Starlings vs The System
The System slowed down and stopped and struggled to restart enough to bring all its beauty and all its ugliness out in high relief.
The way our deepest attitudes are shaped at scale has never been more clear. The messages that are everywhere originate from a dwindling few sources, all with the intention of maintaining existing power relations. Creating fear, creating division, creating a sense of why bother? — all time-tested methods of population management.
Being told in every way that our primary need and value is simply to consume also works very well for the companies who sell us products to make us feel better, as Julio Vincent Gambuto put it when he wrote Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting back in April, 2020. Over 30 million people read it, so presumably lots of us are completely aware that the stories we are told about ourselves through the channels we willingly inject into our mental models are what shape our behavior. Without really solving our problems.
Master Messaging Control loosened up in the early days of social media. The gatekeeper approach failed to stop unauthorized information and perspectives when everyone had a bigger megaphone for a while. Of course, as we are now told, all that freedom was terribly destructive. New forms of monitoring and restriction have been put in place to protect us from ourselves. That’s what we are told, even as it is common knowledge that it was the owners of massive social media networks who were terribly destructive by targeting our vulnerabilities to increase their own wealth.
Alternative narratives will not be distributed through mass media platforms controlled by corporations driven by shareholder value, whether those platforms are considered mainstream media or social media.
All that’s left is personal networks.
I am by definition a Nano Influencer.
Celebrities became irrelevant as their false claims and fake caring became too obvious and too cringeworthy. Then, Influencers, supposedly normal people who just happen to have a couple hundred thousand Friends, became the best way to tell personal stories that sell products. Unfortunately, the darn Influencers began thinking of themselves as Celebrities, which has inevitably led to their decline.
Long live the Nano Influencer! Followers in the 1,000–5,000 range — that’s me.
Except My Plan is about telling different stories that won’t help anyone sell anything. Stories about people who aren’t just consumers, where buying products doesn’t relieve our suffering and helping others does.
For VR stories, there’s Medium, where I have Followers and receive Views. Getting more of either makes me feel good. That’s an attachment and it causes me suffering too. Less now, since learning in VR, building worlds, connecting with people not on auto-pilot, and writing about it has become what I do.
I started using Sub-Stack for everything else when Matt Taibbi moved there and because Followers on a platform want what they followed me for, which is VR. So,two channels for nano-influencing, topical and personal. Acting on my own this way, I feel part of something larger.
Not larger, like, a movement. More like a flock. A flock of ideas.
A murmuration of starlings moves in astonishing ways with no leader and no apparent coordination. The long history of understanding how flocks move can be summarized as ‘be mindfully focused locally while constantly monitoring the big picture.’
Starting with Wayne Potts’ breakthrough, “Chorus Line Hypothesis,’ published in Nature, May, 1984, it is now well-established that flocking birds do not simply respond to cues from their next door neighbor. They anticipate change and time their move to be part of it. But how?
In March, 2009, Audubon Magazine published research based on high speed motion capture and analysis that quantified the precise number of nearby fellow-travelers individual European Starlings were tracking and responding to — about six or seven. It matters, because only noticing cues that close does not provide sufficient reaction time to join the propagating wave front. Something else must be involved.
A 2014 PNAS article, Role of projection in the control of bird flocks, isn’t The Answer, but it shows how the answer has to function, whether it’s fish or birds or insect swarms. The researchers show that flocking birds also have a coarse-grained global view of the flock as a whole, not just the six or seven neighbors. Perceptions of dark and light correspond to flock density, which has an optimal state referred to as marginal opacity, or:
“the maximum density at which a typical individual still can see out of the flock in many directions.”
Marginal opacity provides just enough room to move for each individual but a tight enough pack to provide coherence.
The vector that each member travels in order to restore or maintain marginal opacity for the flock is constantly computed, based only on darkness and lightness in different sections of their view. Every starling’s unique projected image of the whole is the basis for every individual on-going adjustment. The nearby feedback from the six or seven neighbors fine tunes the big picture directions.
No such integrated global-local system has been described in any research I am aware of. It just seems obvious. Different research findings about the same questions of flock coordination show different parts of The Answer.
As a metaphor, the global-local model perfectly describes how I see my nano-influencer role as a part of something larger. The flock of ideas I feel part of is a de-centralized, guerilla flock. If there is a leader in the effort to provide a counter narrative to fear, divisiveness and consumption, it is not obvious who it is.
Eckhart Tolle is frequently listed as the most influential spiritual leader in the world and because he does not identify with any one religion, the only limiting factor is being seen as a spiritual leader in the first place. Many people simply will not tune in to that channel.
I do have my local set six or seven other writers who I track very closely. I am very open to their influence. Matt Taibbi is one of them. Long-time Ed Tech blogger Stephen Downes is another. Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn combine podcasting with e-news for SupChina and I look to them every day for cues.
The Flock as a whole is a cross-species mash-up that looks different to everyone and never stays the same. Coarse-grained views of Buddhist ideas soar and co-exist with Quantum Mechanics ideas, China ideas, AI ideas, and ideas about Media, Economics, Finance, and Power. Ideas about Mortality and Cancer have a strong and growing presence in the flock of ideas I’m traveling with.
I’m on my own, moving with an undefined flock that’s growing. Platform restrictions and the end of net neutrality are reactions to the rise of new narratives. Starlings aren’t consciously trying to change oppressive narratives. They’re just being starlings staying alive. That’s what I’m doing, except for the starling part, to strengthen an alternative. As the alternative attracts significant attention and becomes conspicuous, it is attacked.
Being attacked is what murmurations do best. They are designed to survive. The ones that didn’t keep up get picked off. I wonder how big the flock of ideas can get, how big it needs to be to create tipping points and paradigm shifts at scale.
I am not assuming I will know the answers to these questions since I am already semi-old. I doubt starlings even ask the questions but they’ve come up with some great approaches to individual degrees of freedom and flock membership. I’m following their lead to help live my life.