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Part Four: What Needs to Come Sooner

(If There is to be a Later)

Scenes from Last Episode

When we were last together in our third installment of episode three: (“Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good — What Comes Next”) we tried some perspective-taking. We slipped on the Gucci loafers of Senate Republicans to understand their resistance to helping the unemployed through the fall and winter of our pandemic discontent. We looked through the lens of Senator Rick Scott of Florida who argued that the hardball negotiation by Senate Republicans was a feature, not a bug, of keeping American labor lean, hungry, and ready to resume where it left off.

Senator Scott’s pumping on the economic relief brakes is understandable. The wealthy underwrite elections, the parties protect their donors and in Mr. Scott, we’ve got a two-for-one sale displayed proudly in the C-SPAN store window Remember that return on investment in GOP majorities a.k.a. The Tax Reform Act of 2017? Turning the clock forward to the pandemic zone shot us clear past the final solution:

1. Neutering and defanging the federal government.

2. Turning the clock back to a world of unrestrained capital

3. Fleecing, before fleeing the republic, for which it stands.

No Life Boats in Coach

Of course, once the plane crashes, fixing the auto pilot is a luxury for the survivors. Even those survivors in first class who can float their own way to safety. Even recovery of the flight recorder is a distraction to the stranded hoards in coach. Would the most unfit be voted off the island by the libertarians watching at home? What would women and children first look like to the crew piloting this rescue plane?

Wake up from the scripted nightmare and a cold splash of aspirational reality could revive us. According to former Treasury Richard Rubin, federal revenues were already running a full two points below normal when the pandemic hit. Compared to the glory days of the dot.com heyday and tax revenues are now 16.5% of GDP, compared to 20% in the late nineties.

My point? A narrow post-contested victory this November still brings the of wiggle room needed to reverse the 2017 tax holiday for those likeliest to make it a working vacation. That consequential first step has the public, and history on its side.

Confidence in paying for what exactly?

  • The freedom for taxable income to do the most good for the most salary-dependent people.
  • The priority shifting from American Color War to a national obsession with a shared precondition called economic insecurity.

That’s where capital in search of a home goes. Not its reflexive old normal routine: the highest return on the hoarded investments of insistent shareholders. That’s the bottom-line for the underwriters at the crash sites of broken auto pilots.

U.S. is Them

There are limits. Soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. We all need skin in the game. Even the self-dealers and self-makers who think they can redirect highway funds to repair their imperial driveways. It can’t fall on the losers of a prior election. We need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The concussive bluster of who gets to govern returns to the mutual respect of governing effectively. The new adversaries are not those in disagreement but dissolution: the enemies of compromise.

Here are the counter-arguments to Senator Scott’s tough winners-don’t-negotiate love from Rubin himself, a former Goldman Sachs-plated lion of Wall Street, and the furthest voice from the Bernie Bro Choir of any corporate-respecting Democrat:

Prediction #3 — The economy as a manageable problem to solve in a plausible way…

There will be ample room to increase revenues, on a highly progressive basis, for example, by increasing corporate taxes, restoring individual rates, repealing pass-through preferences and imposing a financial transactions tax. — Robert Rubin, Bringing the Economy Back to Life, 4.17.20, The New York Times

The calculation extends to health coverage:

We should also pursue universal health care coverage, preferably through a public option, while at the same time reducing  our system’s overall costs, which far exceed other developed economies’.  Ibid.

And that credit card balance!

Addressing our debt/G.D.P. ratio is in our longer-term economic interest and also benefits us in the nearer term, as greatly increased debt could impede the recovery. Ibid.

Some of these resentments began spilling into the public square over the summer. The backlash against systemic racism for starters. Remember that post racial society that Chief Justice Roberts used to justify the gutting of key provisions in the Voting Rights Act?

Perhaps those same rose-colored blinders are what justified the left’s lethargic turnout during off-year Obama era elections. Either way, that pendulum swing is in full counter-punch. Pendulum whiplash. Darkest midnight to highest noon.

A Petition to Replace Faster, Better, Cheaper

Why is it that economic inequality is not a bug of an unjust society? It’s a feature of a smoothly-running free market economy. For me, the answer is personal and simple. I feel lucky to have a job. And it’s not just any job so I double down on gratitude. I experience feverish gratitude that the job pays enough to sustain a family and a modest retirement savings. Head over heels on a slow day, really.  My appreciation reflects the precipitous fall from office to service worker. Concepts like recognition, generosity, or even job performance do not factor into this equation. Income flow for most of us is a precarious thing. There is no actual bump in pay for superior effort. Maintaining income flow is reward in itself.

Performance reviews aside, a former colleague summed up his amazement at another widening gap. It’s the one between

… How stubbornly we defend our pocketbooks against scams, knock-offs, and mark-ups… versus …

How cheaply we discount our own value to a contracting labor market. 

The connection here is more than personal. When every labor is justified as an exchange of assets, the cheaper the transaction, the more marginalized the laborer. We get this theoretically for buying cheap T-Shirts and jeans from Pakistan. Does that rationale find its way home when it’s our work product that finds its ways into the software code, legal contracts, marketing collateral, or even health care coverage consumed by our employers?

The corona-infested economy may well in fact settle for a continuation of faster, better, cheaper; especially if we don’t find a replacement for the race-to-the-lowest reduction-based logic. That’s a return to the humming along economy that dropped us like a stranded passenger that forfeited their free Two Day shipping flight home from planet Amazon.

It’s not enough to blame the status quo for this predicament. We need to intercept faster, better, cheaper at the factory gates before escorting it out of the board room. We need to knock innovation off its trajectory enough to factor the greater good into the disruptions to come. Only then can we justify a future that includes us in business-as-usual. Three next chapters have yet to be written. Blame their stripped-down open-endedness on the allure of alternative arrangements and these bloated time bubbles:

    • What’s an economy for? This is not the question that comes to mind in the reinsertion of the prior default settings of manufacturing and distribution. Plug and play makes sense to the owners of capital than the holders of debt, let alone the 50% who were a few off weeks from belly-up when the prior economy was purring along. How do we get from a trillion dollar cash injection to more of it actually circulating as we enter that tentative, post coma rehab phase?
    • What’s our collective sense of security? Is it to beat back the advancing hordes of the bad hombres? Perhaps it’s no longer about who’s: (1) labeling who the terrorists or, (2) determining the greater of two evils … global, or homegrown (you pick ’em!) Perhaps it’s about an America first that favors the nationalizing of the medical necessities we’ll need as more of us are victimized by changing climates, dissipating resources, and heavy hand of the unforeseen to come.
    • What’s the role of the individual in all this? Prioritizing what brings us together in shared sacrifice was a pipedream before this pandemic. It becomes almost graspable if we can re-establish the guiding clarity of the greater good. That’s no drug-induced high. That’s corona phoning in a sick-out from the Oval Office last evening. But that begs the biggest-picture question looming on the great post-pandemic horizon. How to see each other as individual contributors to that greater good, and not its dilution.

Will the pivot back to a road ahead be engineered outside the exclusionary interests of the muscular capital elites? Until offshore means: (1) a full-time residence in a private island tax haven, or (2) different planet to occupy, we have a shared outcome in a mutual controlling interest.

A Poverty of Professions

Part of that mutual interest is to occupy the time on earth of those whose needs suddenly outpace the capital formation of their labors. A paucity of wealth-providing trades and professions is a seldom mentioned scarcity in the recently completed run of the bull market. It’s also curious that our oligarchy-favoring leadership decides that throwing unregulated profits at corporations is the shortest distance between record-setting unemployment and mission accomplished.

What future economy will open the door of career choices for the able-minded people of an entering workforce?

Prediction #4 — Amazon needs workers until … they don’t

In 2020, they’re arriving into workplaces where their labor is both urgently needed and conspicuously treated as a problem to be eventually solved.” — John Herrman, Amazon’s Big Breakdown, The New York Times, 5.27.20

Easy access to short bursts of cash works out great for the connected and the corrupted. For the rest of us, writing the rules requires a new way to tie three laudable goals long buried under an unsustainable pile of Better, Faster Cheaper: compensation, merit, and stability. OK, merit cuts both ways and the current steadiness in direction is taking us to some pretty unstable territory. How about if stable keeps merit honest? That leaves an open slot for “better” to climb back in… so long as we unmoor it from the  greasy downslide to the cheap farm that globalization wins no matter who’s racing.

You Don’t Have to Worship a Dollar (to Go to Work Everyday)

I’m a part-timer nanny who drives for a ride-sharing service when I’m not pinch-hitting for a local caterer.

How many gigs are you holding up? Are they even consistent enough to be counted the same from one pay period to the next?

What if the social contract wasn’t bleed-me-dry in exchange for a chance of a promotable event in some foreseeable future? What if there was an actual dependency between the personal fortunes of the big tech elites and my take home pay? What if the downstream impact of decisions were felt firsthand by the folks who make them? Would they make those same decisions if they had to live with those decisions?

Returning to Senator Scott’s cautionary “do better someplace else” tale on the Senate floor, when was the last time you personally were moved to refuse the terms of your employer? That’s the leverage needed for economic recovery. And it’s not a return to work or the ethic of hard work. It’s the dignity of work that provides for the workers and their managers. Not simply for owners and shareholders.

The dignity of work: Step one in our long national recovery to come.

2020 Foresight | Part Three: What Comes Next

And now we are not returning to our normally scheduled programming.

Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good

The Oasis of Normalcy

When we’re knocked for a loop, normalcy is the comfort food of the disoriented. It’s allure comes from the reordering of so many misplaced pieces. We won’t have to walk barefoot and blindfolded through this pool of shattered fragments known to many as Ground Hog Year, known to some as an unyielding series of cancellations, and known to all as the year the media told time according to a scoreboard of accumulated deaths and new Covid cases.

Flirting with the sudden, unannounced resumption of normal ends the uncertainty, clarifies our work schedule, sends our children back to class, and buys us a drink at the watering hole we used to call bumping into someone. The bipartisan prayer for a cure-all vaccine is an understandable as the natural inflating of expectations around a pay-off delayed. Even a promise so universal that it can’t be politicized.

But the funny thing about normal is this: As we begin our inevitable return to the creature comforts of indoor dining, commuter transit, karaoke nights, nail salons, movie theaters, and preassigned theatrical seating, we find that our audience antennas are tuned to once remote signals we hadn’t picked up before.

We begin to insist on safety platinum plus deluxe edition. There should be six sanitizing stations from the time the gel enters our fingers until the moment the card reader ca-chings. The sound piped into our ears is the breathy ventilation that infuses our lungs with a purified whiff of mountain spring breeze. Anything less and it’s the stale, recycled scent of someone waiting to exhale the memories of the now bankrupt perfume counters of department stores from the zombie malls of the 20-teens.

Funny how the normal we insist on has as little to do with those pre-pandemic aerosols from sample perfume spritzes at Macy*s or a whiff of cotton candy-scented mesh teddies at Victoria Secret. In the world to come, we are practically punch drunk from bombardments of judgment about the state of our containerized orifices. It’s not just a lack of will for taking on further changes. It’s the thinning air under that facial mask that limits our abilities to imagine a world we want to publicly engage in.

How do we overcome these instincts towards self-protection for rethinking what’s possible and not just what’s preventable? How do see this transition as a respite from carrying forward the former burdens we needn’t carry into a more enduring future? What comes next is the struggle to fill the void of today with a new balance of personal and collective responsibility. What does that look like?

When Taking Care of Business Means Business as Usual

Prediction #1 :  “I think Jeff Bezos is going to offer the COVID-19 test as part of every Prime membership. I think that’s where we’re headed.” — Scott Galloway, New York Magazine, May, 2020

Destabilizing is bad. We get that. Even our most skydiver selves are clutching our parachute cords when confronted by the no tomorrow future of street violence spilling its way into living room, kitchen, and utility mud room mayhem. What’s not so easy to navigate is where an unquestioning return to flawed assumptions about how normalcy clears the destabilizing bar at any low, medium, or high bar setting.

Perhaps no evidence trail is more tread upon in the service of stability than social contract number one: Playing by the rules is good for me and for you. Like any prevalent notion, this agreement is presupposed. It is ingrained in both our better and second natures. This accommodation is primal. It is transcendent. It is central to how we conduct ourselves within a society held together by the same reciprocal understanding.

What pre-COVID assertion has risen up to challenge social contract number one? Is it that a vote for my opponent is a vote for chaos? Is it that I’m a chump for playing by the rules and the social contract was never followed in the first place? Is it that democracy is too unpredictable to be left in the hands of a public electorate? Nope. It’s about our uncompromising push for a return to normalcy. We’re talking finger-in-the-socket mental-distancing. It’s no longer getting back to the life we know. It’s more personal than that. It’s getting back to the life we miss. That’s one selective memory and it lingers long past any expired social contracts.

Put down your gun, your phone, your remote, your thumbs, and the jewels and metals around your ring finger. There is no negotiation. There is no commentary. There is no rehash of a status quo consensus. Just an insatiable appetite for the ending of this moment. And in its place? The comfort of the expected.

The Pursuit of Human Misery

One thing that no one expects in America is justice: The notion that social contract number one is back in force, and binding, regardless of our social strata. We can miss the ideal of working towards a more just society. We can strive again towards that more perfect union. But until our measurement systems are refactored to include such goals, our pursuit of human happiness will be limited to trading averages, credit risks, hedge funds, and score-keeping perfected through the relationship between our online behavior and purchase histories.

How else to explain a financial scoreboard of booming stock markets and depression level unemployment numbers? And those are just the job consumers, i.e. people in need of a pay check or two. What about the small business owner who just sank a ton of dough into an unessential business? What’s their sense of what comes next?

Three-point-five-percent (3.5%) unemployment it turns out was no better firewall against our shuttered economy and its after-effects than if it hadn’t come down at all these past record-breaking 112 consecutive months. There is no social distancing the loss of a paycheck from the arrival of a rent bill. All those jobs created over those 9 years? Gone within a matter of weeks. In early June unemployment plummets to 13.5%! So much winning? You’re probably bored with so much winning!

The next set of financial health tests needs to focus less on corporate earnings and more on personal assets. Forget about another tax break encouraging big ticket investments of putting capital to work in employment-generating enterprises. Save your breath. Wear your mask.

Instead we need to scorecard how well the massive outlays from our next government find their way into a dynamic and re-awoken economy. For instance, what if money was not a contest of who’s richest but a travel log for what happens after it leaves the treasury? It certainly doesn’t find it’s way back if we look through the tax records of Amazon, Starbucks, and Chevron. But it might if instead we were tracking more graspable indicators of personal financial health:

(1) How many paychecks away from homelessness?

(2) The rate of adult children still living with their parents?

(3) The savings rate of all?

How much are these trends reversible, sustainable? Is there even a place at the policy-making table to seat for sustainability? Other than an incumbent’s need to stay in power?

That Deer in the Headlights is Yesterday’s Road Kill

If the capital outside of circulation is being sold as credit to poor people, the next election won’t be between two candidates from two parties. That’s no longer plausible when the business of America is politics. Elected leaders cease to govern or persuade in terms of electorates. They had been working the ballroom, not the big tent.

Now it’s the breakout room on Zoom. That’s a frank and open exchange compared to the headspace between an itchy Twitter finger and the inaudible scream factory. That piercing incitement you don’t have to unmute. The dog whistling to the same wind that catches cryptic QAnon jabbering and late night punch line chortles alike. Loud and clear.

What about your own internal chatterbox? The voices that escape from the scream factory into your own fingers. You want convenience? You’ll find your instant cash-out at the ATM located near the slot machines.

Oh, you said voting machines? Sorry. Some hearing loss is inevitable at the scream factory.

You’ll hope there’s enough time between jobs to get cross-town for the privilege of waiting hours for a crack at expressing your power. Exiting stage left: Evacuations of the donor class to their own bunker islands, sheltered from the pitchforks of the disenfranchised, income-challenged, followers on Facebook, and former homeowners-turned-refugees.

And now we resume our regularly unsustainable programming

Do we want to continue feeding an economic engine that halts to a sputtering stop once the perpetual motion brakes get pumped? That’s no simple brake job with the plumes rising under the hood.

Here’s what a good corporate citizen would say about what comes next for the recirculated capital that lands on their own balance sheets:

Prediction #2:  “With many businesses likely to be operating to some extent with public money, the scrutiny will be intense. There will be real effects on the relations between government and business, and between business and society. — McKinsey & Company, The Future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal, April 14, 2020

Remember, this ante-raising of untapped corporate responsibilities is a warning from the same preeminent consulting group that captains of industry retain to lessen their collective loads; to make social problems (and larger payrolls) disappear.

In fact it’s the separation anxiety of reliable labor pools from their steady pay checks that makes the American unemployment experience the towering shadow presence in the national psyche. Outfits like McKinsey rush to fill the void between the terminators and the terminated. It’s vital to organized lay-offs that a third-party luxury brand like McKinsey validate the decision. So vital, that paying McKinsey’s exorbitant fees is a relative bargain to the executive boards paying these fees from one ledger and justifying their workforce reductions from another.

None of the terminators want the social contract muscling in here. That’s the nuanced conversation between labor and management that once sought common ground and goes like this:

(1) No one gets everything they wanted.

(2) Nobody leaves empty-handed.

I’m not aware of such a meeting. Maybe McKinsey shouldn’t be faulted for keeping the guest list to clients only.

Here’s another meeting I wasn’t invited to that I can overhear going down in my kitchen. It’s a Zoom call between public school administrators and staff in the district my wife teaches in. She and her unionized colleagues are being duly informed that they’re simultaneously teaching virtual and classroom school. The choices here for public school teachers? Do what I tell you. Maybe you’ll keep your job. Maybe.

Nobody ever said the business of America is labor. Not even Bernie, right? What about restaurant owners, pet groomers, and local farmers? What about the local repair shop, the nail salon, and the micro brew? Let’s compare the difference between the smallness and the largesse that passes for American business.

The $25 billion the Senate scrounged up to address the zero balance of the small business rescue fund is also the same sum marketing the increase of Jeff Bezos’ net worth since the beginning of the pandemic. Percentage-wise that’s a second place finish for eye-popping according to Americans for Tax Fairness.

New York Post | April 30, 2020: Activists painted “Protect Amazon workers” in giant print on a street outside CEO Jeff Bezos’s Washington mansion to protest the online retail giant’s treatment of workers during the coronavirus crisis.

The winner is Mark Zuckerberg whose personal net worth has soared by nearly half of his pre-corona fortune. So has Zuckerberg’s capacity for recouping perceived losses at the hands of his labor force, like the popularity of working from home:

“If you live in a location where the cost of living is dramatically lower, or the cost of labor is lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower in those places.“

These veiled suggestions of salary reductions for not shouldering the same real estate costs as one’s corporate keeper is astonishing both for its miserliness and rejection of one of few remaining cards a remote worker has left to play: The cost differential between where they settle and the more urbane locations of their office commutes.

In one career-span, we’ve seen “people” downgraded from their employer’s “most prized assets” to their costliest. What rounding error does management solve? The margins they can’t deliver to the board without those pink slips. The rewards are obvious: a bigger share price and sudden drop of interest in next year’s bonuses. Good thing too. A raise is no longer a justified investment in human capital. It’s an arrow on your back that follows you to the next downsizing.

Who’s essential in that equation? It’s cash horses like Zuckerberg. It’s the boss who identifies with putting their capital assets to work — not their workers, and certainly not themselves. That could create even costlier, unplanned liabilities as-in small tokens of empathic understanding: Let them work from worksites of their choosing? Sounds consistent for a tech giant that…

(1) Mines the emotional surveillance of its users regardless of location, and

(2) Outsources its editorial function to faceless, underpaid offshore contractors.

Stealing the Future from the Social Ordering Economy

For all this doomsday forecasting, why am I then more optimistic about making promises than pensive about holding onto the ones no longer worth keeping?  Because, however you define 2020…

      • We’re in it together
      • We’re all fighting the same real enemy
      • Gated communities are not immune from it
      • Winning that fight is more important than pleasing shareholders
      • Many of the newly invented enemies are jokers in the deck of an overplayed hand. They are seen for the distractions that they are.

What happens when disruptions are visited on us by viruses instead of innovations?

Anger fuels the patience many voters will need to wait their turn long after the polling stations close on November 3rd. Less angry and the might have surrendered. More satisfied and they may have … Satisfaction? What does that even look like under the banner of the face mask?

1) Capital in search of its next home: Perhaps it means that money expands its role beyond the value of its investment potential for top-heavy holders of excess capital.

2) It’s the density, stupid: Maybe it’s that we stop knowing what’s best for people living in density settings that differ wildly from our own sense of place and community.

3) An under-cushion in lieu of safety net: And if economic insecurity ceases to be the isolated desperation of individuals, perhaps our societal concern can become the cohesion-forming kick we need to re-unify our country. Even if it means that the unemployed don’t have to choose between their next job or their next rent payment.

For all of us privileged with the gift of health, COVID-19 has some overlooked, silver linings. It’s provided us…

(1) Clearer skies,

(2) Puttering around the residence, (a.k.a. home improvement),

(3) Plummeting crime rates,

(4) Accelerated time tables for the demise of coal, and fossil fuels, and the,

(5) Boatloads of time we never had to reflect on the contrived clutter of our double-bookings and self-serve regular approach to hitting already congested highways.

But wait, you say. What advantages our idle minds to serve an economy in toxic shock? Is there no higher calling than reviving that social-ordering economy? And what of the spoiled appetites of our newly enfranchised non-workforce? Isn’t the disrepair of our unemployment systems enough incentive to settle for the entry floor of the big box stock room?

Here are three what comes next game-changers to keep those end-of-the-tunnel lights set to sustainable and away from our personal stash of unpaid bills. This is what the social contract to address economic insecurity looks like in three bold strokes:

1) Guaranteed minimum income (GMI): The GMI proposals floated by Andrew Yang in last fall’s primary season predated the generous unemployment package attached to the passage of last spring’s CARES Act. Both The unsqueezing of the already marginalized means giving workers the ability to better determine where they invest their labor.  Perhaps one guy standing in the way said it best: “The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, ‘I don’t need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else.’” — Senator Rick Scott

Those of us less tormented by notions of sloth may not agree with Senator Scott that our work ethics are in the balance so much as the fighting shape of our beleaguered American middle-class. There is no better color, race, or red/blue state-blind bill than the economic security provisions it contains.

Without those? Remove the last vestiges of that frayed social fabric and you have more than skin in the game. You have exposed bone striking against raw nerve. Or, what we already had before the pandemic.  That’s where the terminators lose their ability to float undesirable jobs for unsustainable wages. That’s where the gravity of the virus speeds into the passing lane; then swerves into the oncoming rattle of foreclosures, bankruptcies, and a prolonged loss of appetite for all but the essentials.

2) Education as Equalizer | The return to social mobility — Somewhere along the lines of self-interest, we lost sight of higher education as a win/win proposition for its graduates and a future depending on their success.

The end of the college campus as party central and the intimacies of classroom instruction means a refocus on learning and away from the emptiness of the overachieving: boilerplate recommendations, standardized test scores, an over-scheduled crush of extracurriculars, “and middling students who play arcane sports.”

Our future notions of leadership, community, and a responsible citizenry should not rest on a winner-take-all competition for acceptance to elite colleges and universities. A virtual education depends on access to technology, not the trappings of privileges that come with SAT coaching, bribing, or the boasting of what NYU Professor, Scott Galloway refers to as the luxury brands of higher education: The lower the admission rate, the more bullet-proof the Harvards, Princetons, and Stamfords of this stardom-ticketing enterprise.

A return to admissions based on the capacity of each students’ willingness to better themselves is not some vain hope or fabled stepping stone. It’s what used to pass for a college degree:

    1. Its restoration will scale to social mobility for the graduate and the greater social good for the world they pass on.
    2. What they will learn there is not to be traumatized by the debating of ideas. There they will learn to hold two opposable views in their heads while considering the respective merits of competing explanations.

That both of these aspirations are no longer even offered as electives these days is reason enough to ride roughshod over the glimmering towers of the ivory-coated fortresses. Yes, end the tax-exempt status of institutions that stockpile bloated endowments for the single purpose of inflating them further.

3) Gamify the IRS | From Tax Avoidance to Aspiration Spending — Looking for redress from that ransacked social contract? The one that says we’re all equal under the law? The one that says our treasury is funded by the size of our incomes, not our loopholes? Sorry, next party in power. But soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. That’s skin in the game we need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The empathy, perspective-taking, and context needed to govern effectively is replaced by the concussive bluster of who gets to govern.

We don’t have a demand-side system based on need. It’s a want-based system based on the incentive to opt-out. Where’s the justice in that? The only ones left holding the treasury afloat is a declining base of taxpayers; too affluent to avoid taxes, and too poor to stash their incomes under said loopholes.

One way to spend-down our debts and shortfalls is to give taxpayers the agency required to address policy issues of their own choosing: Immigration, defense, housing, Medicare, early childhood education… (as if the list ever shortens).

Given the monopoly-sized influence of the lobbies on tax policy, we taxpayers must insist that we file our returns with the added calculation for where to direct those funds. Need to gin-up the stakes? Market the choices like a Power Ball Lottery? Fine. Go gamify the thing. Give every thousandth return collected a free pass. The more skin, the better the game.

Now that you see what happens next, how can I bait your breath for more?

Stay tuned for more Foresight: Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good. Our next installment is Part 4’s What Needs to Come Sooner (if there is to be a later) and petitions the innovation orthodoxy of faster, better, cheaper with a supply chain that squares with accountable demand-side outcomes of compensation, merit, and stability.

2020 Foresight | Part Two: What Came Last

The allure of the “return to normal” when there’s no such return.

Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good

Wernher von Braun, with JFK pointing at Saturn I at Cape Canaveral, November 16, 1963. Wikimedia Commons

“They’ll miss that time in the past — it really did exist — when kids used to mess around outdoors. Go off and just do stuff. Build forts, have wars, die, hang out.”

Garrison Keillor, The Future of Nostalgia

In the first of our five part series, we plotted the coordinates of “now.” Defining where we on-board that journey is critical for determining how we leave this world a better place than it found us; hence fulfilling our mission of reckoning with the terrible afflictions of COVID-19 pandemic virus as a force for achieving that ultimate good.

In this installment, we wrestle with what came last:

    • Not for the sake of repeating a settled chronology of causes and effects
    • Not as a sobering reminder of squandered passions and dissipating pipe dreams

But to issue a heightened awareness on the temptations of wasting a perfectly acceptable crisis: the allure of the “return to normal” when there’s no such return.

The Landfill of Nostalgic Futures

Recently I’ve revisited a museum-full of mid-20th century prophesies. Full disclosure: the ones I grew up with as a kid. The ones that told me what promises beckoned as an adult.

Which cultural institution please?

One privilege, if not promise delivered by the virus is the blessing of keeping my unessential job and conduct it remotely. Others like me have been granted this bubble of time — the one reward we’re always falling short on. And now this time surplus. One way I’ve decided to shape this unstructured transition between past and future is a revisit to The Future of the Past Museum. That’s the place where the rose-colored glasses get the telescopic look-over.

In the days of the great World’s Fairs, unabashed horizon-gazing was a kind of sport: Which fair sponsor could star in its own show under the dome of the sunny tomorrow pavilion? Goofy corporate galaxies and crass depictions aside, why this hankering for hindsight of the future — 2020 edition?

Well for one, this hurdling down the highway routine was old even when our retractable tires were to grow hovercraft fins and glide across the take-offs and landings of our choosing:

Prediction #1 — When tubular is the closest distance between two points…

“The shape of our means of transportation will not be rectangular as today but round or tubular, like the shape of a cigarette.”

Anon, The World in the Year 2058 (As Predicted in 1958), Translation by Patrick Casiano, Yiddish Book Center

Visitors look down on the animated model of the city of the future: “[Democracity] wouldn’t need a police force since a city devoid of slums and poverty will breed little crime.”

That was when we were late for our future destiny appointments. Now that we’ve been living in this future, it’s taken on the air of the familiar — the more there’s nowhere else we’d rather be. And then the virus arrives and we realize that this holding pattern is not some transitional shorthand to the next placeholder:

“Every telephone will be connected to a television so that the persons speaking can see each other. It will be possible to make a phone call from anywhere in the world; you will even be able to connect while out on the street.”

ibid

Why am I more excited than anxious? Why is it that I’m not reserving my place for more preferential positioning when the checkered flag waves us off the starting blocks?  This is an unscripted skip in the narrative. We’ve jumped the track. What if I teleport to a tent city of Rip Van Winkles?

“According to the opinion of experts the clothing in 100 years will be protected against stains and damage. Clothing will come with a net of metal thread and micro tubes for all kinds of needs, such as cooling and heating.”

ibid

It’s the past as prologue or what Mr. Keillor speculated as “yesterday never [looking] better than it will tomorrow.”

I didn’t venture out for a cheap source of campy nostalgia or smug superiority. I did it to inform the most grounded way to build sustainably — something that won’t be swept away by the next set of election returns, unscheduled climate event, or media conspiracies. With another nod to Father Paulikas who was introduced in our last installment: Having emptied ourselves, what do we really want to fill our world with once we rebuild?

Settling for the Return to Sub-Normal

When we know the virus-cancelling ride we were taken on is angling for curbside pickup in the resumption of the usual?  When do you know that the calming message of getting-back-to-our-lives should be panic to your ears? 

There’s the economy, the politics, and the toys that enable them, a.k.a. devices. All three are poised to interrupt our irregular programming to commandeer normalcy’s return.

The economy crackling through your supermarket PA system is fixated on one thing: unemployment. This simple calculus indicates three things:

    • a disregard for investments other than their rate of return,
    • obliviousness to the dormant capital that accumulates outside the economy, and
    • little appetite for how unsustainable the last extra helpings of normal turned out to be.

But it’s a funny thing about deep, overnight unemployment looking for a safe employment harbor to land in. Recent times have been all about individuals. We’re now free to pick religious traditions, no faith at all, sex partners, gender identities, and schedule our offspring in accordance with preferential chromosomal patterns. That’s all well and good for individuals who have the means to exercise these freedoms.

They’re also not top-of-mind for individuals with a declining number of options for feeding and sheltering their families. Making it in a world of dwindling incomes and job prospects is not an abstraction for most of us. Increasing our choices for socially productive job options at a sustainable wage is not a given. It is not close-at-hand. For many, this humble exchange of services for goods remains an out-of-range aspiration. 

What will happen after the shareholder classes thank the working classes for their service? If that question is rhetorical, the only answer will be in the form of lip service. If our economy actually recognized its marginalized participants, their true worth would be measured not by a competing laborer’s wages in a developing country but in the actual cost of food, shelter, transit, health, and childcare: the stuff of earning what used to be called an honest living.

The political u-turn back to subnormal deviates from the calls for economic normalcy’s return in one essential way: Those are the circus of distractions to steal attention from economic insecurity. The ease by which voters can be disconnected from their income streams is both:

(1) The strongest, tangible bond shared by most Americans, and

(2) Potential unraveler of the known political order.

Take a brief trip with me to the recent past.

In the winter of 2017/18 our existential threat was a government shutdown and a looming trade war with China. Shuttering the federal government was not a winning issue for President Trump. Not only did his approvals dip to levels lower than the march on Charleston, Mueller reports, impeachment hearings, or a vacuum on post pandemic leadership.  It also triggered arguably the only binding setback for his party since taking office: Delivering the lower house back into Democratic hands the following fall.

Another reason for the ratings dip? The Tax Reform Act of 2017. How unpopular? A majority-rule GOP exploded the same deficits that had given rise to the Tea Party in the first Obama Administration. The result? More stock buybacks for shareholders, even greater disparities of wealth, and an impact on GDP that came nowhere close to delivering the growth predicted — unless growth was measured by the revenues the donor class got to keep. 

Now citizens across the globe could face higher taxes and/or fewer services in order to pay for the $10.6 trillion committed so far to bringing the moribund world economy back to life.

The global strategy consulting giant McKinsey writes…

The public will expect—indeed, demand—that their money be used for the benefit of society at large. This raises complicated questions. What does it mean for businesses to do right by their employees and customers? If a financial institution accepts a bailout, how should it think about calling in loans? When, if ever, is it appropriate to resume buybacks and switch out declining death rates for a return to higher dividends?

In other words, when can the world’s least terrible system for distributing goods and services revive the animus and predatorial spoils that passed for the power structure of the pre-infected social order? When will the social fractures revealed by the virus pass once again into the widespread acceptance of a force beyond organized human control?

An insurmountable supernatural power beyond scope, explanation, or responsibility, let alone a plan for addressing.

The Black Box on Our Doorsteps

In recent years this mysterious tide of overwhelming forces has begun to resemble what used to be reined in, even shutoff or sent packing.  Some like surveillance capitalism was simply unthinkable except in the most fatalistic of Orwellian prophesies prior to the dawn of smartphone world. On the surface: a screen full of apps. Below? A shadow army of prods and probes for exploiting our cognitive pleasure centers. Now it’s a done deal — no handshake or any terms of acceptance required.

This too has come to pass in our where-is-now reckoning.

Other supernatural forces like “cloud computing” or “two day delivery” sound ushered in like the two tablets contained in the Ark of the Covenant and written by the finger of God.

Where does your data go during your time on earth? It goes to the same place your spirit ascends after this one. In the meantime, pay your bills and anything that can be boxed in the Ark of Amazon will mysteriously appear within 48 hours of your sending for it.

Certainly the long-term business plans of oligarchs like Jeff Bezos are predicated on us delivery destinations not planning ahead more than 48 hours into that foreseeable future.

Mad Magazine#144 July 1971, back cover

The shortness of breath given over to anxiety provides a more certain course for panic than creative, long-term problem-solving. Fortunately for us, we’re holed up in earth base abodes. Our launch pads idling in our driveways.

These days I’m rolling listlessly out of bed just when I used to be barreling into rush hour congestion.

Assuming the virus isn’t waiting for me in the kitchen, am I really going to toss the pandemic into the dread pile and remove it from the commuter traffic that awaits me in tomorrow’s edition of return to yesterday?

Stay tuned for more Foresight: Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good. Part 3’s What Comes Next covers the blind-spots and instinctive habits that limit our choices. How do we overcome them in rethinking what’s possible? What comes next is the struggle to fill the void of today with a new balance of personal and collective responsibility. 

 

2020 Foresight

Only time will tell. But what will time be telling?

Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good

Sometimes you get to stay home from school and your homework becomes your life’s work. Your life’s work is your own personal cure-world-hunger crusade. The assignment? Leave the world in a better place than it found you.

That’s the inspiration for 2020 Foresight. It’s a love letter to the not so distant day when a middle-aged American white male will expire. On that day he will have nudged the forward progress of his member species towards a slightly better place than self-preservation can provide or a clear conscience can afford. The essay is broken into five parts:

1.  Where is Now: Put your finger on the inflection so we share that same in-between ‘before’ and ‘after’. Where is now plots our GPS location of collective experience. This is our sense of time knocked off all alarm settings. Our sense of scheduling … of equilibrium itself a transitional proposition. Only time will tell. But what will time be telling?

2.  What Came Last: What’s lingering in the rear view that’s easily mistaken for a “return to normal” when there’s no such return. What came last is the residual expectation. The what-is-supposed-to-happen-next side of regaining normalcy. Spoiler alert: This was a challenging status quo even when upholding it was business as usual.

3.   What Comes Next: What are the blind spots and instinctive habits that limit our choices and how do we overcome them in rethinking what’s possible? What comes next is the struggle to fill the void of today with a new balance of personal and collective responsibility. It’s not an indulgence, a temporary reshuffling, or an accommodation with a sunset clause buried in legalese.

4.  What Needs to Come Sooner (If there is to be a later): What are the viable choices that will arise? What alternative conditions will be imposed on us if we choose not to. What needs to come sooner moves the clock up on the agreements required for drafting a new social contract. What new social contract? The one needed to earn public trust and redefine governance for the greater good.

5.  Knock Ourselves Out: Consider it the shopping list for the future that has everything. The wish list arrives. It ships from a future touched by all of us with skin in the game. No skin to spare? Surely some will prefer their future arrives through forces beyond their shaping. The rest of us will be left to ponder: What kinds of victories are possible when every battle is not based on a zero sum fight to a stalemate?

Each part builds on the temporary respite afforded to those of us spared from direct harm of the Covid-19 virus. Its indifference to the suffering inflicted presents the healthy, the sheltered, and the enduring a sobering opportunity: To rethink society on a scale that pushes our collective strengths beyond the comfort zone territory of individual choices.

Where do we know we’re not just rethinking but redoing? When we center on a definable and prevailing public interest for which we all have responsibilities and the reward of a brighter future.

When will we see evidence of that world taking shape? When we connect the larger forces of human affairs to our own sense of how we as individuals contribute to those systems. Not the invisible hand of markets, the black box of technology, or the anonymity of dark money. Not how these seemingly supernatural forces operate with indifference to the wider society. But how they are operated by humans with a clear reciprocal need for involving the rest of us. Hello?  There is no future for the rest of us without the surfacing clear risks and rewards in a shared outcome.

PART ONE: WHERE IS NOW

Summer is descending in a curtain of heat upon the northern hemisphere. It marks the third change in season that COVID-19 has danced freely on all expectations of normal.

We’re in a record-setting heatwave of new Coronavirus cases. There is no end in sight. And yet the beginning is plain to see.

Are we there yet?

Where does a person find that safer harbor. Not to defend the shifting grounds below us, or even prepare for the newer versions of normal that will prevail through the news cycles of the foreseeable. Want to see the future? Wait five minutes.

Where is the refuge where we seek to plant our feet in a world that bends towards a better one for the greater good?   One not as fragmented, breakable, or hostile to the vast majorities of those seeking such refuge?

When changes are sweeping, their jarring power is absolute and the impact fills us with dread. Some of that is wanting to spare loved ones from suffering. Even more foundational is the lack of control over what happens next. When do we wonder out of our quarantines and how much can these new routines blend in with the crowds, events, and routines that signifies the return of that control?

How about soon?

For many of us stay-at-homers, the pandemic odyssey resembles those long, device-less car trips of yore. Inquiring minds narrow in on the cure: “When are we getting there?” we fidget from the backseat. The fact we’re actually home when we implore this means our destination is more highly in question than the long, strange trip we’ve been on since late winter: Friday, March 13th if you’re keeping score at home.

Those of us less fixated on the “when” can focus on the “there.” It’s a place filled with hope about where there can lead. Here are two places it can’t if our hopes are to arrive there with us:

1.  Where we just were: The business-as-usual state of that last turn-off on the exit to Covid-19

2.  Wake me up when we get there: A future based on the fantasy escape from the present

We need a better appreciation of our past limitations If hope has a fighting chance at building a better world. Put with more eloquence and less judgment:

“The world is empty now. How should we fill it? writes Steven Paulikas, an Episcopal Priest from Park Slope Brooklyn.

One way to answer Father Paulikas is to look at our shopping cart of hopes and dreams in the not-so-distant past. It’s striking how implausible a resumption of our regularly scheduled future now appears.

Individuals had their run of the place in the immediate past. Two entire political parties were either devoured or cowed by one reality show star. He won the highest office in the land while proclaiming a rigged election. A victim that emerges victorious not only in spite, but because of his victimhood.

It’s hard to write a more doom-affirming or personal narrative than that. And the victory was the creation — not of a plan or a vision or even a plausible conspiracy but of a vacuum. The loss of a common connection between the government, the governed, and a win-win outcome for the courageous and the practical. Key to its revival: a newly discovered appreciation for the act of reaching an impure, evolving, and empathic compromise.

Individuals were on the receiving end of our collective distrust of institutions. Enfeebled regulators? Lower corporate tax rates? No trickle-down in the bonus pool? That’s because the rain only fell on the highest earners. The trajectory of this growth? The showering of dividends on the expected future earnings of trillionaires-in-their-own-lifetimes. A scale where oligarchs command more wealth than many sovereign governments. Arguably, it will take a private fortune in the future to seriously dent a looming monster like climate change. And it will take the deepest, most aggressive state imaginable to siphon those accounts before tomorrow’s barons leave earth entirely.

This windfall for individuals is the single defining feature of yesterday’s competitive landscape and incentive to start cooperating through groups. What groups exactly, earthlings? 

    • The followers of the meme originators of the most recent monster sightings on social media?
    • The gatekeepers of College Admissions for the post corruption elites?
    • Our own freely-associated congregations, fan clubs, and identity profiles?

The sooner a majority of Americans can separate our views on culture war issues from the divisions sowed by these differences, the sooner we can sign-up as charter members of the economically insecure.

Ready, Reset, Go

Give the dreamer a canvas to paint a post-pandemic do-over and your creative writing assignment casts society in role of populist-snorting addict with a long overdue withdrawal from … you guessed it: the economy we just came from! For the clear-eyed horizon gazer, perhaps the road before us weaves somewhere between playing out the doomsday clock and a wholesale Quentin Tarantino rewrite where vengeance sides with angels.

In either projection, power without accountability is the price we will pay for a wanton rejection of political elites. There is no return to the America we once knew. And the sooner we lose the idea of a nostalgic guidepost, the sooner we’ll get to know a country where most Americans willingly exceed the boundaries of today: A country that defines its greatness by limiting …

    1.  The sacrifices of those best positioned to make the most lasting of contributions.
    2.  The participation of the marginalized.
    3.  The agency of the taxpayer.

Imagine a revenue collection system where taxpayers can channel a small portion of their payments towards those areas of the public trust they wish to see funded. Imagine acknowledging that many of our working poor are service providers as well as receivers. Consider the problem-solving capacity of our most profitable enterprises. Why limit their genius to shareholder wealth when they can serve the broader public in ways that government-run programs cannot.

And who says that time gets reset according to the quarterly earnings clock?  Who says that debtors need to assume all the risk for their loans? Who says that our greatest shared experience as Americans is the looming shadow of economic insecurity? That’s the group that would have most of us as members.

It’s curious that the federal poverty rate has declined after the bottom dropped out of the economy. Let me repeat that. The post-Pandemic spending designed to prop up the economy has done more for the country’s bottom earners than the wages earned through their own labors. Not working in a teetering economy? I can pay my bills. Working for the man? Not so much.

Now that’s a reset whether you’re defining where now is these days or deciding to leave that dead-end job because you see better opportunities. For those of us with more footing, a little wiggle room can reduce the impoverishment of our imaginations. Instead of outlasting our cash, perhaps it’s the prevailing economic insecurity of America we should be outliving.

Next installment: What Came Last is a deconstruction of the gravitational pull from the recent past. That’s the allure of the familiar in these lock down times. How do we get back on our feet with the confidence to stray past the road of no return?

A Book In You

Part Two: Scenes From My Supplicant Relationship with Amazon

In our first install of A Book in You, we considered the lengths obscure authors should go to cuddle-up with the planet’s pre-eminent publishing platform. Not far is the short answer. We then offered some humbling arrangements for squeezing your post publication juices out of the bewildering, impersonal, and ultimately casino-like interior of an Amazon landing page.

In Part One, we rolled the dice across the craps table of self-publishing: Oh the heights we can scale and the walls we can crash in the act of merchandising our better manuscripts!

We considered the potentials for reaching that vast untethered legion of kindred communities. We talked about how this aspiration is the author’s to carry, not the platform’s. Only the writer can plant and nurture the relationship between their creative works and their audience of engaged readers, as tempting as it may be to pair one’s literary gifts with their digital marketing plans.

In this install, we break down my unprofessional relationship with Amazon into three acts:

(1) a fantasy dialog between the two of us as I dip my toes into the Amazon rapids.

(2) a real-life transaction of me insisting on a refund from a no-returns policy of a non-existent product.

(3) a fictionalized best face on what Amazon could be if it got out of its own way to refactor the needs of its content providers and customers.

Act One

A Fantasy Comment Box is Closed for Repairs

Time to go off-script. Here’s my imaginary groveling with the casino operator side, Dr. Amazon:

Me: I’ve got a storehouse of lessons to share. They draw from 35+ years of interrogating databases and teaching search technologies how to interpret human desires for knowledge. Not vases, body wash, screen protectors, or even a case of hand sanitizer. I’m here to sell know-how about K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E. I’m here to suggest ways to improve what you do whenever you’re conscious of the time and effort required to take a concerted set of actions, a.k.a. R-E-S-E-A-R-C-H.

Dr. Amazon: How you going to pour this intangible product you describe into a package?

Me: I taught aspiring private investigators how to find the bad guys. But also how to apply their own passionate embrace for research-based problem-solving to catch the bad guys.

Dr. Amazon: Isn’t this just a pulp fiction embellishment for running a credit score against a criminal record?

Me: You reduce everything to a transaction. You’re leaving out the off-screen non-automated calculations like skepticism, intuition, and even the rule-making machine in more highly evolved human thinking before the algorithms ever fire. Sort of like which pattern am I trying to match?

Dr. Amazon in the driver’s seat.

Dr. Amazon: Who you decide to trust is your own consumer prerogative. We’re here to give you the least resistance at the point of sale. That’s the trust business we run here at Amazon.

Me: I’m here to nurture the take no one’s word until we test it our in our own kitchens of research. A healthy skepticism is our best defense against a cynical blanket condemnation of all claims on truth.

Dr. Amazon: But that doesn’t mean you get to cherry-pick the truths about your book.

Me: The review part of my customers’ review copy is naturally, optional. I ask for their feedback in a public setting based on the same credo we explored for unpacking the limitations of mutual interest: One cannot confer credibility unto themselves!

Dr. Amazon: That’s why we quality check our book reviews against quid pro quos and other likely review inflation arrangements.

Me: But then again, why is there a market for everything you touch? That includes the black market that exists for peddling fake reviews?

Dr. Amazon: That’s one of the occupational hazards of being a transaction engine. And being a tech company that shovels cruise ships full of content to waiting shipyards of newsfeeds. Did we mention we’re not in the content business? We’re a tech company.

Me: And you are also a public company. In public life today, power is measured by degrees of being public. I’m not on your board of anything. But not all influence is for sale. Not all trust systems need to run on faith alone. Reporters who do their searching out loud can trust in their own evidence-gathering, not on any one evidence provider. No matter how loudly they announce themselves

Dr. Amazon: At least our customers know where they’ll end up, along with their packages.

Me: That’s another place we part ways. The declarative act of Searching Out Loud means using the information we get over the web to resolve questions that require independence free of predetermined conclusions. The less we know about where our investigations may lead, the more we need to search out loud.
 

Act Two

An Actual Exchange: This Chat May Be Recorded for Quality Assurance

Speaking of phone calls, here’s a verbatim transcript of a chat session between myself and a support professional reached through the “Contact Us” section in the “Need More Help” link of the “Browse Topics” tucked under Terms and Conditions buried in the page footer.

That’s…

Contact Us > Need More Help > Terms and Conditions > Browse Topics > Chat Option

… if you’re scoring at home.

Amazon Connect – Customer Contact Center in the Cloud

As we pick up the action I’m trying to recover some money for an e-book I tried to gift to a former student in Nigeria who was unable to access the link provided here.

  • 9:20 PM

Mirthuna | Customer Service

Marc, In order to download the book , the recipient need to update a US address in her account

  • 9:20 PM

She doesn’t live in the U.S.

  • 9:20 PM

Mirthuna | Customer Service

I understand that however in order to download the book she need to update a US address in her account for a moment to download the book

  • 9:22 PM

She is not going to commit fraud in order to download an e-book. Please refund me the cost of this order.

  • 9:23 PM

Mirthuna | Customer Service

Please give me a chance so that I can help you with the issue

Could you please help me with the address as well the zip code?

And so on. Thirty interactions over thirty-two minutes. Passed between three customer service reps. Yes, I was finally granted a $9.99 refund for a product that can never be used.

So what did we learn? There is a non-anglicized person in reserve should actual exchanges spill over the menu options and into the realm of human complexity.

The above exchange happened last week when it took over 30 interactions over thirty-two minutes for me to be passed between three such customer care reps before I was granted my narrow micro-victory: a refund for a book that can never be read. There is the e-book and the paperback. But there is no Nigerian version and the student has no physical US-based address.

Did you know none of your non-U.S.-based friends and contacts can be gifted books from Amazon.us.com? Hopefully I just spared you 32 minutes.

Act Three

A Fictionalized Win-Win: The Professional Advantages of Dignifying Amazon Customers

In this future setting I’m about to hit the payment button when the shipping costs give me pause. In this scenario the customer support chat is built into the checkout page:

Me: I’m buying multiple copies of my own book and paying the full retail price. Is there a reason I’m being charged $5.99 a pop on the shipping for each book? The total cost of the order puts me well above the free shipping threshold.

Sensible Post Corona Amazon: Yes, that’s true.  However, your book is being sent to many addressees in your contacts list.

Me: It’s also true that I’m paying full price and that the shipment accounts for over 50% of the cost of each order.

Sensible Post Corona Amazon: Let me ask you a few questions: (1) Do you need to recoup the royalties on your shipment? (2) Do your contacts expect our reliable two day express shipping for their orders?

Me: Great questions, Amazon. What would I say by saying no to both questions?

Sensible Post Corona Amazon: You could slice the cost of each shipment by close to half.

Future Amazon: Less call center, more call and response.

Me: Well, being that you hold onto my royalty payments for months at a time, I’m in no great hurry to receive my __% cut if it lowers my upfront costs. Also, there are no holiday deadlines or birthdays involved here so timely shipments are not a factor.

Sensible Post Corona Amazon: We can waive those.

Me: Nice!

Sensible Post Corona Amazon: Also, we can offer you discounts of up to 10% on bulk orders of 100 or more books.

Me: Sounds like the right marketing strategy for getting this book out of its landing page and into the mail-boxes of the people who don’t know the author but will recognize the value of the resource.

Sensible Post Corona Amazon: Glad to help amplify the volume of trust-based transactions.

That’s truly what will spell the difference between a future where an Amazon package is a welcome arrival or an unsolicited distraction, i.e. the rest of the recycle pile from today’s mail.

A Book in You?

Part One: Self-Publishing on Amazon — A Six Month Review

(c) Philippe Put, Feed Your Head

Perhaps like me you walk around with a loop of recurring observations. Your life is not an endless joyride or constant struggle so much as a classroom for matching patterns, testing theories, and stepping back in alternate states of affirmation and surprise. Some of these insights lead to inescapable conclusions. Others to nagging questions that persist in the face of mounting evidence.

Some of those quandaries just won’t quit. For them it’s off to the lightning round of interpretive hedging. Each of these rationales touch on the themes and examples that we prep for our best laid lesson plans. The purpose to our learning becomes the unwritten book we carry around. Private musings seeking refuge in an open dialog.

In this two part series on self-publishing, we explore the heights we can scale and the walls we can crash in the act of merchandising our better cover-bound mousetraps. In this case, how to rethink the smell test we all take when weighing the evidence we gather in independent investigations.

As we’ll see, the author’s side of this story is as much an act of discovery as the sharing of their subject matter. The experiences of channeling these inspirations through a faceless global platform like Amazon are largely as unwritten as our collective works, prior to publication.

Some people carry around imaginings that form into characters and stories. I carry around actual and invented questions best addressed by research into facts, evidence, and the histories entrusted with their collection. Six months post publication I can attest to you this: There is no great American novel equivalent waiting to answer the pent-up demand for conducting independent web-based research investigations.

Picking a universal theme (boosting one’s research acumen) doesn’t ensure that curious readers are moved to rally their investigation skills. The entrance barriers are non-existent. The costs for getting it wrong are at best … interpretive. Some would argue non-existent in a world of false equivalencies and the self-selecting nature of filter bubbles. But even if most of my would-be readers are reluctant to embrace a book on research, the ideas, use cases, and frameworks enjoy a longer-term shelf life that eclipses any sputtering sales trends for research primers.

It’s the ideas that live beyond the gratification cycles of the well-read and independent-minded that my book dropped (and fell from sight) last fall. This ticket to the land of the published is punched by our own pride. After all, this form of self-expression went by the name of Vanity Publishing — before there was social media. Before there was Amazon. Even before bookstores were qualified as hardcovers and paperbacks, not bricks and mortar.

Self-Publishing on Amazon: A Six Month Review

Amazon wish fulfillment, reality version: (c) The Amazon fulfillment center in Romulus, Dustin Dwyer, Michigan Radio

Like its football fields of warehouses, writing about Amazon is inexhaustible. Like its labyrinth of supply chains, Amazon itself forms a limitless source of crossed signals — a self-contained mesh of stoked appetites, phantom caterers, and limited time Prime discounts in a swirl of circling delivery vans.

… Before it was the cloud’s data center, it was the world’s strip mall.

… Before the department store, it was a portal within a winning search navigation schema.

… And before that, there was the beginning. There was the written word for sale … the book store.

The ubiquity is so prevailing that one can define life on western commerce earth by a single set of conditions: A love / hate relationship with the placidly sinister Amazon. Queue Kevin Spacey voice-over.

My modest topic of Amazon as self-publishing platform seems feeble, even quaint, given the gravity of Amazon’s impact on the transactional footprints of our debits and credits — a verifiable consumer-level GPS of the travels of commerce. But there it is. As if I’m fixated on the “phone” piece of “smart” and the former refers to a synchronous exchange of voices between two paired microphones and speakers.

So I did promise you a six month review. Let’s consider what’s reasonable and what’s out-of-bounds for leveraging Amazon…

      • On a modest marketing budget,
      • An overwhelming number of marketing options, and
      • A limited interest in learning, let alone executing a manageable number of them.

Alexa … How Do I Survive Your Ecosystem?

So there’s the grind-you-down until you abandon the idea you’re exchanging free time and real capital for actual goods and services. Then there was last week’s revelation that even non U.S.-based customers can’t read the digital version of the book. This despite they’re owning Amazon hardware (Kindle) to consumer digital products (books) that I (me) produced on their software (Kindle Create) for the expressed purpose of streamlining the distribution process by relenting to the hermetic Amazon ecosystem.

It was never my expressed goal to become a subject matter expert of e-book publishing. I checked my modest goals at the Amazon door and thought: Here’s a way to stay in touch with former colleagues, students, and potentially other teachers and learners who want to absorb, reject, augment, and ultimately add to the canon of curriculum. Scroll down to …

Education & Reference > Education > Research

That’s me where you address how humans can train themselves to be digitally literate in a world of anonymous sources, surveillance capitalism, and unblinking chatbots.

I didn’t learn of the ecosystem’s failings by adding e-publisher to my badging credentials. I learned by posting my issue to a discussion list of e-publishing experts; a forum hosted on … Amazon, of course! My question about the incompatibilities of Amazon software working on Amazon devices was addressed rapidly and thoughtfully by five digital publishing experts that apparently patrol the board to compare wits, cultivate contacts, and mine for new prospects. I expressed my appreciation for their instant recognition of a known issue. Privately, I’m thinking: why does Amazon deliver such a poor customer experience?

The simple answer is … because they can. The longer, more unsettling answer is that the self-published digital literacy expert should not conflate Amazon’s share price with a free piggy-back ride to my own success. It’s easy to take for granted the efficiencies of printing-on-demand, centralized author pages, and production-ready templates for would-be publishers. But the appeal of the well-honed profit machine is not a default win-win setting for Amazon and its content-providing supply chain.

Not having an idle inventory of unsold books in your attic is a welcome reality that Amazon brought to the publishing masses. But there is no magic keyword match to raise your profile or expose that end of the virtual warehouse where your books lie in wait. The idleness has shifted from dormant inventories to D-I-Y publishers who would naturally shy away from self-promotion and merchandising.

A Community of Publishers

Then again, the vanity barkers don’t have a lock on the pride of authorship. Many self-respecting self-publishers embrace the notion that it’s about the ideas they’re surfacing, not their mugs and tee-shirts. A community of learners doesn’t require a market for books. Authors are experts of their trades and the book is entrée into those peer groups that are forums for bringing thoughtful and challenging dialog to the author’s voice.

Six months into the great upload of one serious decades-long obsession, the lessons are these:

1. Figure out your brand: This sounds menial, even insulting if one could tread boldly on their lack of confidence. But my reluctance to engage on social media means playing the cards that lend meaning to the substance behind the marketing. For me it’s plugging the work through podcasts, instructional videos, and any venues where local researchers may flock.

2. Gift the book: In my case there are 5 bite-sized versions of the full volume. These do well as courtesy copies, tutorials, and learning aids broken down by specific lessons. The hope is to stoke an appetite for the complete work, or even better, a full review of the trial run.

3. Find your self-promo comfort zone: Most of all, resist the temptation to believe that one’s work will speak for itself or that the strength of Amazon’s gravitation will pull your book up the marketing hill. It won’t.

The last lesson anyone should draw? That the distribution of your publications bears any relationship to the books in you.

The Black Hole of Blindspots

Part Two: Taken Unawares

Self-identifying With Those We Investigate

 

(c) Ant-o-Rama, 2015: Darth Apple Caught Unawares

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”

Sidney J. Harris

In our last segment, we grappled with those elements of blindspots that exceed our grasp of our influence as researchers. We looked at our limits of imagination, perspective-taking, and the obstacle of wish-fulfillment as areas in need of greater self-awareness and pro-active monitoring of tendencies that can undermine our effectiveness as researchers. In part two, we explore the more personal level of coming to terms with our blindspots: What that looks like in the context of “business as usual.”

How can can take our own shortcomings on-board? Where does this help us to raise our game as researchers, both in the conducting of our cases and reporting of our findings? What does it mean to become an expert at our own failings?

That too is a mastery over blindspots. One that saves us from repeating the temptation to go it alone when there’s a collaborator who can lead where we will falter.

Flattering Ourselves

Not everyone swipes their badge and descends into their fortified bunker or a fortress dressing up as avatars for a theoretical confrontation. So how do we make this real? How does this play out on a more personal level? More to the point: How do we assess the probability of these imagined events actually visiting us in the future? Are we privileging our own self-importance? Are we inflating the box office appeal of us starring in our own video game cinema? Virtual reality headset not included!

One of the firsthand experiences we all walk away from is the kind we go to great lengths not to experience again. That sense of dread and avoidance at-all-costs comes from events we consider beyond our control, even our comprehension. We know where to find our personal shutoff valves. We know where to run for safety, to wrestle back control from a daunting adversary, or the chaos that sends us fleeing its crushing, oversized footprints.

But what happens when these grim outcomes are in reach and we’re the last to know? What happens when we’re oblivious to these looming dangers, until the menace is upon us?  Our lack of awareness and preparedness can amplify the pain. There’s no hunkering down or shelter to seek when the moment of dread arrives arm-and-arm with our own ignorance (and search history). There is no transitional period from the blow to the head to crashing said head to the hard, frosty floor.

Coming to Blows With Our Demons

It’s not just cushioning the blow that should concern us. It’s the gnawing realization that the factors leading to this sneak attack were conspiring in broad daylight right under our congested sniffers. We can’t blow the cover of every closed door meeting. The challenge is for our dismay to move beyond our wounded pride to a front row seat of our own gullible, unsuspecting nature. That’s the show worth watching long after the element of surprise recedes. Confronting one’s vulnerabilities benefits us in two ways as researchers:

1.       A wider recognition of our personal blindspots

2.       An enhanced appreciation for the people we investigate

These sobering and ultimately enriching lessons carries us beyond the limitations of our own risk avoidance. It moves us past the shortness of breath and imagination that comes with being spooked. It elevates us beyond our own instincts for self-preservation and summons powers normally associated with superheroes. We can walk through the walls of closed door meetings. We can better handle the aggressive language of the alleged suspects in their defensive crouches. We sidestep the familiarity traps that befall the prisoners of self-imposed comfort zones.

As outsiders, we’re less prone to the rising pressure of maintaining a code of silence. We are not looking the other way but that doesn’t mean we compromise a confidence; not when there may be more to see. As fluency learners, we’re not staked to unassailable positions, sacred cow sources, or the close-ended commitments of sunk costs and confirmation bias. Not having an airtight narrative doesn’t put us on shaky ground. Neither does losing our earlier assumptions when they don’t match the surprising evidence we gather.

Taking One for the Project

(c) Fortune Magazine, 2020

Another burden worth shedding is that successful investigations ride on the shoulders of the investigator. Admissions of fault or confessions to a deeper truth are not tests of our will or diplomacy skills. Many times these breakthroughs are measured as much by the emotional distance the witness or whistleblower opens between themselves and the wrath of the person or group they’re implicating: The further the distance, the more forceful the allegation.

These dynamics don’t play-out on their own. They require the perspective-taking of the investigator to determine the psychological distance between case informants and their respective risk profiles. Has enough time expired to re-approach a long-buried secret? Have the sparring fighters returned to their ringside corners? Enough airing of past differences to have ironed them out?

There are countless back stories that relative newcomers stumble into; unsettled scores cloaked behind the territorial claims of entrenched adversaries. A learner’s mind is an inquiring one outside the safety of established social circles and affirming peer groups. Newcomer over-confidence in one’s abilities to hear and speak like a native? That’s a blindspot unique to investigators.

An ego can be a heavy thing to carry around. Fortunately we only have to carry one of those at a time (being a parent notwithstanding!)  However, you get the unfiltered glimpse of the onlooker when you lower the barricades around the locked-down neighborhoods where your pride is patrolling. The spectator figures who form the optics of how that hot, inflamed blindspot looks to others in the cold light of day.

There’s humility for starters. Is a co-worker fibbing when they over-apologize for coming late to a meeting? Perhaps I too can recollect not sharing a key reason why I was the one late to the last call? Is that target on my back etched in my own handiwork? Did I unwittingly tamper with the holy grail of someone else’s lost horizon? Am I culpable, guilty as charged? Does my own gullible nature testify to my innocence? Can both conclusions be drawn from the conflicting parties impacted by my research?

More Scratches Below the Surface

Besides our clumsy, fragile egos, another obstacle worth kicking out from under us is this notion of control. We leave the stage managing to the attorneys and production crews. But for investigators the action falls into line with two paths to discovery: guided and unguided questions. Guided questions have hard stops, pre-determined assumptions, and a bias towards binary yes/no answers. Unguided questions give the respondent more interpretive leeway. Given enough discretion, they can even reframe the question.

Put another way, guided questions are the ones we want to answer. Unguided are those our targets want to address. Confusing the two and you’re splintering a blindspot through all manner of observing lenses: spyglasses, binoculars, microscopes, drone cams … to name a few. In fact, our guided questions are unmasked invitations to theories and speculations that our targets know to be tenuous, contestable, even flat-out wrong, and insulting. 

Why would the interrogated dignify a misguided question premised on the interrogator’s foregone conclusion?  Another reason to tread lightly through the signals we investigators strike. The imaginations we fire. The burden of those loaded questions we carry. Is the evidence conclusive? Or do the loose-ends stray from our theories of the case?

“The whole truth” is the sworn testimony we commit to upholding in our legal oath as trial witnesses. The more versions to consider, the more pronounced the role of blindspots as the obstruction to this clarified, verifiable and binding view of conflict resolution. We investigators need to address our own culpability as direct participants in the legal processing of justice before we can permeate the blindspots that cloud the periphery of all containable truths.

The Black Hole of Blindspots

Part One:
Primping in Front of Smoke and Mirrors

I am an unreliable witness to my own existence.

― Russell Brand

In our last post we explored our metaphorical nose for sniffing out the evidence that doesn’t quite smell right: Keeping Your Nose Clean: BS Detection in a World of Fake News and Real Threats. Recognizing and acting on the stench of social media infused misinformation is not an elective but a mandatory requirement for maintaining an informed citizenry in a 21st Century Democracy. Fair enough.

But what about when we’re the messengers of our own research? What happens if our own personal biases compromise our findings? What does it matter if we’re connecting events, matching patterns, calling out questionable behaviors, and assessing the exposure of search targets in our case outcomes? Why show at the presentation if our research methods are not beyond reproach?

In this dispatch we reflect on fine-tuning the information filters that pass through all of us and onto those around us. These are the signals picked up through our words and actions that undermine our ability to investigate and compromise the success of our investigations.

In Part One, we’ll get acquainted with the blindspots — the self-defeating intuitions buried right under our noses (and our stars).  I believe that researchers and consultants have a special relationship with blindspots. It’s us agents of knowledge who need to test the limits of our own self-awareness. It’s at the root of our reputations and effectiveness. Only through a growing and continual pulse-taking of our unintended selves can we see our investigations through to the promise of resolution, justice, and a greater understanding of past events by the future histories we’re called on to inform.

On the Merits

Professions all have rites of passage. From passing the bar, to the CPA exam, to the laminated medical license in the exam room, there are a myriad of milestones and certifications to validate the quality of service delivered by a certified professional. There is no such credentialing for professional investigators. Our work must stand in place of any formal degree or accreditation process. It must stand on its own merits:

        • Doubt on the investigation’s sources and methods
        • Suspicion on the investigator’s motives for conducting it

There is one self-imposed quality check at the disposal of the investigator. The probing for one’s reflexive judgments or blindspots is the researcher’s equivalent to “Doctor, heal thyself.” More than one’s personal loyalties or internal biases, blindspots are the shadow elements that cast…

It’s not a passing coincidence that these two criteria are non-negotiable. They are the deal-breakers for producing credible recommendations drawn from sound research: The two gold standards from which hinge the independent judgment of the investigator.

Can You Look Bad Breath in the Face?

We are rarely the first to notice our own unadorned scents and odors. All but the closest friends and family are loath to let us in on this most universal of blindspots.  This private humbling packs some additional positive takeaways besides the need for breath mints. That’s when we exercise our sniffers as a form of entertainment.

There’s nothing escapist or recreational about getting closer to our own blindspots. Yet removing our own self-serving natures is essential for confronting our own limitations in:

A. Imagination: What’s being talked about in the discussions I’m excluded from? What’s my capacity to write a gossip column: (1) about me, and (2) without access to primary sources?

B. Perspective-taking: How am I being engaged in ways that bring optimal benefit to the other parties? Am I an emissary, broker, pawn, or stooge?

C. Wish-fulfillment: Where am I missing the subtext or nonverbal signals that deny or pushback on what I believe to be reasonable, deserved, or warranted? Can I remove my sense of how things should go from how they actually went?

All three play starring roles in the writing and production of plot twists we never see coming but the audience can sense from a mile away. Call it an overestimation of our talents. Overconfidence in our powers to influence. A tendency to get in our own way — even when walking a straight line. There’s no warm welcomes, smooth landings, or YouTube replays.

How else to explain our insatiable appetite for non-fictional crime stories? Do we believe the characters? Does it seem more or less likely that the well-reported narrative actually went down in the manner depicted in the Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon series? More times than not, it comes down to the frailties — to that realm of human weakness also known as a surplus of pride, a lack of self-awareness, and the shock ending that leads to the tragic fall of our antagonist. Why? A black hole of blindspots, that’s why.

There is, however, a deeper appreciation for the humility needed to endure and learn from the muted glare of blindspots. That living classroom lesson is easily transported to our role as researchers — a role that calls out for self-control, attentive listening, and not playing a starring role in our own insular narratives. These aren’t just codes of conduct and decorum. They are the very ambitions for truly excellent investigators to build on.

(Keep on Playing Those) War Games

While many of our own biases are exposed in our politics and expressed behaviors, blindspots land below the surface. They are the unknown-knowns. Their arrival time is also unknown and their blindsided landing zone is of little solace to the methodical and well-prepped. Well-resourced organizations have as much to protect as they have to imagine about the agents of surprise and disruption.

Some dedicate entire control centers and war rooms just to role play emergency attacks or adverse events that could expose a closely-held secret or compromise a key competitive advantage. These simulations are run in the name of risk management. Really what the participants are trying to do is anticipate the improbable harm that comes to organizations without the capacity to imagine these catastrophic off-the-radar scenarios.

Most war room maneuvers never live out beyond the darkest fantasies of their executioners. A few become false alarms. Some are legitimate enough to impose new fire drills or precautions needed to keep a lid on the potential dangers. All of them change the thinking of the risk professionals, competitive intelligence managers, and top executives who run through these paces. They improve their perspective-taking.

These exercises force them to look at the world from the outside and contentious views of those with much to gain from disrupting that world. We might not be stirred by the altruistic path of empathy when walking in the shoes of an enemy or adversary. But it is a critical to our own safety and preservation in conflicting, often hostile conditions that we can see them as an us. When we objectify our own positions we can better understand, relate to, and ultimately address those who wake each morning with the incentive to find and exploit our blindspots.

In our next installment, we’ll explore the more personal level of coming to terms with our blindspots: What that looks like in the context of “business as usual.” How we can take our own shortcomings on-board in order to raise our game as researchers. In our cases, this means…

          • Speaking with greater presence about events we didn’t attend,
          • Delegating to collaborators whose strengths include sparing us the investigative roles we’re not best suited to perform, and
          • Developing empathy for persons of interest who we may share little more than a unique assortment of blindspots.

Keeping Your Nose Clean (Part Two): Calling Out the Disinformers

(c) www.power3point0.org

In our last dispatch: BS Detection in a World of Fake News and Real Threats. Defining the fundamental differences and mutual dependencies between misinformation and disinformation in a complex world flooded with sweeping assertions and unproven claims.

So how do we identify these forms of coercion? So much of our public space is occupied by the intention of persuaders to influence our behavior that we’re likelier to notice the absence of manipulation in our digital interactions than neutral actors whose only impartial goal is to put their information before us.

You know you’re on the receiving end of a disinformation campaign when at least 3 of the following conditions are met:

Passive Voice:  Using the passive voice to validate a  premise or conclusion defies  plausible explanation, i.e. "it's been  said" … "people are saying" …  "we're hearing more and more", etc.  
Implicit Agreements: Messengers bury the unstated agendas of their sponsors and underwriters. 
Inconvenient Complications: They're glossed over when they don't match, confirm, and ultimately undermine the campaign goal. 
Battle-ready Posturing: Building resistance is the point -- not the actual conflict in question. 
Reflexive Responses: Ignoring a late-breaking event with narrative-altering potential. 
Gaslighting: Framing  an adversary with the very accusation that accounts for the disinformer's own misdeeds, rogue behavior, and punitive actions.
Time Warps: Confusing the ordering of events separates fact patterns from the arguments they're supporting.  
Self-confirming Statements: "I feel. Therefore I'm right." 
Circular Reasoning: This is the echo chamber of ad nauseum talking points. 
Under the Radar: What's  not only explicit or implied but escaping the notice of the messenger  completely, a.k.a. their blindspots. The wider the unawareness, the more  likely we are under a disinformation attack.
(c) Martin Shovel

Reclaiming Our Agency as Investigators

So how de we keep our bearings in this cloudiest of landscapes? How do we regain our footing when the stampeding crowds are oblivious to detachment and perspective-taking?

Self-awareness: Our first line of defense against a muddle of mis- and dis- is to recognize our own predilections and assumptions. Only by recognizing our personal biases and instincts can we assess our own blind spots. Where are we most persuadable by misleading actors? Where do we let our guards down? When can we be most easily played?

The middle ground: Once we move past the polar bear clinging to the melting glaciers, we need to cast outward to the motivations of the message sender. Is it merely self-interest that places us in the line of their motivational fire? Have they gone the extra step to be transparent: “don’t take my word…” or conversational, especially if the motivation is of mutual concern.

On one side of the fence, accusers tend to inflate actual damages. On the other, deniers tend to under-estimate the unintended consequences of their public statements. Investigators should factor these confirmation biases into their own findings.

Smell test: Finally, we need to calibrate our BS detector. What’s the end game here? How complete is their full disclosure. Are they running past some loose-ends still a long way from resolution?  How do you know your sniffer is working?

  1. Always brake for integrity. Someone share a compromising piece of info? At whose expense? Clear your spyglass and take in an extra breath of empirical deliberation if it “costs” the provider something in the process.
  2. Don’t let a skeptical nature dismiss competing explanations. Persons of good faith may differ but an understanding of those differences demands this.
  3. Resist the rush to judgement. We’ve all been burned. We’ve got our suspicions. But they can be harbored under the protection of your better judgement while keeping an open mind to opposable sets of facts, alternative interpretations, and unshared experiences.

There are other fog-clearing practices to clarify the incoming mis and determine the unstated intentions buried in the dis. The hard part is absorbing the force of the disinformer’s aggression. Surprise and haste are two calculations made by disinformation campaigners to engage our visceral impulses.

We need to rise above the insistence to react at the provocation before us. This is not an unresolved issue up for debate. This is a willful act to influence the persuadable and shutdown the opposition.

In such matters the independent voice falls outside of either camp. We need to consume the message without absorbing its uncritical acceptance of its claims on our own judgments.  Only then can we tell what’s worthy of attention from the falsehoods planted to distract our focus. Our own goals are not to evolve into impartial fact-checkers but of independent investigators, swayable by evidence.  Only when we come to know the motives of the disinformer can we petition for our own interests.

Keeping Your Nose Clean So Your Sniffer Can Tell When Things Don’t Smell Right

Part One: BS Detection in a World of Fake News and Real Threats.

Dissing the Missing

We were once inundated with information overload. These days an information fog shadows us as persistently as the dragnet of personal data collection. Its density thickens with a sprinkling of the toxic twin-headed vapor trails of mis- and dis-information. These droplets rain down on us from clouds of doubt that fall on cynical brains. Conditions for a mis- and dis- cloud burst are rife for conflicts. In the gloom of low visibility, they descend with no clear path to resolution and “no good options” for getting there.

Why, you say, do I need the twins? I’m plenty confused and doubtful in the density of my own fog. I’m already being pelted with incoming mis. Now you’re seeding the clouds with additional dis? Facts and opinions are now going bump in broadest daylight. Conspiracies are flourishing, egged on by persuasion-filtered innuendo. The evidence is sketchy. Context is disappearing, and now at the tail of the 2010s, we’ve truly lost our way. Took no effort at all!

Another snoop can’t retrace our own footsteps. But I do have some suggestions about how you can get yourself back on track — become your own service animal in the quest for an empirical truth. But first, what of the twins? How did they grow into this hydra-headed two-faced scrambler of once common understandings and shared values? Can they metastasize into three heads? Egads, let’s look at that one with our eyes drawn away from direct exposure.

First, let’s step back over the bridge to the land of national media networks held together with printing presses and TV antennas. There’s a dot on that distant landscape called fringe media and it’s a xeroxed pamphlet or poster fastened by a dangling staple or pushpin. The low rent district has some exclusive members. And no one’s in a hurry to join the club.

Mis and dis are no strangers to conspiracists, bloviators, and persuasion seekers, heels firmly dug in. In fact, they have a working arrangement of mutual benefit. Think of them as a tag team. But there’s no carrot or stick here. We’re not talking good/bad cop interrogations.

Misinformation is a side-show. A distraction. Tall tales and urban legends. Misinformation scrambles the signal, amplifies the flog, sows the initial seeds of doubt. If there is any collusion it’s that a blob of misinformation is disorienting. Two blobs can throw us into a state of confusion. Three blobs and we’re flying blind.

Up the Frustration Vent

Enter the clarity and purpose of deliberately misleading information. And don’t discount certainty. In the hands of true believer it may be a leap for some. But in the hands of the disinformer, it’s an intoxicant, providing an outlet for those festering anxieties and uncertainties induced by a thick trail of mis. Disinformation provides the escape valve:

      • Grab your pitchforks!
      • Head for the exits!

A successful disinformation campaign not only clears the air but fans the grievance flames so that their frustrations are channeled towards the object of their hostilities. Often, they come with a lesson or instruction to act on the proof offered by the disinformer. In the case of social media, actors like Russia’s Internet Research Agency posed as like-minded American activists. The goal was for hostile agents like IRA to amplify already polarizing conflicts. Each schism a brand-ready theme for opening a new disinformation campaign front.

Disinformation is the main act, planting those seeds deep enough so that the earlier misinforming falsehood is sprouting up as a clearly absorbed conclusion. One in which recipients may be encouraged to take sides but will just as likely desensitize the un-inflamed:

This is a political food fight. Both sides are talking over each other and no one’s speaking to me.

In our next dispatch:

You’ve Been Served

How to gain the upper-hand on hoaxes, smoke screens, and information intended to put us on the defensive