Dunning-Kruger and the New Media Douchebag

I haven’t taken New Media Douchebag Anil Dash to task here yet, but I ran across a blog post by Anil that I couldn’t pass up. Not nec­es­sar­ily because the  arti­cle was par­tic­u­larly bad (although it is) but because it’s emblem­atic of some­thing that I see con­stantly amongst the New Media Douchebag col­lec­tive. In fact, this trait may well be one of the core defin­ing aspects of the quin­tes­sen­tial New Media Douchebag. Specifically, it’s the utter and com­plete inabil­ity of the New Media Douchebag to real­ize that they are pon­tif­i­cat­ing about a sub­ject that the are woe­fully ill-prepared to discuss.

We’ve seen this time and again. It seems that New Media Douchebags are will­ing to play pun­dit on any sub­ject rang­ing from eco­nom­ics, to pol­i­tics, to race rela­tions — usu­ally with hilar­i­ously hor­rific results. I’ve thought long and hard on this phe­nom­e­non, and I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that it results from  a unique com­bi­na­tion of the innate nar­cis­sism that fuels the aver­age New Media Douchebag cou­pled with a spe­cific form of the Dunning – Kruger effect. For the unaware, the Dunning-Kruger effect is the state where a per­son doesn’t pos­sess the skill-set to make a good deci­sion, and also doesn’t pos­sess the abil­ity to rec­og­nize that they lack that skill. Basically, the more incom­pe­tent some­one is, the more likely they are to believe that they are more com­pe­tent than the aver­age person.

I say that New Media Douchebags exhibit a spe­cific form of the Dunning-Kruger effect because I don’t think that the stan­dard def­i­n­i­tion applies here. In most cases New Media Douchebags have been some­what suc­cess­ful at some­thing in their careers. Whether it be the inven­tion of XML, the mass adop­tion of RSS, or what­ever the fuck Scoble’s claim to fame is; most New Media Douchebags have done some­thing right at least once in their life.

Unfortunately, in the case of New Media Douchebags, it seems that this sin­gu­lar suc­cess com­bines with their innate nar­cis­sism to cause them to think that they are equally astute in all areas of thought. Perhaps it’s the binary folly that many engi­neers and soft­ware devel­op­ers are prone to. Whatever the rea­son, it has led to a spate of fuck­tards who have had one good idea in their life feel­ing con­fi­dent dis­pens­ing advice in areas far out­side their core competency.

Which leads us, inex­orably, to Anil Dash’s blog post that trig­gered this one. In The “Yes, And…” Culture Anil attempts to solve the world’s prob­lems with the magic of impro­vi­sa­tional theater.

Let’s start off with the first few para­graphs of Mr. Dash’s missive:

In impro­vi­sa­tional the­ater and com­edy, one of the first rules of par­tic­i­pa­tion is allow­ing co-creation. Basically, instead of say­ing “No, wait!” you respond to your col­lab­o­ra­tors with “Yes, and…” to con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion and start to cre­ate some­thing great together.

That prin­ci­ple of col­lab­o­ra­tive and cumu­la­tive cre­ation is a fun­da­men­tal aspect of mod­ern cul­ture in gen­eral. Remixing, reboot­ing, remak­ing and re-imagining cul­ture require a “Yes, and…” aes­thetic. When a moment of online inspi­ra­tion blos­soms into a full-fledged meme, com­mu­ni­ties from 4Chan to YouTube are demon­strat­ing their embrace of impro­vi­sa­tional culture.

But this doesn’t just apply to goofy web memes. This could be an inter­est­ing, even impor­tant aspect of how soci­ety and pol­icy evolve as well.

Here we go, right off the bat we have the inap­pro­pri­ate appli­ca­tion of a spe­cific dis­ci­pline to the world in gen­eral. And as a bonus it’s chock-a-block full of hip­ster douchebag con­de­scen­sion. “You see, in impro­vi­sa­tional the­ater we…” Blah, I can hear the ital­ics from here. But let’s wait and see the spe­cific exam­ples that Anil has in mind:

Take, for exam­ple, the recent Citizens United case at the Supreme Court. The rul­ing states, in effect, that com­pa­nies can now spend an unlim­ited amount of their funds on polit­i­cal cam­paign ads for var­i­ous can­di­dates. People who pre­fer humans to cor­po­ra­tions are, nat­u­rally, con­cerned about the pend­ing com­ple­tion of the cor­po­rate takeover of elections.

Yes, let’s look at Citi­zens United an egre­gious case of the Supreme Court giv­ing away the rights of real peo­ple in favor of fic­ti­tious cor­po­rate “per­sons.” What does Anil sug­gest we do to reclaim our rights as cit­i­zens? Does he sug­gest that we speak out in protest. Does he sug­gest that we join the var­i­ous move­ments in the United States aimed at revok­ing “cor­po­rate personhood.”

Oh hell no. We who would roll back the excesses of the Roberts Court are get­ting “…into the usual long, expen­sive, unpro­duc­tive cultural-battle-masquerading-as-political-battle that makes so many of us get turned off by pol­i­tics.” Well for­give fuck­ing me Anil. I’m sorry that my desire to pro­tect our rights is “turn­ing you off.”

So, what does Anil propose?

What could it look like in a “Yes, and.…” cul­ture, though? What if, while acknowl­edg­ing that spend­ing is not speech, we decide to forgo try­ing to roll back the law, and instead roll it for­ward? Yes, cor­po­ra­tions can buy polit­i­cal adver­tise­ments, but what if any employee of the cor­po­ra­tion could sub­mit the con­tent of the adver­tise­ment? The last video in before a TV station’s pro­gram­ming dead­line would be the one that went on the air, priv­i­leg­ing those who are nim­ble with media, instead of just cor­po­rate officers.

Lords of Kobol is Anil seri­ous? Yes, we the peo­ple will over­power the finan­cial might of the cor­po­ra­tion by being the adver­tis­ing ver­sion of eBay snipers! Like most nerds, Anil seems com­pletely obliv­i­ous to the fact that math­e­mat­i­cal laws have poor record of map­ping to human behav­ior. A=B and B=C there­fore A=C may work in a proof. But when the equa­tion is mega­corp = per­son and Joe Fucktard = per­son the answer sure as fuck isn’t mega­corp = Joe Fucktard.

Does Anil seri­ously believe that any cor­po­ra­tion that was going to bother financ­ing a polit­i­cal adver­tise­ment would take the slight­est chance that some ran­dom cunt like me would get a chance at the micro­phone. It’s ludicrous.

Moreover, Anil dis­plays the usual Silly Valley nar­cis­sis­tic cal­lous­ness toward the aver­age worker. Anil may be able to say what­ever he wants with impunity, but some of us work in places where the price of agi­ta­tion is a quick trip to the bread line.

But Anil doesn’t stop there.

Or if we strug­gle with Arizona’s new law which allows police to detain sus­pected undoc­u­mented immi­grants, instead of merely fight­ing to repeal the pol­icy, we should extend it. Any legal res­i­dent or cit­i­zen of the United States who is wrongly detained by the police should get a free gun, per­haps one of those con­fis­cated by the police. In that way, when we abridge the Fourth Amendment rights of some­one, we make it up to them by sup­port­ing their Second Amendment rights. You want to pro­tect the rights of Americans? Yes, and… we do too.

God’s balls! Even if you assume that Anil is being face­tious here these are still some of the stu­pid­est words com­mit­ted to dig­i­tal storage.

The bot­tom line is that Anil Dash dis­plays an utter and com­plete lack of under­stand­ing of the issues that he’s bab­bling about. His solu­tions are facile at best, and dan­ger­ous at the worst. The most obnox­ious thing is that there are peo­ple who think that this clod is insight­ful.