(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on January 2nd, 2020. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)
Resituating Yourself Digitally In the 2020’s
Day 2 of 2020 and I’m already winning the race for “Worst Blog Post Title of the Year”
I Was WRONG
I rarely admit to being wrong about anything. So consider this a rare tale of failure admittance.
Picture the inane insanity of a British General Election. The media whips itself into frenzy. The polls created by supposed professionals seem to show either wild variation or, more likely, made up nonsense.
Britain has just had three years of what can only be described as political nonsense of the worst kind; both major parties playing a strategy towards getting a stalemate and all the alternatives similarly backing this rubbish outcome because if nobody gets what they want, nothing gets done.
Why’s this a story and what does it have to do with me being wrong?
Well… every time there’s been a political scenario in the past few years where it looks like the media is picking a horse and the data seems to be picking another, I’ve found that I could make money with exchanging currencies at the right time.
I’m not a day-trader; I don’t even think I’m an investor, (more on that in a future post,) but I found out accidentally when I got ruthlessly screwed during a currency transaction a while back that I’d rather wait until opportune times to change to and from GBP.
When Brexit occurred, I made money. When Trump got elected and the dollar shot up, I made money. This was based on an intuitive sense that the harpies were wrong and the data was right.
But this year, I almost got swayed by the craziness.
With all political parties fractured and the majority of MPs aiming for a deadlock, I believed we were going to have a hung-parliament. The data said we’d get a Conservative majority, but the media, the hashtags and even people who should have known what they were talking about were wrong.
I almost bought a ton of dollars anticipating GBP falling.
The morning of the election, the aggregated poll data was showing that there’d be a big conservative majority.
On the morning of the election, I was confused. I posted this:
I’ve successfully avoided talking about politics during this election campaign. That’s deliberate because this isn’t the Politics Channel.
But it’s interesting how, once again, trending tags and discussion across Social Media don’t reflect data from collected poll data one bit.
— Jamie McSloy (@JamieMcSloy) December 12, 2019
And I decided not to do the currency exchange thing.
Luckily, trusting the data was correct.
Crazies and the Big Experiment
I was lucky in that instance, and since, I’ve realised that relying solely on intuition/predictive powers isn’t the best way to do things. That’s quite a revelation for someone who bases basically everything off his internal intuitive prediction system.
Here’s the thing: you had people with access to far more data than I have who were completely wrong. The results from exit polls came in and political pundits with decades of experience were flabbergasted and couldn’t believe what had happened.
And social media… well it’s full of crazies, to be honest. On all sides, you have vast swathes of people who are unwittingly NPC propaganda machines. The issue is that because of the nature of the media at the moment, that craziness infects the data you receive into your mind.
Even if you’re rational and you successfully parse the information through your scepticism filters, if it’s bad data, it’s bad data and your conclusions aren’t going to be satisfactory.
Now, to engage in the craziness myself a little, and by all means filter this if you disagree; I’m 90% sure that the various astro-turf campaigns are deliberately orchestrated and that we’re in the biggest mind-control experiment ever devised.
That’s not great for your brain.
Analogue Your Life
I have a friend who recently spent some time in America. He told me that the constant bombardment of all things political and culture-war over there is far worse than it is here. I can’t confirm that, but felt like I should note it.
And I can’t believe it because here you have to take huge steps to insulate yourself from the crazy. The blog’s Mission Statement has always been that your goal should be to fix your life and create a bottom-up approach to fixing the world, and that most of the “Big Issue” culture-war stuff is a smoke screen.
In 2019, I got side-tracked by this. In 2020, I’ll be more conscious of what I let in data-wise, and I think you should too.
Some things to try:
- Planned digital detoxes, (if in doubt, lunch breaks, weekends, holidays, sabbaticals in order of time off)
- Conscious curation of news media (Get an RSS Feed who uses RSS anymore?)
- Cut off people who bring the drama stuff in and set boundaries
For that last one; a lot of people recommended over this Christmas/New Year period to massively blow up at your family if you don’t agree with their politics. This is utterly retarded. However, there’s something to be said for saying, “Don’t talk politics at the dinner table.”
There’s also something to be said for curating your social media feeds – and muting people if necessary. I did this in 2019, and it was honestly like a fog had been lifted. I’d tried to minimise exposure to controversial stuff, but it kept finding me.
Stuff like “Twitter Wars” where people pick fights on the internet – it’s never been my thing, (what with it being dorky as hell,) but I kept getting exposed to other people doing it.
Muting just a couple of people made it disappear. Ironically, those people tweet a lot about stoicism and cutting off toxicity. Funny how that works.
So you might want to try that. This is all just a form of taking conscious control of what you’re consuming cognitively.
Online Is Big Business… But It’s Got To Be Your Business
A few times in 2019, I thought about posting thoughts on the above.
I felt in a tough spot because I was an online businessman who runs a blog about (among other things) teaching online business skills and I sell services that help people make huge amounts of money through online business.
How could I reconcile that with telling you all that the online world was a big bad guy and it was ruining your mind?
And the conscious control aspect is important, and I couldn’t see it because I’d lost conscious control of what I was consuming.
Simplify it into the common adages;
- You are what you eat (figuratively, we consume media)
- You need to use tools, not have them use you
The internet is a great way for you to improve your skills, make more money and network with great people. The nature of the net means you’re going to find more like-minds there than in your town, you have more opportunities in a global marketplace and you can find whatever you’re looking for.
On the other hand, to make use of that, you have to avoid the pitfalls of accidental brainwashing and being side-tracked by the endless possibilities.