All tribes need tribal leaders, who in turn need loyalty. Followers of Corbyn and Trump will both detest the comparison, but note how both have the merch, the chants, the hagiography. They’re radically different, but both are products of the tribalism that social media has accidentally brought about. ❧
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📑 Anomie – Wikipedia | Annotations about economics
Anomie (/ˈænəˌmi/) is a "condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals".[1] It is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, e.g., under unruly scenarios resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values.
I can’t help but see this definition and think it needs to be applied to economics immediately. In particular I can think of a few quick examples of economic anomie which are artificially covering up a free market and causing issues within individual communities.
College Textbooks
Here publishers are marketing to professors who assign particular textbooks and subverting students which are the actual market and consumers of those textbooks. This causes an inflated market and has allowed textbook prices to spiral out of control.
The American Health Care Market
In this example, the health care providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) have been segmented away from their consumers (patients) by intermediary insurance companies which are driving the market to their own good rather than a free-er set of smaller (and importantly local) markets that would be composed of just the sellers and the buyers. As a result, the consumer of health care has no ability to put a particular price on what they’re receiving (and typically they rarely ever ask, even more so when they have insurance). This type of economic anomie is causing terrific havoc within the area.
(Aside: while the majority of health care markets is very small in size (by distance), I will submit that the advent of medical tourism does a bit to widen potential markets, but this segment of the market is tiny and very privileged in comparison.)
Others
In a non-economic setting it also seems to be highly applicable to social media silos like Facebook, Twitter, et al as they break social norms. I’ll have to circle back to write a longer essay about this with regard to the IndieWeb movement.
📑 Anomie and Trumpism
He [Émile Durkheim] believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for better or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This was contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person's life and their subsequent depression. ❧
Is this what America is experiencing in the midst of Donald J. Trump’s new Republican party?
I’m left wondering if there is a potential link to Jonah Goldberg having used the word “Suicide” specifically in the title of his recent book? Neither Émile Durkheim nor anomie appear within the text however. The link seems more than fitting.
📑 The Right Time to Burn A Match | Alyson Indrunas
Alyson Indrunas (Spoke & Hub)I learned a valuable lesson that the haters have all the energy in the world to share their outrage but the people you really want to reach respect you, your time, and what you’re doing and they are often too busy to take the time to express gratitude. ❧
📑 Cantinflas | Wikipedia
Among the things that endeared him to his public was his comic use of language in his films; his characters (all of which were really variations of the main "Cantinflas" persona but cast in different social roles and circumstances) would strike up a normal conversation and then complicate it to the point where no one understood what they were talking about. The Cantinflas character was particularly adept at obfuscating the conversation when he owed somebody money, was courting an attractive young woman, or was trying to talk his way out of trouble with authorities, whom he managed to humiliate without their even being able to tell. This manner of talking became known as Cantinflear, and it became common parlance for Spanish speakers to say "¡estás cantinfleando!" (loosely translated as you're pulling a "Cantinflas!" or you're "Cantinflassing!") whenever someone became hard to understand in conversation.
Similar to doubletalk, technobabble, and other varieties of speech.
📑 Code of Conduct
J. Gregory McVerry (edu522.networkedlearningcollaborative.com)Incessentaly correcting graamer ❧
This may be my favorite line of the entire code of conduct! I’m doing my best to resist….
📑 Launching #EDU 522 Week Zero | INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION
Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)I also think as educators we should own what we make, or at least have it released to the Commons. Copyright on teacher created materials in the public school makes little sense. Nobody wants to steal your stuff and no municipality will ever profit on sales. Give it an open license.
📑 Gutenberg support · Issue #190 · dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds
Post Kinds consists of a few elements
- A URL parser that takes an input URL and tries to extract it into structured data
- Enhancements to the Post Editor to add additional structured data to the post object
- A Taxonomy that takes that structured data and classifies it and dictates behavior
- A rendering piece that takes the structured data stored in post meta and displays it using templates that can be overridden in the theme by including them in a subdirectory called kind_views
This is a great short description from a WordPress developer perspective of what the Post Kinds Plugin does
📑 Unfollowing Everybody | Anil Dash
To that point, I've also basically not refollowed any news accounts or "official" corporate accounts. Anything I need to know about major headlines gets surfaced through other channels, or even just other parts of Twitter, so I don't need to see social media updates from media companies whose entire economic model is predicated on causing me enough stress to click through to their sites.
Some good general advice…
📑 Unfollowing Everybody | Anil Dash
It turns out, I don't mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.
📑 Community, Privatization, Efficiency | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)Reversing the trend toward privatization will thus require not just massive public mobilization and demand of elected officials, but also a hard turn away from efficiency as a primary value, a recognition that the building of relationships and the cultivation of care is slow and difficult and of necessity inefficient. In fact, that its value lies in its inefficiency — but making the case for such inefficiency as a necessary value requires a lot of effort, and a lot of caution.
There’s a kernel here of something about the value of links (social, business, etc.) as put forward by Cesar Hidalgo in Why Information Grows. Where is the real value? How can it best be extracted? Built up? Having a more direct means of valuing these otherwise seeming intangibles will be important in the future.
📑 Community, Privatization, Efficiency | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)This displacement is of course operative in the de-funding of public universities, effectively transforming them into non-profits rather than state institutions. The effects of this program of neoliberal1 reform run deep, not least that the dominant motivator behind these privatized institutions becomes sustainability rather than service, leaving universities, like non-profits, in an endless cycle of fundraising and budget cuts.
📑 Community, Privatization, Efficiency | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)Throughout Generous Thinking, one of my interests lies in the effects of, and the need to reverse, the shift in our cultural understanding of education (and especially higher education); where in the mid-twentieth century, the value of education was largely understood to be social, it has in recent decades come to be described as providing primarily private, individual benefits. And this, inevitably, has accompanied a shift from education being treated as a public service to being treated as a private responsibility.
📑 ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans | Washington Post
Despite the risks, however, Mariner Finance is eager to gain new customers. The company declined to say how many unsolicited checks it mails out, but because only about 1 percent of recipients cash them, the number is probably in the millions. The “loans-by-mail” program accounted for 28 percent of Mariner’s loans issued in the third quarter of 2017, according to Kroll. Mariner’s two largest competitors, by contrast, rarely use the tactic.
Incidentally 1% is the response rate necessary to make spam email and fax financially viable. Coincidence?
Do businesses that rely on a low response rate of 1-2% and succeed have something in common? Could they all be considered predatory?
📑 Highlight of “Interviewing my digital domains”
Chris Aldrich used Hypothesis to annotate my post on Interviewing my digital domains.
Testing out the ability to more easily highlight content on the web and display it on my website using the Post Kinds Plugin. Typically a highlight wouldn’t include a textual note (like this), otherwise it would be considered marginalia or a general annotation. Perhaps I’ll get around to adding an annotation type shortly as well.
I’ve got an archive list of highlights now as well as a highlight feed.