The idea of the Purge is simple: shed the superfluous elements of my life and focus on what’s really important. This was informed by a known weakness of mine where it takes me a lot of effort to start something (the threshold for starting a new activity is high), but once I’m into it I will find it very difficult to stop. A good test for this will be to imagine asking myself a year from now what I have achieved and being satisfied with the answer.

Some of the easy things fell off the list pretty quickly. The first one were the blogs I was subscribed to — I used to read about 200 blog posts a day, ranging from what was going on in New York City to a blog dedicated to making stuff. Given that I’m way behind on making stuff, and have enough to do in New York City, I purged the list to the most important 20 a day, mostly from reddit.com

Imagine going to any of a number of shows during a music festival. There are seats but since it’s a festival, seating is sequential and kept in order by the festival staff. Initially the staff seat the customers on a first-come, first-served basis but pretty quickly into the festival, people start offering bribes to the staff in exchange for a better seat. The staff has full discretion over seating so they willingly take the bribes.

As more and more people catch on, the staff begin reserving seats in anticipation for future late-comers who may offer a higher bribe. A secondary market forms where people come to the concert, offer bribes for multiple seats and resell them later. These people now have specialized jobs which allows them to find customers better (and, since they are not staff members, can openly offer good seats for money). This also pleases the staff members because they get bulk pricing and have to spend less time dealing with money.

If this is an efficient market, there is competition between secondary market makers, and the best ones minimize the risk of having a seat unfilled, so all seats are filled, but each seat now has a price tag attached to it. A system where staff members were given the power to seat the customers and they succumb to corruption naturally turns into a fully capitalistic system.

A big problem with predicting a new trend is that we are fundamentally shaped by the current one. Just like revolutions are as much a result of an individual’s actions as the pressure from the Zeitgeist, our collective behaviors define a trend. Moreover, we are not really aware of being a part of a trend, which makes it very difficult to step outside of the proverbial box.

Let’s use an example. My generation defines several trends, most of which we are probably not aware of. First, there is a huge movement towards a hyperconnected-but-also-hyperisolated life. We don’t use land lines anymore. Email is the preferred method of communication — most times you can get a faster response by sending an email than by calling someone (this generational gap is most evident with the software vendors I interact with at work — a funny pattern emerges, where they call me and I email them back). More and more of us are eating well. CNN only makes us angry (recently I realized that ESPN is a much preferred station to watch at lunch despite the subject matter). This happens. Most of the time we don’t stop to think about all these things that are our everyday tasks; but it is exactly these things that draw us to social networking sites like Facebook. Twitter is another great example of a product that capitalizes on the schism between hyperconnectedness (you use Twitter to blast information about yourself to the entire world) and hyperisolation (you use Twitter to blast information about yourself to the entire world). The fact that I’m not quite sure what to call this trend shows how difficult it is to define it.

So if you want to create the next big thing, the thing that will be the next trend setter, you have to first understand the current trend. That’s not enough, though. Twitter started operation in 2006. It’s fascinating that a product which I hypothesized my generation is already too old for was created at the peak of what I believed to be my capacity for cultural absorption. This means that the things you’re thinking about as “the next big things” are probably already behind the new trend. It’s a little bit like sitting in traffic: you see cars moving faster in the lane next to you so you quickly switch lanes hoping to move faster. But to your frustration, you end up moving slower. This is because when you came up with the idea to switch lanes, statistically most other drivers had already done so so you’re just lagging behind and receiving the due punishment — joining the lane that is about to slow down to a crawl while opening the lane you were just in for the new trendsetters.

So what should we do? When you understand the Zeitgeist and finally come up with an idea for the next big thing, think about what the big thing after that would be.

I believe that it is intrinsic in human nature to possess a kind of confirmation bias, extrapolating severely limited set of data points (say, the time span of one generation) to make statements about timeless truths, concepts lasting for very long time frames. In other words, we all have a kind of local view of history which is causing us to make incorrect assumptions about the past, or is preventing us from questioning things enough to make good predictions about the future.

There are numerous examples to support this idea. Until about 2006, the general populace was convinced that housing prices will always go up. We fear of terrorists taking over planes but forget that in the seventies, plane hijackings were rather common. We love good food but just fifty years ago Americans considered food to be a rather utilitarian exercise.

It is commonly thought (and by “It is thought” I mean “at some point we all thought that, even if now we may not admit it because of a certain pressure from those who tend to expose common conceptions as myths who may make us appear stupid”) that the Middle Ages were by and large a waste — several centuries of backwardness. However, I believe that we think that only because we live in a technophiliac age where one assigns value to a very specific kind of progress that was, admittedly, absent in the Middle Ages. This is most likely coupled with a phenomenon in which we conveniently forget that progress has an exponential nature — sure, the Renaissance seemed like a huge step forward, but it very likely needed to be bootstrapped by a much slower progress that was brewing in the centuries before it. But, even more fundamentally, our belief in progress is an even more deeply rooted assumption about the human race. Can we extrapolate it into the future? Will we always aim towards progress? What if we deplete our natural resources?

And how about political systems? We think of monarchy as a less developed, more primitive form of government that suffers from a lot of problems that we have since managed to mitigate with other systems. But again, this is just confirmation bias: we were raised in a culture that relishes in the importance of democracy. We seem to think that democracy will reign forever — or at least, that monarchy will never come back. But that doesn’t have to be the case (Frank Herbert was onto something). It doesn’t have to be the case because the path between concept and execution is chaotic — small variations in the original assumptions can lead to massive differences in execution, so what seems like a massive problem with monarchy in the context of eighteenth-century world citizen’s worldview may easily be solvable with twenty-first-century’s tools and mindset. For example yes, there is potential for abuse, but what if we use technology to limit it just as technology today ensures we don’t abuse some of the privileges given to us. Once we solve these problems (which centuries of oppression have brought to the foreground), the underlying framework may provide a much more efficient way to stabilize the society (in fact, I’ve always thought that democracy is ostentatiously very inefficient — just think about the years of training, campaigning, and money spent by the candidate who loses the elections).

That’s exactly the problem with extrapolation: it assumes that some phenomenon can be approximated well with a linear model. So long as the extrapolation is minimal, most phenomena do behave pretty nicely: if today we’re burning up coal like crazy, tomorrow we are also likely to use up a lot of it. But it does not necessarily follow that in fifty years we will. Extrapolation over a long time window is unable to take into account the interactions of the thousands of variables that affect the outcomes we’re trying to predict.

History, or social sciences in general, suffer from this problem particularly much, precisely because there are so many variables at play (i.e. the systems they try to explain are so chaotic). In a way, one of my biggest realizations was that social sciences are enormously more complex than exact sciences because the latter have the liberty of operating on kiddie worlds where everything can be controlled and measured and there are relatively few degrees of freedom. It’s only when we move on to sciences that rely on inaccurate, nondeterministic and complex objects, such as economics (struggling with the complexity of human nature when applied to incentive-driven behavior), politics (struggling with the complexity of understanding the impact of policies on e.g. economics) and history (struggling with the complexity stemming from the interplay of a number of economic, political and social factors with individuals and their decision-making process), that the number of variables increases beyond our comprehension. Those models are nowhere near linear, so let’s not extrapolate.

There are some positive consequences of the abandonment of superfluous extrapolation. It is not necessarily the case that food will look less and less like food — in fact, we are slowly starting to see people go back to natural sources of food, from organic food to CSAs to growing their own vegetables. We may run out of rare earth metals in twenty years, but that doesn’t necessarily imply armageddon.

Recently I woke up, panting. Just a moment seconds earlier, out of nowhere, a feeling came to me in my dream. I dreamt of something indescribable. It was akin to being in the presence of pure evil, something that permeated me yet had no form of its own. It was terrifying.

This is interesting because it means that there is this entire dimension to music that I can’t see that others see. What is it like? Is appreciating music for its lyrics like seeing color after a lifetime of color-blindness?

A large portion of our disposable capital and time (especially when we’re young) goes to entertainment and our pastimes. We spend a large number of money after work, looking for something to keep us engaged. What if it was social norm to give back to the society instead of spending the time and money on oneself? Not a requirement, but something seen as a way to fit in (just like trendy clothing) or a way to pass time (like watching TV)?