New post HIDDEN COSTS

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The Moonrose

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Check out how the Three Things Project Works

The Three Things Project

The task at hand   

Of course we like to be brief.

The anagram TL:DR has leaked into our common speaking practice so much so that I’m grateful anyone reads what I’m saying. It’s so bad that I’ve had people reject complex arguments I have tried to express because the logic was too long, so really not worth his time.

We’ve also reached the point where “fake news” has become the shield and sword in every debate, where people solidly assert all sorts of facts are no longer facts. Just check climate change, the safety of vaccinations, Flat Earth conventions, Bush’s justifications for the Gulf War and invasion of Iraq, Trump’s taxes, or Clinton’s e mails to see the most hysterical ideas held up as truth.

There’s many many factors that came to bring us here. I think the whole model of commercial news is to blame. When you tell people stories about the world, just so you can shift their focus from the world to which floor wax is better, or cram your local news with stories about psychic pets, just so you can keep your viewership connected and ad revenue up, you have to expect the truth to suffer.

In fact here is the indictment aimed at the news industry, you have abused our attention and now you and the rest of us are going to pay. You acted badly, and said anything to keep our attention. Now we refuse to pay attention to sirens and any amount of flashing lights. Now a master manipulator sits in the White House and is using your abuses and crimes as license to get away with kleptocracy to a legendary level. The bigness of his huge bigness is huge.

The next presidential player will be eager to take up the charge for their tax money sucking vampire lords and do the same, because no one sets aside powers once they have them; they never do. Until we get torches and pitchforks, nothing will change. So enjoy candy crush or whatever has occupied your hands and heads at the time.

If you don’t think we have a problem, ask yourself, why does every presidential election always reduce itself to gay/women’s rights, abortion, racism, and the second amendment? The ruling president never works with those issues. The rest of congress and all authorities spend precious little time on those issues. Yet we talk about them as if there was nothing else to talk about, in tones grave and urgent. You know it, it’s all bullshit.

I stopped watching news, hoping that being uninformed was better than being misinformed. If you feel all butt-hurt and indicted by this, you’re not listening. Of course who could blame you? I’ve taken over 300 words just to point out the problem.

It turns out there’s no victory in dropping my news addiction. It made me feel connected with the world. It helped me be smug thinking I know things. What I found is that the voices of the world, your voice, any voice, is something I crave. Talk to me. Be earnest.

The psychologist Tom Lundgren tried to measure how much we know, adding facts we knew, forgot, replaced, edited, and finally discarded in favor of new things over a lifetime. It turns out we know about a gig of stuff. As you know even that figure is strangely small if you think in terms of video, but in terms of books and spoken words, that’s can be sizable. What it comes down to is that we use each other as our external hard drive and need a consensus to actually call knowledge something worth knowing.

I need you.

In this sense I love you. You help me know things. I crave that. I found that after dropping all news, I was incredibly lonely and depressed. I live in New Mexico, USA, and everything here is remote. But it’s all less remote if I have you and this thin internet connection.

So as a lark, I asked a number of friends to tell me three things. There were precious few limitations. I was hoping they might keep those statements to a single declarative statement. Some did Some told me that their dog died, In fact the sheer number of statements about dogs and cats took up about half the first serving of statements.

Some people were confused and even insisted they didn’t know three things. They were somehow unqualified to say they know anything unless some superior told them it was ok, or they had a specific degree from an Accredited University (tm).

On that first day I asked for Three Things, I learned we have five different kinds of white blood cells, the German word for “strength” is feminine in gender, and one man in London woke up horny and was hoping someday he could do that with someone there to help. Strangely, I find that just as informative as knowing that congress is debating removing healthcare from everyone, because that would be nice, right? (#sarcasm, if you couldn’t tell.)

I realize the only way we can cross these artificial lines of conflict that our conversation managers of the world have invented, is to conduct this conversation ourselves and take it out of the hands of our masters. Read what other people say. React and start the conversation about it at home and around.

I implore you, right now, tell me three things.

Tell me three things please! Do it now and do it again tomorrow. If you think of it, keep it going. I’ll collect them and assemble them in my blog and make sure you get credit if you like. I will never ever argue the truth of what you’re saying, and this is not about that argument. Don’t be a troll and try to break this tool. I get to ignore you if you do. We need this discussion. Let’s get started.