'People can "like" certain articles of clothing on the brand's Facebook page, and the like counts are updated in real time on hangers in the store. Presumably you'd want to find something you actually like — but that not many people "like"— so that you can maintain your flimsy illusion of actually having unique tastes.'

'We have recently proposed that physical pain – the pain experienced upon bodily injury – and social pain – the pain experienced upon social injury when social relationships are threatened, damaged or lost – share neural and computational mechanisms. This shared system is responsible for detecting cues that might be harmful to survival, such as physical danger or social separation, and then for recruiting attention and coping resources to minimize threat. Such an overlap would be evolutionarily adaptive. Because of the prolonged period of immaturity and the critical need for maternal care in mammalian infants, it has been suggested that the pain mechanisms involved in detecting and preventing physical danger were co-opted by the more recently evolved social attachment system to detect and prevent social separation. If the need to maintain close contact with the mother for nurturance and protection is crucial to mammalian survival, experiencing pain upon social separation would be an adaptive way to prevent the harmful consequences of maternal separation. -- When young children experience physical pain, they experience social pain more easily and more frequently in response to separation from their caregiver. Similarly, individuals with chronic pain disorders are more likely than healthy controls to have an anxious attachment style, characterized by a preoccupation with the commitment status of relationship partners and to have heightened fears of social evaluation and rejection... -- ...certain drugs have similar regulatory effects on both physical and social pain. Opiate-based drugs, known for their effectiveness in alleviating physical pain, lessen social pain in animals and humans. Additionally, anti-depressants, often prescribed for anxiety or depression resulting from social stressors, have recently been found to alleviate physical pain as well and are now prescribed regularly to treat chronic pain.'

'When you look at the compare good and evil optimists, you realize that both believe in change and the idea of "progress." The optimistic evil, when they really get going, tend to put everybody who disagrees with their idea of progress into concentration camps. The optimistic good pursue a softer version of the same strategy: they seek out like-minded people with whom they can achieve positive resonance, and avoid people or thoughts they label "negative," a label they apply to any kind of non-scripted dissent. When they pursue action around fundamentally ugly realities, they still look for "heart-warming" and "inspirational." They are fundamentally what Barbara Ehrenreich has labeled "Bright-Sided" people. Whether or not the realize it, they put people they disagree with on the sidelines in cultural concentration camps where their voices are drowned out by positive cheerleading. This is a "tyranny of the vocal minority" consequence, since the optimistic-good (both Right and Left varieties) are so vocal in singing the same tune. Voices of dissent do not harmonize as well. There is a certain merit to this heuristic. Serious change requires collective action, motivation and energy. Negative thoughts and people do drain this energy. But the heuristic gets dangerous when it turns into an unchecked, runaway sort of self-reinforcing positivism.'

'The definition of the situation is a fundamental concept in symbolic interactionism advanced by the American sociologist W. I. Thomas. It is a kind of collective agreement between people on the characteristics of a situation, and from there, how to appropriately react and fit into it. "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In other words, the interpretation of a situation causes the action. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there even is an objectively correct interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals' behavior. "The situations that men define as true, become true for them."'

'Moving in harmony can make people feel more connected to one another and, as a result, lead to positive collective action. -- Wiltermuth, an expert on group dynamics, says the findings are the first to indicate that synchronous activities may be used to influence leader-follower relations and are especially pertinent, as synchronized action like marching and chanting are still used in political and religious rallies to influence people throughout the world. Wiltermuth notes, "The findings suggest that synchrony cannot only be used for good, but also as a tool to promote evil."'

"Culture is about a large group of people having a set of shared, chronically accessible, constructs."

'"Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those." Pagel argues that our evolution as "social learners" has likely had the effect, as it's played out through hundreds of millennia, of encouraging the development of copying skills, perhaps over the development of originality. "We like to think we're a highly inventive, innovative species," he explains. "But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves ... And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators." What that also means is that as the scope of our potential copying broadens, through advances in communication and networking, we have ever less incentive to be creative. We become ever more adept at cutting and pasting.'

'If you are in the middle class, you are expected to own certain things, do certain things and do so at quality levels that exceed the quality purchased by the poor class (if they purchase that category of things at all) but don’t hit luxury levels. You are also expected to not buy certain things that are either above or beneath you, or do certain things for yourself. For the middle class, there are things that are beneath your station and things that are above your station. For the rich and poor, things are much more one-sided. ...imitation and uniformity in consumption define the middle class. In countries where the middle class is burgeoning instead of dying, especially in Asia, the growth of the class is tracked via measurement of ownership rates of certain typical goods at typical quality levels. By contrast, there is much more variety in how the poor are poor, and how the rich are rich. When a middle class goes into decline, you get a large segment of the population engaging in a desperate scramble to keep up appearances, while switching from collective-norm-based to individual-risk-based financial thinking.'

'Volunteers whose posterior medial frontal cortex, an area in the middle of the brain that is associated with reward processing, were exposed to the magnetic pulses suffered reduced levels of conformity. The researchers believe this part of the brain dates back a long way in the evolution of animals and is responsible or automatically "correcting" our performance when we fall out of line with a group. They say that by suspending this mechanism, it allows people to think and behave differently. They now believe it may be possible to develop drugs or behaviour changing techniques that could increase or decrease people's conformity. "Right now we can search for behavioural techniques that modulate activity of the posterior medial frontal cortex without any physical intervention. Hopefully, with help of these techniques someone would be able to partly immune themselves to 'group pressure'." -- Monkey see; Monkey wear pulsating tinfoil hat.

'It isn't just saying that the beliefs converge; it is saying that since the beliefs converge along with greater confidence in their "truthfulness", it becomes more difficult for any individual to not converge as well – and feel confident about it. Now consider the more general implications. "Well, I'm going to be an independent thinker and not be affected by the herd and make my own educated guess." No, you won't. The moment you have the other people's guesses, you cannot shake that information. Your "independent" guess necessarily includes that guess in some way, you can't unlearn it. Either your guess converges towards the herd, or your guess is characterized as against the herd. Either way, the herd affected your thinking in ways you don't realize. You're part of the dialectic and you didn't even want to be. That you don't want to be part of it ensures you are part of it. ...it makes a third independent idea highly unlikely (unless, again, it forms in opposition to ideas 1 or 2.)'

'...looting makes "powerless people suddenly feel powerful" and that is "very intoxicating". The world has been turned upside down. The youngsters are used to adults in authority telling them they cannot do this or this will happen. Then they do it and nothing happens." Numbers are all important in a riot... "You cannot riot on your own. A one-man riot is a tantrum. At some point the bigger crowds confronting the police realise that they are in control." They are swept away by the crowd... they take on the values of the group. [Their] own internal values and norms become less salient. ...it suggests it's normal. "Humans are the best on the planet at imitating. And we tend to imitate what is successful." "It boils down to the buzz. It's an excitement. You can't take away that thrill – the roar of the crowd. That sense of a group of men, something's happening." ...most of the rioters are from poor estates who have no "stake in conformity", who have nothing to lose. "They are not 'us'."'

'Social action is the eventual result of social mood change, not the cause of social mood change. Cautious businessmen cause recession. A happy population makes leaders appear talented. Depressed and fearful people are susceptible to epidemics. Increasingly optimistic people make the stock market rise. Outraged people seek out scandals. A desire to speculate fosters the availability of derivatives. Fearful and angry people make war. People who want to smile choose happy music. Nervous people test nuclear bombs. -- A Temporal Continuum of Socionomic Response: Socionomic actions fall along an open-ended continuum of delay following the initial impetus from social mood, from immediate (e.g. stock market trends) through intermediate (e.g. styles of popular entertainment) to eventual (e.g. climates of peace and war). This continuum makes earlier sociometers leading indicators of later ones, which is one source of their utility. ...there is no leading indicator of social mood itself.'

'"Calling on those close to me to endlessly reconfirm my worldview makes coming to conclusions that much easier." Lim added that on the occasions when she does encounter someone with a conflicting take, she is quickly reassured by her real friends that Laura is a total bitch.'

'The mindset of the middle class is off-putting—to the heterodox, to the sovereign, and to the individualist. The mindset is a dull recital on the virtues of moderation and proscription: don't stay up too late; don't drink too much; don't exercise too hard; don't risk too much; don't challenge authority; don't question orthodoxy. Democracy is particularly appealing to the middle class because it appeals to a faux sense of empowerment. The middle class is the human equivalent of an animal herd, because it never learns the concepts of unintended consequences, moral hazards, and opportunity costs. Such concepts are never taught, for obvious reasons, in its government-run education system. That the middle class pretends to understand the concepts of freedom and liberty makes it even more contemptible. Threaten the middle class's government-sponsored rice bowl with the specifics of liberty and it reflexively reacts with the brand of opprobrium: radical.'

'...dissociation into traumatized alters occurs more in [large] groups because one feels more helpless and more depersonalized, particularly in the largest groups, nations, and therefore more fearful. When we think of acting in society or even [speaking] in front of a large group, one feels more open to attack, to humiliation, and one can more easily switch into the traumatized hemisphere. Our first line of defense when in a social trance is to cling to a "strong" leader or a "strong" subgroup, merge our alters with them and join in various group activities, often violent ones, to defend ourselves. Thus it makes sense that the inevitable characteristics of a group [are] invincibility, grandiosity, irresponsibility, impulsiveness, suggestibility and fearfulness, all qualities of the neglectful and traumatic figures stored in our social alters. Without the laterality of the brain, neither politics nor religion can exist, as they do not in other animals who do not have divided selves.'

'...if one subscribes (as we do) to the idea of an Anglo-American power elite that uses its tremendous, familial banking wealth to move society toward one-world government, then the evolution we are observing makes a good deal of sense. Money power makes all the difference; it provides a formidable incentive for self-censorship. Money determines fashion; wealthy donors fund museums and theatres that make "gate-keeper" decisions. The subtlety of money power—as brutal as it can be—is wondrous to behold. What was resisted in one generation is welcomed in the next. The beauty of money power is that once a theme, trend or cultural direction is set into place, it tends to propagate on its own. Only a relative few gatekeepers are needed. Establish a trend and the mimetic elements of human behavior take over. People are inevitably tribal. It is a survival instinct and a success-instinct. One sees what is successful and wishes to emulate it. Within this context almost anything can be nurtured.'

'A special 'Crash JP Morgan' edition of the Keiser Report. This time Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, look at the call from Eric Cantona to withdraw money from the banks and at the viral 'Crash JP Morgan Buy Silver' campaign by Max Keiser. In the second half of the show Max talks to Alex Jones about Google bombs, naked body scanners and 'Crash JP Morgan Buy Silver'.'

'Relativism is not sanity, just wandering with the lost herd...' -- "There's no way to fight irrational certainty with relativism."

'It hurts to be wrong. Not just emotionally, but physically, especially when it’s public... The horror of it is almost cinematic. The more artificially pumped your ego, or the more brainwashed with academic pretension, the more terrifying that moment of realization is, that moment when all your assumptions are dashed aside like a three-year-old’s alphabet blocks. To a certain point, it is understandable why so many people live in such violent denial, however, this does not detract from the perils of that denial… Useful idiots talk, they don’t listen. They ask lots of questions, but never wait to hear your answers. For them, questions are not a search for information, but rather a method of antagonism. It is a way to keep everyone else on guard while making themselves feel superior. In this game, the useful idiot never has to expose his ignorance because he never has to enter into a meaningful dialogue with anyone who has an opposing view. All he has to do is attack, attack, attack.'

Pay-walled. Recommended. -- When a pyramid scheme nears its inevitable end... "...the public insist on being handed the empty bag because they think they're going to make money, they want in on the game, everyone else has been making money, they feel left out so they insist on buying these things at the peak, and they are the ones who lose everything."

'The most fascinating part about this entire process was not the verbal broadcast of my opt out status, nor having my crotch swept by the latex-covered back hand of some anonymous TSA agent, but rather the curious fact that I was the only one opting out. Although I must have watched at least a hundred people go through this particular security checkpoint, there wasn't a single other person who opted out of the naked body scan. They all just lined up like cattle to have their bodies scanned with ionizing radiation. To me, that's just fascinating. That when people are given a choice to opt out of being irradiated, they will choose to just go along with the naked body scan rather than risk standing out by requesting to opt out. It's odd that people trust the government when the government doesn't trust them at all. If the government treats you like a criminal, a terrorist, a lab rat and a vaccine depository, doesn't that only prove they don't honor you as a sovereign individual?'

"The shape of political authority in society mirrors that of the family. When you have better families you end up with better governments. When you have non-authoritarian, pacificist parenting with respect for the self-ownership of children, you will inevitably end up with a free society. If you want to change society, you have to change people's early childhood experiences. Objective morality, property rights and self-ownership all fall counter to just about everybody's experience of their family and certainly against their experience of church and school. So we're fighting a real uphill battle, it's one that we'll win, but it's going to take a long time."

Gisted -- "Culture is the exact opposite of what is real and what is true." Because of its desire for virtue, the true-self is corrupted into obedience by the miming of the eating of the invisible apple, and the reward that's given to this shattered true-self is a substitute false-self which is what we call culture. Culture is always a lie. And the big lie is always believed more than the little lie. Once you can get somebody to place their identity in a collective falsehood, you've got them for life. There's no way back to your true-self once your self-aggrandizing false-self is the substitute source of your self-esteem. There's a famous line from Hanns Johst's play Schlageter: ‘When I hear "culture,” I release the safety catch on my gun!’ That line resonates because it's true. When you can get people to believe false things and to obey bullies, then they are ready to participate in the brutality of the collective and to be a soldier of evil in the world.

"All advertising advertises advertising." -- Marshall McLuhan

'Sheeple (a portmanteau of "sheep" and "people") is a term of disparagement, in which people are likened to sheep. It is often used to denote persons who voluntarily acquiesce to a perceived authority or suggestion without sufficient research to understand fully the ramifications involved in that decision, and thus undermine their own human individuality or in other cases give up certain rights. The implication of sheeple is that as a collective, people believe or do whatever they are told, especially if told so by a perceived authority figure believed to be trustworthy, without critically thinking about it or doing adequate research to be sure that it is an accurate representation of the real world around them. The term is generally used in a political and sometimes in a spiritual sense.'

'In the language of economic sociology, options are performative; they create what they putatively just describe. In other words, the models have agency (that’s market models we’re talking about, not the fashion models, heaven’s no!). Options enable investors to anticipate other investors’ actions, which spurs herding behavior, where actors decide to disregard their own information (i.e., “That Coco Rocha, urgh!”) and imitate instead the decisions taken by others before them (but Russell Marsh optioned her). Herding and cascades are rather problematic to financial markets; they leads investors to artificially bid up asset values... because investors, like fashionistas, react to each other as well as to the aggregate traces of fellow investors’ actions (captured well in signaling instruments like options), they exacerbate systemic risk. Essentially, valuing financial goods is a matter of trying to be in fashion, which is a gamble.'

'...one can gain much understanding of current events by paying attention to Western power-elite rhetoric in all its varied manifestations. Anyone can perform the kind of analysis the Bell attempts to provide. Simply accept (a terrible and fearful thing to be sure) that there is a power elite – a group of extraordinarily wealthy and powerful families and individuals engaged in an intergenerational conspiracy to create world governance – and then begin to track the dominant social themes that they utilize to shove a hitherto-unsuspecting public in the desired direction. -- ...the Internet has ravaged elite memes. Suffice it to say that what is happening now is a kind of huge and unstoppable tidal wave, one that is sweeping all before its path. Cultures and belief-systems will be reconfigured before all this is over. We believe the elite may have finally recognized this – certainly we see rhetorical indications that it has. (Perhaps elements read the Bell?)'

'Human Flesh Search (Chinese: 人肉搜索; pinyin: Rénròu Sōusuǒ) is a primarily Chinese internet phenomenon of massive researching using Internet media such as blogs and forums for the purpose of identifying and exposing individuals to public humiliation, usually out of Chinese nationalistic sentiment, or to break the Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China. It is based on massive human collaboration. The name refers both to the use of knowledge contributed by human beings through social networking, as well as the fact that the searches are usually dedicated to finding the identity of a human being who has committed some sort of offense or social breach online. People conducting such research are commonly referred to collectively as "Human Flesh Search Engines"' -- Rage-directed cognitive surplus?

'A group attending an event cheered in unison Thursday after a man with a microphone called out the group's name. "Wooooo!" group members yelled in an act that made them feel closer to one another than they had before hearing their name said aloud. "That's us!" The group ceased its excited cheering moments later when another group's name was called.'

'Sheeple can change. I have seen it with my own eyes on numerous occasions. If the sheeple you are dealing with at any given moment is a stranger, or mere acquaintance, you may not feel that it is worth the immense effort necessary to enlighten them to the problems at hand. But, if said sheeple is a family member or loved one, you might have no other choice but to push forward. There is nothing worse than seeing the people you care about suffer because you were unsuccessful in warning them of impending danger. The above sections can help in easing through the process of waking up a member of the herd, though the best efforts will be wasted without patience and persistence. In every person there are barriers and doorways to truth. The trick is finding the unique keys which open those doors and break down those barriers. There are some who will claim that it is futile to make the attempt. That we should leave well enough alone. That many are too far gone to be helped. I beg to differ.'

'Men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.' – Charles Mackay

'Rather than lambast LAWCAP and FINCAP its time to look in the mirror. Why are people rolling with the flow? What are the characteristics of these people? This majority is also failing us! We are obliged to point this out. How do you lambast a majority so it wakes up.' -- I see dead people.

Watts on the sheeple: "They wouldn't even know they were helpless, but they would be very 'happy'. Most people cannot think for themselves, they live in Plato's Cave, they can only parrot what each one parrots from the media. And because they can parrot all the same things, they think they're sane."

'Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.' -- InternetToughGuy: “Kill him." -- 'The human-flesh search engine can also serve as a safety valve in a society with ever mounting pressures on the government. “You can’t stop the anger, can’t make everyone shut up, can’t stop the Internet, so you try and channel it as best you can. You try and manage it, kind of like a waterworks hydroelectric project,” MacKinnon explained. “It’s a great way to divert the qi, the anger, to places where it’s the least damaging to the central government’s legitimacy.”'

'...not quite popular content that occupies the middle ground between blockbusters and niches [has been losing out]. The stuff that people used to watch or listen to largely because there was little else on is increasingly being ignored. -- Although you might expect people who seek out obscure products to derive more pleasure from their discoveries than those who simply trudge off to see the occasional blockbuster, the opposite is true. William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. The hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill.'

'Seizing on climate change as an issue around which they can create the appearance of purposeful activity, it is political elites who are the most zealous campaigners, ...the government urges us to urge them to act. At the same time, it also berates us for our apathy. Such is the bizarre relationship between the elite and the electorate today. ...putting pressure on world leaders is really an elite wish-fulfilment fantasy, in which child-citizens across the globe put their faith in parent-politicians engaged in an heroic, planet-saving mission. Climate activists may think they are critics of officialdom, but they are simply fuelling the fantasy. -- It seems unlikely that, in the long run, the elite’s search for meaning in green politics will be successful. The vision it offers – of caution and constraint, low ambition and no progress – is a negative, dystopian one which may evoke fear and conformity, but which will never inspire. It is the ideology of a demoralised society...'

'The fact that many readers have automatically conflated the word “sociopath” with “evil” in fact reflects the demonizing tendencies of loser/clueless group morality. The characteristic of these group moralities is automatic distrust of alternative individual moralities. The clueless are not capable of much compassion, unless they can very strongly identify with the person. ...the clueless and losers often externalize their moral sense, into some sort of collectively (and ritually) adopted code, thereby abdicating responsibility for the moral dimension of their actions entirely. You don’t have to think about the morality of what you do if you can just appeal to some code (religious texts are the main kind...). The morality that they defer to is always a codified communal version of the views of some charismatic sociopath, but it is the abdication of responsibility, as a group, by the clueless and losers, that amplifies the impact of both the Hitlers and Gandhis of the world.'

'The Sociopath's private morality is not, in their view, a matter for external democratic judgment. Sociopaths can be compassionate because their distrust only extends to groups. They are capable of understanding and empathizing with individual pain and acting with compassion. A sociopath who sets out to be compassionate is strongly limited by two factors: the distrust of groups (and therefore skepticism and distrust of large-scale, organized compassion), and the firm grounding in reality. The second factor allows sociopaths to look unsentimentally at all aspects of reality, including the fact that apparently compassionate actions that make you “feel good” and assuage guilt today may have unintended consequences that actually create more evil in the long term. This is what makes even good sociopaths often seem callous to even those among the clueless and losers who trust the sociopath’s intentions. The apparent callousness is actually evidence that hard moral choices are being made.'

'In the entire history of man, no one has ever been brainwashed and realized, or believed, that he had been brainwashed. Those who have been brainwashed will usually passionately defend their manipulators, claiming they have simply been "shown the light". The sad truth is that a high percentage of people want to give away their power—they are true "believers". They look for answers, meaning, and enlightenment outside themselves. True believers are not intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but are those craving to be rid of unwanted self. They are followers, not because of a desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy their passion for self-renunciation! They are eternally incomplete and eternally insecure. Never underestimate the potential danger of these people. They can easily be molded into fanatics who will gladly work and die for their holy cause. It is a substitute for their lost faith in themselves and offers them a substitute for individual hope.'

'#Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller -- '...the long tail has gangrene at its extremity - the niche. More disarming is the conclusion that it isn't just the output of our recommendation algorithms that is leading to what the author calls "monopoly populism"and the end of niche culture ... The network effects that so characterize Internet services are a positive feedback loop where the winners take all (or most). The issue isn't what they bring to the table, it is what they are leaving behind.' -- Success is measured by what's successful.

The perception IS the reality. That's the inherent danger of the immediate consenus-making ability of twitter and other realtime platforms. -- Brendan O'Neill: "Illiberal liberalism" "Emotional incontinence" Righteous indignation/enthusiasm. That's the inherent danger of immediate action/reaction/gratification as opposed to taking the time to think things through – "Boring, hard work," as Nick Cohen puts it. (As a #moralmaze tweeter said, links to in-depth resources provide the best alibi for "shallow" twitterhappy tweetstormers.) Nick Cohen: "There's a lot of utopianism. It's very shallow and very transient. A lot of it is apathetic. It's people affirming themselves." -- RE #moralmaze. It's not surprising to see tweeters so overly keen to defend any and every perceived threat to twitter, though it's not like its going away—calm down. Defending both their newly-felt right to be heard and the social/cultural capital they've built up over the years... TWITTER IS SERIOUS BUSINESS.

'Fear motivates all sorts of animal behaviors. Schooling, flocking, and herding are all security measures. Not only is it less likely that any member of the group will be eaten, but each member of the group has to spend less time watching out for predators. Humans are both no different and very different. We, too, feel fear and react with our amygdala, but we also have a conscious brain that can override those reactions. ...we can go beyond fear, and actually think sensibly about security.

00:36 - "SHUT UP Al-Qaeda!" -- American Police Force. FUCK YEAH!

'...in a ponerized society, many people become infected with the disease. They see what others are doing, and not being strong enough themselves to follow their own moral code, if that code differs from that of their neighbours, they follow the herd. These people are the support base for the status quo. They may not be psychopaths themselves, but they support and defend it. -- Also keep in mind the 12% of individuals who are susceptible to the influence and thinking style of the psychopaths. In the end, you have a total of 18% or more of any given population that seeks to subdue and control the rest. If you then consider that remainder, the 82%, and keep in mind the bell curve, at least 80% of the remainder will follow whoever is in charge. And since psychopaths have no limitations on what they can or will do to get to the top, the ones in charge are generally pathological. It is not power that corrupts, it is that corrupt individuals seek power.

'Cargo Cults, Copycat Behaviour, Crazes, End-of-the-World Panics, Fads, Fantasy-proneness, Hoaxes, Mind Control Fears, Moral and Sexual Panics, Possession, Religious Revivals, Sects, and all kinds of mass persecutions of minority groups, both real and imagined. But underlying all these diverse manifestations are two chief vectors: a negative one involving exaggerated fear and uncertainty, and a positive one driven by hope and expectation. In both cases, these emotions of fear and hope can multi­ply to such an extent that they shape society for better or worse… mostly, it has to be said, for the worse.

'The media is fond of saying that no one in the mainstream saw this coming except Roubini. How stupid is this? The media is the sole decision maker about who we get to pay attention to. If they feature only liars and fools, then of course it will seem that no one saw this coming. And they feature almost entirely liars, fools, and criminal manipulators. Let’s consider who got this right in addition to Roubini. [A long list of truthers] Why did we almost never see these guys on the tube or in print. And why, when we did see them, was the usual purpose to ridicule and harass them? Because the media was and is a co-conspirator, witting or unwitting, with the Wall Street criminal distribution machine. The media is populated by conformist morons, too fat and lazy, too coddled by their Wall Street sponsors to be bothered by anything so mundane as to search for the truth. Only the mainstream infomercial media didn’t get it, because they are, after all, on the payroll of the Wall Street Mob.'

'History's Hidden Engine is the result of more than three years of research and creativity by filmmaker David Moore. Moore traveled North America to capture the insights of 17 brilliant minds, then wove them into this film. In just 59 minutes and with the help of pop songs, news footage and cultural images that are familiar to everyone, this documentary shows how social mood drives trends in movies, music, fashion, finance, economics, politics, the media and war.'

'When do people herd? They herd when they are uncertain. In contexts of uncertainty, the herding impulse drives social behavior. The herding impulse is based in the amygdala, a part of the brain’s limbic system. It is non-rational, unconscious, endogenously-regulated and impulsive. By “non-rational” we mean that the herding impulse is not based on reason, but is not necessarily “irrational.” ccording to socionomic theory, not all synchronized group action is herding behavior. We only recognize herding when the behavior is non-rational and performed in the context of uncertainty.'

'Groupthink emerges because groups are often very similar in background and values. Individual members of the group don't want to rock the boat because it might damage personal relationships. Encouraging critical thinking is not easy, but it is possible. Dissenters are often labelled as trouble-makers and targeted for either conversion to the consensus or outright expulsion from the group. As a result dissenters in groups are likely to be an endangered species. To be effective dissenters must tread a fine line, avoiding pointless confrontation or personal attacks; instead presenting minority viewpoints in an even-handed, well-modulated and authentic fashion. For their part the majority has to fight its instinct to crush dissenters and recognise the risk they are taking in being critical of the majority opinion. Although the majority consensus may well be right, it can be more secure in its decision if dissent is encouraged and all the options are explored.' -- Here be dragons

Apologies Obama supporters, but the lulz have beaten my self restraint -- "Barack Obama is the worst reality show ever created in this country. And the biggest problem with the Barack Obama reality show is, we can't cancel it, for at least four years! We have to watch this thing, day after day. Night after night. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year..." -- CHANGE!!!

Never trust the political opinion of someone in debt or with a stock market gambling problem -- '...here's the big thing about "mainstream" journalism... Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." ...the safest place during a stampede is the middle of the herd. Establishment journalists with mortgages, car payments and children in private schools saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Why couldn't it happen to them? The United States had been attacked. Feelings ran high, especially in New York and Washington. -- Long under siege for "liberal bias," media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. But what's really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.'

'Cyber-mobilization is a process of massing force against decisive points. Above all, cyber-mobilization is a popular form of conflict, not a bunch of elite soldiers typing away in cubicles trying to increase their unit’s Google pagerank. It thrives on public participation and dies without it. Cyber-mobilization offers state and non-state actors three important advantages: movement-building, reach and discretion. Propagandizing or carrying out crude hacking attacks gives followers unable to pick up a rifle an ability to contribute and further emotionally bonds them to the cause. By incorporating the efforts of many different geographically dispersed users, cyber-mobilization also allows states and movements to multiply the combat effectiveness of their attacks. And since civilians do all the hacking, states are insulated from retaliation.'

'From big Wall Street names to real estate agents to ordinary citizens, Covel asks the critical questions: how did we get here and what can we do about it. "Broke: The New American Dream" also cracks down on the media influence upon money decisions. It takes a hard look at the state lotteries and draws remarkable parallels to our Social Security system. An expose of dangerous financial decision-making and media confusion, "Broke" proposes the right accountability for our actions. This riveting investigation dispels the irrational belief that the government can solve personal money woes. Embarking on the genius of Nobel Prize Winners Harry Markowitz and Vernon Smith, viewers get a big picture beyond the chaos and the noise of stock market news and financial journalism. Most importantly, this film is about hope. We don't have to behave like sheep and we don't have to go 'broke.' Active and mindful audiences will discover that there is a way out.'

'Following the crowd is best strategy for an individual until too many people follow the crowd, and then it’s a terrible strategy. The irony. -- For objective things, informational cascades have the potential to do great harm. When people discuss their point of view on something before voting with their behavior, conformity will destroy knowledge. I wonder if the way people find things bifurcates into solutions for subjective things and solutions for objective things? Might social networks like Twitter replace Google and Yahoo! on subjective discovery while the current incumbents retain the keepers of the global truth for objective topics? Will someone use the social graph to sanitize information — that is, use the knowledge of who knows who to de-dupe amplified data and to kill informational cascades?'

'High Frequency Trading (HFT) aka ‘flash trading’ will continue to grow exponentially. Trading will become so fast, time itself will have a public offering after Microsoft secures a patent on it and trading time futures will catapult traders backwards and forwards through time until they need bailouts on debts they have not yet incurred.' -- 'People will start taking themselves public on new Citizen Exchanges created by Obama; commit public sex acts to boost their stock price then short themselves before committing suicide to cash in out-of-the-money puts they bought on themselves. As a result, the porn industry will need a bailout.' -- 'Facebook and Twitter will go public... The more you look in the mirror the more you get paid. Narcissism will get monetized by the Feds with some help by Nassim Taleb. -- Thanks Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO of Goldman Sachs and future President of the United States. We are eternally in your debt.' -- HERDAQ

'The dominant commandments in our "developed" society too often seem to comprise 'thou shalt consume', 'thou shalt work and be successful', 'thou shalt desire', and 'thou shalt love thyself above all others'. A quick scan of 20th century history provides many examples of where the herd instinct has become a religion and a goal in itself - few examples more destructive than Nazi nationalism. Nietzsche’s alternative to the herd is a life of extreme individualism which is supremely narcissistic. Rather than chase after extreme states of being – within or without of the herd – we should strive to negotiate a balance between the two.' -- Comment: Drew: 'To disobey the conformist pressures of the adjacent crowd is to encourage a disproportionate reaction in those who wish us not to trouble them, with our misdirected need for personal independence from the push and shove of the seething mob around us.'

'Now is it just me, or is there this weird group of fanatics growing that think they are influencing the whole of mankind in 140 characters? Seriously, it’s like a cult with chapters and stuff. Yes it’s important, rapidly growing, but let’s get some perspective and just a touch of rigour around some of the claims being made... #MJ was officially dead only when the cult said so #The cult has even delivered democracy to Iran through turning their avatars green' -- On self-regarding sensationalists... 'They title things in really sensational ways, even if it’s not related to the point they are actually trying to make. Why? They know that the cult will see it in their RSS reader, take in the first 4 words, then incorrectly Tweet about it claiming another victory for social media over evil...' -- The self-importance of such people never ceases to amaze.

'the Collective chooses what is Good without regard to societal beliefs, whom the Creator is, or anything associated with how we may otherwise regard new things. Gone, is "Oh, Apple made that? I don't like Apple," gone is, "Jeff likes that movie? Jeff sucks at picking out movies," no longer are there any preconceived notions on what Good is. Good is what the Collective thinks it is. -- Good is a Lie. Anonymous is a Lie. The ideal as improbable as passing a camel through the eye of a needle. -- Anonymous is a lie because it's against nature. As the toad is killed by the scorpion, so then is the Collective dependent upon the Collective. The human searches for patterns, searches for meaning, searches for it's group. As much as we wish to deny it, we are as much a pack animal as the wolf. We agree with those in our pack, and reject those who are not, going so far as to label them, "enemy;" fight against them as though their existence somehow threatens our own.'

'... two new qualities of leadership: #The first is the ability to distribute a leader's influence to as many followers within a given time. #The second is the ability to be sufficiently persuasive to change and hold the allegiance of followers who they can influence. When these factors come into play, the balance of power depends on the distribution of leaders. ...the key to seizing power, or at least gaining a significant foothold, is the effective distribution of a small number of leaders within a larger group. "A better distribution pattern has larger influential region and greater clustering factor, which can equip the leaders with the capability of influencing more followers in a given period and strengthening the persuasion power on the followers as well."' -- In the linked paper: '...the mechanism underlying such an apparent “following the minority” in the whole group is due to the scheme of “following the majority” locally.'

'In the twittersphere, if you just take the tweetstream and put it on Fox News, people are going to be tweeting and looking at their own tweets and making assumptions on their own tweets in this divine narcissistic loop of ego destruction and id aggrandizement to the point where all information to do with self-preservation beyond the next 5 minutes is discounted as having no meaning; so all science, all religion, all philosophy, all the body of knowledge accumulated is meaningless in the twittersphere which is merely an open nerve that's being poked at by the aberant nature of individuals whose illnesses are being carried on the mainstream networks as "news".'

'A new phenomenon is sweeping China after the quake: digital witch hunts of those who dare to be outspoken or criticise. -- According to Ms Eberlein, the term “human flesh search engine”, a literal translation of the Chinese, was first coined in 2001 when an entertainment website asked users to track down film and music trivia. With 210 million Chinese wired up to the internet, it was a powerful concept. It quickly caught on and came to be used as a tool to punish the perpetrators of extra-marital affairs, domestic violence and morality crimes. “Righteousness is one of the five virtues in the Confucian tradition,” Ms Eberlein said. “With the convenience of the internet, and in the case of non-responsive law, the righteous people took matters into their own hands.”' -- McLuhan explains the cause of such violence as a lack of identity in a life lived at the speed of light: http://adamcrowe.posterous.com/kill

'The Internet has proven to be a frighteningly efficient tool to create virtual mobs. But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break. ...on FriendFeed all the comments are aggregated on one page, and everyone participating sees it all. It’s much more likely to break out into a mob. ...it might be a good idea to slow the mob down a little until actual facts can be introduced into the conversation.' -- This slowing down is a valid point regarding realtime sentiment racing ahead of facts and wider context. #iranelection is a perfect case study. Isn't all this just a 'tragedy of the commons (attentional bandwidth)' problem?

'...powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.” We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.' -- Last page: On the pharma-co-logic of the casino-capitalism model. Grim.

On twitter stampedes feedbacking volatility markets. -- Subscribe to the herdfeed. Bringing you falseflags daily.

'Facebook management is acting like a group of cult leaders intent on changing the rest of us into more social, less private people than we might want to be. -- ...a cult-like group "offers considerable security to young people because it greatly simplifies the world and answers a contemporary need to combine a sacred set of dogmatic principles with a claim to a science embodying the truth about human behavior and human psychology." Facebook's claim to speak to the basic human need to "connect," combined with the company's number crunching and shiny new graphs, certainly seems scientific and all-encompassing. But isn't there a lot more to human connection than one liner status updates, photos posted online, "thumbs up" and the other relatively mechanistic interactions that people have on Facebook? What's the end result of all these magical connections through relatively shallow communication? Advertising!' -- What have you bought your self into? How much will it cost to buy you out?

First!

"People have always been affected by the taste of those around them, and that susceptibility to influence helps them make up their own minds. The effect discovered by the Columbia University researchers, however, was much bolder and more specific than that. When an electronic feedback loop is called on to make decisions about quality, their work suggests, there arises an effect that throws everything out of kilter and amplifies the decisions of a few early arrivals into a randomly self-reinforcing spiral of continued popularity. Left to fend for ourselves in a sea of online information, with only our online peers for direction, our decisions about quality and taste, it seems, can become snagged in a self-perpetuating feedback loop of follow-the-leader."

'In the 2008ies we need some new way to keep ourselves from thinking. I don’t know the right word for the new way, but maybe something like a “cinderellism“? Like, you know - that tale, where a simple girl suddenly gets everything? Yeah, the midnight is kind of a downer, but, none of these above stories seem to talk about that. Since there’s a lot of problems around, you need to: 1) be deterred from thinking about those problems; 2) vote for the right guys, just to make sure that YOU chose him. Which later, as Robert Cialdini teaches us, leaves you in defensive position even if you made a bad decision... So, you chose The President, now you must approve what he does - he’s your decision. This is really weird - every other day I hear another Cinderella story, but it stops right before midnight. It’s like some weird recurring dream. It seems like marketing/political plays, made to drive sales/elections. But what if ALL those guys were hired actors?…'

'Now that everyone relentlessly Googles baby names, parents have no excuse if they saddle their kids with the most popular names. What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.” And that’s what’s fascinating about watching the nation-level trends in baby naming. The national nomenclature is transformed living room by living room as one frazzled couple after another makes a seemingly personal decision for underlying phonetic reasons they haven’t considered. “People may think they named a child after great, great grandma Olivia, but they have a lot of great, great grandmas, and they picked Olivia because it fits the popular sounds,” Wattenberg says. And that’s how a country’s culture changes: People cherry-picking from the past as they look for a name to call the future.' -- How about choosing one that's good?

"The members of a hashmob gather, virtually, around a particular hashtag by labeling each of their tweets with said hashtag and then following the resulting hashtag tweet stream. Hashmobbers don't have to subject themselves to the weather, and they don't actually have to be in proximity to any other physical being. A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob." -- #amazonfail

“As hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves in which they are also at zero at the end of the year with credit cards and mortgage bills that are inescapable. Five hundred thousand dollars means taking their kids out of private school and selling their home in a fire sale.” -- “People inherently understand that if they are going to get ahead in whatever corporate culture they are involved in, they need to take on the appurtenances of what defines that culture. So if you are in a culture where spending a lot of money is a sign of success, it’s like the same thing that goes back to high school peer pressure. It’s about fitting in.”

"Twitter is a human API. It’s being defined in real time in front of our eyes, through an amazing example of Internet Darwinism." -- "People want to seem smart. They want the affirmation of retweeting. They want to be noticed. Like it or not, the fluid social graph brings about yearbook psychology way down in our high school psyches, and has more of an impact on our behavior than we think." -- Famo

Linked PDF: 'Forget influentials, herd-like copying is how brands spread' --"The simple truth is that humans, being first and foremost social creatures, rather than independent agents, rely on copying to learn and to negotiate the rich and sophisticated social reality they inhabit. Copying is our species’ number one learning and adaptive strategy. Copying among a population with frequent interactions creates a pull mechanism by which things – visible behaviours, opinions, skills, fashions and so on – spread through populations. -- Two kinds of copying: #Random copying is a continual [unconscious] process. #Directed copying is somewhat more conscious. Random and directed copying leave different signatures, particularly in patterns of turnover in what constitutes the most popular behaviours. The direction of random copying is quite unpredictable over the long term. Directed copying often results in more steady, potentially predictable, change."

"birds of a feather..." -- get shot down together.

"This year we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth... On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships."

'"Where's the outrage?" Complacency would seem to be the default reaction. Like cattle at the abattoir, we mill about munching straw while one by one our brethren receive a bolt to the head before being parceled into roasts.'

"Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge."

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." -- Charles Mackay

"Professional economists are idiots because they believe what they are taught at University." -- This is so monumentally true. Yet there they are on the BBC, NBC, ABC, CNN talking absolute bollocks. Beware the useful idiots.

"... one girl laughed, but then so did another, and then another, and then another, and then another.... just laughter and occasional crying between short moments of exhausted recuperation. When victims were restrained they sometimes became violent."