There are but a dozen websites that are synonymous with the word internet. Google, Youtube, Facebook and Wikipedia, by the sheer scale of the volume of visitors; then there are sites like 4chan and Reddit that are significant for being the birthplaces of internet culture. 4Chan and Reddit are the Jerusalem and Mecca of cyberspace.
About 5 years ago, University College London researchers traced the origins of at least 160 million memes. They found that most memes were first posted on the internet anonymously on one or the other of the two sites. Anonymity is the hotbed for the controversy that buoyed the Gamergate harassment campaign targeted at feminism in 2014, the Fappening which leaked private photographs of mega famous people and, more recently, Reddit shook Hedge Funds by orchestrating a short squeeze on GameStop stocks that eroded $5 to 10 billion from the books of financial institutions.
Big changes are coming to Reddit. The leadership at Reddit has alluded that it’s time for Reddit to grow up as a company after having been around since 2005. Their idea of growing up includes going public, introducing a new pricing policy for third party apps and NSFW content. Change scarcely comes without resistance. To let the Reddit overlords know how they feel about the coming changes, Reddit moderators staged a two-day blackout in the middle of June this year. The home screen looked like the app was offline. I think some communities are still protesting because the Reddit homepage is still NSFW… well at least for the communities that count me within their ranks. Forget about opening this app at work for now. Other communities resorted to spamming images of John Oliver and the iPhone subreddit specifically dedicated their whole page real estate to pictures of Tim Cook.
Reddit’s intent to go public means that they will avail their shares for investment to the general public by listing on a stock exchange. The industry parlance for raising capital in this manner is “IPO”, which stands for initial public offering. There are benefits to listing on an exchange. Indeed, it can symbolise maturity of a firm because listing on an exchange means the enterprise will be subjected to more regulation and held to a higher standard than private enterprises. It also means that all your financial affairs are available in black and white for the scrutiny of the general public. You wouldn’t insist on listing unless you had something you wanted to show to the public.
Being subject to stricter regulation enhances the confidence of your business partners in dealing with you. As a public, listed company you probably have strong governance practices accompanied by a robust risk management culture. Your staff and key personnel are probably well qualified and experienced. Mutatis mutandis, you pose less of a risk vis-a-vis non-regulated counterparts. You qualify for cheaper credit and your goodwill shoots through the roof along with your value.
Redditors have no qualms with the planned IPO. However, the new pricing to access the Reddit API coming along with the IPO is problematic to say the least. For one, it’s expensive - duh! The price plan contemplated by Spez (Founder and CEO) would render the most popular third party apps paying in the region of $1.7 million per month or $20 million a year. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
The developer behind Apollo, Christian Selig, stated outright that he would not have that kind of money. Other third party developers expressed similar sentiments. One said, if this pricing plan is implemented, they would be dead in 30 days. If third party apps die, some subreddits will die along with them as moderators rely heavily on these apps to service their communities. Third party apps offer superior mod tools.
This plan will affect as well the ability of third party apps to run advertisements. This is insult to injury. You introduce an unaffordable price plan to a client and you couple it with compromising that very client’s ability to raise money to meet the ridiculous obligation. And Spez will not stop there, he will also make NSFW content unavailable via API. NSFW content is estimated to be more than 30% of all internet traffic and if you suspend this service, you’re tripling down on decisions that will cripple third party applications. Some of these third party applications are developed to cater to niche Reddit segments like the partially sighted. Killing these apps with ridiculous pricing ultimately alienates these vulnerable groups. Ladies and gentlemen, that is a step-by-step guide on how to engineer a PR nightmare and upset the most influential community on the internet. The consequences of Reddit’s half-step are yet to be fully realised.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
I can’t remember exactly what sparked my new found interest in thermodynamics. Specifically, the second law. The other three laws I don’t particularly care for or perhaps I understand too little? Call it what you like.
The second law of thermodynamics states that for a closed system, entropy is always increasing. This is just one way to state it. That word entropy, got me laughed at by a close engineering friend a few years ago. That memory renders in 4K in all of my brain cells. We were at the Spar opposite NedCentre. As we were walking through one of the aisles, scanning the shelves, I must have seen something that made me think I was a scientist because I blurted out these words, “You know the enthropy…” This guy froze and pivoted to look back at me. He let escape a laugh, more of a shriek than a laugh, that reverberated throughout Mbabane for all Emaswati to hear. Then he hit me with a, “There’s no H in entropy.” He signed off his TED talk with the most concerned look he has ever given me and then took short strides forward, shaking his head. Now it was my turn to freeze. I was so embarrassed. I think to this day he doubts that I managed to attain a degree in Science. Anyway, Naval says we write to remember, but we also write to forget. I think I’m writing about this memory to let it go and move on with life.
Entropy, I have come to learn, is a measure of disorder. My engineer friend would jump in here and say, “No, Manga. That is misleading. Entropy is the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work.” Honestly, what’s the point of that interjection because we don’t understand a word you’re saying, Khula. You may as well be speaking Dothraki. Listen, we are going with disorder. For natural systems, entropy tends to a maximum. This means that natural processes are always increasing in disorder. You take for granted that your hot chocolate cools down over time when left unattended on the kitchen counter. You don’t think about why or how that happens. Neither do I, but for the sake of this article we will pretend that it blows my mind. It turns out that your cup of hot chocolate is obeying the second law of thermodynamics.
Naturally, a hot body will cool down over time. Heat will flow from the hot body to the surrounding cooler environment. This is spontaneous. It happens on its own. If you want to observe the converse, that is, heat flowing from a cool body to one that is warmer, you would have to pump in energy. If you sit through a random lecture on thermodynamics - I had to sit through several researching this - the example of your refrigerator will be among the first to be cited. The refrigerator pumps out heat from the cold cabin into your warmer room. Without the compressor, your refrigerator would not even for a minute sustain the Nkoyoyo temperatures we observed this past week.
Your bedroom naturally becomes more disorderly overtime. Your desk chair doubles as a standby wardrobe. Your surface tops accumulate dust. Your floors become sticky. To restore order, you put in effort and pack your clothes into the wardrobe (hopefully, you’ve washed them). You pick up a duster and go to work. You sweep and scrub your floors. This is true for any natural process you can imagine, disorder will increase. Roads become worse over time on their own. Even if cars did not drive on them, they would reveal cracks over a long enough period of the back-and-forth movement of tectonic plates. Cities would become forests if we allowed the natural process to manifest unmolested. Instead, we cut grass, prune trees, destroy weeds, maintain traffic lights and street lamps to hold on to our idea of order. The legal system is how states inject order into society. Without equitable laws, life would resemble the Purge or Mad Max or your pick of an episode of Black Mirror.
If you still have a bank account that you have not given up on, you will notice that as the month progresses, entropy increases and empties the account. The month begins with the money concentrated in your account under your sole control but diffuses into the universe over time to be in the control of many others. You need conscious effort and energy to retain your earnings. Your physical health follows the same natural process. Without effort, you tend to obesity. Eat without care and you get fat. Your health deteriorates on its own. To restore your width-to-height ratio back to within range of human proportions, you pump in energy to foster an active lifestyle. Order is not natural. You have to invent it.
All of this to say, I need to go back to the gym.
What I’m Reading
A ridiculously long book! I’m still reading The Better Angels of our Nature, a title by Steven Pinker. The chapter that I am currently grappling is 199 pages thick. You know, reading is alright but come on Steven. That is longer than some books. You couldn’t trim it down to bite-size, Steve, my guy? I’m not complaining. This is a brilliant piece of work. Thorough. Well researched. Well written. It reads like what I imagine financial freedom feels like. It’s a book about violence so I am not sure if it was written to be enjoyed, but I am… so much.
We have made irrefutable progress to arrest brutality as a species. It used to be more likely that one would die at the hands of another in centuries past. Life was cut short by raids, tribe warfare and the like. In the present day, you’re twice as likely to die from suicide than homicide. How crazy is that? You are more of an existential threat to yourself than any other human being. Humans should be the least of your worries, you’re even more likely to die from polluted air than at the hands of man.
In 1950, an average armed conflict killed 33 thousand people. In 2007, that number fell to under one thousand. Even when we take arms and go into battle, we’re not as gratuitous with handing out halos. A case in point may be the current conflict in Ukraine. After over a year and some months, casualties are estimated at around 300 thousand. Nazi Germany had reached a comparable death tally just after one month of their invasion of Poland in 1939 to set of the chain of events to which we now refer as World War 2. Death toll aside, the incidence of interstate wars, civil wars, imperial wars and colonial wars is itself plummeting, and heading towards zero.
Steven puts forward a list of contributing factors. I’ll only recall the three that I resonate with. The new peace is attributable to democracy, globalisation and humanitarianism. The proliferation of democratic governments was a sign that human beings were beginning to regard each life as equally valuable. By definition, democracy posits that each citizen has an equal say on how they are to be governed. We tally up the views of those that bother to vote and the most popular view is sustained for everyone. This configuration of society places all on level ground and pays no respect to titles, nobility or any other type of social stratification. If we’re equal, we’re the same. Violence is less likely to erupt amongst friends.
Globalisation took the baton from democracy. It extended kinsmanship beyond the state’s borders. Trade between countries increased mutual benefit by more than the sum of its parts. Read Ricardo’s work on comparative advantage to understand this magic. It became clear to our ancestors that we could achieve more as allies. All of a sudden, our neighbours became more valuable to us alive than dead. We stopped raiding and pillaging and started cooperating. Finally, the Humanitarian movement of last century contributed its fair share to the decline of violence. Humans defined rights for the first time and decreed that rights were inalienable. Black people in white countries leaned on these inalienable rights to launch successful civil rights movements; women followed suit with the feminist movement. In turn, gay rights movements subsequently blossomed and today we even recognise the rights of animals.
Pinker reiterates throughout the book that violence is unraveling. Despite the supposed threat of terrorism, chemical and nuclear warfare that is journalised daily, the world today is the most peaceful it has ever been. Terrorism has claimed fewer lives than car accidents. In fact, about 1500 people who avoided taking an aeroplane for fear of terrorism died in a car crash. The ‘terror’ is not that terrible. Bin Laden spent $500 thousand and two years of planning to bomb the towers in New York. America retaliated by throwing trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives at Bin Laden. This is a disproportionate response by any scale.
The fear of chemical terrorism is even more ridiculous. It’s prohibitively expensive to conjure up a potent chemical weapon when all you have for a laboratory is a cave and your research assistants are 13 years old. Chemicals dissipate quickly and are broken down by sunlight. Chemical attacks that have made the news since the 1980s are only a handful as a direct consequence. There was one where salmonella was weaponised in the US to influence elections in the ‘80s. The terrorists poisoned a total of 700 Americans of which none died. In the far east, Japan, a sarin attack only managed to kill 12 in the following decade. The only true weapons of mass destruction are nuclear weapons. These bad boys are no joke. I’m still reading about how we might yet survive them. I’ll write about it if it’s interesting enough.
Till next Sunday👋🏾.
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