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Technology's Legacy: the 'Loser Edit' Awaits Us All
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times Magazine has an insightful article putting into words how I've felt about information-age culture for a while now. It's about a phenomenon dubbed the "loser edit." The term itself was born out of reality TV — once an outcome had been decided while the show was still taping, the producers would comb back through the footage and selectively paste together everything that seemed to foreshadow the loser's fall. When the show actually aired, it thus had an easy-to-follow narrative.
But as the information age has overtaken us, the "loser edit" is something that can happen to anyone. Any time a celebrity gets into trouble, we can immediately search through two decades of interviews and offhand comments to see if there were hints of their impending fall. It usually becomes a self-reinforcing chain of evidence. The loser edit happens for non-celebrities too, using their social media posts, public records, leaked private records, and anything else available through search.
The worst part is, there's no focal point for the blame. The news media does it, the entertainment industry does it, and we do it to ourselves. Any time the internet gets outraged about something, there are a few people who happily dig up everything they can about the person they now feel justified in hating — and thus, the loser edit begins.
But as the information age has overtaken us, the "loser edit" is something that can happen to anyone. Any time a celebrity gets into trouble, we can immediately search through two decades of interviews and offhand comments to see if there were hints of their impending fall. It usually becomes a self-reinforcing chain of evidence. The loser edit happens for non-celebrities too, using their social media posts, public records, leaked private records, and anything else available through search.
The worst part is, there's no focal point for the blame. The news media does it, the entertainment industry does it, and we do it to ourselves. Any time the internet gets outraged about something, there are a few people who happily dig up everything they can about the person they now feel justified in hating — and thus, the loser edit begins.
Look, it all makes sense!" is a comfortable place in a chaotic World.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Is the biggest oxymoron there is. Verry little on tv is real and so-called 'reality TV' is among the most fake.
News doesn't fare too much better.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Because they can find a handful of things in a sea of evidence and then construct a narrative of guilt around it.
It's why the EU right to have old, irrelevant search results is so important. Society has to forgive and forget, otherwise lives are ruined by one or two mistakes. It's great that machines remember everything for us, but also terrible.
I would say it's the opposite - that if everyone has their mistakes on parade, then it' makes it easier for others can admit that they too aren't perfect. Instead of trying to appear what we're not, we should be more interested in being who we are, warts and all, and encouraging others to do the same.
It wasn't that long ago that a woman who was raped was considered "ruined for life." By speaking out about it instead of trying to hide it, that is no longer the case. Same with gays and lesbians that used to have to hide in the closet. We can't go on wasting lives with some false idea that if you can get people to forget about it, you don't have to deal with it.
We simply can't advance, either as individuals or a society, if we actively "forget" anything that society labels a "mistake." Imagine a world where everyone can't throw rocks because everyone else knows the rock-throwers are also not so perfect.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Remember Fatty Arbuckle? He was a bigger star than Charlie Chaplin in his day. He mentored Charlie Chaplin and discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope.
Then he threw a party where a hooker got sick and later died. Months later, the jury at his final trial actually gave him a formal written statement of apology from the jury, because of the grief he had gone through for no good reason.
His films were banned and his career was over: And all the publicity was edited and picked to ensure the narrative justified his destruction.
It's called "yellow journalism" these days but it's been around since speech was invented.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Which is always 20/20. Humans are not able to predict the future no matter what information we are fed (with the exception of Charlie Sheen). Only after the outcome is realized can we then look back and see the clues leading up to it. It is hindsight that we use as a tool to punish others for not being able to predict the future.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
You can find "proof" of anything you want to on the internet, whether it be that the Queen of England is really a lizard or that Steven Harper is a bible-thumping arsehole. You can "prove" Obama isn't really an American, that Kanye West is gawd or that Kanye West is the biggest ego to ever hit the planet.
The internet is just chock full of articles, forums, blogs, and other sources you can cite to support your pre-determined outcome.
It has always been this way -- there is no "fact checking" required to post something. On the other hand, there is no "editor" on a "mission" to change what you post, either.
At the core of it, the problem is not the internet nor the history it exposes, but the viciousness and old-fashioned nastiness of people who want to destroy others, often just because they can. Add that in to the human stew that just loves to hear and read nasty gossip about people they're jealous of, and you have a recipe for the "loser edit."
Where the internet differs from reality TV, though, is that with "reality" TV, all the episodes are subject to "loser edits" because that's what builds "characters" out of hours and hours of otherwise useless footage into something the general public will suck back like sweetened pablum.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The "Loser edit" if it really is something we should wory about, and seek to avoid, has some rather dire consequences. I mean, think about it. Without the loser edit people like Justin Bieber are OK guys despite 18 documented police interventions and a drug conviction. It means that despite Pat Robertsons direct connection to a diamond mine in the congo that itself was responsible for decades of bloodshed and terror, hes an alright guy with a pretty gruff outlook on the gays. and worse yet, it means Dick Cheney, a man directly responsible for the death of nearly a million Iraqi citizens, is just a misunderstood old fogey.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is yet another reason not to be on FaceBook.
Don't post a ton of shit about your life online, and there will therefore be less material available for YOUR future loser edit.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Bad historians have done this forever, carefully culling information to fit the predetermined narrative that they're trying to present. Don't get me wrong, sometimes this can be done in a way that makes history more entertaining & easier to understand as long as it's highlighted as what it is, but the tenor of modern (particularly American, particularly ) teaching of history is very much a linear, determinate thing: this happened, so then THIS happened, which logically led to that.
HIstory - even recent history - *must* be understood in-context. Frankly, that's what makes GOOD study of history a really hard thing. Monday-morning quarterbacking happens whether the event was last night or 1000 years ago. The people of, for example, Dark Ages Europe are practically aliens from another planet, in terms of how they saw the world; to interpret their choices (or worse, to render moral judgement on their actions) solely through the postmodern view of 2015 would be ludicrous, yet it happens constantly.
"History is written by the winners" has always been true; the internet has simply made it a sport everyone can enjoy. It's no longer academic historians fighting closeted battles over esoteric issues within their field, it's the subject of daily conversation.
Further, with the astonishingly short memory/attention span of the modern American electorate, tendentious people are able to get away with the constant revisionist presentation of events within recent memory.
Hell, half the political conversations I have, the first effort is simply to establish SOME common basis of accepted facts upon which we can even constructively argue.
Idiocracy is truly approaching.
-Styopa
The ultimate example of what you describe are the "built narratives" used by sports commentators when they are describing a team who sucked at the beginning of the season and then comeback to make the playoffs then win the World Series/Superbowl/NBA Finals.
The highlights from games won and lost are played and edited to support the narrative.
I actually get a kick of out watching them rationalize how they knew the team in question was going to "overcome adversity" and "impose their will", etc;
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
One way to put a lid on this sort of behavior is to remove anonymity. It would solve a lot of problems, and it doesn't interfere with freedom of speech - you can still say what you want, you just have to own it, same as if you stood up in the public square and said the same things.
Thomas Paine would say you have a very bad idea there.
There are times when anonymity serves a greater purpose. If I lived in a predominately Islamic-ruled country and wanted to criticize the ruling class about their policies towards women, or introduce the idea that maybe Islam is not a good basis for a legal system, I damned sure would want to remain anonymous while doing so, lest I wind up getting imprisoned or whipped to within an inch of my life over the charge of "blasphemy" (yes, that's a thing in some places, and yes, it goes on even today.)
A better US-based reason? Leaks to the press. Leaks are what point us to uncovering crimes and misdemeanors by public officials. A historical example? Watergate's "Deep Throat". A recent example? Mrs. Clinton's little habit of accepting massive amounts of payola from foreign sources to her "charity" while she was Secretary of State. If it weren't for a leak to the press, no one outside of a few elites would know about it.
So no, m'dear - removing anonymity is not a good thing.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You're misconstruing the argument in the article. They're not saying that we should try to whitewash people who have done bad things, and a person's bad reputation may often be well deserved. They're warning against falling into the trap of, once someone happens into bad circumstances, of creating a narrative for that person that tries to assign their circumstances as a predestined result of fate. The most insidious example I see of this is when someone contracts a serious disease such as cancer. Often the first questions asked by medical staff are regarding their lifestyle choices, which builds into the narrative that they're sick because of the way they lived.
During the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, for example, the first questions asked to those diagnosed were often whether they lived a promiscuous lifestyle, took drugs, or engaged in gay sex. All activities which were frowned upon, and fed into the dominant societal narrative at the time that the people who were contracting AIDS were losers who contracted the disease because of their loser lifestyle. I'd argue in that case the loser edit was applied to a whole category of people, and held back progress in addressing a serious health issue.
Would they be doing this if they couldn't remain anonymous? Doubt it very much.
Exactly what steps did Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Dean Buntrock, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski, Mark Swartz, Richard Scrushy, David Glenn, Leland Brendsel, Vaughn Clarke, Robert Dean, Nazir Dossani, Hank Greenberg, Bernie Madoff, David Friehling, Frank DePascalli, and Ramalinga Raju take to remain anonymous? They were named officers of corporations that committed financial fraud and cost many people billions of dollars, and there was no way any of them thought they'd have anonymity as a shield.
It's a shame that most people want the benefits of the fight waged by their predecessors, but are unwilling to pay it forward.
It's a shame that there are people on this planet who think they know better than the people who have something they want to hide for social reasons.
Living in fear every day of losing your job because someone outs you is not a life,
It isn't your responsibility to make that decision for them, nor should you be using this as an excuse to defend those who do "loser edits" of people who want to keep their private lives somewhat private. Your example of people who speak out about their rape experiences living happier lives than those who don't missed one critical factor: they are speaking out VOLUNTARILY, not as the result of some arrogant know-it-all who decided they'd be happier if their lives were made public.
If you don't have the courage of openly standing behind your opinions, then maybe they aren't worth listening to.
You've just demonstrated ad hominem. You're paying attention to who says something, not what has been said. Most people consider that a vice, not a virtue. More people, I dare say, value the ideas over the identity, and the more the better
Does the name "Thomas Paine" ring a bell? Obviously someone whose ideas are not worth listening to, because:
Obviously those ideas were the fiction of a madman, irrelevant to anyone and unworthy of publication. And yet:
Perhaps others are more aware that staying alive to write another day is more valuable in the long run than becoming an immediate, little known and unheard martyr for a cause? Like those who would stand up against an, e.g., Islamic government and say "you really ought not treat women that way." Perhaps you think that "Deep Throat" had nothing of value to say, either.
I've been the target of a fair amount of hate and discrimination, but you don't see me backing down. Or hiding behind a nym.
Yeah, thank God that /. vets the identities of people who post under other than "Anonymous Coward" names, so we know that you are the one, true Barbara Hudson (I'm sorry, BarbaraHudson) on the planet and that is your true, real meatspace name.
My phone number's also out there. There's nothing for adults to be afraid of.
There's nothing YOU fear, maybe, but it's arrogance to project that lack of concern over your own safety onto others and tell them how they should behave. Or to defend things like "loser edits" because you have no fear and forcing other people into the open will only prove you are right.