(2020-06-08) Solana Jump

Mike Solana: Jump. Back in elementary school a ‘scientific theory’ hit the playground that blew my mind: if every person in China jumped at the same time, their impact would knock our planet off its axis and the world would end....this idea really captured me. It was the frightening image of it first, every single person in a country doing the same thing, at the same time

at the scale of a billion people? I used to watch a lot of Star Trek with my dad, and this was Borg shit

the billion jumpers weren’t drones. They were people, just like me, and I didn’t want to die. Why would they?

Instantaneous, global mass hysteria was just not possible (sociogenic), let alone the direction of that hysteria to some particular end. I could rest easy, I decided, and it was back to my dreams of the Starship Enterprise.

But a lot has changed since 1993.

fooled into doing it by a megalomaniacal supervillain

Today, almost half the global population is connected to the internet by the supercomputing smartphones that live in our pocket.

ubiquitous social media dramatically increased the speed at which ideas travel and, perhaps more significantly, deeply socialized the dynamic. We no longer learn about the world from institutions, or even the illusion of them. We learn about the world from people we care about. This binds our sense of truth to tribal identity, and that is a powerful, fundamentally emotional connection

Throughout the early years of social media it was obvious the dominant platforms had a problem with bullying.

an important question emerged: what is the difference between a mob and a righteous movement?

In the late 2000s, people wondered openly if any kind of ‘revolution’ online could manifest physically, in the real world. Did tweets actually change anything?

Looking back, it’s hard to believe anyone ever doubted the power of the social internet

For years, now, the stage has been set for a meme-induced global mass hysteria, and there is a kind of poetry in the viral moment’s historic incarnation. Literally, it came as a virus.

Our governments shut the world down, and regardless of whether or not it was wise to do so, they were motivated, as we all were, by what we read on social media.

It’s notable how often the information we shared was wrong

COVID-19 was a biological crisis. But it was also a global information disaster.

There are two reads on how we reacted to the pandemic. First, thank God for the internet. We acted rapidly, shut the world down, and saved tens of millions of lives.

The second read on our reaction to COVID-19 is we should never have shut the world down. We didn’t understand the virus, and we still don’t. Now our economy teeters on the brink of global depression

neither frame on global paralysis is nearly as important as the fact that it was possible. An idea is now capable of almost immediately crippling the world. There is only one question that should be consuming us today: What else is possible?

The danger, at every scale, is large numbers of people acting rapidly and emotionally on information they just received. The information will almost certainly, by the very nature of new information, be incomplete or inaccurate.

we have much more to worry about than witches targeted by mobs for burning, an ancient impulse in people now technologically mutated. Whole communities, cities, and nations are at risk. Let’s talk about politics.

Not every revolution is a net disaster, just most of them. Political violence around the world has far more often led to destruction and widespread human misery than it has to peace and prosperity

Americans have a unique blindness to the subject

Today the word “democracy” is sacrosanct among Americans, but we don’t and never have had a democracy. This is an absence by design. An inherently unstable form of government, our Founding Fathers believed, without exception, democracy would lead to chaos, and that chaos would lead to tyranny. The architects of our nation therefore designed a democratic republic, with a representative democracy.

The United States does not owe its prosperity to dramatic change, but to an historically rare stability.

Even absent social media, the speed at which rapid political change is possible in America has been accelerating for two centuries. Checks have eroded. Balances have become less balanced. At the same time, the federal government has grown more powerful, and the executive branch commands more of that power than ever

The threat of a fallen nuclear state would of course affect us all

Many people correctly intuit something is wrong with social media, and they wonder if it can be fixed with government regulation. It cannot. A federal law prohibiting all politicians at every level from sharing to the popular platforms would be a compelling, partial solution to the specific threat of state-backed, mob-initiated conflict.

But it would not address the central problem with social sharing at scale, and is anyway not the sort of regulation being prescribed.

Our loudest regulatory enthusiasts are almost entirely censorship oriented, and they suspiciously tend to map their censorship prescriptions to their personal politics. This alone should be enough of a warning that we shut the notion down.

how can we protect ourselves from an idea that doesn’t yet exist?

Anger is the binding agent of every mob

Our greatest defense against madness, then, would be calming down while on some powerful, primal level wanting the opposite

Getting comfortable with being wrong would also help, as would expecting people around us to be wrong.

It would be helpful to know when we’re spending an unusual amount of time focused on a topic. Is this a new interest, or is it an obsession? More importantly, how many other people are focused on the topic? Is that number growing? How fast? I’m not sure what a fire drill for global madness looks like, but an alarm alone — just the knowledge we may be in the middle of a mass hysteria — is something Google could build in a week, and it would have tremendous benefit.

I can’t imagine anything more frustrating while overcome with meme-induced hysteria than a pop-up warning that I might not be thinking clearly. But of course this is precisely when I’d most need the warning

The security of warehouses, factories, and critical infrastructure — from power plants to bridges and tunnels — could all conceivably be jeopardized along with the lives of their owners and operators. And if supply chains are affected, trade will be compromised.

the danger here isn’t that Americans lose access to cheap jeans from Vietnam. Not every country produces its own food, energy, or medicine. Chronic, pandemic-like fits of fear and rage will make the stabile functioning of human civilization impossible

We even have a word for it — groupthink. But thought, here, is only an illusion. Mobs don’t think at all. They only burn, and when the burning stops there’s nothing left.