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Narrative Capture

Before we talk about narrative capture, let’s look at capture of another type.

Regulatory capture

Regulatory capture involves situations where a regulator ends up serving the interests of an industry, specific company, or other group. The people who are supposed to be making the rules end up following the lead of the very groups that they are supposed to be regulating.

Sometimes this is intentionally planned and financially supported and sometimes it just happens because of system design.

For a glimpse of thinking about regulatory capture during the late 1800s attempt to regulate railroads in the US, we have this attorney’s letter to a railroad president:

“My impressions would be that, looking at the matter from a railroad point of view exclusively, [repeal of the Interstate Commerce Act] would not be a wise thing to undertake…. The attempt would not be likely to succeed; if it did not succeed, and were made on the ground of the inefficiency and uselessness of the Commission, the result would very probably be giving it the power it now lacks. The Commission, as its functions have now been limited by the courts, is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a Commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things…. The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.” — Richard Olney, letter to Charles E. Perkins, 1892

Or, as I’ve heard someone say, “I like having a big board to report to because they never get anything done.” Continue reading “Narrative Capture”

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A Question of Timing (Erasing History)

It’s may be a bit overused, but I’m going to start this essay with a Kundera quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

“In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on to the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was the great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.

“Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close by him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.

“The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

“Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history, and of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on that balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”

There are numerous examples of removing someone from history, mostly from national leaders who didn’t need subtlety in their actions.

Some of the most obvious examples come from authoritarians and apart from Gottwald, include Stalin’s historical removal of Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Yezhov, or Mao’s removal of Bo Gu. But how else do we remove people from history? Does the inability to ever truly erase something online change this?

 

Let’s look at ways we choose to eliminate history and when we do it. Continue reading “A Question of Timing (Erasing History)”

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The Tiktok Ban (and the Openness Trap)

While I often say that I don’t respond to recent business news here, I have also recently broken that rule a few times. So I decided to look at the potential Tiktok ban in the US. To connect this potential ban to my other writing I’ll go back to Merton’s five causes of unintended consequences to point out some less discussed reasons for why the ban might be good or bad.

Related to the discussion around Tiktok, I was reminded that this week marks the 30th year since I first visited mainland China. I remember this because I was in Beijing at the same time that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait — the first week of August 1990. The hotel TV did not black out that specific part of the news.

Since that time I went to mainland China perhaps around 50 times both for work and to travel. For a large country with big regional differences, I don’t count 50 trips as a lot. But I’ve found my perspective to be different from that of others who spent more time there simply because I have seen the country over a longer time.

Continue reading “The Tiktok Ban (and the Openness Trap)”

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Inevitable Surveillance?

What is the purpose of surveilling a domestic population? Is it inevitable?

Surveillance and spying are a little different but the benefits of each have long been understood. The purposes of spying are to know when an enemy is going to attack, their capabilities, the potential to attack them first, or what one might gain in making an attack, state to state or tribe to tribe. Learn plans, intentionally mislead, survive.

Domestic surveillance is different or at least thought of as being different. For some types of domestic surveillance the purpose seems to be that the population harbors enemies (overlapping with spying above), whether this means enemies of the state itself or those harmful to the rest of the population.

A version of that is that if there are people who have “wrong thinking,” then their “wrong thinking” can infect their neighbors, and eventually lead to violence or chaos. Continue reading “Inevitable Surveillance?”

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Changes in Value (Part 1)

When something changes in financial value quickly, unintended consequences abound. When this change happens at scale, affecting many people, the consequences are even more extreme. These changes impact supply and demand and social change around the world.

Let’s look at some examples of value change causing havoc. This week I’m intentionally (well, almost entirely) not writing about the topic you can’t escape.
Continue reading “Changes in Value (Part 1)”

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Coronavirus Consequences

As a rule, I don’t cover breaking news on this site. Plenty of other sources do that. Instead, when I do write about current events I focus on looking at the effects that systems have generating unintended consequences. That’s why I’m only writing about the Wuhan novel coronavirus now, almost at the end of the declared 14-day lockdown period.

And what a story of systems.

While the novel coronavirus fatality rate is estimated at 2.2% versus 9.6% for SARS, some other qualities of this outbreak may make the illness more difficult to contain, namely the long period of incubation (14 day estimate) and the increased amount of travel, including international and domestic Lunar New Year travel shortly before the lockdown period.

If you want an example of how times have changed since earlier epidemics, watch this video from the English publication of China’s People’s Daily. Continue reading “Coronavirus Consequences”

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The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)



Let’s come back, more directly, to a theme in my writing — what happens when something small becomes a tipping point for change. When the seemingly innocuous becomes unpredictable.

If you’ve only casually followed the Hong Kong protests and reaction from the Chinese mainland and overseas Chinese communities, you might wonder about the importance and meaning of the covered eye. Specifically, the right eye.

Hong Kong protesters found one of their many symbols (and there are many) when police shot and injured the right eye of a protesting woman in August. The injured eye is a more powerful symbol than even that of the man police shot on October 1 (Chinese National Day) in the chest (that is, the heart).

But since the now famous protester’s eye injury we’ve seen company ad campaign apologies and even an individual arrest all because of missing eyes.

But the eye I was reminded of was none of these. It was a different eye — also a right eye and in China — that over 40 years ago had results reminiscent to those eyes of today.

Continue reading “The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)”

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The 70th anniversary of the PRC

“So it’s his fault?!”

That was what I heard a Taiwanese visitor say years ago in front of the statue of Koxinga, located in Tainan, Taiwan.

Koxinga was a Ming dynasty general who fled to Taiwan and established an Ming outpost there from 1662 to 1683. The Qing dynasty (which defeated the Ming) later defeated Koxinga’s new kingdom and wrapped Taiwan into the Qing dynasty.

The visitor’s complaint: that without Koxinga there would not be a struggle, going on even today, over the future of Taiwan.

This is a post about founding ceremonies. And today is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Continue reading “The 70th anniversary of the PRC”

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Selecting the Scalable Snapshot

One of the themes of these posts is that we unintended consequences of a change come from the way it scales.

It is also superficially easier to judge events as at risk of unintended consequences (easier, not more accurate) when there is an image — a snapshot — that represents risk.

So what are causes of difficulty when we make judgments? I’ll go into some examples.

After two back-to-back mass shootings in the US, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted something seemingly logical yet awful (shown later in post). Interestingly, people took offense and attacked him for the apparent logic (he later apologized). His offense: insensitively calling out and comparing the magnitude of different causes of death.

But the problem with Tyson’s tweet wasn’t that at all. Continue reading “Selecting the Scalable Snapshot”