March: RoboHelper is now live. You helpdesk guys can sit back and relax now! :-)

May: Jesus, guys. What are you doing at the helpdesk? Your consultation numbers are way, way down. You’d best to do something about this.

Sure enough, some musicians have done well selling T-shirts and concert tickets, but it is striking how many of the top-grossing acts began in the predigital era, and how much of today’s music is a mash-up of the old.

(OK, technically that’s John Tierney summarizing and paraphrasing Lanier, but they are of an accord.)

This is a familiar story, which is a polite way of saying it’s a mindless cliche. Sadly for the Chicken Littles, this particular story is ridonculously easy to evaluate against, y’know, facts.

Be-shambled as it is, the music industry is still big business, and where you have big business you have business watchers and reporters. This means we can discover who the top-grossing acts are with just a few clicks of the mouse. (Well, we can get a damned good proxy for the top-grossing acts, anyway.)[1]

Ah, but wait! There’s a trap, a slimy little trick that Lanier and his ilk might be exploiting. Forbes has a list of the top-earning musicians of 2009. Well, there’s an article that claims to be a list; in fact it’s just highlights from this theoretical list that may exist somewhere. The Forbes article does tell us that the top earners of the year were all old–decades old!–acts.

But lookie: “To compile the list of the year’s top-earning musicians, we considered earnings from album sales, touring, publishing and endorsement deals….”

Since the Eagles learned this trick, legacy super-artists have learned they can charge ticket premiums because their fanbase contains a big bunch of older, better-heeled customers. That definitely gives a boost, but it’s the “endorsement deals” that clinches it. Fame is capital; hold onto it long enough and it grows (and profits) exponentially. If we’re looking at total earnings and not current popularity, then it’s not at all surprising that older acts will top the list. This supports what Lanier says, but it’s orthogonal to what (I think) Lanier wants us to think he means.

Let’s flip it around a bit, cut right to the heart of the matter. Lanier wants us to look at the list of top-grossing acts, conflate “top-grossing” with “most relevant”, see the age of said acts, and then lament over how our culture has stagnated in the last ten years. (The birth of Napster in 1999 is usually taken by such critics to be the birth of the digital era.)

But you know what? We have a huge-ass data point smack in the center of the pre-digital, post-[birth of contemporary pop] era, a single musical moment in which the most relevant acts of the day were gathered together in a single room (more or less). January 28, 1985 saw the final recording session for “We Are the World”. The soloists, with year of first top-20 single noted parenthetically:

1. Lionel Richie (1975)
2. Stevie Wonder (1963)
3. Paul Simon (1965)
4. Kenny Rogers (1968)
5. James Ingram (1981)
6. Tina Turner (1961)
7. Billy Joel (1977)
8. Michael Jackson (1969)
9. Diana Ross (1964)
10. Dionne Warwick (1963)
11. Willie Nelson (1980*)
12. Al Jarreau (1981)
13. Bruce Springsteen (1980)
14. Kenny Loggins (1978)
15. Steve Perry (1982)
16. Daryl Hall (1976)
17. Huey Lewis (1982)
18. Cyndi Lauper (1983)
19. Kim Carnes (1980)
20. Bob Dylan (1965)
21. Ray Charles (1959)

Willie Nelson gets an asterisk because, despite being a well-known and high-charting country musician since the early 1970s, he didn’t hit the pop charts until 1980. I think it’s fair to exclude him from our ciphering.

This gives us an average “age” of 12.4 years with a standard deviation of 8.4 years. When we consider that about a quarter of the artists dated back to the very beginnings of their styles’ entries into popular consciousness, the situation looks even worse for Lanier’s thesis.

That’s the trouble with the cultural Ragnarok types: They’re ignorant of culture, ignorant of history, especially ignorant of cultural history, ignorant of the fact that they’re comparing the elite of their age cohort to the typical of today’s…bah, they’re just generally ignorant. And yet somehow they get column-inches in the paper of record, speaking engagements, publishing contracts, and pots of sweet, sweet money. Oh, and they’re unironically accepted as sages of our age. Ignorance, it seems, really is bliss.

[1] This is the point at which the original post went off the tracks. There was originally going to be an analysis of the average age of the top-selling acts of the last year, but then I found the Forbes article and realized that Lanier was either slimier or stupider than I’d originally assumed.

1. Nigerians are more bestial than insectoid alien invaders.
2. All Earth governments are too dim to realize they could acquire a shit-ton of advanced alien technology in exchange for a shopping cart full of cat food. Nigerians may be subhuman monsters, but they’re brighter than everybody else on the planet.
3. Seriously, for a movie that was supposed to be about xenophobia, the portrayal of Nigerians was pretty shocking. Or maybe the movie was secretly in support of, or at least neutral toward, xenophobia?
4. Apartheid would’ve ended a lot sooner if Mandela and the ANC had cobbled together a few mechas.

The bolt of furious energy strikes Carl Mills in the chest. Mills, a recently downsized reporter, crumples under the blow, but soon staggers to his feet. In the next half hour, he realizes his head is full of the buzzing minds of the disintegrated men and that he has gained the knowledge, the abilities, and the combined strength of one thousand men named Ted!

Mills wanders the lonely highways of America righting wrongs, bringing closure to the lives cut short and trapped in his head, and seeking out the secret behind the Mysterious Origins of MegaTed!

Let’s say that on one sunny day you’re strolling through a park’s secluded meadow with two standard-featured cell phones and a portable time twiddler. You’re bored and lazily digesting lunch, so of course you decide to perform a little temporal sociological experiment.

You adjust your holo-garbs to period-appropriate attire and twiddle time such that a typical middle-class urban male strolls seamlessly from the same park in 1909. You doff your hats at one another, the 1909-er not realizing he has been caught in a time bubble.

You walk up to the gentleman and show him your phones, explaining what they are. You hand him one, ask him to cross to the other side of the meadow, and then you ring him up. You then meet up again face-to-face and record his reaction. You retrieve the phone, bid the fellow good day, and twiddle him back to 1909.

You then perform the same experiment, only this time the subject is from 1859.

The guy from 1909 will have had some familiarity and experience with telephony, but he will only know it in its early, hardwired form. The 1859 guy will have no prior notions about transmission of sound at all, but he will also have no preconceptions about how such a thing might work.

Which of the two men would be more baffled, astounded, and amazed by cell phones?

Plus I have a pimple in a…most delicate location.

Today is guaranteed to suck.

And then there’s this:

Isn’t that amazing?

It’s like the result of a Steam Age biosphere, a series of interconnected subterranean bunkers in which generations of pioneers have interbred in isolation since the 1850s. Almost entirely cut off from the surface world, they’ve received occasional crates packed with contemporary technology and semi-annual telegrams tersely describing advances in surface culture and society. They’ve seen terse descriptions of Santa but never a photo or Coke ad, so this is how they’ve interpreted the icon. Fascinating.

So yeah. Here I break silence with a request for terminology.

I don’t really like using the whole alpha/beta language for describing social hierarchies, equally because it’s not granular enough and because it’s so fucking cliched. Problem is, I don’t know of any other instantly understandable language that can be used to denote relative positions.

What I’m looking for is terminology that can accommodate a position in which one

• is typically sought to join in activities organized by other members of the group;
• and is able to successfully initiate and organize group activities on hir own;
• but lacks the necessary juju to tell a questionable group member to fuck off without raising the ire of more influential members.

An aside that’s not really an aside: A lot of stuff I’ve read recently in both the mainstream press and the nominally professional press suggests that we (”we” meaning roughly the kind of people considered to be exponents of the normative which is assumed by the New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education) are expected to be both opinon leaders and eminently civil, where “civil” is defined as meaning “never making even a semi-private statement suggesting that an incompetent person is, in fact, incompetent”.

Shorter not-really-an-aside: The opinion-making literature for a certain class of people says (without saying) that this class of people should both exemplify and promote The Good without ever openly rebuking those who undermine The Good.

Yes, I’m drunk.

Even outside the current crushing financial situation, that wouldn’t be sustainable, right?

So they came up with a solution:

So, in a few weeks, the university will try something different: letting computer users answer one another’s questions. […] The idea is to open a Web site where students and professors can post their IT woes and share their solutions.

Except that’s sloppy reporting. Nothing new is being created; instead, an existing resource is being modified:

Indiana has something called the Knowledge Base, with more than 15,000 articles on just about any technology installed on the campus (even one on connecting an Xbox to the campus network). Until now, though, only help-desk employees could add or revise articles, which means the resource is expensive to maintain and not always up-to-the-minute.

And about that existing resource:

Though anyone can search the Knowledge Base (it gets about 18 million hits a year), the primary audience is help-desk staff members, who use it as a reference library when they answer calls.

Notice that the primary audience is help-desk staff members bit? Yeah.

So the thing is already getting heavy use[1], and the primary user group is the people who are being paid to answer phones. How, again, is this supposed to reduce the number of people calling in with problems? The answers to their questions are clearly often already there, the callers are either not looking for them or, having read them, still in need of somebody to walk them through the solution.

“If you build it, they will come” clearly doesn’t work. Why would “If you modify it slightly, then they’ll come” work any better?

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