The book is centered on Xiaomi, a Chinese cell phone firm. I found the writing rather jumpy, almost ADD. Here are some random excerpts (each of these is from different parts of the book):
This focus on a handful of individual product lines in turn allows the company to stay small. Employees who have been through Xiaomi’s hiring process are told that the company’s goal is to hire as few people as possible, by concentrating on attracting and retaining talented employees.
China, remarkably, has managed to create an alternate path, building a country where information moves like people,, in highly identified and constrained ways
the usual modes of censorship and surveillance are no longer enough to keep control of public opinion, and the government is expanding its online propaganda efforts. The people who flood online conversations with pro-Beijing sentiment are . . .paid half a yuan for every post.
the People’s Liberation Army paper published one saying, “The Internet has grown into an ideological battlefield, and whoever controls the tool will win the war.”
Of course, the idea of trying to operate a firm with a relatively small cadre of talented employees sounds very reasonable to someone in the tech business. But note that it is quite different from old-fashioned economic models, in which you hire “labor” until marginal revenue equals marginal cost.
But the issue that I am still mulling is the role of social media in affecting the evolution of beliefs and behavior. My sense is that people’s dislike of “the other” has gone up quite a bit during the relatively short period in which social media went from a small niche phenomenon to a mass-market phenomenon.
“But the issue that I am still mulling is the role of social media in affecting the evolution of beliefs and behavior.”
Consider the famous quote from Keynes:
Below the level of conscious awareness, people are instinctively and constantly trying to solve various ‘Social Calculus’ problems, and in order to synchronize with one’s fellows requires a good ability to figure out, “the average opinion of average opinion,” and to keep up to date with the latest shifting fads, and jump on the latest bandwagons.
The way people do this is by constantly scanning their social scenes and inferring this kind of information from environmental cues.
And what social-media does to influence people is a version of what mass-media does, which is the ‘mind-hack’ of hijacking this mechanism by stuffing the channel with signals that fool them into perceiving that there is a certain kind of consensus among the people they care about most, and who they most want to imitate and signal affiliation with.
The inferred consensus may bear little relation to actual consensus, or may even be the bootstrapping mechanism that brings that consensus into real existence by broadcasting the pretense that it already exists.
But regardless, the psychological system cannot help but process the information in a way that tells some mental module that the winds are changing direction, and that they better get with the program, because all the good, cool, smart people are doing it, and only the bad, evil morons aren’t.
Bottom Line: The PLA paper’s authors are totally right, and one would be wise to suspect that many, many other organizations – governments, corporations, whatever – are investing lots of resources into doing the same thing they are.
What I find fascinating is how it seems like most Chinese don’t care or even appreciate that their government lies, as if willingness to lie indicates how much they truly care.
Not a perfect example, but in the US this quote: “The Internet has grown into an ideological battlefield, and whoever controls the tool will win the war.”
Would obviously be read as anti-Washington, but in China it is pro-Beijing and paid for.