February 2021 – Simon Sheridan

Propaganda School Part 11: Revenge on the Nerds

There were some goings on in the Australian media landscape this week that I think are worth reflecting on in this series of posts as they shine a light on the dynamics involved in the modern propaganda apparatus.

I’ve spoken already in this series about the catastrophe that hit the mainstream media with the rise of the internet. Once upon a time, the media had a near monopoly on certain kinds of information. This included news and current affairs but also advertisements. If you were in the market for a house or a new car, you had to buy a newspaper to find out what was for sale. The media organisation got paid by the consumers buying the paper and also by advertisers paying for print space. It was a very profitable business that allowed powerful and financially independent companies to pay for professional journalists to go out and find the news. This is what was called The Fourth Estate. The media wielded significant power. Senior journalists were often household names. They would be the ones who would receive leaks of secret information or do some piece of investigative journalism that would see a government minister sacked or perhaps even topple a government.

That all changed when the internet came along. Newspapers in particular saw their revenues decimated. Real estate and car advertisement were taken over by online players and consumers turned to online news rather than the print edition of newspapers. Despite their best attempts to get people to pay, newspapers have never found a very profitable business model online. They limp along just a shadow of their former selves. As a result, there is no longer any money to pay for quality journalism anymore. All this is Economics 101. The internet allowed information to flow freely. Wen you increase the supply of something without a proportionate increase in the demand, the price goes down. The price of ‘news’ in the modern world is essentially 0. Why buy a newspaper or wait for the evening news when there’s probably a photo or a video online 5 minutes after the event?

Not only did legacy media see their revenues cut by the internet, they became increasingly reliant on the big tech players for both content and traffic. We have already seen in this series how social media content forms a large part of mainstream news articles these days. But mainstream news also gets a lot of referrals from social media sites. Sometimes, they even pay for those referrals. Take a quick look at Twitter’s ‘news feed’ and you’ll see it’s sponsored content. Users on twitter and facebook also share articles freely. Thus, legacy media became dependent on social media at the same time that social media (and the wider internet) destroyed its revenue base. A pretty tough pill to swallow, no doubt.

This is all old news, of course. It’s also old news that google, Facebook and other big tech players have monopolies which are not in the public interest especially when you consider their enormous power to decide what information people are exposed to. There’s also the matter of how much (or little) tax they pay tax to national governments. There is no shortage of public policy issues to tackle if governments are willing.

Again this backdrop, we saw the Australian Government announce a policy last year which supposedly touched on all these issues. The legislation that eventually passed required google and Facebook to pay (certain) legacy media companies for their content. It seemed on the face of it quite a ridiculous piece of legislation. Google put up a good public relations fight which included links on their search engine and youtube where the CEO of google Australia explained why they were against the legislation. Facebook simply said it would pull out of Australian news if the legislation was passed. As the date to enforce the legislation approached, google caved in and did a deal behind closed doors while Facebook did what it said it was going to do and pulled Australian news from its site. In doing so, it took out a number of other pages including Australian government departments and services. This all went down last week. The news made global headlines but it was in Australia where the squealing was loudest as both sides of government and media were unanimous in their condemnation of the move.

A lot could be said about what happened but I want to stick to the theme of this series of posts. What happened is that the Australian government passed legislation to offer protection to a local industry. Let’s put that in context. Over the last few decades, the Australian Government has let the clothing and shoe wear industry go broke, it has let much of Australian manufacturing go broke, it has let the car manufacturing industry go broke, it even seems set to allow all local oil refining capacity to disappear too. The Australian Government has shown a great willingness to embrace globalisation and free trade and yet it is prepared to prop up the media. Why? Well, one obvious reason is that the media and the government are in a symbiotic relationship. This is especially true now that the media has greatly reduced power to hold the government to account. Nowadays, the legacy media now functions as nothing much more than a public relations department for the government. They provide a valuable service for government and it’s therefore in the governments interest to ‘save’ the media. Government propping up an already moribund industry is going to make the media even less likely to be critical of government policy and to act as a proper Fourth Estate.

Ironically, Facebook’s action showed what it looks like when there is no symbiotic relationship between a corporation and a government. They simply told the government to go jump. For a few brief days it was a joy to watch as both government and media in Australia lost their collective shit over Mark Zuckerberg who had the impertinence to betray the fact that he couldn’t give a damn about the Australian media. And why should he? Isn’t the whole point of social media that you connect people with other people not with boring government departments or legacy media channels. Facebook clearly doesn’t care about Australian news and yet many Australians apparently get their news from Facebook. Maybe it would be better if they got their news from a service that does care. Facebook pulling out of Australian news probably would have been a net win to all concerned. Of course, Facebook caved in and came to a deal with the government which means they are back in the news business even though they clearly don’t want to be.

Where does this leave us? I would argue we are now worse off on all counts than we were before the Australian Government passed its legislation. The business model of the legacy media is still in tatters. They will continue operating but we won’t see a return to proper journalism and a proper Fourth Estate. Facebook and google’s monopolies haven’t changed. They will almost certainly find a way to write the new costs off on tax and will continue doing as they please. Worse than that, the new government legislation creates a barrier to entry to both new media players (who won’t get the generous google/facebook subsidy) and new tech players meaning their market dominance is less likely to be challenged. The only outcome here is to slightly increase the revenue for media businesses whose business model has already been superseded. Better to let them go broke and open up opportunities for new players to enter. But that won’t happen because the government needs the legacy media.

So, a bad outcome all round. But for a few glorious days we got to see what happens when government and a large corporate’s interests are not aligned. That’s a rare sight in the modern world where corporations are in bed with government to such an extent that disagreements barely even see the light of day. And we got to see what happens when the propaganda machine sets its sights on a single target and opens fire with all guns blazing (although I suppose the entire Trump presidency was the same dynamic).

All posts in this series:

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

Way back in the very first post in this series I stated that my position right from the start of the corona event has been that it is a mass hysteria on a global scale facilitated by the internet. I was not the only one to make this analysis. Several psychologists also came out with the same conclusion. They noted, and this is something to bear in mind for those wondering when all this is going to come to an end, that a mass hysteria would take years to sort itself out. Certainly 2021 looks like a write-off. Whether corona will extend beyond that is anybody’s guess.

This week I came across a very interesting scholarly article which examines the notion that corona is a mass hysteria but with a focus on how the actions of governments contributed to it. It’s one of the best articles I’ve read on corona and backs up a number of my guesses about what’s going on with scholarly references. It also ties in with an idea I’ve been thinking about recently which is that, politically and psychologically, the corona event is a lot more like war than pandemic in the sense that most western governments (with the exception of Sweden) have been egging the population on rather than trying to calm them. It seems to me that the closest event in recent western history to the corona event is not previous pandemics like Asian Flu or Hong Kong Flu (both comparable as public health problems) but rather World War One. The correspondences are there. Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”? Those kind of promises happened at the start of World War One too. Kaiser Wilhelm told his troops they would be home by the end of autumn. In Britain, it was assumed victory would be had by Christmas at the latest. Of course, it was four years and millions of deaths later before it all finally came to an end.

The bill for the corona event is going to be similar to that for the wars. Australia already has $1.5 trillion of national debt baked into the cake but that’s only the start. I would guess it will be many trillions by the time all gets counted. Like with war debt this will create massive inflation and we have already started to see that in soaring property prices and ridiculous stock market valuations.

Then there is the mass hysteria part. In a mass hysteria, people do things that look crazy in normal times. In WW1 this involved telling young men to jump out of trenches and run into machine guns. The corona event can’t compare to that for sheer madness but things have happened in the last year in western societies that nobody would have believed possible prior. This week here in Melbourne we saw Australian citizens wearing garbage bags being hauled out of quarantine hotels. We have seen pregnant women handcuffed in front of their children over social media posts. We have seen grandmothers pushed down the aisles of the Queen Victoria Market by baton-wielding stormtroopers (errr, police). State borders have been closed at days or even hours notice while governments welcomed in Hollywood movie stars and sports players. In the middle of all that, the Prime Minister decided to change a line in the national anthem to read “we are one and free”. Really? We have never been less ‘one’ or ‘free’ since the Federation of the country. Probably not the most appropriate time for that change, mate.

In many states in the US, it looks like children and teenagers will go two years and maybe more without in-person schooling while many elderly people in nursing homes may also go years without being allowed to see their loved ones in person. The list could go on and the whole thing is not over yet. Who knows what else will come especially the biggest unknown which is the long term effects of a mass vaccination program.

Like the events of WW1, our response has been radically disproportionate to the initial problem. Also like war, there is a big geopolitical element to corona. Once governments went with the plague story interpretation they needed a vaccine to end the story. But that has big implications for international travel and commerce. Any country which decided to break ranks and deny the importance of corona would set its citizens up to be excluded from other countries on the basis of vaccination status. How exactly all that gets sorted out is going to be something to watch carefully. Presumably countries will have to recognise each other’s vaccines as valid so that, for example, Chinese citizens can take a Chinese vaccine to travel elsewhere and vice versa. Will that actually happen or will countries make foreign citizens take ‘their vaccine’ to enter?

The idea among some that we can take the crisis and use it renew our society also harks back to the post WW2 era. A nice little Marshall Plan (Great Reset) to rebuild shattered economies this time with a green energy agenda. Sounds nice in theory (actually, it sounds horrible in theory as anybody who has read about the Great Reset would know). But the future that awaits us is almost certainly much more like the post-WW1 era: political instability (already there in the USA and Europe), inflation (already here), massive debts that can’t be repaid perhaps leading to currency collapse (Germany had a hyperinflation and reset its currency in the 1920s/1930s). Oh yeah, and the great depression.

Most importantly, if both government action and the internet have contributed to this mass hysteria, there is no reason why other hysterias will not break out. We have the WHO there to identify ‘new’ viruses. The technology is there to create PCR tests and distribute them instantly. Big Pharma is there waiting to make billions from vaccines and testing. In short, there is nothing stopping this whole thing from happening again unless governments put some safeguards in place. Safeguards like defunding the WHO. But we know what happened with that idea. If, as the authors of the paper cited above note, bigger government makes mass hysterias more likely and mass hysterias create big government (by shrinking and curtailing civil society) then we have a positive feedback loop. Just like WW1 made WW2 more likely (some might say inevitable). Another reason to bunker down and buckle up.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing

The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle

The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death

The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

The Diogenes Chicken

Over the past year I have inadvertently become something of an amateur ornithologist. When the corona business arrived, I was on a break from paid employment while I worked on my second and third novel. That break ended up lasting a lot longer than I thought and also included the writing of my book on the corona event. Nowadays, I’m back in a paid job but am working from home. I live about half a kilometre from the Werribee River with a major bird wetlands only about ten kilometres from my house so the area is rich in bird species. As my work desk overlooks my backyard, I get to watch as they come and go. Birds seen in my area on a normal day include, in rough order of size: sparrows, New Holland honeyeaters, willy wagtails, starlings, Indian mynas (grrrrr!), rainbow lorikeets, blackbirds, spotted doves, quail, wattlebirds, magpies, cockateels, galahs, crows and sulphur-crested cockatoos.

One of the things I have learned about birds in the last year or so is that mimicry is a big thing and not just within the same species but across species. For example, I put in a bird bath in the early summer of 2019. It was a very hot summer that year but not a single bird looked at the birdbath for more than a week. One day, an enterprising blackbird landed a took a drink. Within ten minutes, all kinds of other birds were drinking and the bath has been a hit ever since. The same dynamic played out with my pear tree. Again, a blackbird was the initial culprit who learned that the fruit was mighty tasty. Another blackbird joined in. That was ok because there was heaps of fruit on the tree and I noticed that if I just threw a pear on the ground the blackbirds would bicker all day over it and the damage was mitigated. The real problems began when the New Holland honeyeaters saw what the blackbirds were doing and decided to copy. The wattlebirds then copied them and I had to take defensive action to save the remaining pears (fortunately it was mid autumn by that time and I had already eaten a majority of the fruit anyway).

As I posted about here, I have recently added another species of bird to the garden: chickens. It’s been fun to observe their behaviour. Like the other birds, copying is a big thing for chickens. A week ago I was eating a bunch of grapes off one of my backyard vines. I threw a few grapes to the chickens assuming they would eagerly devour them but they showed no interest. Then, just yesterday, one of the chickens tried a grape for herself off another vine. The others saw her and instantly rushed over to see what this new discovery was about. All of sudden, the chickens were mad about grapes. Fashion seems to be a thing in the bird world as much as the human.

Another thing that birds and humans share in common is a social hierarchy. The human one is far more complex and there are multiple hierarchies across different domains. Nevertheless, we also have the equivalent of a pecking order which is why the behaviour of one of my new chickens reminded me of an old story about the Greek philosopher Diogenes. But, before we get to that, let’s meet the chickens.

First up is the top hen, a black Australorp. She’s a beautiful bird with shiny black feathers who is noticeably larger than the others and doesn’t mind throwing her weight around especially when food comes into the equation. She’s especially hard on….

The number two chook: a blue Australorp. Blue is a moody bird who is clearly the smartest of the group (by contrast, the black Australorp seems quite dumb). What she receives from the top hen she dishes out to the next hen down the line:

A rhode island red. Also a very attractive and smart bird. She’s actually a little bit bigger than the blue Australorp but just doesn’t have the fire in the belly and backs out of any engagement.

Which leaves the fourth hen who, for reasons that will become clear in a moment, I have named Diogena.

A floppy comb is sometimes thought to indicate sickness but with Diogena I have a feeling it’s a fashion choice. A little bit punk rock.

Diogena is an Ancona breed. Originally, I had assumed Diogena was the bottom chicken in the pecking order. When I got the chickens home the first time, she seemed to integrate the worst. In fact, I was worried she was sick as she didn’t seem to eat and wasn’t socialising with the other chickens. But she slowly integrated with the group and began eating and everything settled into a nice rhythm. Diogena is clearly the smallest chicken of the group, another reason why I had assumed she was bottom rung on the ladder. Then something interesting happened.

I was giving the chickens some zucchini as a treat (they love zucchini and I don’t). As a good chicken owner, I try to apportion the treats geographically far enough apart that every chicken gets at least some. But as the treat gets devoured and supply runs short, inevitably the pecking order is asserted and the top chicken hoards whatever is left. The black Australorp ruthlessly enforces this rule at such times and on this occasion had successfully chased the blue Australorp and the Rhode Island Red away. Diogena, in her normal fashion, hadn’t contested the treat. She will eat one if thrown her way but otherwise stays out of the fray. However, on this occasion she decided to wander over to the Black Australorp and help herself to some zucchini. I watched on expecting her to get the same nice hard pecking the others had got but was amazed to see that not only did the Black Australorp not peck Diogena, she forfeited the zucchini to her. This got me thinking and I realised I had never seen Diogena either peck or be pecked. She seemed to be outside the pecking order.

Apart from food, the other main way the pecking order is enforced is over who gets which roosting position in the coop. Higher is better and, in my coop, closest to the wall on the higher roosting bars is the most coveted position. Once the hens had learned to use the roosting bars, inevitably it was the two Australorps on the upper bars and the other two below. This was the way it was for the first few weeks. Occasionally, the Rhode Island Red would get above her station and jump up top but the blue Australorp would kick her off down below where she belonged. Until the day in question, Diogena had done her usual thing of casually roosting at the bottom and avoiding any disagreements. But not this day. This day Diogena decided she was going to roost on the top bars. Not just that, but in the coveted wall position. I thought for sure that she would be booted back to her place but yet again, the black Australorp just ceded the ground and took up a position below.

It was at this point that the story of Diogenes the philosopher came to my mind. Diogenes is the best known member of the Cynic school of philosophy. The word cynic meant ‘dog-like’ in Ancient Greek and the Cynics, Diogenes in particular, were known for living on the streets or in the woods or wherever they pleased. The Cynic philosophy is a fascinating one and was a prelude to the Stoic philosophy. It eschews social convention and encourages people to live according to their own nature in whatever way they see fit. One of the most famous stories that encapsulates this is the one where Diogenes was lying in the sun and Alexander the Great, who had heard about the great philosopher, came to visit. He asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him and Diogenes replied “step to the side, you are blocking the sun.” It is said that Alexander later asserted that if he was not Alexander, the most powerful man on earth at the time, he would rather be Diogenes.

These stories might be apocryphal but they do reveal something very important about social hierarchies which is that the most ‘freedom’ (in a very general sense of the word) is found either at the top or at the bottom. Interestingly, it seems that Alexander knew that and respected Diogenes as an equal. I am probably massively anthropomorphising the situation, but I think the same dynamic is going on in my chicken coop right now. In any case, I am pleased to have Diogena – the Cynic Chicken – in my backyard.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. We’re gonna have to ask you to leave. This is a respectable roosting bar.”

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

I’ve referred several times in this series of posts to the cybernetics/systems thinking movement of the 20^th century. The other day I came across this interview with the daughter of two of the greats that movement – Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. In the article, Mary Catherine Bateson laments how systems thinking got hijacked by the technology industry. This struck a chord with me because it’s through my work in the IT that I was introduced to those ideas. I think she probably overestimates the degree to which the concepts of systems thinking are actually used in IT but she’s right on the whole that this is where the attention has gone towards while moving away from systems thinking as a way to think about the world. What gets called systems thinking in the academic world these days seems to be driven by the idea that it’s a way to do better science which is ironic because systems thinking was, among other things, a sharp critique of the naïve scientific thinking of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. It set out to define clearly the limitations of science so that hubris did not take over. The corona event represents the reappearance of that hubris in our culture. For that reason, our response to corona can be sharply critiqued from the perspective of systems thinking. Let’s just have a look at one important concept from systems thinking to get an idea of what that critique might look like. It’s one raised by Mary Catherine Bateson in the article above: side effects.

From the point of view of the universe (does the universe have a point of view?), there is no such thing as a side effect. Effects are just effects. The phrase side effect is about intention. I act with an intended effect and that is the thing that I care about. Side effects are the other effects which follow from my action; the ones I didn’t intend. But we can be more specific because side effects are normally the effects I didn’t intend but which also come to my attention usually because they are negative effects. There are a whole host of other effects that never come to my attention. They exist but I don’t give them the name side effects because I am unaware of them.

Effects and side effects are information. Gregory Bateson defined information as “a difference that makes a difference”. In the case of an effect, it must make a difference that we notice. Otherwise, we don’t call it an effect. This is a very important point because it makes explicit the role of the observer. An action may have all kinds of effects that an observer does not notice because they do not get above the threshold of awareness of the observer. For example, there are sound waves floating around all the time that we do not perceive because they do not get above the noise floor that is partly hard wired in our hearing apparatus and partly a function of our attention. There was a ‘difference’ but it did not make a ‘difference’ to us. We must be attuned to perceive the effect.

So, there are effects which we are looking for and are able to notice, side effects which we were not looking for but which came to our attention anyway and then all the effects we were not looking for and didn’t come to our attention. There is one other kind of effect worth mention which is a perceived effect which is not related to the action or cause. An example of this is optical illusions which relate to edge cases around our perceptual apparatus. In more complex domains, we can fool ourselves into perceiving effects which were not really there. Let me give my favourite personal example of this.

Just over ten years ago I started to get into audio engineering in a big way. I have always been an enthusiastic amateur musician and, with the advent of cheap home recording technology, it seemed like a good thing to get into recording music if for no other reason than as a practice tool. Learning how to mix and master recorded music is fiendishly difficult. To do it well requires you not so much to master the tools (although you must eventually do that) but how to rewire your aural perception. You must learn to hear when a difference makes a difference. Newbie audio engineers will fiddle around with the various settings on reverbs and compressors but they aren’t really hearing the difference. They haven’t learned how to listen properly. It’s not until you have learned how to listen that you can make real progress. In the meantime, you’re swimming around in a world where nothing seems to make any difference.

I was swimming in that world on the morning in question. I was working on a song that was sounding like shit. I was frustrated. Nothing I did seemed to make any difference. I added reverb, it still sounded shit. I took the reverb away. Still shit. Then I made a big but very tempting mistake: I went to the internet and typed “why does my mix sound like shit.” There are five bazillion answers to this question but the one that came up first was compression. That’s the thing that makes the difference between pro recordings and amateurs. So said the internet. I followed a thread where there was a link to a new compressor that somebody said would fix all my problems. I eagerly downloaded it. This was gonna be great. I would install this thing and be on a way one ticket to recording superstardom. I inserted the plugin into the mix, took a deep breath and then switched it on.

The effect was instantaneous. The track burst to life. The guitars were clearer, the drums bigger, the vocals cut through with the clarity of a spring morning and the mellifluousness of a choir of angels. I sat back and took it all in marvelling at how wonderful this new compressor was. Once the euphoria had died down, I opened my eyes and decided to check the settings that I was using so I wouldn’t forget them. I looked down at the compressor plugin on the computer screen and to my horror, to my sheer disbelief, realised the compressor was not even turned on. I had clicked the wrong button. To be sure of my mistake, I turned it on for real. The mix of my song changed but not in any significant way. It still sounded like shit. My mixes continued to sound like shit for about another year till I finally learned that it didn’t really matter what compressor you used so much as how you used it.

In this case I had convinced myself that I heard an effect that wasn’t really there. Why? Because I really wanted it to work. If intention and will are required to perceive an effect it’s also true that emotions and imagination can create an effect where one does not exist. Then you have fooled yourself. Most of the time it’s hard to know whether you are fooling yourself or not. There’s usually no on/off button which can give definitive feedback. A big part of science is learning how to test things in a way that gives definitive feedback. That’s why not fooling yourself was one of the main rules of science outlined by the great Richard Feynman but it holds in life in general. Learning to be objective is largely learning to be able to put aside emotions and see something for what it is even when you really, really, don’t want it to be the case. It’s also about knowing when you haven’t set up your testing in such a way as to give a clear answer about what is happening. That is why blind testing and randomised control trials are so important in science. They exclude the researcher’s emotions from the equation. Even scientists allow their emotions to get in the way and to see and effect where there isn’t one.

The point to be made here is that just perceiving an effect is often very difficult. In complex domains like sound engineering and science, it takes a lot of practice and it’s easy to fool yourself. What about side effects? These are normally not so hard to ascertain as they usually force their way into our attention whether we like it or not. The challenge is not to see them but to simply admit their existence and deal with the inevitable frustration or disappointment they cause. Let me give an example of such a side effect from my personal experience.

I decided to set up some raised wicking beds in my backyard. The summers in Melbourne are typically hot and dry. There is definitely not enough rain to grow vegetables without extra watering. Wicking beds are an excellent way to irrigate vegetables as there is almost no evaporative loss of moisture and you can fill them up about once a week and then forget about them for the rest of the week which makes maintenance very easy. The effect I was looking for out my wicking beds was to grow vegetables with the least amount of work and watering possible. That was the happy path. Of course, any gardener knows gardens rarely deliver the happy path, at least not straight away. Gardens are complex systems and side effects pop up regularly.

In constructing my wicking beds, I decided to make them look nice by re-using some weatherboards I had lying around as cladding. It worked and the beds looked attractive enough. In the process, however, I had inadvertently created the perfect habitat for snails. In between the weatherboards and the container that was holding the soil was a nice dark, damp place that was about an inch wide and protected from the outside world. It was also right next door to a food supply: the seedlings for my vegetables. My wicking beds were like a five star snail hotel with an all-you-can eat breakfast buffet thrown in. One day I went outside to check on my seedlings and they were gone with the tell-tale trail of slime indicating clearly who the culprits were.

Systems theory says that any system you build will produce effects that you did not foresee. This includes side effects that will barge their way into your consciousness whether you like it or not and a whole host of other effects that you will never know about because you are not looking for them. Sometimes those affects are small and localised like my snail problem. But with large systems you can get very big negative effects such as major environmental damage or loss of life. Side effects are information and, used correctly, that information will allow you build a better system. I could have removed the weatherboards from my wicking beds to solve the snail problem. However, once I learned where the snails were, it was a trivial matter to pick them off the boards and feed them to my chickens. In so doing, I was able to turn a negative side effect into a positive one. This is known as adaptation, which is another important concept in systems thinking.

We’ve seen that effects can be hard to determine and that side effects are always present. Knowing all this we can make some general statements about systems. The newer a system, the more side effects there will be and most of these will be negative. (I can state the truth of this as my job is to test newly built IT systems. There are always more bugs at the start than at the end). When building a system you should be sure to set up information channels for side effects to be dealt with so you can learn and correct. It is never a good idea to roll out a big new system at scale without first prototyping and testing at a smaller scale. To do so invites collateral damage from negative side effects on a large scale.

Which brings us to the corona event and I’m sure the reader can see where I’m going with this. Never before attempted lockdowns on a global scale, all kinds of governments measures that have never been tried or tested and now as the fitting finale to the whole show a never before tried vaccine rolled out on mass after being rushed through testing. From a systems point of view, all this is guaranteed to cause large scale side effects. We have already begun to see these in the mass unemployment, closure of small businesses, massive new government debt and all the rest. But with corona it’s not even clear any more what main effect we are aiming towards. Originally, it was ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ but that has changed to, well, who knows? The newly elected President Biden admitted as much a week or so ago when he said there was nothing much that could be done about corona (after promising during the election campaign that he had a plan, of course). We have no idea what we are doing. It all reminds me of my early days of audio engineering, desperately flailing away trying anything to find something that works. That’s not a good look for politicians who are supposed to be leading our society.

In relation to the vaccine, the media, as the modern propaganda machine that it is, is reassuring the public that side effects are ‘normal’ for vaccines. That may be true, but what about the side effects of the new vaccine that we don’t know about yet. Those are the ones that are going to be game changers if they do happen. I’m thinking of autoimmune disease and antibody dependent enhancement. Then there are the social and political side effects. One of these, at least in the US, looks certain to be a growing loss of faith in the government, although that has been building for decades. We have seen in the past few weeks quite ridiculous things like Biden admitting he has no plan for corona, Fauci recommending two masks or even three, Cuomo and Newsom suddenly realising the economy matters. We have the same ridiculousness here in Australia with WA recently mandating masks for people exercising outdoors in the middle of summer in one of the least densely populated cities in the world (Perth).

For now, the public here seems to support it. Will they continue to support it if the vaccines don’t make corona ‘go away’ and once the budget deficit hits several trillion? Who knows? Budget deficits don’t seem to matter anymore. Does anything matter anymore? We live at a time where it’s quite impossible to know what is going to happen next. That outcome was already baked into the cake as soon as we went into lockdown. The main reason not to lockdown was because it would lead us into a situation just like this. The corona event demonstrates that we still haven’t learned the lessons from cybernetics and systems thinking. Rather, we have reverted back to that old hubris and over confidence in ‘science’.

Will we still believe in ‘science’ when all this is over or will one of the side effects of our new system be a cynicism not just of science but our whole society? Time will tell. For now, buckle up and keep your eye out for any side effects that come flying in your direction.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing

The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle

The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death

The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic