDP Japan ranks 35th, around the level of Saudi Arabia, according to INSEAD, a business school…Japan’s indigenous software industry faces several obstacles. The country lacks venture capital, a vibrant stock market and angel investors with technical knowledge to nurture start-ups. And its big, slow firms tend to suffocate the small fry, says Fujiyo Ishiguro, the founder of Netyear, an online-marketing software firm (and one of the few female bosses of a publicly-listed company in Japan). For now, hardware is king. Newspapers cheered when Riken and Fujitsu unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer in June. But the shift towards the intangible is inevitable, says Ms Ishiguro.

Ruby’s creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has some interesting comments:

Zhou: As far as I know most of the mainstream programming languages are from America and Europe—though there are Lua from Brazil and Ruby from Japan. You too mentioned this in your book and you said this feels “lonely”. So what is the cause of this, and what can we do about it?

Matz: Well, for Lua you can include it in Europe/America too because Brazil is part of South America (chuckles). In the south eastern Asia region though there is only Ruby, and it is lonely. Europe and America still remain the most powerful regions as far as programming languages go. Asia, although has massive population, does not compete in this regard, that indeed feels lonely.

I am not sure about other countries, but at least in Japan there are many people working on programming languages, unfortunately other than Ruby none of them are well known. If more people are interested in programming and designing programming languages, there bound to be one or two that’ll break out, right? There is another hurdle in Japan—language. Most Japanese people only speak Japanese and they cannot speak English well. Funnily enough there are programming languages written entirely in Japanese. (Zhou: “In China there also are programming languages written entirely in Chinese.”) In China too? I knew it! No matter how interesting these programming languages are, they will never influence anyone beyond the ones in their own country.

On a side note, I once received an email from an American. He said that you are Japanese, but Ruby looks like English because it’s written in English, why isn’t there any Japanese-written languages? I replied saying that there are, you just don’t know them, and even if you did, you wouldn’t be able to use them. In Japan, more and more people are interested in programming, maybe because both online and in my books I always talk about how fun programming can be. Many people are now taking on the challenge of designing new programming languages. Out of these new languages, even only 0.1% of them ever get any success, I think it’s a win. I don’t know how many people want to take on the same challenge in China, Korea and other countries in Asia, but if people could look beyond “programming languages are created for us, we just passively accept them”, and think “to create a new programming language can also be fun”, then I am sure some of them will succeed.

Talking about open source projects, not many of them are from Japan, China and Korea, and I think this could be an entry point for many. There are many reasons why this is the case though, for example English is hard to learn… (Zhou: “And GitHub is also difficult to use?”) Ha ha, is GitHub usable in China? (Zhou: “It is, it is…”) Oh, that’s not too bad then. But, China’s Great Firewall still has a huge impact, many resources can’t be accessed here, right? (Zhou: “That’s right, for instance the Go programming language’s website is blocked.”) Ah really? Is it because it’s made by Google? [chuckles] In any case, I think there are still many difficulties to face. Also, in Japan many programmers still spend most of the time at work (to put food on the table), it’s very difficult for them to contribute to open source projects. Ten years ago nobody cares about open source in Japan, but nowadays people start to realise the importance of open source, and the number of open source projects is growing. I believe China will soon follow this pattern as well, I am looking forward to it.

In the beginning no one knows what will succeed. When I started with Ruby I could not possibly have predicted its success. So I think for a programming language, timing is really important—and you’ll never know until you tried. I think in China there might also be languages that emerge from the right time that will eventually be a global success.

“Lain Men: Yasuyuki Ueda”, Anime Jump!:

AJ: “I’m not sure if I’m getting this correct, but in an interview with Animerica last year, you mentioned that you weren’t sure you wanted Americans to understand Lain. What exactly did you mean by that statement?”

YU: “I talked about this earlier in the panel… it goes like this. Basically, you have American culture and Japanese culture after WWII. Everyone knows that war is ridiculous, it comes down to killing people. But what I hoped to see between American and Japanese reactions to Lain is a war– a war of ideas… because through conflict of ideas, you understand yourself better, and you gain insight on the culture of your opponent. I don’t so much want Americans to interpret Lain exactly as Japanese fans do, as I want them to hold on to their own point of view, and in doing so, establish conflict, and hopefully, new communication.”

…AJ: “Lain is popular in America. How do you feel about that?”

YU: “I’m glad that everyone likes Lain! But at the same time, I kind of wonder, do people over here really understand Lain? The way I perceive things, the way Japanese viewers perceived Lain would be different from how Americans viewed it. But when I was in L.A., the fans I met seemed so very Japanese in their perception… and that kind of isn’t what I wanted, because like I said earlier, I wanted there to be a clash between cultures. I wanted American fans to see Lain and think, ‘No! That’s screwed up! That’s so wrong!’”

“Panel discussion with Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe”, Otakon 2000, Eng:

Q: “There’s a quote in the program,”this work itself is sort of a cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values we adopted after WWII.” my question is what does he consider an American sense of values, since what he considers an American sense of values might not necessarily be what we do.”

…M(U): “OK, so basically, when I was growing up, American culture had a huge impact on the way I am now, and while I find American culture to be very interesting, there are some things that are very complex and hard for me to understand, and the way Japan and America is now, we’re on good terms, but there are still some things, there’s a communication barrier, that we can’t talk about certain things or we’re not ready to, that we just kind of skirt around the subject of certain taboo issues, if you will, culturally, and it’s not because we’re avoiding them, it’s just that we’re not aware of them because of the communication barrier. I wish we would go further into that.”

“Anime Chat with Lain Creators Ueda & ABe 9PM ET”

Moderator: [Myu-Myu to Moderator]: “Ueda-san, in an interview, you say that Lain is a form of cultural warfare against American culture and values. What are some examples of cultural warfare employed within the Lain anime?”

GERONIMO-U: “There is nothing in LAIN. no warfare in LAIN. Warfare cannot be in the artworks [please wait—there may be mistranslation] I wanted to make a cultural war. There is no warfare in the artwork. However I wanted to go against normal rules and standards.”

Pulp Mag with Kazuya Tsurumaki:

Some of the jokes, gags, and elements in FLCL are subcultural, and if it was very difficult for him to explain some of the elements to the staff, it may be even more so to Americans—or so is his assumption. Tsurumaki told the Otakon panel, “Honestly speaking, I’m very happy that Americans like my work, but the Eva TV series and movies, Kare Kano, and FLCL are basically made for the Japanese audiences. So when I hear that they are being well received by American audiences, I feel very happy; but at the same time I feel a little awkward.”

When PULP asked him what he meant by that, Tsurumaki said, “For example, in Eva, I thought Shinji’s character would only be understood by Japanese fans of this generation. But I was very happy—or actually, shocked—to find out that his kind of character is also understood by Americans.” I appreciated the director’s implied vote of confidence in us, but wondered whether the oft-remarked-upon Japanese sense of cultural singularism was strong enough to cancel out the universal fact of youth disaffection, let alone the worldwide reporting on incidents such as the murders at Columbine.

A YouTube uploader of doujin music received his “second strike” against his account, and announced that he was ceasing activity. In his announcement, he discussed his communication with some Japanese doujin artists, and I found striking the reasons being given by one doujin artist for his copyright crusade:

…As we discussed before Narugami is a bit conservative who is unwilling to share any doujin-related work outside of the Japan so when I defended myself that I have no choice but to pirate his works since there is no any single means to buy their works outside of the Japan and he said that “We don’t want to be exposed abroad because we cannot take responsibility. We want to publish them only in Japan.” and also said that “ZUN also thinks the above problem and that Toho should not been published overseas.” and what he lastly mailed me was this “If you cannot understand it unfortunately, we would protect our culture and our work by other ways.” So this comes to deleting their works from YouTube unfortunately…