Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Why does one of these scenarios seem unfair while the second seems reasonably fair?

Vendors raise soda prices in heat wave.

Vendors lower soda prices in winter.

These could be describing exactly the same real world scenario.

The simple answer is of course that we identify more casually with the buyers rather than the sellers, so that falling prices are good news and rising prices are bad news; but I think there is a third bit and that’s what makes it not just good/bad news but adds an element of fairness, an ethical element.

The first story suggests that the vendors are taking advantage of a misfortune that has befallen their customers. Turning another’s misfortune into your profit doesn’t seem too strong on the ethics.

When thinking about the ethical puzzles around discriminatory pricing “don’t take advantage of other’s misfortune” seem to be a useful rule of thumb. For example if your discriminatory pricing takes advantage of the febbleminded it is more likely that society will sanction you.

Puzzling out good ethics about this stuff isn’t just about being able to show your face in polite company. It’s also about maintaining people’s trust - which lowers your negotiation costs.

Discrimintory pricing as the driver of reduced privacy - By way of Dave Weinberger. I think this is 40% exactly right, but it under estimates the way that technology makes the explicit data into a superfluid and the tendency of firms to chase operational efficencies. Examples: out sourcing, risk management, and lowering barriers for buyers all along the sales pipeline.

I’ve written about the fun of pricing games a couple of times before.

The best book I’ve read on cults is Steven Hassan’s “Releasing
the Bonds: empowering People to Think for Themselves” but there
are a lot of good books because cults tend to prefer to bring smart
capable people under their thrall and some of these escape and respond
by writing books. What makes Hassan’s book helpful is how it provides
a model. You can map various examples cults into it. The cults described in the other books all fit his pattern very nicely.

I’ve been reminded of all this over the last month because the press
keeps saying we have no idea what’s up with the Bathe Party loyalists
in Iraq. Each time I hear that I think “piffle.”

Cults
are, to simplify somewhat: extremely authoritarian, and
hierarchical. Members of the cult are tightly controlled by three
elements: those above them in the hierarchy, close and controlling
observation by the other cult members, and careful control of the
information available to the members. That is all mixed in with a
healthy dose of paranoia about those outside the cult.

The paranoia is a particularly key. Most cult survivors report being
told stories of others who had left who then died in plane crashes,
got horrible afflictions, or were hunted down as traitors. Many cults
spend a great deal of time demonizing those outside the cult which
only helps to reenforce the risks of exiting the cult. Those horrible
stories about Sadam’s tortures have all the marks of the kind of
things that a powerful cult would do to manufacture just this kind of
paranoia.

This isn’t just about control. It’s also about building loyalty
to the cult. If all your information supports the cult’s world
view, and all your fears are constructed to make exiting the cult
a horrific prospect that creates very high loyalty.

This is why Jim Jones’ followers drank the koolaid. They knew it
was going to kill them. He told them. They could see others dying
who were nearer the front of the line. They were loyal and the
alternative - leaving the cult - was worse. Sadam didn’t serve
koolaid.

There are a number of stories in the literature about doomsday cults
where the day came and went with no doom. Most folks would assume that would kind of pull the rug out from under the project; but apparently not. What
seems to happen at that point is that the group’s responses to this crisis. They draw
more tightly together. They redouble their efforts. They often decide
that their faith has granted them a reprieve, or it is a sign and
they are being tested.

Many people assume that since a cult has a firm hierarchy that if
you discredit or remove the leader the whole thing will collapse.
In some small cults this does indeed happen; but for larger cults
you either get a replacement leader or you get a bunch of smaller
little cults.

That’s kind of obvious, each branch in the tree is tends to be
pretty self contained. Each member knows who his authority figure
is. When the leader disappears (as for example L. Ron Hubbard did)
the thing just keeps chugging along. Again, like the embarrass
dooms day cult, the natural solidarity of the group treats the
event not as an opportunity for doubt but as one for increasing
their solidarity.

So what’s the deal in Iraq?

First you have all these middle manager authoritarian leaders. They
are all now running little mini-Bathe Party despotic cults. Their
subordinates who were always scared of ‘others’ are now scared too
death - the demon is at their door. This only increases their
solidarity. These middle managers all need to show leadership, and
what better than a little occasional resistance? You take a few
thousand of these groups and even a tiny bit of resistance looks like
a gorilla war. But notice that you don’t need any overarching
hierarchy to get there; all you need is the cult mentality and
techniques. Each one of these is a potential terrorist cell.

Second you have a huge number of individuals who were in the Bathe
Party cult and are now cut loose of any support network. These folks
have nothing. They have been taught for years and years that should
this day come they will suffer a horrible fate - damnation, ruin,
torture, you name it. These are desperate people. A few of them are
sure to act out. When they do you can call them lone terrorists.

This is a different kind of gorilla war. Well maybe not since these
cult techniques for controlling the members of the group are also
common in well organized gorilla forces.

The media’s tendency to treat this as a game of capture the flag - get
the airport, get the statue, get the deck of cards, get Sadam - misses
the point and just plays to our dumb sports metaphors. De-programming
members of the entire Bathe Party cult is necessary, and tedious,
before that nation will be free of a huge population of desperate
gorilla fighters.

Clay Shirky chimes in on the backchannel discussion (i.e. just how rude is it that in modern meetings people are passing notes in quantity all the time with others both inside and outside the meeting?). He does his bit to move the thread along and rounds up one of the usual suspect, i.e. “Yo vested-interests! Get over it! Too late now. Cat’s out of the bag. Deal.” He throws in the usual story about a previous debate of this kind. The one about calculators in school.

I recall the calculator debate. I was in college. Some students could afford a potent calculator, most couldn’t, I couldn’t Some people had access to symbolic math software and others didn’t. I did. Matlab over the internet could do some of my homework almost with nearly zero effort. My perception at the time was about fairness in the face of widely disparate computational power.

My son recently took a math SAT II test with an approved calculator that could do an awful lot of symbolic math. I wondered how many of the students knew that. How many had been prep’d on the calculator’s capablities? How advantagous to the calculator vendor if he could get an entired generation skilled in his calculator’s UI.

The oldest story of this kind - i.e. stories about out cries over the disruption to existing structures triggered by new technology - I know is about silent reading. Apparently there was a time when men only read outloud, or at least most of them did. About the time the printing press appeared the idea that you could read silently, not even moving your lips, spread across Europe. This created all all kinds of concern amoung those who felt that they were responsible for looking after the thoughts of the population.

That’s of course all entangled in the story of the Protestant revolution. Boy is that a classic story of innovation leading to the displacement of vested interests (aka the hub, aka the intermediary) in that case the role of the chuch as the intermediary between man and God.

Steve Balmer, CEO Microsoft, one of the world’s richest men has, I gather, a list of troubles. Number one is the economy. Number two is open source.

Open source isn’t really Steve’s problem. Steve’s problem is that nobody trusts Microsoft anymore. Nobody.

A large constituency that doesn’t trust them anymore is developers. That’s bad. Microsoft’s OS monopoly provides a bridge between application developers and hardware developers. That’s what Operating Systems do. If both kinds of developers are scared to go over Mr. Balmer’s bridge - being a convicted abuser of your monopoly powers pretty much assures that - then they start looking for other ways over the bridge.

I bought a router recently for - after discounts, coupons, and rebates - five dollars. It’s got an operating system, a web browser, etc. etc. It doesn’t have any Microsoft components.

So I find it particularly amusing that Mr. Balmer would decide that the persona he want’s to adopt is that of Neo - the uber-developer of matrix, the wonderkun who is forced into battle with the system. How bizzare is that!?!

“Before Steve got on stage, there was a video showing Bill and Steve as Morpheus and Neo (respectively). Bill offered Steve two pills�one Big Blue on that required years of consulting, sub-par IT and a general lifetime of hell and the other a small, red one showing the truth. After the video, Steve rose up onto the stage from below the floor dressed in a black trench coat (a la Neo in the matrix).”