Poe's Law and 2020
2020 is a strange year. We seem to be facing so many large issues, a pandemic, climate change, a demand for racial justice. But one thing that seems to sum up 2020 for me is Poe's Law.
Poe's Law
Poe's Law states that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent in which case it isn't really satire.
Poe's Law came about on internet forums since the 80s and has usually meant in specific cases of internet chat rooms where users identity is obscure or unknown. Because of this certain comments on highly divisive topics like religion and social justice issues it becomes hard to understand a poster's intention.
Poe's Law bleeding off this internet making satire almost imposible
A basic example that explains some of the concepts of game theory is the Cake Cutting Game. Consisting of 2 players it involves a cake cutter and a slice chooser.
Extremes get more views, spread faster, make more money
What was true with nightly new is true in our social media world. Extreme views, violent or rare incidents get more views, more likes and are shared by us more. This pushes content to be more extreme. It also encourages mis-information. Look at the cotax for "too much information". That pretty much sums up social media when there is so much content and news and opinions and everyone is shouting to get their story out.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/every-single-cognitive-bias/
We tend to:
- We are wired to notice differences, when something has changed, when something is bizarre or weird or unique or rare. We notice things more when primed or when stored in memory often. We are drawn to things that confirm our beliefs and we notice flaws in others before noticing them in ourselves.
Add Bots to Online Chats
the bots are here to stay, they make a mess of everything. Because they exsist to amplify accounts, tweets, information or downloads, they are used to mess with how popular or viral a message is, or even if that message is real. Then there are bots that bot the message.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/opinion/the-end-of-satire.html "and you cannot possibly discern the intentions of machines that have no intentions"
and to take a set further: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2
"Likewise, the case of the “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot” tshirts (along with the “Keep Calm and Knife Her” and “Keep Calm and Hit Her” ones) is depressing and distressing but comprehensible. Nobody set out to create these shirts: they just paired an unchecked list of verbs and pronouns with an online image generator. It’s quite possible that none of these shirts ever physically existed, were ever purchased or worn, and thus that no harm was done. Once again though, the people creating this content failed to notice, and neither did the distributor. They literally had no idea what they were doing.
The second is the levels of exploitation, not of children because they are children but of children because they are powerless. Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
What concerns me is that this is just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us, all of the time, and we’re still struggling to find a way to even talk about it, to describe its mechanisms and its actions and its effects.
My own ramblings: this is what happens when STEM is pushed over everything else. social studies major, history major? how is that important in our digital age. These preferences lead to sustaining these systems, to make sure programers looked to data that was inherently unjust but treated it like just well... data.
When Extremism is Allowed to flourish
Satire works because the suggestion is usually so extreme that it cannot be true, causing the reader or viewer to understand the fundamental flaws of the system the satire is about.
In satire the use of irony and exaggeration is used as a tool to criticize people's vices on politics or other important issues.
This breaks down when extremes are pushed in earnest. If something is already extreme, than it is hard to know if the content is satire or real, thus: Poe's Law.
- what does it say when people can express such views without anonymity?
- when trust breaks down how can satire function again?
- the effects of being on "warring teams" : Steinbeck seems to have used Ricketts as the model for a character in his novel “In Dubious Battle”: the dispassionate Doc Burton, who considers a workers’ strike a sort of ecosystem. “A man in a group isn’t himself at all,” Doc says; “he’s a cell in an organism that isn’t like him any more than the cells in your body are like you.” It was a concept to which Steinbeck would return in several of his books.
- takeaways for UX designers: pushing to extremes can lose purpose for users, group think is way different from individual think, extremes can be self enforcing (confirmation bias, team think)
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Poe's Law bleeding off this internet making satire almost imposible
A basic example that explains some of the concepts of game theory is the Cake Cutting Game. Consisting of 2 players it involves a cake cutter and a slice chooser.