Melting

Well, I could talk about the recently released speech from the Prime Minister regarding the recent developments on COVID-19, but I won't.

I'm not a news blog. Nor am I interested in being one. Something about not wanting to draw unnecessary attention so as to make it easier to ``keep it real''. Because when things get too popular/large, it becomes much harder to stay to the original roots due to the need to meet a large number of expectations.

It's funny in some ways---in infocomm tech, we are always talking about how we should be building systems that can scale out and/or scale up, but every other piece of experience that we learn from in real life seems to suggest that doing either is generally a Bad Idea. The dissonance between these two is deliciously confusing, and it has begun to show its true dangers as infocomm tech starts to encroach more directly into the living spaces of people.

I think it goes back to the epiphany that I had in my second paragraph.

Because when things get too popular/large, it becomes much harder to stay to the original roots due to the need to meet a large number of expectations.

When infocomm technology was developed and deployed to improve the flow of business-related [structured] information, it helped to streamline and optimise existing business processes. Part of the reason was the need to perform the necessary analysis of the existing [manual] process, identify the associated requirements, impose structure and logic upon them, all before a single line of code is written. That kind of analysis is largely manually done, and requires some intelligent combination of domain experts from both the business process and system sides. When there was a need to scale up/out, it was ``obvious''---the scaling was meant to handle the sheer volume of the data moving about, not necessarily to scale for new conjunctions/interactions that these data might have. So much of algorithm/systems theory is about handling such asymptotic cases.

When such disciplines first met humans in the form of expert systems (and then later on, search, followed by the dreaded ``social media''), this inherently reductionist perspective proved to be inadequate outside of some extremely narrowly defined specialties, at which point the number of beneficiaries often could not justify the cost of developing/deploying such a system. Similar arguments can be made for search engines too---early search engines were nothing more than indexes whose concepts were borrowed from regular library information sciences. Early innovations that made it [computationally] scaleable was when Google was founded with the PageRank algorithm.

But were those systems ever ``interaction scalable''? I would say... no. For if they were, then there wouldn't be a need to incorporate more and more personal-level information to bias output towards what the single person might truly prefer over all others.

It is the same with social media, after they started to expand outside of their original demographic. Facebook wasn't completely garbage when it started out---the true beginning of its fall towards population polarisation was when its user base was expanded to include more than just college students. It got worse when it started to heavily adopt advertising as its source of revenue---I claim the degradation because with advertising and associated stakeholders coming into the play, it becomes more profitable to deliberately isolate population groups enough that they form a single homogenous unit that can be marketed as a targetable audience to convince advertisers to part with their money. That said, a word of fairness is in order---I say ``deliberately isolate'', but that's a description of the outcome rather than the means; the methods were more through ``lying by omission'' to create the necessary echo chambers that would amplify that tribal feel.

Being the largest social media presence on Earth (is it?), the modus operandi eventually became copied elsewhere too, or at least, those who felt suspicously empowered through the segregation in Facebook brought along their self-righteousness into every other space that they exist in, be it some other communications platform or even in real life.

What I am trying to say here isn't about bashing Facebook specifically; it's more about highlighting that while we know how to properly scale out/up infocomm systems to handle volumes of data at acceptable bit-rates, that human interaction bit is still sorely lacking, and is one big source of the paradoxical headache that comes from literate(?) people demonstrating the kind of dark-ages science-fearing bumpkin-ness that we thought we had banished after the renaissance and ages beyond that, with the added irony that they are using science (and business) powered infocomm technology to do their collective belly-aching.

The relevance of what I just mumbled with the beginning of this post will now come to light. Had platforms that connected people (like Facebook) allowing arbitrary pseudonymous connections stayed small, the expected number of ``off-the-rails radicalisation'' events is likely to be small. That's likely due to a combination of the founders' influence, and the innate self-policing nature that a small, tight-knit, group has. I trust someone because I know that someone. When the platforms get large though, it is no longer possible for me to trust someone because I know that said person; I'd have to be satisfied with trusting someone because I know someone that the person also knows, and I trust that proxying third party. The problem then is when people mistake this proxied acceptance as true trust. Because then such people, if sufficiently motivated, can then become the source of the disinformation.

I believe that finding out such bad-faith actors from the get-go without hindsight is likely to be as hard as teaching a machine to emulate the full range of human emotionns to express natural language.

Anyway, for some reason I'm really feeling it in my head right now. I think the consistent 30+°C interior ambient temperature despite it being nearly 2300hrs local time doesn't help.

Till the next update then.