The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

It recently dawned on me that Governments no longer govern people. They govern opinions. These days, people don't vote. Emotions do. Yes, a hand might ultimately pull the lever at the ballot box, but it is the emotion inside that voter's heart which sets in motion the wheels of any electoral backlash. Maybe there was once a Utopian time (I can't quite pinpoint it; go ask a historian) in which the electorate exercised a conscious, effortful mental evaluation of policy positions of candidates and exercised their democratic power with the sober responsibility it theoretically entails. What is clear now, is that these are not  those times. The Tsunami of information that has come with media's atomization (and later on with the internet), coupled with the increase in education worldwide, has created an environment in which any   narrative can be built and backed up by data. Graph from GapMinder. Random selection of countries. ALL increasing their attainment levels. ...

You could say that parasites are evil creatures. They're selfish, manipulative, and insidious. When they infect a host, they hope they don't kill it while they live within (since killing the host would mean killing itself). In that sense, parasites are tangentially symbiotic with the living things they infect. They existentially need a propagator --a host to help them spread themselves as efficiently as possible. Parasites can even take reign of the infected being's behavior for their own benefit: Sneezing is the common cold virus' effective way to propagate itself. Cuddling is the way an infectious virus makes kids look for closeness, so the infection jumps easily to the next host. The Gordian worm manipulates the brain of an infected cricket into jumping into water in order for the worm to mate. We rarely stop to think about this, but interwoven ideas (Narratives) are parasitic, evil body-less "creatures" too. Like parasites, Narratives can't surviv...

Reality is what you perceive it to be. That much is obvious. We were bred this way by nature, and it is thanks to this ability to react to our individually perceived reality  that we are where we are as a species, for better or worse. That we are social animals is no surprise, either. We pick teams , pledge allegiances to like-minded groups, mimic the behavior of other people, and fall for mental shortcuts  that inform our decisions ( many times to our own detriment ). That social networks exploit these bad habits of ours is also exceedingly clear by now. But what about Governments? They don't necessarily need armies of patriotic trolls hawking dissident Facebook users to shape the collective discourse. Forget for now about the fact that Facebook is literally teaching the authoritarian governments of institutionally weak countries how to harness the evil powers of the network to sharpen their manipulation skills and their grip on society.    All Governments ne...

Wars are no longer waged on the ground. Or at least not just there. Conquering Invasions are not necessary when what you need to  conquer is the mind . Inflicting human losses via bullets is so counterproductive. Dead people can't contribute to the monetization of online content, after all. Corpses can't be  groomed online nor harvested for profit , you see. Now, battles are waged in the ethereal realm of the internet. It is there where ideas spawn, linger, are nurtured,  get amplified , and most importantly, morph into radicalization. The decadence of traditional media (with the  disintegration of its grip  on the collective conscience), has given way to this new (and dynamically fluent) status quo: people get their daily dose of information from the internet. They interact with each other, and experience an increasingly broader share of their daily lives there. Physical interaction no longer exists. The public square is now dead. And so is the mall ....

As inhabitants of this universe, we have always evolved within a time continuum. Entropy is inexorable . Time inevitably advances in a single direction. As a consequence, our development as living beings in this planet has always been ruled by the perception of causality. One event happens, and it influences a subsequent event. A linkage between past and present can be drawn. And it can be drawn because this trial-and-error mechanism called evolution settled in our brains after thousands of iterations --in a masterfully choreographed case of survivorship bias -- this form of knowledge acquisition. The linkages have a mundane name: rules. Or what evolutionary psychologists like to fancily call  heuristics . And they have a simple reason to exist: so the brain processes information in the most energy-efficient manner . These have always been the rules of engagement --and we can't consciously process reality any other way. They shaped --nay,  created--  us E...

There used to be a time when the internet was not a winner-take-all mad dash for world dominance. Steven Johnson taught me that.   In the beginning, developers of the foundations of the interwebs created open protocols for the benefit of all, free of charge. Many times under the auspices of the government. That internet still lives on in the guts of what we all experience online nowadays. You just don't realize it, because you pay no licensing fee for the use of the HTTP protocol. No company profits from your use of email protocols POP, SMTP or IMAP, either. They're just there. Built for your benefit by someone who was not tying to hit the next unicorn and become a billionaire (or trillionaire ?). Johnson calls it "InternetOne": the layer of the internet created by distributing its benefits to everyone who cares to join. Cryptocurrencies are an example of it. They distribute the benefits among those participate (through mining) so the network grows. Capitalis...