The Magic of Predicting the Past

Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

Clear back in the year 2000, a New Yorker staff writer published his first book, an overview of recent behavioral science and sociology. The Tipping Point compiled insights from disciplines that frequently don’t communicate well, and distilled their insights into readable vernacular for generalist readers. Malcolm Gladwell introduced an epidemic-like analysis of human group behavior that continues to influence how Americans perceive group behavior and social movements.

A quarter century later, real life has field-tested Gladwell’s precepts, sometimes in direct response to his book. Several of his principles have proven reliable, while others have been OTBE’d: Overtaken By Events. Gladwell takes this, the anniversary of his career-making book, to revisit and update. As journalism of developing social science, it’s interesting reading, though it obviously rehashes the past. As science itself, sadly, it leaves something to be desired.

Gladwell’s dominant principle, that social movements develop like epidemics, seems especially timely because, in the intervening time, two epidemics have gripped American awareness: opioids and COVID-19. (He plays coy that he’s talking about opioids, because he wants his precepts to matter more than the details, but his target audience isn’t fooled.) We can revisit these two epidemics and determine whether Gladwell’s principles accurately describe how these outbreaks unfolded.

First, Gladwell describes the “overstory.” This term comes from ecology, describing the lush efflorescence of life which occupies the canopy of a rain forest, but Gladwell redefines it to fit the sweeping cultural context that humans occupy without conscious awareness. For example, he identifies Miami’s exceedingly high incidence of Medicare fraud with contexts like the Liberty City riots and the Mariel boatlift. My anti-racist spidey sense started tingling.

Then, Gladwell examines the necessity of diversity that protects against contagion. This means both literal diversity—cheetahs are so genetically homogenous that ordinary diseases can devastate communities—or metaphorical diversity, like the differences of backgrounds and goals that defend high schools against pathological groupthink. Nothing here should surprise anybody who got a B in high school biology class, but in today’s cultural milieu, definitely needs restated.

Finally, Gladwell unpacks why some individuals become “superspreaders,” a term most Americans probably first encountered during the pandemic. Some people prove contagious beyond the limits which the laws of chance would determine. Epidemiologists can usually determine fairly straightforwardly which individuals spread, and why, though usually only after they’ve infected others. Gladwell wants social science to have this same trend toward geometric absolutism.

Malcolm Gladwell

Sadly, while his principles seem plausible, they suffer because we only identify them retrospectively. He says, fairly late in the book, that the visible signs of tipping points, the big revolutions of public insight, exist in plain sight. The only reason we miss them, Gladwell asserts, is because we’re looking in the wrong direction. We persistently think change is years away, or longer, until the moment when change happens, usually quickly.

It probably reflects my prejudices, but one example persists in my memory: the sudden reversal of public opinion on gay marriage. The topic consistently failed at polls, most notably California’s Proposition 8. Then abruptly, public sentiment reversed itself, and suddenly most Americans, including a critical mass of conservatives, became accepting of gay marriage. The tipping point, according to Gladwell? The NBC sitcom Will & Grace.

Leave aside that the show’s initial run ended nine years before SCOTUS verified gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Or that, at its ratings peak, it topped out at only 24 million viewers, considerably below M*A*S*H, which notably failed to turn American sentiment against war. The very idea that one TV sitcom could reverse most Americans’ moral precepts seems laughable. This is especially pointed for series with political points, like Mr. Birchum, which is a global laughingstock.

If the conditions which precipitate the turning point are plainly visible, as Gladwell writes, then seemingly, at least one tipping point should’ve been visible. But nobody predicted Will & Grace changing American politics, nor the McKinsey corporation successfully turning Oxycontin into a public pestilence. Gladwell identifies these consequences because they already happened. In other words, Gladwell congratulates himself for successfully predicting the past. The future remains opaque.

Duncan J. Watts calls this tendency “creeping determinism.” We see outcomes as inevitable, Watts contends, because they happened. That’s exactly what happens here: Gladwell spends no thought for alternate contingencies, and doesn’t consider any attempts which failed, only those that succeeded. Thus he creates an overstory that’s factually correct, but not useful. Models like this only matter if they predict outcomes in advance, a goal which remains tragically elusive.

We Don't Have to Serve the Network

Elon Musk

On Monday, September 30^th, 2024, the Verizon mobile phone and data network failed for millions of Americans in multiple markets. This had obvious immediate effects for personal communications and media consumption. But for innumerable gig-economy workers, such as drivers for Über, Lyft, and DoorDash, the outage impeded their ability to work and make a living.

This follows recent outages for other digital service providers. Since Elon Musk took over Xitter and cut support personnel, the site has suffered periodic site failures. This impedes many companies’ ability to communicate en masse with their customers, but is more an inconvenience than a catastrophe. Far worse is the occasional Meta shutdown, as Facebook is the login portal for numerous other digital services.

And, holy cow, remember how many services wend dark following the most recent Microsoft outage? The post-pandemic remote work boom depends, in no small part, on how Microsoft and Meta have standardized communications and data sharing. Such outages steal workers’ ability to do decentralized, autonomous fundamental jobs. Modernity absolutely requires standardization.

Consider how many documents you’ve stored on the much-vaunted Cloud. Not only virtual data systems, like Google Drive, rely on the Cloud; you can’t even save documents locally in Microsoft Word anymore. Not to disparage the sharing and backup possibilities that the Cloud makes possible, but it also creates unprecedented vulnerabilities, both to data outages and to hackers. Everything you write is possibly exposed to mass attacks.

Bill Gates

How, though, do remediate this? The decentralized post-pandemic intellectual workspace requires standardized data platforms and content sharing, which requires large companies to coordinate our systems. Put another way, there’s no such thing as an artisanal cellphone network. Numerous small businesses—from conventional businesses to spunky Etsy entrepreneurs—need concentrated data sharing.

This creates an interesting tension. We valorize entrepreneurs, freelancers, and the self-employed as economic drivers. But to have any market outside a reasonable driving distance, start-up innovators require massive corporations with thousands, if not millions, of workers. The “gig economy” treats every DoorDasher or Über driver as a separate small business. But without the umbrella corporation coordinatingtheir options, their “businesses” vanish.

As a Distributist, I believe that economics should prize personal autonomy and abjure resource hoarding. When carpenters own their tools, and farmers own their land, they have the freedom to enter fair contracts, or refuse unfair ones. But the Distributist model, first postulated in the 1910s, simply didn’t anticipate today’s industrial complexity or global economy. Our world has become less fair, not more.

Therefore, the Verizon outage forces me to reevaluate my own beliefs. Distributed post-industrial economic power requires reliable communication and data storage standards, only possible when our communications systems share a language and a network. That level of coordination only happens when boosted by large corporations. Distributed freedom for some, requires wage servitude for others.

Mark Zuckerberg

Worse, while the liberty of freelance work hypothetically strengthens individual workers, the coordination necessary to actually find work proves terribly brittle. Your DoorDasher can freely accept or refuse each proffered job, but when the network collapses, every job vanishes, leaving the worker without options. In practice, disaggregated freelancers don’t work for themselves, they work for the network.

One could expand this argument to encompass the entire economy. Capitalism’s defenders claim that market capitalism is small-d democratic because we can accept or reject any transaction. This may hold for each unique transaction, but we cannot opt out altogether. We eventually need food, shelter, and clothing, which inevitably means transactions, which means buying into the economy.

Pure libertarian freedom, therefore, is always an illusion. We’re never independent actors; we rely on networks of trust, industry, and solidarity. Whether that means trusting our employers to deal honestly, relying upon industrial processes to keep us connected, or practicing solidarity with our peers (join the union or perish!), we remain permanently enmeshed in networks. I never exist truly alone, but always positionally, within community.

I’m old enough to have watched Communism collapse live on network television. The retreat of the Eastern Bloc revealed environmental blight, impoverished communities, and personal alienation—the same effects we witness now, in late American capitalism. The conventional economic binary which the Cold War bequeathed us proves massively unprepared for the post-industrial information economy.

When the network leaves us vulnerable, we need to recognize that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of our communities, not vice versa. We require new paradigms that organize our economy, technology, and government to serve us. And I’m only just beginning to delve into how that might work.

The Persistence of Epic Novels

Plato and Aristotle, depicted by Raphael

Aristotle, in the Poetics, records a sentiment probably shared by 3,000 years of classical studies students: the epics of Homer are too damn long. The Iliad and the Odyssey each comprise twenty-four “books,” each book running hundreds of lines. In the ancient Athenian recitation competitions, one speaker would memorize one book, and one or two would speak per day, meaning recitations lasted anywhere from nearly two weeks, to nearly a month.

To Aristotle, this was excessive, and he asked for “epics” which a single performer could recite in one or two nights. But Aristotle, writing half a millennium after Homer, might’ve missed something important. Classicist Barry B. Powell suggests, in the introduction to his translation of the Odyssey, that Homer’s performances probably did last only one night. Today, when Homer is “required reading,” we forget he was pop entertainment in his day.

Powell postulates that Homer was probably illiterate, and didn’t have his massive epics memorized. Instead, Powell suggests that Homer improvised his poetry on well-known themes, and each performance was unique. They probably lasted for one- or two-night engagements, But when somebody finally pledged to transcribe Homer’s poetry, Powell believes, Homer composed in long-form, unpacking details usually elided, to create a sweeping saga intended for the page.

This difference matters. Even three millennia ago, Homer realized that people reading a book committed themselves to something vaster, with a willingness to persevere across the span of days. Works intended for public recitation generally run much shorter—it takes approximately two hours to read the entire Gospel of Mark aloud. But books are a different order of beast, and Homer, transcribing early in the medium’s history, already knew that.

Now, as then, we have conflicting desires for short-form and longer entertainments. There’s nothing new under the sun. We want stories we can devour in one sitting, often already prepared for the next one, and we want stories that take days to consume, which we must pursue doggedly. But the changing media market has split our interests. First television, and more recently the internet, swallowed up the market for short-form, one-evening entertainments.

An undated traditional depiction of Homer

Authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote short stories for commercial purposes. The magazines in which they published, like The Atlantic, the Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker, had large audiences and paid handsomely. At his peak, Fitzgerald notoriously tore off short stories for magazine markets to get paid, and wrote the novels for which he’s now more famous to indulge a literary inclination that wouldn’t have paid particularly well.

Since Fitzgerald’s time, the magazine market has become considerably less lucrative. The Atlantic no longer publishes fiction and The New Yorker mostly only publishes well-known names or controversial content that drives engagement. A handful of genre magazines pay moderate rates, and art purists still regularly launch small-circulation “zines,” but the short-form entertainment market has moved mainly onto electronic media.

Conversely, contra Aristotle, the book continues to harbor the epic format he thought Homer overstretched. From Dante and Milton to J.R.R. Tolkien and Tom Clancy, authors preserve Homer’s physical length and dramatic sweep, because people really want that scale and that depth of immersion. People want an “entertainment” that will take them out of themselves and their own lives for literally days, even weeks, at a stretch.

And electronic media largely can’t provide that. Compare the prose and streaming versions of one of our time’s greatest epic authors. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series certainly has its detractors, but Jordan’s audience remained loyal, even when many felt his middle novels lagged. Not only were the books physically and thematically massive, but his story unfolded across multiple books, and readers remained immersed in his milieu for years.

But the streaming media adaptation of Jordan’s books largely fell flat. Not only did it take two years to produce a second season, even with the storyline already written, but when the product finally emerged, it suffered from cost overruns and content bloat. The audience from Jordan’s novels disliked the compromises which the transition between media forced, and the series has struggled to find a non-book audience.

Simply put, Aristotle was wrong. Audiences don’t find the length, density, and complexity of Homer’s epics off-putting. Indeed, as TV and Netflix continue consuming our short-form entertainments, audiences not only still buy books, but they support longer books and convoluted book series. Aristotle thought the hoi polloi weren’t lettered enough to follow stories that took days to develop, but given the choice, that’s apparently what audiences want.

Okay, But Why Haitians Specifically?

Hispaniola, with Haiti in green, in a map from the Encyclopedia Britannica

Springfield, Ohio, mayor Rob Rue has spent the last week on a multimedia blitz campaign to shut up the former President of the United States. After Donald Trump lied outright in last week’s Presidential debate about Haitian immigrants eating pets, his community has been plagued with harassment, bomb threats, and constant insipient violence. Springfield’s Haitians, mostly factory workers and their families, are reputedly afraid to walk outdoors.

Those who know me best, know that Haiti and Haitian issues weigh heavy on my heart. I learned of the country in 1991, when a military junta under General Raoul Cedras, overthrew the legitimately elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. I became curious about why Haiti, the second-oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, hasn’t become as prosperous, democratic, and free as the United States. So I set out to learn.

Unfortunately, few sources publish much about Haiti outside close-knit foreign policy circles. Most public libraries have only two authors: Wade Davis and Paul Farmer, who perceived Haiti very differently. Despite being within spitting distance of Florida and Puerto Rico, Haiti remains terra incognita to most Americans. Therefore I don’t proclaim to be a Haiti expert or Haitian studies scholar; I’m some guy who cares deeply and seeks information wherever it dwells.

In that capacity, a friend asked me this weekend: why do politicians single out Haitians, specifically, to embody their paranoia about immigration? After all, Trump previously identified Haiti by name in his notorious “shithole countries” comments, and conservatives from Ted Cruz to Ted Turner have name-checked Haitians as diseased, criminal, and otherwise generally undesirable. In today’s fraught world, what makes Haitians so noteworthy?

I cannot encapsulate Haitian history into a 750-word blog without performing a gratuitous disservice. Though rebellious slaves drove French colonial powers from the colony formerly known as San Domingue in 1804, France withheld diplomatic recognition until 1824. The United States didn’t recognize Haiti until 1862, because before then, Southern slaveholders couldn’t stomach a republic born of slave rebellion on America’s back porch.

The United States came into existence with a landed aristocracy, a veteran diplomatic corps, and allies in France and Spain. Haiti had nothing like that, and developed in isolation for its first generation. Without experienced governors, the country’s founders bungled the launch, and the nation never fully recovered. Though San Domingue’s slave-driven sugar plantations made it the richest colony in the Caribbean, the liberated slaves couldn’t sustain the economy.

Springfield, Ohio, mayor Rob Rue has become a national celebrity this
week. One suspects he probably didn't want the notoriety.

This dispossession opened Haiti to manipulation. Especially during the Cold War, America propped up military strongmen throughout the Western Hemisphere as safeguards against communism. This includes Haiti’s Duvalier dynasty, which governed through terror of its secret police, the Tonton Macoute. When Baby Doc Duvalier, manifestly incompetent, finally fled Haiti, American intelligence forces collaborated to shelter him in France. Later, future dictator Raoul Cedras attended the School of the Americas.

The United States and France have feuded for economic dominion over Haiti, as most populous Francophonic nation in its region. America currently holds sway in that regard, as President Clinton made President Aristide sign a free-trade agreement as a precondition for American intervention. As usually happens when agrarian nations sign free-trade agreements with America, cheap American produce ramped rural poverty above seventy percent.

Throughout the 1970s, tourists from France, America, and Quebec flocked to picturesque Haitian beaches, mostly around Cap-Haïtien and Tortuga. As often happens in chronically impoverished countries, tourists began paying for sex with cash-strapped locals. The timing was unfortunate. A strange, little-understood sexually transmitted virus was just gaining ground in North America at the time. By the 1980s, AIDS was rampant among Haiti’s poor.

Notice the pattern. European (and later American) powers imported slavery, political instability, poverty, and disease into a once-thriving nation. Literally from the very beginning, as some historians believe Christopher Columbus made his first Western Hemisphere landfall in Haiti. “Ayiti” is the native Taino name for the island of Hispaniola. Wealthier, stronger powers spent over five centuries exporting our worst sociopolitical outcomes to Haiti, then blaming Haiti for receiving them.

Whenever strongmen like Donald Trump look at Haitians, they don’t see people. They see the outcome of Euro-American policies that target the poor, the non-White, and the distant. They see the living, walking embodiment of Western imperialism’s consequences for the most disadvantaged. Haiti, by its existence, convicts Western imperialists of their sins.

Given an opportunity to make even the most nominal repairs to the damage Empire causes, they instead turn blame outward. Imperialists, apparently, will always punish the poor among us for being poor.

“Simple Facts,” and Other Political Lies

Steve Benen, Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past

Donald Trump notoriously occupies a parallel world, where he twice won the popular vote, engineered a thriving economy, and wasn’t helped into office by Russia. That’s fine, by itself; many people suffer from what netizens call “Main Character Syndrome.” Trump, however, has a unique capability to draw others into his fantasies. Political writer Steve Benen offers to analyze how exactly this happens. Yet somehow, the analysis never quite arrives.

Specialists within a field will sometimes promise to explain something fundamental to their discipline, but ultimately just describe it. I encountered this phenomenon in the writings of sociologist Duncan J. Watts, though it predates him. Watts writes that art historians, purposing to explain why Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is the best artwork ever, will then describe its traits. The Mona Lisa is best, Watts claims, because it resembles the Mona Lisa.

That, I believe, happens with this book. Benen breaks the Republican machine’s structure of lies into seven broad categories, including election denialism, the unfinished Wall, his merely okay economy that couldn’t withstand COVID-19, and the January 6^th insurrection. Benen lists the lies extensively, though largely in ways that assume you remember what really happened. And, unfortunately, that’s about all he does, reprinting a 200-page laundry list.

First, notwithstanding the title, Benen reveals a problem less with the Republican Party than with the Trump political apparatus. Benen cites several Republicans who directly criticize Trump’s specious narrative, including Dan Coates and John Bolton, both former Trump insiders. But Coates and Bolton aren’t running for reelection. Sitting Republicans must share Trump’s parallel universe because, if they don’t, they know they’ll get turfed out in the primaries.

Then, having listed the former administration’s fantasies, which he debunks with rudimentary Google searches and appeals to our own memories, Benen… stops. Having identified a pattern of obfuscation, Benen believes he’s completed his responsibilities. But his intended audience, which shares his overall dim opinion of the Trump years, will likely respond: “No shit.” Because, as Benen writes, we remember what really happened. We watched it happen on live TV.

Don’t mistake Benen’s motives, or mine. Political operatives spin events to suit a partisan narrative, and wise voters anticipate it. Skillful politicians in make defeat look temporary, embarrassment seem minor, and the other side’s foibles appear as moral catastrophes. Benen acknowledges this early, and clarifies that he means something altogether different. Trump’s organization repeatedly insists our eyes lie, and reality is Trump’s narrative, not the evidence of our senses.

Steve Benen

Trump and his political hangers-on began spinning false narratives with such alacrity, it boggled the imagination. From Day One, he dispatched Sean Spicer to propagate false reports of massive Inauguration Day crowds, despite the paltry attendance displayed on global TV the day before. Trump’s machine began spinning false yarns about the Lafayette Park clearance on June 1^st, 2020, or the January 6^th insurrection, literally within hours.

More interesting, Trump’s lies aren’t even internally consistent. Anybody who fibbed to their parents about grades or curfews knows that sticking to the fabricated narrative is key. But, as Benen’s accounting shows, Trump’s falsehoods shift with political winds and Trump’s personal mood. Partisan accounts of, say, the Russian election interference case, change repeatedly. The only constant is that any account that Trump dislikes, is dismissed.

Benen’s audience probably shares my curiosity. We remember what happened because, as Benen writes, we watched it happen live. I care more about two follow-up questions: how can Trump and his supporters be so brazen in their untruths? And why do rank-and-file Republicans believe this baloney-sauce when they, like everyone else, saw what really happened? What political or sociological mechanism lets Trump spin obvious fantasies, while others eat it up?

Those answers aren’t forthcoming. Benen’s mostly left-leaning audience knows already that Trump can lie flagrantly, about events we all saw happen, and face few electoral consequences. We also know that nobody apparently shares Trump’s mojo. We all watched Ron DeSantis and Kari Lake using Trump’s playbook, and we watched them descend into national laughingstocks. Trump, alone, has this ability to invent another reality, and sell it to a loyal base.

Again, no kidding. These facts (ironically enough, under the circumstances) aren’t in dispute. But without further understanding, we’ll find ourselves trapped inside the event horizon of Trump’s black hole, debunking similar falsehoods forever. Benen admits, in his epilogue, that he lacks any solution. But he also lacks any deeper analysis, any willingness to read between the lines. He tells us what we already know—and what Trump already denies.