Social Media Gives a Mob a “Brain” That Speeds its Impulsive Actions

In my air ambulance profession, I speak to 20 people per day who are in the midst of crisis. Perhaps their spouse is dying of cancer and they are urgently seeking treatment. Perhaps their parent has suffered a stroke and they want to return them home. In most cases, there is a side story to the tragedy that involves the family’s history. I see it playing out in most transports.

Three stereotypical daughters deal with their family crisis from different perspectives. One daughter is the executor to the will and diligently works to balance the medical needs of the patient with the needs of the surviving spouse’s financial well being. Another daughter wants to bring mom and dad home so that she can return all the love they provided her. Yet another daughter is estranged from the family and is cynical about spending anything that would lessen the value of her future estate.

The historical interactions of the family up to the crisis point can lead to a spectrum of outcomes, from loving family nurturing, to pragmatic situational ethics, even to cold calculations. Similarly to a family dealing with a medical transport crisis, the history of how each community has met its social needs prior to its crisis influences the reactions of factions in the community during the crisis and affects the potential outcomes of the crisis itself.

Americans continue to be inspired by the stories of communities coming together during great tragedies, reaching out to help each other. We are comforted that most people do not seek to prey on victims but to comfort their neighbors. People that join our industry connect with these principles of servitude. However, we also witness in our daily media individuals who have lashed out because of feelings of desperation, and we see the efforts of law enforcement to contain those that opportunistically prey on others.

Massive demonstrations such as those on the mall in Washington can be conducted peacefully and can affect national dialogue. However, in the face of emotional catalysts like a police shooting or a even significant piece of social legislation such as austerity measures, demonstrations can impulsively well up. In the midst of demonstrations, citizens with differing histories, some having felt hopelessly oppressed by their community, can turn to mobbery as an expression and an outlet for their fears and angers.

Looting has a core element of anger for some as well. We saw in New Orleans, in a city with a history of socioeconomic disaffected communities, that even when political actions miscommunicated and mishandled emergency response, most victims continued to do what they could to help rescue their families and neighbors. However, the reaction of many erupted into survivalist looting for food and water. Others righteously rationalized their opportunistic looting for electronics. Some even reacted by violently attacking would be rescuers and by shooting at rescue helicopters and boats.

A new wave of mobbery and looting has already been demonstrated in multiple cities in America including Milwaukee and now Philadelphia, its mayor reacting by implementing citywide curfews. Social media has added the element of a collective mob brain. It caught England off guard with its quick execution and retreat of hundreds of participants. Its evolution is a “logical” next step for electronically assisted, virtually assimilated, pseudo gang communication.

Just as social media brought thousands of young people together to demonstrate in North Africa who before sat in isolation without a collective voice, it can now bring hundreds of our youth together who beforehand sat in quiet desperation of their socioeconomically diminished futures. A proactive engaging for better youth outlets and of preparing for spontaneous social media driven violent reactions is now warranted based on worldwide trends.

Trump will Most Likely Feed His Detractors Some Political Slop

While I am not sure Trump would make a great president, I have enjoyed his forthrightness and his deliberate speech. He is, however, pandering to the masses when he says things like go in and take the oil, that’s what empires do, and when he plays up the Obama birther controversy.

However, the politics with which he was invited to the correspondents’ dinner just to be made the object of bitter ridicule may prove to be painful to those who so successfully plotted. As they say, revenge is best served cold, and Trump has chillers hidden in one of his big towers just so that he can store up the enormous cold revenge necessary to play with the big boys in these high stake games.

I enjoy the special brand of joke politics played at these dinners and have watched with slight attention and amusement. This year, both Seth and the president crossed a line in attempting (and probably succeeding) in embarrassing Trump.

Trump cannot cattle call, as is his usual retort, against these gentlemen for picking on him in a roast that is intended to poke fun at Washington politics. By responding publicly to the President’s jokes, or even more so to Seth Myers’, Trump would look petty and foolish.

No, he has to wait,… and plot,… and steam, …and find the perfect, cold plate of political slop to feed the president, and to impact a seemingly disconnected harm to Seth’s career many months from now.

My Independent Observation……

The Periodic War Between Carbon and Silicon has Begun

What an abundant element this carbon is and yet what trouble it presents the world. So many deaths have occurred trying to control it. Prior to the industrial era, kings compiled great armies, sometimes exceeding a million men, who thrust swords and spears supported by thousands of slaves and serfs drawing up carbon from the earth in foodstuffs to supply these fighting masses with the energy needed to control the earth’s wealth.

With the industrial revolution, the ready supply of liquid carbon could easily be transformed by machines to produce goods that used to require the energy of thousands of men. Industrialists could now produce great wealth without logistical and political control of millions of people. Carbon concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few “robber barons” who lacked political structure but who learned how to harness this plentiful element. They used their newfound wealth to transform and influence the new politics of the 20th century.

The greatest multinational corporations of the early 20th century, the oil conglomerates, were the first and only to be tried for treason against the United States directly after WWII. When it was found that the American federal government was complicit in their treason, the trials ended quietly, forever establishing carbon’s place as the greatest influencer of industrialized national politics throughout the 20th and early 21st century.

Now, the world is attempting to stand up against carbon’s combustion consequences as scientists finalize their debate of its cataclysmic environmental destruction effects. Thankfully prior to the industrial age, the earth was able to recapture the carbon used by man faster than he could combust it. However, since the early 1900′s, industries and transportation have accelerated combustion, and disasters have been escalating both in size and number in direct correlation to carbon’s excess formation in our upper atmosphere.

While governments continue to debate its impact on our environment, their concerns will be of little consequence to its continued use. Because great concentration of wealth requires great emission of CO2, and because consolidation of the world’s wealth is still in its infancy, the political and business powerful will continue to accelerate carbon combustion to amass wealth, even exacerbating environmental consequences by transferring production assets miles and oceans away from the ultimate consumers through globalization.

The acceleration of carbon emissions into our atmosphere has not only rapidly transformed world politics, a majority of scientists claim it has rapidly transformed the environment, leaving the world little time to compensate, e.g. melting polar ice caps. I suggest that it has deteriorated the earth’s living organisms just as rapidly because Darwinism cannot compete with its detrimental effects.

The human body consumes carbon to live and the brain has a set point that tells us to exhale when carbon reaches its upper limits in our blood stream. However, since the tobacco industry’s escalation of carbon into the lungs quarter of the world’s population, now a quarter of all deaths in the world occur as our body’s carbon exhaling mechanism fails because of smoking and we slowly suffocate to death through the ravages of COPD brought on through years of inhaling carbon.

We know that man’s internal set point for carbon in the bloodstream has been constant for millions of years but so has his lower set point. On a macro level it appears that higher atmospheric CO2 is causing global melting. On a micro level, since environmental CO2 has edged to a slightly higher concentration in the air we breathe, how are our Darwinian body systems compensating?

Whether or not carbon combustion is destroying our ecosystem or our biological compensation, this element carbon in its liquid form will be the engine of mass transfers of wealth and world destabilization for years to come. The international banking system will continue to support capital flow in pursuit of carbon transfers. And America’s quantitative easing II has only helped to clear a temporary but sizable log jam in the carbon transfer system, while destabilizing America’s future.

The common man, unorganized against the concentrated power of carbon, lost his voice. Governments have been transformed to a carbon base. While impossible for the masses to fight fire element with fire element, another element on the periodic table has risen up in defense. As seen in recent North African demonstrations and less recently in the American Tea Party movement, the common man has begun to rally around the element, silicon.

Only second in prevalence to oxygen, silicon is the 21st century answer to carbon, connecting a diverse human race in a social network, more energy rich than its carbon based industrialized political nemesis. From the garages of Silicon Valley, the silicon chip has risen on an accelerated path of discovery and development to harness the ideas of man and to create libraries of digital thought that each year promises to double our collective recorded knowledge. Based upon this sea of infinite intellectual capacity, the common man has learned to communicate through fiber highways in such a way as to connect the very synapses of millions, nay billions of individual brains into a virtual organic computer focused on the survival of mankind.

In fact, the word computer has become obsolete, as silicon has enabled this virtual organic mass to connect through the internet’s social gateways to become an analyzer, a discerner, a communicator, a wisdom generator, an emotional synthesizer, a political organizer, a voice harmonizer, unifier and amplifier. The word computer has, in fact, only been a fuzzifying place holder as mankind is only now rallying the true potential of this siliconic instrument.

The common man has now emerged as a metamorphosed political force that can no longer be contained by traditional carbon party constraints. Individual social media democrats have slid around conventional party politics like sand through a sieve to rally through non-party power dynamics like the American tea “party” and mass North African freedom rallies to demand and garner political change. Not to be outdone, carbon is racing to concentrate further through MNC networks to cement its worldwide dominance on the periodical table. The race between carbon and silicon is being played out as we speak, and individuals around the planet are taking sides in this great battle. My bet is for silicon to edge out carbon in years to come.

While The U.S. Invented the Internet; Other Countries Will Use It to Reinvent Themselves

by Al Logiodice

February 15, 2011

I’ve been working in internet-related businesses for more than a decade, and mostly in e-commerce. When we started out, people thought that ecommerce was going to put Walmart out of business. But the real transformative power of the internet isn’t going to be in commerce; it’s going to be in social interaction. To put it bluntly, the internet will be the most important tool that democracy and self-determination has ever found.

Back in the 1930s we did have some social upheaval, and the US was at some risk of becoming socialist. But the primary communication medium of that day (radio) saved democracy in the US. It was also a spoke-and-hub style of communication…one speaker, many listeners. Now the internet allows us (worldwide) the ability to have true peer-to-peer conversation; everyone can talk with anyone.

I think that peer-to-peer conversation (facebook, twitter, etc.) was the turbocharger that Egypt needed to make the changes that they made. Something similar is happening in Bahrain, and probably soon in Saudi Arabia.

In those countries people will figure out how to use the internet as the means to their self-determination. They have no roadmap, no plethora of talking heads like we do, so they can invent something that actually works as they go along. It seems that the older generation use these new media as fluidly as the youth.

And they may invent a self-determination that improves on ours, while we wallow in our old hybrid model; we’re partly stuck in our old world of talking heads telling us what to think. Imagine telling your grandfather that he should be Twittering (“I’ll slappa you face!”). We’re still stuck listening to Beck and Coulter and Maddow and others, telling us what to think, where to look, what’s important, etc., rather than listening to each other, exchanging ideas, and learning from each other. 

While the US may have invented the internet, other countries are going to use the internet to re-invent themselves. The internet is well on it’s way to revolutionizing democracy, but maybe just not ours. We’ll be stuck in our own hole for a long time, while the Egypts, Bahrains, Irans, and maybe even Chinas use the web to come up with entirely new models of governance and society.

In addition to his experience as an E-commerce manager; designing, developing, and operating B2C and B2B websites, contributing to organizational development, corporate strategy, program/project management, Mr. Logiodice is a regular contributer to the White House Group on Linkedin.

Egypt is a Bellwether of America’s Social Media Democracy

Whether a flaw or a design of our financial democracy, it has difficulty breathing under the weight of powerful special interests.  The undue influence of our lobbying community may become inconsequential for it seems that we are entering the age of the social media democracy. Societal shifts in Europe, Asia and the Middle East are crying out to political structures throughout the world that they will resist submission to pre-social media norms. We have witnessed masses overthrow governments in Tunisia and Egypt, throngs defend their dwindling entitlements in Europe, and millions vote down political movements in the United States as the world grasps social media to close the gap between their knowlege of the world and their inability to participate in it.

An entire generation is comfortably connected like you and I here, traveling together down a social trajectory, driven by their access to knowledge and their lack of freedom to monetize it.  Those with the greatest information-wealth disparities, countries like Egypt, are further down the path toward collective action but all countries, including America, are reacting to this new social age.

Egypt added dimension to a global phenomenon that Obama adroitly tapped in his rise to power, and that emboldens the the American Tea Party beyond a gross misreading of the American politically elite. Obama’s electorate and the Tea Party ground swell are just two previous faces joining Egypt’s along the same social media democracy trajectory.

With Obama and the Tea Party as its benefactors, different faces of the American middle quickly reversed election courses in 2008 and 2010 as they defended their dwindling turf from the edges. First stunned Republicans and now dumbfounded Democrats are both recoiling from the speed at which America is marching to its own Tahrir Square.

Every society has its wealth generating workhorses and benefactors. During Mubarak’s 30 years of emergency rule, America’s overwhelming workforce was its baby boom generation. American wealthy and MNCs accumulated wealth from their purchases and investments. State and local governments swelled in the wake of their taxes. The Fed printed money to cover their trade deficits. Generations immediately following the baby boomers bowed to their immovable force and waited for their retirements to advance to positions of power.

But Gen Yers, who adapted first to this new social media, gathered in cyberspace to assess the effect of baby boomers on their fate. This generation, same age as the Egyptians who would rise up three years later, saw the unreachable financial landscape they would inherit and the dysfunctional institutions through which they would support the baby boomers’ retirement years. Gen Yers rose up and tweeted for change.

Their tweet revolution did not stop the inevitable collapse. As more baby boomers joined the ranks of the retired, the bubble engine was taken out of the economy, leaving in its wake collapsed institutions and stunned governments unwilling to downsize. As America caught the severe cold of the Great Recession, much of the world including Egypt caught an economic flu, exacerbating Egypt’s hopelessness, 50% who are under 24 years of age.

As the recession pressed on, our Tea Party, mostly middle class Americans, watched in dismay as our federal government continued its path toward universal healthcare while more houses were lost than at any time since the Great Depression, and the ranks of the unemployed escalated. In two short years, their movement turned down the power of the ruling party. Less than a half year later, the social media revolution of Egypt changed control of its ruling class.

With smart phones and Facebook accelerating through their business cycles, these two examples have proven to be low cost penetrants through the defenses of both America’s financial democracy and Egypt’s dictatorship. Social media tipped the power of pivotal changes in favor of grass roots, disorganized citizenry. Knowing its power to transform civilizations, financial houses will attempt to harness and manipulate its control of the electorate (It has been much easier to financially manage 535 in Congress).

 If they are unsuccessful at coaxing the horse back into the barn, the cooling force of the Senate in American politics may not be able to compete with the speed of wireless media. The result could be an overheating of our electorate to tip America in the wrong direction of history. Our youth are more educated perhaps than the Egyptian youth yearning for their freedoms. May God help the Egyptians’ newfound instrument of change.

 Where will social media take our Gen Yers? Will they align with politicians that say we can continue to ignore the debt and that they too can claim their piece of the borrowed pie, or will they educate themselves and collectively throw their support to a purveyor of healthy prescriptions for our time?