Whatever Things on My Mind

What Makes a Human?

I’m intrigued by this particular quote from a NewScientist article:

“To suggest that we have used a cow gene and that our wheat is somehow part-cow betrays a misunderstanding which may serve to confuse people or scare them but has no basis in scientific reality.”

The quote was an anecdote on a Genetically Modified Wheat experiment that was under fire from activists. You can see a part of the debate in Sense About Science if you’re interested.

It’s a rather intriguing quote to think that just because there’s a part of something other than human itself inside the human gene pool, it made someone not human. This is an interesting thought, one which I think needs to be rectified.

We do know that there are similarities in genomic codes between humans and chimpanzees, gorillas; and also with pigs! We also know that some eight percent of our DNA came from virus, and there are also bacterial DNA in human genes. There’s also this report that 20 percent of nonhuman genome databases are contaminated with human DNA.

It seems that interspecies gene transfer is not a rarity. Bacteria being the most dominant in interspecies gene transfer. 

In that case, what makes a human?

For one, just because you have the genes, doesn’t make you human by definition. What people often miss is that, it’s not just the genes that make you either human, pig, bacterium, or chimpanzee, but also the interaction between those genes, at what time, on what type of behavior. That’s a complex stuff to observe.

And yet, to understand that all those genes are made from various sequences of the very same genetic building blocks, Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine, which are all made of Hydrogen, Nitrogen, and Carbon atoms. Mindblowing. 

The key point here is that any one of any organic being’s genes need to interact with another designated gene at a designated time and place, or otherwise it will make a problem for the being, and the probabilistic survival for those genes themselves.

Imagine if when you’re just a small fetus, the genes that made your eyes failed to cooperate with each other, and thus they fail to build your eye. You won’t be reading this now, and maybe you won’t be pretty successful in reproduction too, that would be the end of those uncooperative genes. But you also wouldn’t want those genes to start building a new eye for you, when you’re no longer a fetus, and definitely not when they randomly build it in your palm.

So many processes happen in your body, from ever since you were just a zygote trying to be an embryo. Long before you grow protoformic limbs and become a fetus. Be happy that your genes are not that creative.

Anyway, the point here is that, just having human genes won’t necessarily make you human. Just as you have so many nonhuman genes in you won’t make you not human. Your humanness is something borne from the interactions and behaviors of those genes. I would be digressing to emergence, but I’ll just end this post here before I bore you to death.

Tanggapan Atas Penelitian @icipg Yang Dilakukan @yanuarnugroho dan @dinitaputri

Sebenarnya saya ingin menyampaikan komentar saya ini di forum diskusinya supaya bisa dapat tanggapan selekasnya dari para peneliti. Tapi apa daya, otak saya terlalu lambat, dan saya tidak cukup berani berkomentar di hadapan para praktisi dan petinggi media yang hadir pada saat itu.

Alhasil, saya menuliskannya di ruang publik yang saya miliki, dalam bahasa indonesia, karena saya tidak ingin dikomentari keminggris dan tulisan ini tampaknya tidak akan ditampilkan juga di media massa konvensional. Tulisan ini pun disampaikan selekasnya, agar tidak menjadi bisul di pikiran saya, sehingga saya bisa fokus mengerjakan tugas-tugas saya. Yang mungkin perlu dibahas kali ini adalah penelitian tentang kondisi industri media saat ini di Indonesia.

Sesuai temuan penelitian, memang ada oligopoli dalam industri media, yang dipegang oleh dua belas kelompok media. Tapi apakah ini berdampak baik atau buruk terhadap masyarakat, mungkin perlu dikaji ulang. Saya kira belum tentu oligopoli dapat dikatakan mereduksi hak warga untuk memperoleh informasi begitu saja. Dan mungkin komodifikasi informasi adalah sebuah kelaziman di masa ini.

Ini fakta yang menyedihkan bila kita berpendapat bahwa informasi adalah sebuah hal adiluhung yang semestinya tidak dikomodifikasi. Namun, saya kira komodifikasi memang artifak utama di zaman ini, ditilik dari jumlah dan ragam komodifikasi yang terjadi.

Point penting yang perlu disorot di sini adalah bahwa informasi itu tidak gratis, dan karenanya tidak bebas. Informasi perlu dikumpulkan, oleh orang yang mungkin perlu dibayar, melalui institusi yang mungkin membutuhkan profit untuk dapat membayar pengumpul informasi.

Penyebaran informasi ini pun belum tentu gratis. Ada kepentingan ekonomi yang perlu dipenuhi dalam industri media. Dan tentunya sah2 saja bila pemodal melakukan framing, sensor, atau proses penyuntingan apapun untuk merangkai informasi yang akan disampaikan pada kita. Di sisi lain, jumlah media yang banyak mungkin dapat menghasilkan keragaman informasi.

Meskipun pada kenyataannya, kita cenderung akan terpaku pada satu set media tertentu yang kita konsumsi secara rutin. Di sini saya ingin mengomentari peta jejaring yang dicantumkan dalam riset tersebut. Peta tersebut mungkin perlu menimbang serta jumlah pembaca dan polarisasi opini terhadap, mungkin kasus tertentu yang dijadikan contoh.

Misalkan kasus Lapindo. Jika misalnya hanya kelompok Visi Media yang mendukung Bakrie, dengan misalnya 8 juta pemirsa, sementara ada 11 kelompok media lain yang menyalahkan Bakrie dengan misalnya 50 juta pemirsa, maka mungkin sudah selayaknya bila kelompok Visi Media memanfaatkan lebih banyak ruang pemberitaan terhadap Bakrie dalam kasus Lapindo, sebagai usaha pembelaan.

Point kedua ada dalam tingkat intervensi stakeholders terhadap pemberitaan. Saya rasa perlu ditekankan bahwa porsi kontribusi pembaca tidak sebanding dengan kontribusi dari, misalnya, pengiklan. Saya ambil contoh bila harga sirkulasi koran X adalah Rp 1000, dengan pembaca 2 ribu orang. Koran ini berarti mendapatkan 2 juta rupiah per edisi terbit. Nilai yang mungkin tidak dapat menutup biaya produksi koran tersebut dalam satu hari.

Keuntungan yang didapat dari iklan cenderung lebih besar daripada keuntungan dari penjualan koran. Contoh yang lebih ekstrim lagi mungkin terjadi pada tayangan televisi free-to-air, di mana penonton tidak membayar sepeser pun untuk mendapatkan informasi, dan seluruh biaya dibebankan pada pengiklan.

Logikanya sederhana. Karena yang membiayai pengumpulan, pengelolaan, dan penyampaian produk informasi bukanlah pembaca, maka media terpaksa harus melayani kepentingan sponsor2nya demi kelangsungan organisasi media.

Jika pembiayaan dilakukan oleh pemirsa, maka mungkin sudah selayaknya hak warga dalam memperoleh informasi yang berimbang itu dipenuhi setinggi mungkin. Bila kita dapat bersepakat bahwa media massa adalah agen yang tidak netral dalam penyampaian informasi, dan bahwa industri media hampir tidak mungkin dibiayai oleh pembacanya secara menyeluruh, maka mungkin implikasi logisnya akan berbeda.

Misalnya bahwa mungkin cara untuk memperoleh informasi berimbang adalah dengan memperbanyak penguasaan media, atau mungkin dengan memanfaatkan media alternatif sebagai pengumpul dan penyedia informasi.

Kuncinya ada di kompetisi yang lebih tinggi antara masyarakat sebagai produsen dan konsumen informasi, dengan media sebagai produsen dan distributor informasi. Selanjutnya mungkin ketimpangan ini bisa dibawa ke ranah regulasi. Tapi itu di bahasan selanjutnya. Setidaknya bisul saya sudah dipecahkan untuk saat ini.

Here's a free idea for your research purpose

A friend asked me for a research idea. He was so stupid that he couldn’t get out from common analysis projects. His objective was to somehow find out how to increase sales. The usual stuff all over again. Dear marketers, come to me when you have a creative objective please. So I came up with this idea: find emergent purchase behavior from the idiots who purchased his products.

His product is a stupid, mediocre one with no clear benefit and a low level involvement. People buy his product impulsively, no serious consideration at a low cost. Fair enough. You won’t aggravate over something that doesn’t cost you much, unless you’re obsessive with your purchase behavior.

I would definitely ask why the hell do his company make such a product and hope that it would somehow sell. Apparently, there are enough idiots in this land to have the company profit from selling mediocre items without any benefits. I’m assuming that his company is not the only one doing it.

My assumption would probably be right, since he said there’s a big churn on the purchase of his product. This is what interests me. There’s a big churn for something insignificant. From my perspective, it’s amazing that the product was somewhat successful; it’s even more amazing to know that people actually buy the stupid stuff periodically.

So the first questions I would want to address are:
•    Who the hell are these idiots who purchased the stupid stuff?
•    What other things they purchased along with the stupid stuff?
•    What other things that function like the stupid stuff?
•    What’s the relation between those stuff?
•    How much do people spend on those other things?
•    When do they buy such things?
•    Where do they buy such things?

From these questions, I’m pretty sure he could find out what product sets are closely related to his stupid stuff. Are they, for instance, belong to the category of ‘stupid useless stuff people buy’ or maybe ‘stuff that are sold in colorful packages’? I would be surprised if that stupid stuff belongs only in one category.

People assign multiple meanings to an object. So there should be several categories that would be assigned to that stupid useless crap. These categories could be compared to one another to see a trend. For instance, people buy X along with Y and Z in the category of ‘stupid useless cheap stuff to buy’ when A, B, and C, who are on the same category, are not on sale. Stuff like that would be useful to know. It shows that objects A, B, and C are what people want, but won’t afford.

He would also be able to know if the churn rates between those products tend to favor a product or another. Maybe within the set A, B, and C, people tend to buy C for some reasons unknown.
The concept of Interchangeability is interesting. It’s not a new concept, really. We already know of complementary and substitute goods. What’s important is how a product is relatively more preferred as a substitute than the other. The more interchangeable a product set is, the likelier that the products in the set was purchased replacing one another.

From there, he could deduce which stuff that people are more dependent or reliant upon. Maybe his product is more desirable, but people don’t depend much on it. Or maybe what is dependent is not the product, but the product category. This needs a test of its own.

Then there’s the decay rate too. How long do a product set stays constant. For instance, Set A that contains the products X, Y, Z, remains the same before someone put product Y that is interchangeable with A, on sale. The general trend of the decay can be a good indicator of what people need and if there’s an outbreak in behavioral shift.

So basically, what I’m trying to propose is for my friend to monitor the purchase shifts and what might probably cause it. The stupidest answer would be related to price levels, especially if the product was sold primarily for the low income group. But price level might not explain everything. There’s probably another set of answers to find out.

For instance, why do people who buy condom X also bought beers A, B, and C during the second and third week of the month? Maybe it’s not the beer or the condom, but both. They need alcohol consumption to ease getting laid, since they can’t afford to spend too much for sex. Surely that could generate some ideas for marketing.

All in all, be creative in a research. You don’t know what you will find. Most of them are useless but some of them, when processed right, can be very useful for so many stuff.

Having Faith On Something? Think Again, But Not Retrospectively

In my last article, I mentioned something about the fact that you can’t predict what’s going on in the society unless it has happened before. I’d like to explain it further here, since I think this idea deserves an article of its own.

Let’s start with a simple example of what commonly happens in the so-called social marketing. Assuming that this represents the truth., let’s suppose you have a friend who is known as an avid Star Wars fan. She know every single thing about the whole Star Wars Expanded Universe, and she memorized them all. She even considered changing her name to Jaina Solo.

She is an uber sexy geeky chick, and you decided you want to ask her out. You decided to learn a thing or two about Star Wars, just for conversational purposes, and you finally do it.

You asked her out for a coffee, talk about Star Wars, learn more stuff from her, and had the chance to ask her out again, on a more romantic date. She smiled and agreed to it.

One day, out of whatever reasons you have, you suggest to her to buy a Jaina Solo lightsaber replica. But she doesn’t seem to like the idea. Something seems off, and you think she put some distance from you. So you went home and think about it for hours.

You mentally reiterated whatever was wrong, replaying the date, and the situation when you gave her that lightsaber replica. You can’t seem to find any reason why she rejected your gift. Finally, after losing sleep for several nights, you decided that maybe you’re not really her type, and she’s not the one for you. So you moved on.

Well, not a good story, but I think it conveyed my point. You can’t know the unknown. And you based your judgment on what you know instead. Making assumptions that makes sense. Nothing wrong here, it’s just how your mind works.

The aforementioned story convey what I will call as an observational parallax. In the field of astrophysics, Parralax isn’t an alien thing, in fact, it’s used to help measuring the distance between astronomical objects.

Before parallax phenomenon was understood, however, we generally assume that when we see a star at a certain point in the sky, the star is there and will always be there for all times.

Now we know that astronomical objects shift positions in an orbit of their own, with little to no relation to earth’s position. We also know that the shift of positions can be used, in conjunction with other observational facts, to extrapolate the position of the said astronomical object in another time.

What was not known back then, is that the light that travels to our eyes had taken years to travel from its source. The point of light that you know as coming from Alpha Centauri that you see on your night sky tonight, is the point of light that was sent from the star 4.24 years ago. In effect, that Alpha Centauri you see now, is the Alpha Centauri as it has been 4 years ago.

The same observational parallax happens with our cute geeky Star Wars fanchick. Your observation of her captured some minutes of her and sorts, not the complete existence. Who knows if she thinks that the lightsaber replica you gave her was thought of as reminding her of the lightsaber that Jaina Solo used to slay Darth Caedus (formerly known as her brother, Jacen Solo). Who knows if by the time you gave her the item, she no longer has interest in Star Wars?

In a larger scale, though not astronomical, it happens with the dynamic society.  People change, and so does society. Suppose we make a theory about the fluid dynamics of society now, how long will the theory lasts? A year? Two years?

Its validity may end tomorrow morning, for all I care. That’s what happens when something big and unpredictable happens. Something called as Force Majeur, or Black Swan, or whatever random stuff that happens when some shit hits the fan.

The problem is, when you observe and rationalize something, you consider only the things you have known. During your time away, things might have changed, the dominant trends that you saw during your observational period might have been replaced by some stuff that you can’t know until it happens.

When it happens, you rationalize again and make new conclusion, while things might already change again out there.

When a scientist makes an observation, usually it takes more than just a quick glance. Observational data should be documented properly, categorized, and methodologically analyzed, so that the scientist can get some measure of validity in  the theory. And it’s still a ceteris paribus condition with some margins of error included.

Marketers and practiciioners don’t do that. If they take the time to ponder and think deep, they’ll lose the time, momentum, and whatever is necessary to do what they do. Most of the time, they rely on established theories that’s already available, or to make logical leaps to arrive to a conclusion and spend time building something from it.

The problem is, the theory might not be valid anymore, but nobody knows it because the scientists haven’t observed and rationalized the change thoroughly, and the practicioners have no idea that the shift had taken place. I’m not talking about Force Majeurs here, rather some minor shifts that happens collectively under the radar and might or might not affect the society as a whole.

We are not predictive, cognitively speaking. We just learn from our mistakes and others’ mistakes, and make retrospective conclusions out of it. We strive to understand patterns, believing that it would be recurrent.

But now we know better.

So yeah, be a little skeptical towards theories and conclusions. It might be outdated, or it might not be good enough to explain the present conditions. Having faith in anything, in this sense, would be totally irrational, since who knows if it’s valid or not.

No Man Is An Island, or Maybe We Should Be. A Cause Against Interdependency

While, as John Donne had put it, no man is an island, the problem of interdependence is something I think we should address in the recent trend of growing uncertainty. Being interdependent is generally good, in times of stability. But in times of chaos and turmoil, being interdependent means you can’t actually do anything yourself without the help from others. Help that might never came because something took that significant party away from your effort.

In my previous article, I mentioned a bit about the fact that interdependency increased relationships, interactions, cooperations, and cohesiveness between related parties. Inter-related supply chain is a good example of this.

Let’s suppose you need to eat in order to save the nation. For the farmers to produce your food, they need fertilizers from the factories, sent to them via truck drivers who needs to eat as well. The factories, to supply fertilizers, need workers who need to eat, and electricity from the nearest power plant. These power plants needs people who need to eat as well, and deliveries from the truck drivers. You’re doing good with your plan, until someday the truck drivers decided to go on a strike. Suddenly distribution channels are broken, and nothing gets delivered. Everyone starve and die.

Well, maybe not that horrid, but some really smart guy from Carnegie Mellon had make an analysis of it, and found out that the highest interdependencies between critical infrastructures occur upstream (e.g., in the second or third-level of the supply chain).

To be fair, interdependency is something that promote cohesiveness and cooperation. Coupled with peer pressure and punishment against freeloaders, as well as isolation to outsiders and others for their otherness, creating interdependency can produce something good and beneficial for the society.  You can read more about Social Interdependency Theory here if you like.

Interdependency can be good or bad. It could be the key to promote cooperation and save a nation, or it could be a way to go rapidly downhill to total chaos. I think I can think of several positive aspects of making interdependency schemes on developing a nation.

One of them is about  providing an illusion of equal chances for everybody to participate, somehow, in the development. In truth, it’s about distributing as many wealth as possible to the least amount of possible people.

Money is scarce, wealth is even more scarce. People try to make some niche for themselves so they can somehow fit in the larger system and get a living out of it. This basic process happens in a larger ecosystem too. Every species carved themselves a good niche to live and reproduce. (if you don’t know it by now, I’ll blandly state that nature is a highly complex interdependent system too.)

Interdependence in nature seems to be managed through redundancy. There’s always extra set of anything to complement for the random loss that might happen anytime. Something that maybe man-made systems need to make.

And here, I’ll jump to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb said as a Black Swan Phenomenon. In a world where all swans are white, the emergence of a black swan is considered highly improbable. But, as we now know, black swans do exist. The same applies to almost everything, 9/11 included.

One way to put it in simple terms is that the gap between what we don’t know and what we think we know is the door to all these black swan events.

As an example: Social Media workers used to think they know what kinds of tweets get retweeted, what will make trending topics. We all know that it’s a trending topic only when it gets listed. And we would always wonder how we get those trending topics. We all try to rationalize it and make somewhat “educated” guesses of what caused it, after it became a trending topic. Before that, nobody knows.

The problem is always the reversed logic. It happens because whatever stuff, instead of these whatever stuff will cause that. While, there’s never any guarantee that the same whatever stuff will reproduce the same thing again.

Even if you had made a trending topic with a formula, there’s no way to make sure you will make another trending topic again with the same formula a minute later.

The same stuff goes to interdependency problems. Here in this world, we have a very interdependent supersystem consisted of many interdependent systems, built by interdependent networks of our social beings. When a black swan appears someplace, it will make an effect, and there’s no way to know if it will be beneficial to the society or not.

We make formulas to ensure that we can manage whatever randomness life will throw at us. To figuratively make lemonades from whatever lemons thrown to us. But we can never be sure that the next lemonade will be as good, or as easy to process, as the last lemonade that we turn into lemonade with the formula we have at hand.

And in terms of the highly interdependent systems, when one system can’t handle the amount of lemons that life had thrown at it, the whole system will be affected. In a limited scale, we can always erect barriers to shield us from the lemon throwing competition. But of course, it assumes that the lemons are generic. Whoever would have the mind to make a barrier to stand a +30 zombifying ultradense neutrino lemons?

So yeah, building anti-chaos barriers is a guaranteed-to-fail action. Look at the new order regime. Nobody could have predicted the international monetary crisis during the 90s. That is one hell of a lemon.

Economists squandered, wall street people came to action and ‘saved’ the economy. Heroes were annointed. Plans were made and implemented, and life returns to normal. We are all safe from chaos for now. Right, the last sentence was a big bullshit.

Now we all know that 9/11 happened. But nobody during the 90s would’ve predicted that some random guy would hijack a plane and drive it right to the twin towers. At least, not on the media. Who would have believed it anyway? Unlike now paranoia and insecurity-related dramas are not common before 2001.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggested to maximize potential solutions, despite of the occurrence or inoccurrence of any problems. That’s just highly improbable, since we only have a set amount of time and so many potential problems at hand. Of course, we can all maximize our potentials in many aspects nonetheless as individuals.

But in business minds, that means quite a number of investments with no particular point where you will get any returns. Hell, there might never be any returns at all. Thus, most businessmen stayed with the tried, true and tested retrospective formulas that offered some semblance of ROI, assuming no black swans will hit the fan, and no lemon throwing god will have an episode.

I’m not keen in risk management, but I think most economists can suggest a thing or two about it. Let’s just assume black swans don’t exist, and learn a thing or two from them. This reminds me about an economist that said one of the best way to keep yourself from black swan’s harm is to raise as many funds as possible and turn it into a cushion. I came back to him as soon as I learned about the amount of Luxembourg’s national debt.

So I guess, the best way to get out from all this mess is to either be outside the interdependent system and make the best out of what’s available, or you can spread your eggs on as many baskets as possible, since there’s a good probabillity that one of the baskets will be your safe haven during the age of chaos. If you're a bit uncertain about this solution, please look to your genitals and remember that it was basically how you were conceived in the first place.

Up to this point, you might think that I’m not giving you any solutions. My defense is twofold. One, I have no authority whatsoever to suggest you doing anything. Two: there is no solution but to adapt and make redundancies, just like what mother nature had taught us all for the last several billion years of life’s existence in this planet.

All in all… it seems the best solution is to be an island after all. In your stone, John Donne!

Between Keynes, World Wars, and The Future

So my friend @sociotalker finally made a kultwit about neoliberalism, something most indonesians don’t understand. Well, not their fault, because the anti-neoliberalism propaganda that they see is mostly about demonizing the said economic model for the bad condition of Indonesian microeconomics. People need a demon, something to loathe, something to put the blame upon. Ironically, that’s what happens to God as well, but sometimes God can enjoy the attribution of good stuff too.

Anyway, we know that there’s something wrong with indonesian economics, but good news (or bad news, if you happen to have no economical advantages whatsoever) is, it happens all around the globe for the last several decades. The way I see it, there’s no end to the infamous Great Depression, just series of alleviations and meanderings to dampen its effects.

While my perspective, basically, is just a big non-academical, all-intuitive, and is basically just a general bullshit, I will still write it down because I won’t be able to sleep before this is posted. So read on if you want.

From where I see it, macrodynamics of international economy and politics is a continuous story of who gets the most power to be left alone, to be envied at, or to lead the rest. No story starts without a prologue and ends without a finale. There’s always a specific, underlying, recurrent, leitmotif to every actions taken by countries all over the world.

While there are lots of stories from the times of the ancients to the modern world, this story actually started during the industrial revolution, where natural resources were extracted in great numbers, production factories boomed, and the demand for energy and labors were sky high.

Back then, England was the center of the perceptual universe, America was the runner up. England with the inventions and the marvel of sea armada has the most acess to natural resources and energy. During the previous age, the naval expeditions of the royal navy had secured multiple ports in various lands across the globe for resources. We’re Indonesians, of course we know what happened during the colonial age.

The problem starts when England started to expand in terms of production capacity and broke free from the Malthusian Trap. This started an europe-wide race to get more income per person that requires more extraction of resources and energy from the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, the most aggressive competitor was Germany.

With the increased income, came increased consumption and the start of what economists called as the Great Divergence. Some countries experience the exponential growth while some other countries (namely, the exploited lands such as sub-saharan africa) are still  in the Malthusian Trap.

David Landes (1998) argued that European culture is more conducive to economic growth, and in the rise of economy means the rise of both production and consumption. The market needs to move faster and faster, and energy consumption increases. Colonization efforts grew and the international game of chess was played with more vigor. This process continues and gave birth to World War I. (for a very beautiful story about the turn of the ages up to this point in time, I would recommend Ernst Hans Gombrich’s “A Little History of the World” for more avid readers)

War is a very expensive investment, and the losing party tends to lose everything. This happens to Germany who had to pay for reparations in the affected countries. Among other things happening globally, this gave rise to the dream of a Third Reich which will lead into the advent of World War II.

But the most interesting things happen with the involvement of the Americans. Basically, they gain the most during the aftermath of the World War I. Long before Marshall Plan, there was Dawes Plan whose main point is about financing Germany in the efforts of post-war reparations. A debt that haunts Germany until it’s finally settled in 2010.

The side effect of Dawes Plan is the dependency it created to Germany. I’m pretty sure this is what modern colonization means, creating dependency from another sovereign nation and make them dependent for their livelihood. My stupid analysis would suggest this is the seed for a global domination plan.

However, the Great Depression somehow happened. I don’t know how, or why, it happens. But we all can agree that it happened, and one of its effects was the inability for Germany to pay for its war debts. (for a good quick read on the Great Depression, I recommend this page here on american economy during 1920-1930)

America, in dire need for cash and in a show of generosity, decided to make another plan to replace Dawes Plan, since Germany wouldn’t be able to pay its debts anyway. Young Plan was about postponing the payment dues, lowering the debts, and generally making Germany continued to pay its debts under a softer terms and conditions.

But opposition came and gave room for the rise of a brilliant overlord named Adolf Hitler. As you can see up to this point, there seems to be a downhill race in humanity since the freedom from Malthusian Trap. One evil leads to another, maybe.

The structure of the world changes rapidly in the chaos following World War II. In the aftermath, came what is known as Marshall Plan. America’s revamped version of Dawes Plan, but this time, the financing goes to the allies in developing their post-war economy, and in effect, dividing the rest of the world into new colonial territories based on economic dependency. Yes, we’re a part of the colonial territory.

As a sidenote, during the 1910s, America was a military pygmy who accelerated and mobilized its economy to war-funding efforts just to participate in the first great war. This resulted in an investment called Germany, and failed gloriously along with the Great Depression. A re-enactment of this opportunistic war-investment happened in the second great war, and this time it results in a plan that put the allies and not the war loser on the debitor side.

Market growth was accelerated during this era because world commerce was believed to be a precondition for peace. America gained success in leading the development of world economy during this era. The logic here is that if all nations are related in an interdependent relation, they would refrain from making wars  with each other. Most of the world powers during this age agreed to the logic. Except the Soviet Union who believed that each nation should be mutually independent and self sufficient. Cold War between Soviet bloc and the rest of the world happened afterwards. 

During this age of post-war aftermath, World Bank and International Monetary Fund was established to prevent the economic collapse as what had happened after the first great war. The concept was to build two intergovernmental agencies to oversee market stability and regulating international investments in the emerging markets of the third world countries. Basically, these regulatory agencies, plus the cost of war, successfully prevent the advent of another great war.

While the idea is simple, the regulatory details and the following economic consequence is not. The financial crisis during 2007 – 2010 proved that, among other things, risk assessment models that had dominated the mainstream economy since the rise of World Bank and IMF was not infallible. Bubbles burst, eventually.

Even so, it doesn’t mean that the economic models developed by Keynes along with his American counterpart White wasn’t effective. It has prevented the post-war problems for so long, though it couldn’t answer to the Great Divide between world powers and leftover countries.

So yeah. After such a long bullshit, I think the problem lies not in the economic models, but the economic strategies taken by the world powers. America, as we see, participates in war as a form of investment. England participate in war as a form of resource pooling expansion. And in this age of economical interdependence, the war happens in the economy perspectives and actions taken by governments.

Presently, Indonesia is facing two options: either it will go China, or it continues to go America. For both world powers, Indonesia is a very important market. Lots of consumers, lots of cheap labors, and lots of natural resources. And it’s not easy to navigate between the two world powers. (add to that, the general problems indonesia has from the very beginning and its independence minus absolute sovereignity).

During the last economic crisis, however, Europe and America faced potential bankruptcy, so I’m thinking that there would be world wars going on. So far, the unrests happening in Africa and Middle East is well contained, but who knows if it will go into an all out war once the investment money runs thin and the return is nowhere in sight.

So yeah, libertarianism my ass.

Click To Donate To Your Mind

It’s interesting to read about click activism, in the light of click a link, like this page, or follow, or retweet, for charity, in twitter and facebook area. The one that’s been quite a talk in these recent days is the donation that brands will donate for every followers they have. It’s an interesting thing, and you might have some opinions about it yourself.

But before that, I think I should properly disclaim that this is my personal opinion, based on whatever stuff I have in store about this kind of stuff, and does not reflect the views of my employers and that of their clients.

Now, with those stuff in place, let’s go to the issue at hand.

First thing first, I don’t think that people are altruistic. The need to survive and to allow for one’s own lineage tends to overshadow the need to contribute to a greater cause. Taking from evolutionary studies, altruism risen to aid individuals to survive. This sense of altruism can take many forms, starting from taking care of your kin’s children, or even to donate for the survival of someone your own species.

Scientists tend to agree that this sense of altruism, as a part of life-strategy, has something to do with the survival of social animals such as ants and primates. And while we can debate for its finer details, I think we can generally put the whole discussion in two boxes: either humans are generally altruistic, or that they are generally individualistic.

If humans are altruistic, then we’ll generally throw ourselves in the face of danger for the survival of any other human. Which is not the case, since most conditions favoring altruism tend to have relational and cost/beneficial considerations about it. You might not throw yourself away for a random stranger, unless you’re a caped superhero in red undies and blue spandex; but you might throw yourself away for your closest families and friends.

For most people, giving away a Rp 1000 bill (maybe an equivalent of 50 cents for you who are more accustomed to american dollar bills) for some beggar or pengamen they met on their way to office won’t be a big sacrifice. Most of the time, it could’ve been just a way to get rid of the said recipient. Sad, but since I’ve seen it happen, so it’s not improbable to happen again.

Of course, not everyone is that cold and looking at the beggars as freeloaders of the society. Maybe there are still some people with more romantic hearts that think of it as an act of charity for the poor and needy, a way to help them surviving their daily hardship.

Either way, there’s always a problem of inequality in the distribution of wealth and resources. We try to make the best of what’s there, for whatever purpose. And maybe most of the purpose was driven by the need to feel good. You feel good when there’s no annoying stuff bugging you, and you feel good when you feel you had somehow contributed to the society. Admit it. It’s called as being human.

Then along came corporations and their marketing efforts to grasp the world and turn everyone into their fanatic believer, evangelists, preachers, and above all else, their loyalist zombies. It might be an exaggeration, but I don’t think it’s too far-fetched. The purpose of corporations is to make profit anyway. And most of them profited from making us consuming their products.

One of their marketing effort is by making a communication campaign that opened room for people to participate, however small, in what seem to be a contribution for the betterment of the society. This is not an inherently evil kind of thing. The need to feel good is there, the brands just have to transmute it into something that doesn’t, somehow, crossed the abstract boundaries made by random unknown people. But if the said effort to open room for people to participate might have included exaggerated claims and misrepresentation of the facts, then I think we have a problem.

David Rieff, the author of “A bed for the night: humanitarinism in crisis” suggested that some humanitarian aids for disaster/war/tsunami/whatever reliefs, might include exaggerated claims and boasted numbers.

On the recent Foreign Policy article, he wrote that such claims are “...not the compassionate rhetoric of solidarity, but advertising hype… The fact that those who dispense such misinformation mean well does not lessen the distortion.” And that “…these days, only the most extreme, most apocalyptic situations are likely to move donors in the rich world.”

Well, it’s a sad world we live in where disaster relief is made into a business, and business include disaster reliefs as a marketing effort. I think we have a serious problem now that charity has become investment, and that investment means a quick return.

Such examples of following a brand for a sum of donation, clicking a link to donate, and buying something to donate, might be a deviation for the humanitarian aspect of charity. It might also be a good example of misinterpretations of charity.

I think we can all agree that donations made incognito are just as useful as donations made with hours of airtime. But the extra effort of making the publicity could be seen as an investment for the company, whatever it is. And I don’t think leveraging customers, potential consumers, and generally anything for the business to profit and build upon is nothing close to altruism.

No. It’s business as usual.

Whatever Stuff about Media Ecology, part 2

Following my last post, I think it’s only natural for me to write about the media as a channel. I don’t think this would be a long post. I think most of us, especially those who are actively tweeting and updating facebook statuses already know how the media acts as a channel to convey a message.

Just a quick reiteration of common knowledge: we all need some sort of a channel to allow our message to be transferred. You can actually put any message through any medium, as long as you know that there will be someone receiving it on the other end.

But McLuhan thought that even as a channel, the medium acts also as a message. This is a very interesting point. It supposes that, what you say on a newspaper is somewhat different from what you say on twitter, facebook, email, chat, or anything else.

The question is whether the condition of “the medium as the message” is an integral part of the media or a social part of the media.
If the condition is integral, then it should mean that there would be no particular difference from writing a 140 characters message on one’s own personal blog and tweeting it.

But no, a tweet, series of tweets, and a blog post would be perceived differently. Cognitively speaking, you process a tweet differently than a longer narrative. A tweet, most people would say, would be just like a snack whereas a blog post would be something heavier, but not as heavy as a book, or an economist article.

Then, maybe it’s social. If so, then it means that it has something to do with the attributes applied to a media as a channel. Newspapers, for instance, has an air of formal authority that differentiated it from, say, radio channels.
But, of course, the attribution came from how the media, as an actor, developed its personality and social representations based on its own policies. Things like yellow journalism or sensational headlines, for instance, differentiated a news portal from another and interact with existing perceptions about the media industry as a whole.

And so,  if you write an essay on something like detik.com, it would be perceived differently than if you write it on the economist. A hard news coming from a news radio station would be perceived with more trust than from a comedy radio station. Nothing new here. It’s still the same old stuff.

It would be more interesting if I talk about the cognition process that allows you to perceive something as different from another. But that’s another story.

Whatever Stuff about Media Ecology, part 1

So, generally, there’s no single consensus on what the frak Media Ecology is. And I’m not an authority in this stuff. So maybe you can read the discussion here and google the rest. Or if you have no time and need something simple for your taste, wiki it. But let me introduce you to my side on the story.

So, if we hear the phrase Media Ecology, two things would leap into mind: media and ecology. Of course, we know what media means, either as a collective of mediums, as a channel of communication, and even as an industry. But the tricky part is the ecology part. Which aspect does it mean, actually?

For one, the ecology in media ecology can refer to the study of the media as an ecosystem, and it can also refer to the study of the ecosystem where the media exists. In the first meaning, maybe we can talk about, for example, twitter as an ecosystem. Or maybe we can talk about the socio economic, cultural, and political policies that made twitter exists as we know it, like in the second meaning.

For all I care, the term Media Ecology refers to the totality of media studies. In the sense that it encompassed all related aspects in the world of media. Both the external aspects like the habits of the people, the policies that affect the media, or the internal aspects like the agenda setting, rhetorics, and the perspective a media takes. We can also see what the modes of communication existed in the media, if we see it as a channel, instead of as an actor or as an industry.

Generally speaking, understanding the media leads to media literacy. And in this age of disinformations led by the noble amateurs, I would suggest that media literacy is highly important. Both for the audience and the communicators. But, I’d like to keep the marketers away from this discussion, if possible.

Why? Because they’re marketers. They’re already trying to flood our daily life with their marketing efforts, it’s best to keep them like that as we develop our +20 Natural Resistance to Advertisements. Too bad it’s impossible, since predators and prey co-evolved to keep their edge in the battle of the species. But I digress. Right.

But, objectively speaking, marketers, as an agent, is an integral part of the media ecosystem. They fund the media through their advertisement, and if we take it into account, they’re the ones subsidizing the media so we can actually purchase them. And funding is very important for a media to exist in this kind of world economy system. Simply because, efforts need to be paid, one way or another.

This leads to an interesting discussion about who the media (as an actor) serves. Ideally, we want the media to serve our interests. On the other hand, the media needs to serve the funding and keep the sponsors happy. On the other hand, the media won’t have influence if it doesn’t serve the interests of the readers. This is a dilemma best solved by game theorists and not communication theorists.

As an amateur observer, I’d think that the best strategy for the media is to serve the sponsors and not the readers. If the media have enough power, the readers will remain, and the media can always deliberately miscommunicate about the agenda setting of a particular news article so as the readers would think that the media serve to their interest. I don’t want to be a party pooper, but as a general rule of thumb, the media consumers are media illiterate, and the media has the power to sway the readers’ perception.

Even in the ‘democratized’ media like twitter, the perceived power of the media is inequal, in the sense that the audience can’t really do anything about whatever the media choose. Perhaps you can make the news that the media would publish, but you can’t do anything about the agenda setting and the general perspective that the media will apply to your story.

Add to that, the dynamic of trust that the media holds. If you remember how you react to detik’s news, and compare that to economist’s news, that’s your trust affecting your judgment. This Trust can be a two sided coin. On one hand, it helps in judging which party holds the more probability to be correct, and on the other hand, it could blind you to the ulterior motives of a media.

But this is me talking about the media as an actor. Let’s hear me talking about the media as a channel, before going forth to what I learned from McLuhan in terms of Medium as the Message… in another post :D

Six Handshakes Away?

So I was thinking about several stuff from the small world experiment. One conclusion of it is that our social network is vast and robust enough so that it might be possible that everyone in this world is connected through the friends of friends of friends network.

True that you can forward something through a network of friends. Back then, I got my copy of the Phantom of the Opera songbook through this network of friends.

On a side, it's cute to think that there's no strangers, and that everyone is actually friends that we haven't meet yet. On the other side, what we experience every single day is (largely ignored) encounters with strangers.

Look at those cars and motors you see on the road. Do you recognize them? One of them could be your future friend, but it's ultimately an abstract, almost random, notion.

I think the problem lies in the selectivity of our mind. Despite the theoretical 150 meaningful relationships, there's a temporal limitation on how we perceive the prominence of our network of friends. One limitation, for example, is the prominence based on mutual interest.

As an illustration, let's suppose you live in a quiet suburb, working somewhere downtown in a corporate-ish office of some sort. You have friends from your 15 years of school, 4 years of university, friends you found in social media (whatever it means), and friends from your office. You're also a model kit hobbyist, and you frequently hangout in cafés.

Let's suppose I ask you about model kit, your reference point would be someone in your circle of model kit interest. Not your coworker or something. This is what I called as degree of prominence.

The problem with this degree of prominence is that it's generally temporal. It's prominent if and only if it's interesting enough for you. Suppose you're bored with model kits. Would that model kit friend of yours remain prominent to you?

It also applies to the so-called top of mind awareness thingy. The people on top of your awareness are either people you often interact with, or people with higher degree of significance to you. As the interaction and/or the significance wanes, so does the awareness about that person. That's why there's the so-called phatic communication.

In a larger scope, there are weak social bonds and strong social bonds. In our everyday life, weak social bonds are more abundant than the stronger bonds. Of course it is. Stronger social bonds require interactions, context, and whatever there is for people to be friends. Weak social bonds could only require recognition, for a time.

I mean, unless the stranger is an angelic being sent from the heavens, I'm sure you wouldn't remember meeting him/her earlier this week. That's another set of prominence for you.

So.. With the abundance of weak social bonds in our social network, I tend to think that the six degrees of separation still have a long way to go before it can be made into anything useful.

I'll write something later about the weak social bonds. It's still unstructured as I try to write this article on my handheld. Just for the sake of writing something down.