the [shrink] cooperative

for my of flag day photos, check out my flickr page.

From baekdal “Where is Everybody?” complete with a revolution by revolution breakdown of the evolution. highlight:

For the first time in our lives we were being exposed to more information than we could consume. In the age of newspapers we had to choose what we wanted to see. But in 2004 we had to choose what we didn’t want to see.

This had a devastating effect on the traditional forms of information. In the past, you could get people’s attention simply by making something. People wanted more choices, so you simply had to give them another choice. But in 2004 this changed. People started to have enough, and now you actually had to make something better. It was not enough that it was different.

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

Many thanks to Jonah Lehrer for the above, which builds rather nicely on my recent re-discovery of Crowds and Power, by Elias Canetti:

“The open crowd is the true crowd, the crowd abandoning itself freely to its natural urge for growth. An open crowd has no clear feeling or idea of the size it may attain; it does not depend on a known building which it has to fill; its size is not determined; it wants to grow indefinitely and what it needs for this is more and more people. in this naked state, the crowd is at its most conspicuous, but, because it always disintegrates, it seems something outside the ordinary course of life and so is never taken quite seriously. Men might have gone on disregarding it if the enormous increase of population in modern times, and the rapid growth of cities, had not more and more often given rise to it’s formation. ”

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

And, later, in a small chapter (as they all are in the book) on Rhythm:

“Man has always listened to the footsteps of other men; he has certainly paid more attention to them than to his own. Animals too have their familiar gait; their rhythms are often richer and more audible than those of men; hoofed animals flee in herds, like regiments of drummers. The knowledge of the animals by which he was surrounded, which threatened him and which he hunted, was man’s oldest knowledge. he learnt to know animals by the rhythm of their movement. The earliest writing he learnt to read was that of their tracks; it was a kind of rhythmic notation imprinted on the soft ground and, as he read it, he connected it with the sound of its formation. 

<snip>

They were always hungry and on the watch for game; and the more there was of it, the better for them. But they also wanted to be more themselves. Man’s feeling for his own increase was always strong and is certainly not to be understood only as his urge for self-propogation. Men wanted to be more, then and there; the large numbers of the her which they hunted belnded in their feelings with their own numbers which they wished to be large, and they expressed this in a specific state of communal excitement which i shall call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd.

The means of achieving this state was first of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied. Steps added to steps in quick succession conjure up a larger number of men than there are. The men do not move away but, dancing, remain on the same spot…..

<snip>

What they lack in numbers the dancers make up for in intensity; if they stamp harder, it sounds as if there are more of them. As long as they go on dancing, they exert an attraction on all in their neighborhood. Everyone within hearing joins them and remains with them. The natural thing would be fore new people to go on joining them for ever, but soon there are none left and the dancers have to conjure up increase out of their own limited numbers. they move as though there were more and more of them. Their excitement grows and reaches frenzy. 

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

I cannot recall how I came upon Elias Canetti and Crowds and Power. He wrote it in 1960. I cannot imagine not having read it, or have it on my shelf. In it, he catalogs, in a way that I do not think we do anymore, his own understanding of what a crowd is, the various forms it takes, how they behave,  and what it does to the individual.

Do we imagine crowds that same as we have in the past? I don’t think so. We imagine and talk about crowds seems to have shifted dramatically of late. I do not have an answer to the question that this post poses, but if there is a place to turn to begin, it’s this book. Read more…

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

Thanks to noah brier for this link to a clip from a UK game show based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. From noah:

The prisoner’s dilemma as explained by The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

In the traditional version of the game, the police have arrested two suspects and are interrogating them in separate rooms. Each can either confess, thereby implicating the other, or keep silent. No matter what the other suspect does, each can improve his own position by confessing. If the other confesses, then one had better do the same to avoid the especially harsh sentence that awaits a recalcitrant holdout. If the other keeps silent, then one can obtain the favorable treatment accorded a state’s witness by confessing.

 TV seems more free than ever to explore and challenge  human nature, and culture. Once the reality TV floodgates opened, there was simply no way of denying the simple truth - we are fascinated by ourselves and find the opportunity to watch absolutely riveting.

If it is true that we consume what we are afraid we are losing, what do these sophisticated shows indicate about the state our lives? All the contemporary questions are here - cooperation vs. competition, selfishness vs. altruism, trust vs. protectionism. it’s good TV, without a doubt.

I think it’s interesting to see a sophisticated game like this - the simple challenge of the Prisoner’s Dilemma - wrapped up in the clothes of the game show. It seems to invert the paradigm in a way that feels jarring and uncomfortable - when did contestants ever have to trust each other?

We used to turn to game shows to watch people compete. perhaps an indication that we lacked competition in our own lives. Now, it appears, we are turning to these moments to observe cooperation. Which is more rare and, as a result, more compelling and more imaginary?