- A quick overview of the recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth;
- Acronyms: The apex of absurdity in our 21st century communications;
- Why don’t we have a little more anthropology in our lives?
A wonderful edition of Michael Rosen’s Word of Mouth podcast hit my inbox yesterday, titled, “How to Think Like an Anthropologist.” In it, he interviews regular Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett on the importance of understanding language use, and change, with regards to how it reflects our changing cultures:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001wjf9
Tett is the author of Anthro-Vision, a book about anthropology and its ability to unpick the multifaceted beast known only as, “Things We Take For Granted in Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
That’s its real name. Please, refer to it by its stage name: T.H.I.N.G.S. That’s the ‘TH’ from ‘Things,’ the ‘IN’ from ‘in,’ the ‘G’ from “Everything,” and the ‘S’ from ‘Universe.’ Trust me, it knows what it’s talking about – it’s got an acronym and everything!
I’ve been banging on for a while now that we could all use more anthropology in our lives:
https://brologue.net/2024/01/29/here-be-spongebobs/
https://brologue.net/2023/12/23/three-amstrads-two-droll-daves-and-an-orange-on-a-black-tee/
Who put it better than David Graeber, who, in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, writes that his profession sits atop a sprawling archive of human experience and experimentation? There seems no stone an anthropologist won’t turn to if it helps to make a point. Linguistics – the study of language – is one such stone.
From teachers observing children coming up with names to describe groups of characters in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, to Tett’s own observations on language changes in Tajikistan – Soviet and post-Soviet – her interview with Rosen flings us headfirst into ideas about how language, when mixed up with culture, can be used to persuade – and deceive.
With regards to the changing language of economics and finance leading up to and during the crash of 2007/08, this quip, from Anthro-Vision, and included in the show notes, is a tantalising hot-button trigger:
If you want to hide something in the 21st century world, you don’t need to create a James Bond style plot. Just cover it in acronyms.
I mean, really. Here, in this quote, under protest, is one such slippery T.H.I.N.G.. Acronyms are the apex of absurdity in our 21st century communications. Taken for granted? In some professions, it’s nigh-on a birthright! One has to wonder if we really hear ourselves when someone comes at you with acronyms, like you know them as well as they do.
I’m not denying that acronyms can make communication more efficient. The key word here is ‘can.’ Fighting games are a great example – in traditional fighters, we might use the numbers 1 through 9, plus a letter, to acronymise a sequence of inputs that leads to an attack. It’s a helpful shorthand for mapping attacks to inputs, or when the name of said attacks are just too damn long:
https://www.dustloop.com/wiki/index.php/Notation
If we take acronyms to their illogical extremities, we arrive at the madcap kooky-koo world of backronyms. I refuse to believe that backronyms aren’t a ploy to highlight their own insanity. They are sublimely excremental. Dave Gorman and co. sum them up more succinctly than I ever could:
This podcast has helped me glue together some ideas I’ve had stewing in the Zettel for a year now:
The title of this note refers to bullshit in the strictly Frankfurtian sense – information which is dispersed with no regard for truth or falsity, and without any effort to “get it right;” it is substantially different from lying, because liars, in their attempts to warp the truth, are nonetheless concerned about the truth. They think they know what’s true, and that’s their reason for lying.
A bullshit jargon, as I’ve titled the note, would therefore be a colloquialism in a given field that expresses some sort of epistemology, but, if we break it down to its most fundamental level, is only ever superficial. My colleagues make it a habit. Often during standups, they can’t go a minute without saying some jargon word, or acronym. Often, because I’m the new kid, I’ve asked them what these things actually mean. At this point, they hear themselves, and answer honestly: “I don’t know.”
With backronyms, Poe’s Law makes it impossible to tell if their creators are aware of the bullshit they’re creating, or if they are indeed cynical in their clutching at letters and words to make something sound appealing. Either way, they’re at least more transparent in their agenda.
Although I think my pet theory hits the right notes, the title, “Bullshit Jargon in the Digital Age” says way too much. Jargon didn’t just appear with the age of computing, and it’s always been kinda bullshit. Nonetheless, we can’t go a day in tech without hearing some new term, technique, or acronym. You have to spend an hour unpacking, an hour reading diagrams, and an hour to recall what you’ve read, just to understand them. That’s what ‘keeping up’ in this field involves.
Ironic, isn’t it? The humanities kid who fell for the STEM meme – that’s me – ends up in STEM, where most of the work in keeping up is really just understanding new language, and how and when it is used. I was slightly cynical at the idea that ‘prompt engineering’ a large language model could be a serious gig – then I learned these systems could be hacked through ‘prompt injection.’
Prompt injection is basically lockpicking a smaller model to answer questions it’s been trained not to answer. It’s like when Odysseus woke up the cyclops, Polyphemus, to move a boulder blocking their path. Calling himself ‘Nobody,’ when Polyphemus is later attacked and calls for help from the other cyclopes, they tell him to stop, because ‘nobody’ has hurt him.
In practice – well, let this post from fasterthanlime do the talking (h/t to Troy Sobotka who boosted it). This is about the least worst thing you can do with prompt injection:
https://hachyderm.io/@fasterthanlime/111974592642053107
For all its supposed short-term efficiency, acronymitis seems to exacerbate a more complex, long-term headache. In the second half of the Word of Mouth episode, Tett recalls in 2005 attending a business conference in France. This ‘securitisation forum,’ as organisers put it, was more like ‘financial sausage-making’ – chopping up debt from many different sources, blending in spices, and selling it all off as sausages in new casings.
What happened in 2007, then, was a bit like a food posioning scandal (what popped into my mind instead was the horsemeat scandal of 2013, but I digress). One of the meat sources was tainted, and had been chopped up so much that investors had no idea what sausages they could buy safely. So, quite rightly, the investors went on strike.
Now, instead of meat, think of debt. Investors weren’t being sold sausages, they were being sold CDOs – Collateralised Debt Obligations. Instead of charts and numbers, Tett thought of her time studying marriage rituals in Tajikistan. She saw a group of scattered tribes – the financiers who came up with CDOs – coming together to engage in ceremonies – formal, and informal – to reaffirm their ties to each other, and how to reaffirm their supposed status as the only people who knew how CDOs worked.
What resulted from that conference was a whole slew of new acronyms – CDS, ABCDS, ABS, and so on. If it sounds like pure gibberish, that’s because A) it is, and B) don’t make me tap the sign – it’s supposed to sound like gibberish. We are two steps removed from the kazoos-in-lieu-of-dialogue within the opening scene to Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights:
Trust the financiers – they know what they’re talking about. They’ve got acronyms and everything! Of course, us lay people are partly to blame. On the one hand, we rely on financiers to do what they do, yet we have no idea precisely what that doing involves, but nonetheless, we let them do it. After all, as Tett alludes, T.H.I.N.G.S were working – mortgages, credit cards, and suchlike.
On the other hand, the financiers were operating on a more cynical level – “We know you rely on us to do what we do, and we know what we’re doing. Here’s some acronyms, now go away, you bother us.”
Rosen is quick to catch the trick – it’s as if one’s use of acronyms conveys a sense of knowing and expertise, regardless whether that’s true or not. If political action, at its basic level, is simply acting with the intention of influencing others’ actions, then the use of acronyms – and their overuse – is overtly political:
If you cover something in acronyms, and make it seem very technical, and geeky, then [you know] most journalists will look at that and go, ‘UGGGH, how BORING! How on earth do I take a story about ABCDS, or CDOs and put it on the front page?’
Gillian Tett
He goes on to complete her point – through anthro-vision, taking in the conference and all that it attracted as though she were an alien, it seemed that many of the financiers in attendance also had no idea what they were talking about. In their supposed familiarity with the systems that they had shaped, they could not see how those systems could fail. Three years after the fact, fail they certainly did.
“We know you rely on us to do what we do, and we know what we’re doing. Except we don’t know what we’re doing, but we’d like you to think we do. Here’s some acronyms.”
Their mistake was believing that keeping everything under wraps, obfuscating how systems work, would keep T.H.I.N.G.S working, and that lay people can’t be trusted to know how T.H.I.N.G.S work. We can still see this ideology at work today – for instance, take one of Cory Doctorow’s recent posts on Google’s obsession with keeping its search algorithm under wraps:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/
The Algorithm™ must be kept under wraps, say Google, ‘otherwise the spammers would win.’ And yet as far as we’re aware, the spammers have already won, be that through AI-generated guff, SEO-boosted doppelgangers of your favourite takeaway sites that charge a premium while boiler-room scammers skim the profits, or other such nonsense:
It’s all too tempting to take these as reasons not to listen. That would be completely antithetical to the spirit of anthropology. To quote John Managhan and Peter Just from their Very Short Introduction on Anthropology:
‘People are everywhere the same except in the ways they differ’, which is not, admittedly, a very profound statement. Yet in an important sense it is what a century of anthropology has taught us, and on closer inspection this is no small thing. It teaches us, for one thing, to take nothing about human beings for granted.
To not take human beings for granted means to listen; to become the participant observer who sees things with “child-like wonder,” asks stupid questions, and asks the questions no-one else would dare to ask. Although, Managhan and Just do go on to write:
When someone begins a peroration with the phrase ‘but of course, it’s human nature to…’, start looking for the exit! Because what you are about to hear will most likely reflect the speaker’s most deeply held prejudices rather than the product of a genuine cross-cultural understanding.
There’s nothing about humans we can take for granted, sure, and yet, as Graeber noted in Fragments, there seemed to him a certain reluctance among his peers. Despite their access to almost the entirety of human experience, they wouldn’t dare, even after walking a reader through real-life case studies, to make generalisations about humanity. The one discipline where nothing’s off the table; the one discipline in the position to generalise, yet anthropologists just won’t.
Tech tries to generalise us, and it fails miserably. On the atomic level (pick one):
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
Everywhere you turn in tech, at least in the global north, there seems to be a distinct lack of this kind of listening. Last year’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes were all about not listening. Ever notice how ‘AI’ (again, large language models) keeps getting billed not as an auxiliary tool for helping existing workers, but as something to replace them entirely? No model is as yet capable of this, but that hardly stops people in power from trying.
Are people like Sam Altman not in a similar position to those financiers at the forum – the very same ones that contributed to the 2008 crash, who kept everything in secret, who thought they knew what they were doing, but didn’t? Perhaps even more insidious are the ones among them who pretend to listen, but really aren’t. I touch on such people in my look at Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/28/one-hundred-percent-mindful-british-and-irish-beef/
I haven’t read Tett’s Anthro-Vision, but it’s on my radar. Her points from the Word of Mouth episode resonate with me. In the time that I’ve returned to playing NASB2 on a competitive level, I’ve tried to view the opinions of others from the perspective of a neutral participant observer. Of course, none of us are a true tabula rasa, but making up this character in my head of the ‘platfighter anthropologist’ helps to ground me nonetheless.
It’s this character that also lets me ask questions no-one dare ask – or, for instance, prodding at the idea that we perhaps don’t know everything about ragequitting, and that our attitudes towards it are really more to do with how poorly humans react to aggression:
https://brologue.net/2024/01/21/careful-with-that-capslock-eugene/
A panacea it is not, but anthropology is certainly an antidote to that odious phrase, the antipanacea, “There is no alternative.” There’s always an alternative: anthropologists have all the available evidence to show us how T.H.I.N.G.S change. A little more of it in our lives won’t bring a conclusive end to our current polycrises, but knowing how we got here, what we’re doing, where we’re at, and where we’re going, through its lens, would help make it easier for everyone to navigate.
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