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. ...

Technology has finally broken the Media's choke-hold of Society's Collective Conscience  and I don't know if that is a good thing or not. Truth and fact have been disrupted, making way for the rule of emotion and intuition over rationality and knowledge. I don't think The Zuck ever stopped to think about the true consequences of making people more connected all over the world. But the reality is now in the open, and we can all attest to it now:  Interconnectedness drives instability . What started with the seemingly innocuous (and commendable) goal allowing people to share baby pictures among family members morphed into allowing activists to organize political demonstrations. And then  giving Alt-Right trolls a megaphone . Goading is so much fun! Until the reaction is border militias with elite-training itching to kill imaginary ISIS invaders at the SW border with very non-imaginary AR15s. Actual bloody revolutions still rage, efficiently kindled by the smartpho...

Broadcast speech is a public good. Like air. You don't really see it, but it's there; permeating every aspect of your life. You silently feed off of it. You pollute it, and you mess it up for everyone else around you. You know it's dirty. You know it's toxic, and you try to avoid the malicious part of it, but it's always there, a nagging background noise that drones and drones incessantly, chipping away at your sanity. No one really wants to be in charge of keeping it clean, because it's next to impossible to do it. Yes, some high-level, clumsily written rules exist, but nothing that really prevents you or anyone else from spoiling it for everybody else. Oh, yes. The slippery slope argument. You can't contain free speech in any form because then you have to forbid all  speech under this magically simplistic view. And no one wants to live in an oppressive society, right? God forbid someone is forced to use some basic common sense to avoid mocking the...

Era 1996. Mi universo giraba alrededor de ese experimento social (la Universidad) en donde juegan contigo a que te dan responsabilidades, tú te estresas por cumplirlas, y al cabo de 4 años y medio te hacen creer --quizás sea éste el elemento más valioso del experimento-- que estás preparado para conquistar el mundo. Redacción Avanzada era   una de esas clases aburridas que te imponen para "pulir tu capacidad de escritura." Nada qué ver con tu área de estudio, pero para poder salir con el "sello de calidad" de graduado de esa Universidad había que llevarla --nada como "sellar" a los educandos cual producto ensamblado en línea de producción industrial para emular la moda de cultura organizacional de la época. La de los 90's era el "Control de Calidad." La meta era producir graduados de homogeneidad robótica: Licenciados e Ingenieros  ISO 9000 En medio de esta estructura de rígida monotonía, una tarea trivial. Escrito de 500 palabras donde ...