What if the ebook revolution isn’t about ebooks? What if, instead, it’s a symptom of a fundamental restructuring of most of the nature of market economies?

Here’s my line of thinking:

In getting any given market, you have three basic problems:
1) Discoverability
2) Awareness
3) Perishability

With food (and, as Dean Wesley Smith aptly pointed out, with books), the perishability issue is the most pressing. Turnaround has to happen fast, or the product spoils, either because of inherent perishability (in the case of food and pharmaceuticals) or limited shelf space (in the case of almost everything else), or because of changing demand (fashions, tech gadgets). But with digital products, and with manufacturing-on-demand, the marginal costs of production are much, much lower, so the tolerance for long-term return is consequently much higher, in economic terms.

With ebooks and POD, for example, I can write a book today, and even if it never breaks big, I’ll still be earning pizza money from it in thirty years. If, over that same thirty years, I stick to writing at a manageable pace, I’m building a passive income that will replace my regular household income, so long as I’m patient enough.

Discoverability and market awareness are the next big hurdles, but market persistence is the single greatest generator of market awareness. If you live in town near a hole-in-the-wall restaurant (assuming it serves a cuisine you like and has a sign that catches your eye), chances are very good that you will eventually have dinner there. Then, if you like it, you’ll eat there again sometime–maybe regularly. Coca-cola might spend billions on advertising every year, but all that money does is keep their logo visible. It makes them familiar–which means that you’re more likely to grab for a coke when faced with an assortment of unfamiliar choices.

In the collapsing global supply chain of the last thirty years, this has produced what economists call a “Matthew Effect.” The big brands get bigger, the little brands fade out. They fade out because they don’t make enough short-term profit to assure them of long-term product positioning that could build market awareness and enhance discoverability. The short-term profit problem is tied directly to manufacturing costs: to be on the shelf, you have to have cash outlay to produce a product. To stay on the shelf, you have to recoup enough to make the next round of perishable products, and you often also have to buy co-op space (where you pay rent for your shelf space) to the retailers selling your products. After all, if your product doesn’t move, they’re taking a bath on shelf space they could be devoting to brands that move faster.

In The Long Tail, Clay Shirky spotted that online retailing changes this to some extent–digital products and theoretically infinite shelf space mean that anyone can hang out in any marketplace for as long as they want, so long as their products aren’t perishable and the cost of carrying the product is near zero. He said the future consists of selling an increasingly small volume of an increasingly large catalog (i.e. instead of selling 5 cans of coke, you might sell 2 Cokes, 1 Pepsi, one RC Cola, and 1 7up).

As the long tail model has spread into the content industries (books, films, music, etc.), we’ve heard a lot of doomsayers talk about how the long tail will make it impossible for artists to get discovered, for movies to recoup their costs, for bands to afford studio time. And in some cases, these predictions have born out in the short term–but I’m beginning to think this is a temporary situation. Here’s why:

Corporate accounting philosophy, all things being equal, tends toward the short term. Stock price is based in large part on the perception that profits in the next quarter will match predictions, and for the stock price to rise those predictions and the reports validating them must show a certain amount of growth–otherwise, profit-seekers will move their stocks to other companies which appear to be growing fast. In other words, the stock market is a venue on which people with a short-term focus gamble on blockbusters. The previous generation of VCs, getting their start in the dot-com era, have mimicked this blockbuster mentality, looking for ultra-high returns on a short time horizon. And, in a world of blockbuster products, mass media, and collapsed supply chains, this sort of thinking was thoroughly reasonable.

But it’s also highly volatile. It’s the kind of underlying market conditions that create market bubbles. It creates an unstable economic environment, and a reluctance to invest, as eventually even the adrenaline junkies run out of tolerance for ultra-high levels of risk.

This is where I think ebooks come back into the picture. Take the slow-growth model I outlined above. Agonizingly slow growth, even. With digital products, having no manufacturing costs beyond the initial R&D, it’s a natural fit. It’s the one place where the long tail REALLY works, if you have the patience for it. And I think that this fact, coupled with one other, is starting to radically reshape the fundamentals of the world economy.

That other factor is something called “discount rate on those dollars diminishes–if the project is internally financed, that discount rate can fall to near the level of inflation.

Practical results would include:
Large studios being more willing to finance niche-market entertainment.
Crazy-innovative disruptive technologies would get a longer exposure window in the marketplace.
Niche-market products becoming economical for giant corporations to manufacture (I’ve got my pie-in-the sky hopes for a revival of the Pontiac Firebird line, assuming GM doesn’t go belly-up again in the next ten years).
Drug development becoming more economical, as long earn-back windows become more viable (which translates to cheaper medicines in the medium-to-long term).

From my (admittedly limited) vantage point, the penetration of this kind of long-term, long-tail thinking into these large sectors is inevitable, both because of risk fatigue and because of the continually-diminishing marginal costs created by infinite shelf-space, JIT manufacturing, and easily retooled assembly lines.

The mass market revolution of the 20s-50s, after all, was created by the underlying economic realities of assembly-line manufacturing and mass media. The per-unit manufacturing cost was SO low on an assembly line compared to hand-making something, that artisan jobs shrank to hobbies, and the market access costs through mass media were SO high that only a well-financed company could even hope to have a chance.

But now, thanks to the convergence of the Internet with other communications technologies, the marketplace is atomized. Despite the temporary dominance of any single company (in the last twenty years we’ve seen Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon, and half a dozen others all take their turn at market dominance in one space or another–there’s no reason to expect that the current apparent monopolies will prove any more resilient), then both the marketplaces and the products they carry will continue to grow more diverse. For companies and investors to continue to remain profitable (or dominant),they will be forced to move to more subtle and diverse ways of quantifying risk and tabulating returns; shifting some of their business to long-time horizon projects. And a long time horizon changes everything about the way the world currently does business.

I wish I could effectively emphasize how important this kind of a change is. The best way I know is to list companies that are characterized by this kind of long-term thinking, and that took a long time–often more than a decade–to achieve profitability. Pixar and Apple spring to mind as ones that you’ll all know. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Edison’s Menlo Park are some others.

Because of all this, I think that what we’re seeing in publishing is a minor early symptom of a wave that’s in the process of altering the face of civilization as fundamentally as did the printing press. And, like that earlier revolution, it’s going to take a while to shake out–maybe a lifetime or two. Growing up in the late part of the 20th century, people of my generation had to learn to be extraordinarily impatient in order to survive. Now, the tables are turning. Entrepreneurs in the early 21st century now must learn patience and endurance. That goes double for authors and creatives–at least if we want to see our endeavors pay off (instead of winding up bouncing from one perceived failure to another because we can’t sit still).

Five or ten years or twenty years isn’t too long to wait to live off a passive income from ebooks. Our grandparents had a word for what we’re calling the worst-case income scenario of an indie author who sticks with it for the long haul: pension

I know these musings might rub a lot of you the wrong way. I could be completely wrong. Please do drop comments and arguments below (and please make them more nuanced than “the corporateocracy will never let this happen” or other species of that kind of fearmongering). The more I think about this situation, the more radical the outcomes look to me. Radical changes to the very economic ground we walk on are often tumultuous, uncomfortable, and terrifying. But the possible outcomes of this thing looks for those of us starting on a path of life-long innovation and creativity, whatever the industry, than the situation has in at least a hundred years–if not at any time in recorded history.

Assuming we keep our heads.

Vanity

On the ever-so-self-indulgent subject of, well, me, there are a few items potentially of interest.

First, I released a second Clarke Lantham novel. When Clarke Lantham goes home for Christmas, the results can’t be good.

Meanwhile, the first Clarke Lantham book has been getting some attention. KindleAuthor just interviewed me about it, View from Valhalla loved it, and Seth Harwood, Gail Carriger, and Philippa Ballantine all liked it well enough to provide blurbs. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check out the first couple chapters here. For that matter, you can check out the first part of book to, A Ghostly Christmas Present, here. Enjoy!

Art and Writing
If you’re an artist, or a writer, and you live somewhere that the influence of Hollywood reaches (i.e. everywhere), it’s very easy to forget that being “in shape,” “fit,” or “athletic,” doesn’t mean the same thing as “lean,” “6-pack abs,” or “what I saw on the cover of Vogue this month.” Forgetting this basic fact of life robs stories and paintings and graphic novels of realism, even if slightly. So, for your benefit and mine, here’s a photo essay featuring over 100 Olympic atheletes in phenomenal shape, each featuring a very unique body type.

Odd how the two most “offensive” words in the English language at the moment were words that were only mildly naughty 30 years ago. While one of these will continue to be a problem for a while, the other is redeemable. Check out Hal Duncan’s brilliant linguistic history of “cunt,” and his take-down of the implicit sexism sold with the demonization of what is, after all, a very cute word for a very delightful organ. He also goes into depth in the way usage varies on either side of the Atlantic. Unusually thought-provoking, and not played for shock value. Very useful for writers who write cross-culturally.

Publishing
We all know publishing is changing — snooze, hit the alarm, pull the other one, etc. We read about it in the New York Times a hundred times, which one would expect, as publishing is a big presence in New York. But when you read about it in the LA Times you know the movement’s gone big. Of course, this is the LA Times, which isn’t exactly a bastion of non-sensationalistic accuracy. Even so, it’s a fun read full of links to authors doing innovative things. Fun stuff!

TeleRead posted an interesting overview of the history of book piracy, it’s sociodynamics, and economics, with a follow-up column speculating on what it means for the industry. Some interesting stuff here by Chris Meadows.

For those of you who, like me, have a huge library full of books by dead people that will never be released in e-book format (or, at least, not for anothe decade or two) there is an inexpensive non-destructive way to digitize your books. This method is legal and ethically benign so long as you do not share or sell the resulting digital books. As an open source advocate and DIY culture member, I am very much in favor of projects like this. As an author who makes his living off his intellectual property, I work hard to make sure my work is always available in forms that do not strip the reader of his or her fair use rights. The other side of that contract is that the reader doesn’t steal or pirate the creative work of the entertainers whose work they consume. So, with that caveat, enjoy the workshop experience I’ll keep writing ‘em if you keep reading ‘em.

Speaking of piracy, Paul Cornell writes a provocative ethics article about illegal downloading filled with many good and some rather flacid points. Worth a read, nicely thought-provoking.

Got a book available on Kindle? You can now post the sample on your website with the Kindle for the Web app. This post from indieKindle gives instructions for embedding the app on your site or in a blog post.

And, speaking of e-books…solar powered e-reader, anyone?

Beauty
A really fun time-lapse of what looks like the blizzard from hell — over 3 feet in less than 24hrs. Most impressive – the best 30 seconds you’ll spend today.

Terry Gilliam, whose work has always been kinda steampunky anyway, is producing a steampunk puppet movie that looks really damn cool if this short film version of it is any indication.

Not to be out-done on the time-lapse front, NASA brings you a time-lapse of a sunset from another world. Click here to watch a Martian sunset.

And for breathtaking, how bout a collection of photos of man-made footprints on other worlds?

Science & Technology

Recycling. We all do it for the environment, but some kinds of recycling–like recycling plastic–are a waste of energy, resources, money, and doesn’t yeild an environemntal or economic gain. This isn’t true for everything–aluminum, scrap metal, electronics, and (thanks to a recent breakthrough in dealing with treatment of toxic de-inking chemicals) paper–all yeild tremendous benefits when properly recycled. But plastics…man, plastics are a problem. They’re all chemically different, they have to be very carefully sorted, cooked, and then are downcycled (made into things further down the supply chain) rather than recycled to the same quality. It’s a dirty secret, and it’s been a bit of a problem and embarassment for a couple decades now. That might not be true for much longer. Seems that, rather than resorting to dogmatism and moral guilting on one side, or lazy-bones naysaying on the other, one scientist has figured out a process for recycling all plastics that’s inexpensive, energy efficient, and a net environmental gain. Bravo!

In the realm of philosophy of science, Alvin Plantinga, an otherwise respected epistemologist from Harvard, is in the process of dipping his face in egg when it comes to philosphy of science. His companionable discussion with Daniel Dennet gives you the bulk of his case in his own words, and P.Z. Meyers (whom I consider entertaining but not exactly one for nuance) takes him apart very effectively here.

Research on different kinds of invisiblity continues apace. This article talks time distortion effects of certain kinds of meta-materials, and gives a roadmap for a proof-of-concept. I’ve been having a blast watching this field go from the stuff of dreams and science fiction to the stuff of serious, hard-core well-funded research in the last ten years. I can’t wait to see–or not see–some metamaterial-based invisibility prototypes in action.

In other news, 3D image editing for anaglyph is coming soon to a computer near you.

The field of linguistics has long been one of those in-between sciences–not quite a real hard science, but something more quantitative than a social science. Google Books looks to be changing that. Ronald Bailey talks about the new trend in tracking linguistic and cultural evolution using quantitative analysis of Google’s book database.

You know the insomnia you get after a traumatic experience? Turns out that trying like hell to get to sleep might not be such a good idea after all.

If you’ve heard about geopolitical unrest because of China’s attempts to lock down the rare-earth metal market, don’t worry. Turns out they’re not the only country with lots of the “rare” stuff.

Education

If you’re a strong autodidact like me, you’re always on the prowl for new educational stuff. OpenCulture just updated their list of free online courses from major universities this month, and the selection is getting really impressive. Even scarier, as one who grew up in academia, I’m starting to recognize a lot of names on that list.

Meanwhile, one of the most excellent shows on the history of technology, James Burke’s Connections, has made its way onto YouTube. Bears multiple re-watchings. Check it out.

If you’re like most people, you’ve heard about the Theory of Relativity (E=MC^2) and have a vague idea that it means all matter is energy or something like that, but you’ve never really been able to get your head around the math to understand what it really means. Well, fear not — the always-readable Bertrand Russel wrote the definitive popularization of general relativity, and Derek Jacobi read it. Now, it’s available for free to the public as an audiobook. Go grab it now, give it a listen, and prepare to have your mind turned inside-out. Fun stuff

Also in the “good clean fun” department, someone with actual sexual experience on the order of decades is now producing a sex education series on youtube. Funny, clever, and no-bullshit, he calls it the “Guide to Getting It On,” and he hits a lot of points that younger, hipper educators often miss.

Politics

This is the only political article this time, and I’m including it because of how much of a shocker it is. Francis Fukyama’s analysis of where liberal econimcs went wrong by embracing the liberalization of financial markets instead of trade-goods markets. It’s very interesting watching the Keynsians, the Monetarists, and the Hayekians all starting to converge on this point in the wake of the recent banking crisis. More interesting to me is that Adam Smith got there two hundred years ago–and that politicians and policy makers still aren’t listening.

— — — —
I got tons more in my salad bowl, but that’s already a more substantive meal than I had planned to serve up. Hope you enjoy — and have a great New Year!

If, appearances to the contrary, the customer actually sets the price in a marketplace, and all this hullabaloo is about ebooks, then what is the proper price for an ebook?

Nobody knows. The market is still shaking itself out, and pricing models require some fairly complex calculus about tradeoffs (some of which Moses Siregar III covers here). J. A. Konrath is firmly advocating for the $2.99 price point, and his number seem to back up his decision. A number of newcomers are pricing their books at the rock bottom end of the market, on the very sensible assumption that, since they have no established name, they need to be an impulse buy if they’re going to sell at all. Others are pricing above the current median range of $2.99-4.50 (where over 70% of the top sellers sit, according to my research over the last few months) on the assumption that looking expensive will attract the buyer looking for material that rises above the slush, and attract that buyer well enough that any sales hit they take from the higher price will be more than made up for in the higher income that the higher prices generate.

It’s a calculated bet, and at the moment there are precious few people conducting any experiments with pricing. This leaves the field to the experimenters–and in any open marketplace, experimentation provides that most precious of commodities: information.

However, one thing all these people have in common with savvier established authors and publishers: they understand what business we’re in.

No matter how pretty or profound or affecting our prose, we’re in the entertainment business. There is art to what we do, and passion, and often a deeply held hope that what we write will connect with people and make a difference in their lives, but none of that gets past the most basic, essential piece of advice any writer ever gave to another about the business:

“Let’s not kid ourselves: We’re fighting for their beer money.” -Robert A. Heinlein

No, I’m talking about industries and businesses that don’t yet know they’re dead. The ones whose future demise is as certain as the next big earthquake: we don’t know quite when, and we don’t know quite where, but the prospect that somebody will huff and puff and blow the house down has a probability of 1.

There’s a pretty reliable way to spot a zombie, and it’s on display everywhere in publishing right now. This summer, I’ve seen it everywhere from PW to BEA to some of the audio leaking out of WorldCon to Litopia (where it’s becoming such a regular feature that I’m beginning to think that the otherwise erudite, urbane, and thoroughly enjoyable panel have all been sniffing from the same glue barrel). It’s predictable, it’s boring, and it’s the thing that will, in the end, make publishing go the way of the music industry (hopefully not the buggy whip industry, though that’s always possible):

An entitlement mentality.

In other words, when faced with changes, the industry starts talking about “value” as if it’s something intrinsic. They talk about falling prices and lower barriers to entry “cheapening” the “reading experience.” They talk of the problem of “wading through the crap” and of falling advances, and fret about how agents and publishers and writers are going to make a living.

As a writer who’s currently pursuing multiple release avenues for his work, I’ve got a vested interest here. I want to get paid for my work, more than I get through my tip jar (though, if you do drop cash in the tip jar or buy books through my Amazon links, thank you!) or through selling tech articles. I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I’m in this game for the money: I love telling stories, and I want to make my living at it.

But, I do not deserve to make my living at it, unless I can find the people who want the stories I have to tell. All businesses, of all kinds, exist for one reason (and one reason only): because they meet a market demand.

The Real Cost of a Book

Michael Shatzkin has gone over what the margins are on differrent types of books at different pricing structures, and it gives an idea at least of what publishers report their margins as.

Michael Stackpole has also done a whole series on ebook pricing, during which he makes the point that what costs are involved in ebook production could be drastically reduced if publishers would move their operations out of New York. Not only would they be able to reduce overhead and salaries without reducing quality of life for their employees, they’d also be in a position to get out of their rather expensive mafia-controlled (not kidding) shipping contracts, and their complicity in money laundering (a plus all around, I’d think).

Suffice it to say, the marginal cost on an ebook is 10-20% less than on a mass market paperback, without factoring in returns. More units sold equals lower marginal costs, while the per-unit profit grows accordingly. And that’s without moving anyone out of New York.

So, if you’re going by costs, an ebook should cost, at lowest, around 20% less than the mass market paperback of the same book.

But, believe it or not, I don’t think this matters at all.

Literary Conceit

To explain why I think that way, I have to walk you through a bit of Econ 101.

A market is anyone willing to trade, and there are a lot of different markets out there. Writers have, for years, been marketing to publishers, not to fans. We sell, or don’t sell, according to the tastes of editors. Most editors have pretty damn good taste, others not so much, but their job is to acquire books that they can sell to their market: the people who buy books.

You see a problem built into the system already: other economic considerations aside, because only a certain kind of person has the temperament and bearing to be an editor (it is, after all, a highly political job best suited for well-educated, intelligent, personable people), the books made available to the customer will appeal to only a limited subset of the potential reading audience.

As a multi-NYT Bestseller told me a while back (and no, I’m not saying who): “Fans? I don’t give a damn about the fans. I can’t afford to. I have to keep my editor interested if I want to keep writing.”

So, in books, the consumer is not the customer, which is (to put it mildly) kind of perverse. But, just as with the music industry, digital product is changing where the power lies and putting it where it belongs: in the hands of the consumer.

The consumer is, after all, the ultimate end of the supply chain. Giving them the proximate power means that a lot of the rest of the economic model of publishing has to shift, or it won’t last. And the consumer sets the price in any market. If a consumer doesn’t buy an item because the price is restricted, it’s overpriced. If the price of an item induces so many people to buy it that it creates a supply shortage, the price is too low. All businesses, whether they realize it or not, set their prices to take advantage of a sweet spot where they get the most profit possible per unit (well, not all businesses do this. Those who are unable to find this price point or control their costs so they can live at this sweet spot go belly-up pretty damn quick).

But, of course, some writers, agents, and publishers think they’re indispensable. They are the curators and bastions of culture, after all. If it weren’t for them, we’d all be awash in the lowest form of vulgar entertainment. There’d be no place for art (this is a nearly-verbatim paraphrase of a line I heard recently on a well-respected literary talk show).

This also is a huge crock of shit. Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo were paid by the word. Poe wrote for money and was considered a hack. Shakespeare was vulgar popular entertainment. There is no qualitative difference in the recipe of art versus schlock that any of us can see now, though an entire industry (critics) exists to try to hide that basic fact. The difference between vulgar entertainment and high art isn’t the intention of the writer, the heart she puts into her story, or social consciousness. The only difference is “What are people reading a hundred years from now?”

The stuff that ages well, that stays relevant and motivates people to keep recommending it, reading it to their children, and passing it on—that’s art. That’s the stuff that’s hit something vital in the cultural soul. The rest of it is just vulgar entertainment (some of it transcendentally beautiful entertainment, some of it boring or crappy as hell—your mileage may vary).

Writers. agents, and publishers (in common with other successful businesses) also tend to believe that they deserve their position. They don’t. Markets are fickle. You deserve where you are today because you earned your way there by meeting a market demand and being relevant–you don’t deserve to stay there tomorrow unless you’re relevant tomorrow.

I don’t care if that’s not fair (and I also actually don’t like it, because it means my retirement probably isn’t ever going to happen), it’s the way life works. As Doni Kollin (whose day job is as an economics professor) said to me over a drink recently, “In business, as in evolution, the big don’t eat the small. The fast eat the slow. And the big guys are usually slow.” If you’ve grown big, you have to be more competitive, not less, because the young-and-hungry are nipping at your heels.

For a recent parallel, look at the IT world. Fifteen years ago, Microsoft ran the world, Netscape was dead, Google didn’t exist, and Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now, Apple is the biggest IT firm in the world, Google runs the internet, Firefox is the most popular browser, and Microsoft no longer defines the industry. This is what happens in a normal ecosystem.

So, How Do I Spot a Zombie Again?

Zombie businesses and industries suffer under a trio of delusions:

1) They’re indispensable.

2) They set the prices.

3) They deserve their position.

Not one of these things are true.

The notion of indispensability depends on the assumption that “The way we do things today is the optimal way.” It’s almost never true. No industry—not the oil industry, not the auto industry, not the banks, not farming, and not writers—is indispensable. All of them exist because they meet a market demand. Sometimes, that market is lobbyists, governments, editors, ad executives, or the teeming masses of humanity—but if they stop meeting that demand, they stop existing. Once a business starts thinking they’re indispensable, their days are numbered.

Consumers set prices. There is no such thing as “intrinsic” value. An item is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. If you price ebooks at $15.00 a unit, as many people will pirate them as buy them. Price them at $3.00-$5.00, most people will buy, not pirate (because pirating is more trouble than buying at that price), and your aggregate profit margin will be better. Start thinking that you control your product’s price, and your sales are going to fall.

And as far as deserving one’s position? Don’t make me laugh. The more open a market gets (and by ‘open’ I’m talking transparency as well as freedom), the more meritocratic it gets. The people who succeed are those who meet the needs of their consumers. Period. You don’t meet those needs, you fade.

So, no, I don’t think it matters how much it costs to produce an ebook. It only matters that there are some people and businesses who are willing to take the risk and bear the costs in an attempt to meet a market demand, because if they meet the demand well, their marginal costs will go to near-zero.

The Real Meaning of eBooks

Economists have a term for what happens when a new player enters a market and, through innovation, changes the fundamentals of how it works: creative destruction. By making old ways of doing things obsolete, or by creating viable persistent alternatives, growth happens in a marketplace. Opportunity is created. Sometimes, the fabric of society is radically transformed. Almost always, this means that folks wedded to the old paradigm are in for a rough ride.

Now, in the publishing world, the barrier to entry is so low that thinly disguised fan fiction writers can have a shot at the market. It is, truly, turning into a slush pile out there. But that’s not a bad thing. Some of those slush writers will succeed brilliantly the same way Rodriguez and Tarantino did with independent film as outsiders. Most won’t.

Why? For the first time ever, fans matter in a measurable way. Sampling, podcasts, any one of the now 31 (and growing) genre-friendly, pro-rate paying e-magazines, and market innovations such as Stackpole’s Chain Story help customers discriminate between good and bad product. They build reputations. Reputations matter.

But there’s another, even better effect of having the barrier to entry set very low: there is room for literally thousands of new niche markets to develop. Just like what cable did to TV, just like what the internet did to music and radio, so too e-readers and smart phones and POD and open marketplaces are doing to literature: filling out the bell curve, feeding pent-up demand in sectors that were previously under-served, and providing opportunities for oddballs like me to find audiences who really want us.

Viva la Revolución!

This post has a follow-up, which you can find here.
—
Copyright 2010 J. Daniel Sawyer

Basically, Oxytocin is a hormone which, when acting as a neurotransmitter, increases trust and social risk taking behavior between people, with the most profound effects being felt between strangers and/or people who don’t know each other well (though, of course, some people simply are born insensitive to these effects). Vasopressin is a hormone that, when acting as a neurotransmitter, increases aggression towards non-bonded others (the effects are stronger in men than in women, and in men it also acts as a bonding-reward circuit, an effect which has not been documented in women).

A cocktail of these two hormones, administered across the blood-brain barrier rather than intravenously, will have the dual effect of increasing the formation of groups and loyalty, and of increasing the subject’s suspicion towards those in the outgroup.

These effects are short-term – a single hit of these hormones degrades in a few minutes. In order to have sustained effects one of three things must happen: 1) the body must be fooled into creating its own supply of bonding hormones (through sustained sexual and/or social interaction), 2) memories formed while under the influence of the hormones must be positive and persistent, providing a foundation for later trust-based behavior, 3) a delivery mechanism that will keep the levels of these neurotransmitters at the desired level (this latest is impossible right now, but the success of other time-release and dosage-self-regulating drugs make positing of this for 129 years from now a very safe bet to place on the table, futurism-wise).

It’s also worth noting that these two hormones can be hugely dangerous when used in high doses as drugs. Oxytocin is used to stimulate labor, for example, and Vasopressin is a blood pressure regulator which, in large doses, can keep a heart beating during hemorrhage but has a lot of nasty side-effects in the cardiovascular system under prolonged exposure. However, in the Central Nervous System, acting as neurotransmitters, these hormones have well-documented, profound (but subtle) effects at small doses. These effects are fairly well known in psychiatric circles, and I’m banking on the notion that they will become a staple for psy-ops and con artists when better delivery systems are developed – in the Antithesis universe, this is exactly the case.

The following is a short lecture (29 minute video) from Paul Zak, the founder of the field of neuroeconomics who did the some of the seminal research in this area.

For the super-geeky among you, here are some more papers on research in this area:
How could MDMA (ecstasy) help anxiety disorders? A neurobiological rationale
Brain basis of early parent-infant interactions: psychology, physiology, and in vivo functional neuroimaging studies.
Oxytocin, a mediator of anti-stress, well-being, social interaction, growth and healing
Dopaminergic-neuropeptide interactions in the social brain.
Neurotransmitters and peptides: whispered secrets and public announcements.
Opposite effects of oxytocin and vasopressin on the emotional expression of the fear response
Effect of arginine vasopressin and oxytocin on acetylcholine-stimulation of corticosteroid and catecholamine secretion from the rat adrenal gland perfused in situ.

This one features Miss Kalendar along with Chris Lester and Kitty Nic’Iaian.

This is it, folks, the final round of Dealing In before we get to Down From Ten. We toast the successful conclusion of Predestination and look forward. Some info on Down From Ten here, as well as some very involved conversations about the themes of Predestination, the possible interaction of quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the nature of trust. Not to mention a LOT of laughs, some inside information on what I’m like as a director, and lots of other stuff. This is one of three episodes in this final Dealing In saga — 61 minutes of audio goodness here. Enjoy!!!
-Dan

Part 1 of the final Dealing In (well, the final one before the end of the book) is here! This week’s serves up a mountain of your emails on a range of topics including:

Old Europe
Bastiat’s Principle
Buried Alive In The Blues
Steampunk (Van Der Meer, Broadmore, Carriger)
Soulless by Gail Carriger
The Red Panda and Black Jack Justice — Decoder Ring Theater
Heather Welliver
The basics behind stereo imaging
McCarthyism and Bill Shelley
Flight of the Conchords “The Humans Are Dead”
Easter Eggs in Predestination
First Gulf War
Xanatos gambits and bounded perspective
Is stealth technology in space possible?
Chicken Scissors
Tom Lehrer
Man Love in Metamor City and on Erotica A La Carte
Scott Sigler’s The Crypt
Angels Unawares

Kitty Nic’Iaian and Chris Lester join, once again. Enjoy!

Jacqueline Novogratz discusses markets and foreign aid and underclass empowerment in Africa. Worth every second.

William James hit a lot closer to the truth when he spotted that Americans are a fundamentally religious bunch. We don’t usually like to think of ourselves that way – even most of us who are religious in a traditional sense tend to pride ourselves on being independent, pragmatic thinkers. We like science – we really do – but most of us don’t really know what science is, and this is where we get into trouble. Even our scientists often mistake ideology for science.

Looking at things through a scientific lens (that is, a perspective that is empirically grounded), one would expect political philosophy among scientfically-minded folk to change as the experience of history and the accumulation of knowldege schools us in the ways of the world. That doesn’t mean that all political opnion should converge on a common conclusion: It’s quite possible, through differences in priority order, for clear-thinking people to disagree on what particular actions should follow from a given and agreed-upon body of knowledge (and that kind of disagreement is healthy). However, this isn’t what happens in today’s America.

Douglas Adams nailed the way politically-minded folk tend to think in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where a main character talks about a computer program that helps people make decisions. It doesn’t work forward from problem to solution, instead it allows the user to chose his desired solution (for example, owning a Porche when he can’t afford the payments) and then work backwards to the present situation, creating a bulletproof logical scenario that nobody can shoot down (not even the financing director at the Porche dealership). This is not goal-oriented thinking and planning, it’s maturbatory self-justification, and it’s pretty much de rigeur politics. Perhaps that’s just human nature – but here’s where it gets tragic and irritating.

The 21st century has seen the cementing of a very strange dynamic in American politics, whereby each side of the political discussion picks its own facts and tries to ignore the rest.

For example, if you don’t like second-hand smoke you’ve got a custom-made political movement already on your side. All you have to do to fight alongside them is pretend that studies showing an actual elevated disease risk through continued exposure over a long period of time actually mean that anyone anywhere who smells second-hand smoke is being poisoned. It’s really easy, all you have to do is ignore the single most basic law of biochemistry: The dosage makes the poison.

The same kind of dynamic goes for nuclear power, or carbon dioxide, or private property rights, or environmental regulation, or evolutionary theory, or lowering the drinking age. You can pick a side, and find a custom made political machine ready to spin reality in the direction you’re already sympathetic to.

This election year is a fun exercise in spotting this kind of thing, because we have one candidate (Obama) who’s deliberately positioning himself as the pro-science guy, in opposition to the Bush administration and the McCain candidacy. He supports NASA. He supports stem cells. He’s on record saying that he doesn’t think blastocysts are human beings. He even (in opposition to major blocks of his own party) supports Nuclear power. He positions himself as a pragmatic man who intends to implement real-world solutions, over/against the fuzzy thinking of his opponent.

On the other hand, we have another candidate (McCain), who has picked a running mate specifically to appeal to the rural romantic consitutency of the country. He talks about freedom and saving the economy, and he’s running with someone who speaks in tongues, thinks humanity begins at conception, and thinks the Earth was created in six days not-too-long-ago.

On the face of it, it seems like a pretty clear choice for anyone who cares about science. On one hand you have a guy who cares about going to Mars – on the other hand you have a guy who thinks a planetarium projector is an “overpriced overhead projector” akin to a futuristic SharpVision.

I wish it were that simple, but it’s not. The curious political alignment of the early 21st century has produced an environment where each party has become very good at spotting pseudoscience and antiscience bullshit in the other party, but can’t smell it in their own even when it’s shoved up their nose. Here are two examples, one from each party’s list of pet issues, to illustrate my point.

Democrats, for example, tend to assume a straight-line cause-and-effect relationship between the scientific fact “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, whose concentrations are rising rapidly, and this drove most of the climate change in the 20th century” and the policy conclusion “we must conserve energy in order to prevent as much damage to the bioshpere as possible.” But no such obvious relationship exists. You can make a case for such a relationship, but in order to do it you have to ignore another whole field of science: economics.

Without getting too technical, economics is the study of the monetary, social, and political systems that result from human interaction in a given set of conditions. As with most social sciences it’s a contingent and contextual field, but the thing that sets it apart from most other “soft” sciences is its quantifiability. Economic phenomena can be measured, and based on the measurements falsifiable predictions can be made, and over time, a more coherent picture of how the economic world works has been built from earlier theories and ideologies that have been subjected to testing in real-world laboratories.

Energy conservation is a fun economic study, because there’s one thing that energy conservation always results in: net energy usage increases. That’s because as demand for energy for a particular application falls, due to more efficient technologies, the money and resources previously devoted to that task get freed up. When that happens, any or all of three things happens: money previously spent on a small number of energy-intensive activities gets spent on a larger number of less energy-intensive activitie. 2) task which used to be too expensive for a segment of the populationn (because they couldn’t afford the energy costs) become accessible, due to increases in efficiency and consequent lower costs of operation. 3) a short-term collective decline in demand results in a short term drop in energy prices, as supply exceeds demand on the market. Any of these three eventualities leads to a net increase in energy usage – all three operating together leads to large net increases in energy usage, even while the per-application energy usage and costs fall through the floor. If you’re an environmentally conscious person who wants to reduce greenhouse emmissions and pollution, you’re not going to achieve your goal through mandating more efficient technologies, or promoting a cap-and-trade carbon scheme, or encouraging energy conservation among the hoi polloi. Those measures will instead reliably lead to higher and higher levels of net energy consumption – both per capita and in aggregate.

Continued in Part 2