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

Online Forever

I’ve been online forever, starting in 1987. That sounds about as topical as sharing an elevator with the Barry Manilow catalog.

Such qualifiers unmask my digital immigrant status. I drag my immigration status all over a digital footprint that thrives on habitual, uncritical behavior. Imagine we were aware of our virtual surroundings. It’s graspable those of us raised on a device called “TV” that we would control our involvement with screens called devices —  sort of a virtual open house meet and greet with our hosts.  And while that invitation never arrived, it didn’t change the very different expectations baby boomers harbor in our experience of the web. Particularly to the virtual world that existed before it.

A pre-internet intro to online means a very different take on a virtual world as a gateway to knowledge — and not the destination itself. We came with an agenda that prevented us from logging off, without addressing each of the items in it:

1. “What’s the 1991 forecast for baby food? … How much of that is fed to house pets?”

2. “Who are the leading suppliers of corrugated cardboard?”

3. “Where should ecotourism operators advertise to jet-setters?”

A manufacturer of business supplies wanted to know the history of the loose‐leaf notebook. A food company needed a list of ranking experts on potato chips. Still another company was interested in the consumption trend of Bloody Marys. A foreign concern, for some reason, was curious where shepherd’s crooks could be found and how much they went for.

These are examples of the commerce pulses an information broker might handle at a research consulting firm called Find/SVP circa post Internet pre web. Each broker was a pressure-tested account holder of a DIALOG, LEXIS/LEXIS or Dow Jones News Retrieval password. We entered these networks with already known metadata patterns and predetermined classifiers, READ: a research plan.

Sometimes, if we were truly on our games, we’d have the questions queued in our command lines before we even logged in. The answers from the database would land in our pre-configured floppies and the response was complete. The client had what they came for. 

Find/SVP had all those answers. The young company, which occupies sprawling, modern offices at Fifth Avenue and 43d Street, has been trail breaker in what is shaping up as a bustling information industry. Instead of putting together their own research centers (or straining to answer really sticky questions), other companies can call Find and get whatever they need. It has 50 employees; 30 of them do nothing but rummage for answers.*

A generation plus later, time online is too cheap to monitor. It’s also plenty costly for the search engine customers who want us to loiter on their sites, catch them on Instagram, and internalize their messages. The only online players, it seems, with a course of action are the platforms that monetize our unguarded online moments. But that begs the point: We still need answers from search engines. We still need our personal and professional intentions translated by a synthetic programming logic and served back to us in digestible chunks on a welcoming interface.

As long as our lives are lived in what we nostalgically call “the real world,” the internet will remain a medium for research. And we take our more telling search results offline so we can interpret motives, weigh evidence, and come to our own conclusions as investigators. Yes, our search patterns are now treated as influenceable streams of habit-forming time sucks. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless to resist the filter bubbles, affinity bias, and other “black box” efforts by the digital giants to qualify and package us as targets for insatiable marketers.

Searching Out Loud is a method for restoring intentionality to interactions between researchers and search engines. Even more broadly, how to revive a long dormant two way conversation between machines and our true learning selves — the part of our creative impulses that are biased towards curiosity and empiricism — the willingness to step back from our own assumptions and experience to consider wider perspectives, competing explanations, and new evidence gathered in light of what we can uncover online and what we can’t.

* Answering QuestionsBusiness Is Asking, By N. R. Kleinfield, The New York Times, October 6, 1977