I really like the way this issue came together. Each item seems to speak to the others in some oblique way. I hope you enjoy it too.
There won’t be a newsletter next Sunday — taking the week off for Easter. In the meantime, I wouldn’t say no to a share or a paid subscription. How about it?
Sort Sol
Photographer Søren Solkær captures pictures of hundreds of thousands of starlings wheeling through the skies of Europe and then tells us about the science of these murmurations.
He talks about “dilution effect” — moving en masse and in tandem to confuse predators and reduce the risk for each individual in the flock.
He talks about “scale-free behavioral correlation” — the way the movement of every single starling in the flock affects every other starling.
He talks about “managing consensus in uncertainty” — the way each bird responds to only six or seven of its neighbors “to optimize the balance between the cohesion of the group and the effort of the individual.”
On our best days, he’s talking about us. We’re all in this together for better and worse, naturally and durably correlated. Read and see more.
Their Products; Our Fault
Essayist Clive Thompson put together this reflection on the invention of jaywalking by car companies, Boy Scouts, and Kiwanis Clubs:
“To be a ‘jaywalker’ was to be a country bumpkin who blundered around urban streets — guileless of the sophisticated ways of the city.
The brilliance of the concept is that it weaponized urban snobbishness against itself. ‘What,’ it coyly asked, ‘do you want to look like some sort of hayseed?’ You wouldn’t need police to keep pedestrians out of the street if the pedestrians policed themselves...
In our contemporary age, many firms employ very much the same trick: Evading responsibility for their products by claiming it’s our fault if we get harmed by them.
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter craft their feeds precisely to reward hot emotionality and anger — then claim to be baffled why so many users are angry and hotly emotional.’” Read more.
‘My Dears’
Speaking of invented social pressures and how one bird can influence the state of the whole flock…Anand Giridharadas talked to Masha Gessen about the future of Russia. Lots of interesting stuff in this interview, but a couple of bits really struck me:
“We learned over the 20th century how totalitarian societies act. [Y]ou could see a society act like that even when the state wasn't applying the broad terror that we've come to accept as the definition of a totalitarian state.
In a totalitarian society, the state actually can't apply direct pressure on every person at all times, but people can apply that pressure on one another. Totalitarian societies depend on horizontal enforcement of behaviors, whether it's something small like parents telling their children not to say things in school because it could get the family in trouble or something quite large like we're seeing in Russia now — for example, painting the letter Z on the walls and parking doors of people who have signed anti-war petitions. Between those two extremes, there's a continuum of people enforcing ideology and behavioral norms without the state directly requiring them to do so.
The other important thing in a totalitarian society is the absence of public space and public opinion. People are constantly asking the wrong question about Russia, asking, Do people support the war? There’s a recent poll showing that people support the war. At this point, it's an actual totalitarian society with actual terror. What are you going to do? It's like asking people, Do you support the war, or would you like to go to prison for 15 years?”
This in contrast to: “One of the most amazing speeches I saw was in the second week of the war from the mayor of Kharkiv. He was saying there's no heat, the conditions were bleak. ‘My dears,’ he called his citizens. He urged them to go into the metro underground, where they would be safe from the shelling and there was enough soup and warm blankets for everybody.
I thought, What would this sound like if this were happening in a Russian city or an American city? Can you imagine an American politician addressing people as ‘My dears?’…
What we need is recognition on the part of politicians that people all over the world are in this state of extreme anxiety, for very good reasons, and they need to be addressed as ‘my dears.’ We can't just leave it to the bad guys to address the anxieties.” Read more.