Selection Systems

Last night I was catching a train back to my car from the city, and at Burnley station, my friend and I briefly waited at a bench after getting off the train, checking when the next train would be.

With no word of consent, my senses were assaulted as I witnessed a march of zombies; commuters shouting, swearing, and stumbling their way off the platform to a bunch of replacement buses around the corner. The pack of drunken youths were followed, a few meters behind, by some comparatively tame adults whose nights had already ended some time ago.

‘I think these people might be the scum of the earth’. I said, watching them vanish out of sight, but not out of ear-shot, around the corner. Then I checked my phone and realised ‘Oh wait, it’s 3am’.

Whether the horde really merited a category like scum of the earth was no longer an important question, because if anybody is deserving of that category, a train station, in inner-Melbourne, at 3am, is exactly the place you would find them.

I try to avoid playing the blame game: I’m not sure that it’s actually anything more than a virtue signalling process, and no doubt I earnt the title ‘scum of the earth’ a couple of times back when I was having my own big nights in the city.

But it’s interesting how frequently I’ve followed the thought ‘hey, this individual/group has trait X!’ with ‘hang on, X is exactly the kind of trait you should expect to find in this environment!’.

I’m starting to think that there are fewer and fewer situations where you can identify a trait in some person that couldn’t have easily been inferred by just looking at the context in which you came across that person.

I’ve trash talked Seven News before but it’s the example that always comes to mind: you walk past a TV with a Seven News exposé on some local criminal going around being a public nuisance, and you feel your body swarm with outrage at how somebody could so blatantly dismiss century-old social norms of decency and respect, but then you remember ‘If there is at least one person whose antisocial behaviour will boil the average person’s blood, you’re guaranteed to find them here on Seven News.’ And then the rage fades away.

Except the rage doesn’t fade away for the average person watching, because they’re not thinking about how a well refined selection system predetermined whose undesirable petty crimes would be showcased on their TV. As far as the viewer is concerned, the fact that there even is one person who can be so abhorrent is sufficient grounds for indignation.

The world is a big place, and whenever there is a system which is going to select for certain traits, if you can come to terms with the fact that those traits show up in some people however few, then you shouldn’t really be phased when those same people show up in that system.

And yet here I am feeling indignant and outraged that a news network gets away with the petty crime of sensationalist journalism, without recalling the fact that if there is at least one news network spouting rage-bait journalism, I’m going to find them on a for-profit, non-government channel in an era where good journalism has mostly proven unsustainable.

God damnit. Am I allowed to be angry at anything? I can’t be angry at the selection systems themselves, firstly because it doesn’t make sense to be take out my anger on the bricks of an inner city train station at 3am (unless I long for a place among my drunken zombie brethren). And secondly because If I’m not going to get angry at a player defecting in a game of prisoner’s dilemma, why should I be angry at a system as complex as ‘modern journalism’ when it’s the result of billions of iterated games between producers and consumers, in a landscape where you either produce content people want to consume, or you perish. Sure, some evil villain could have sat down and invented the concept of rage-bait journalism from scratch, but if they didn’t, somebody else would have. All you need is one, and the world has plenty.

I suppose, then, I can be angry at myself for even taking this mental foray into selection systems at all and in turn denying myself the euphoria of outrage for the foreseeable future.

But anger isn’t so euphoric when it’s directed inwards. That’s probably why people consume this stuff in the first place.