The anatomy of a social virus
How many times, after taking an oversized risk, did you ask yourself ‘why did I do that’? Why did you agree to that medical procedure? Why do people go to concerts to do drugs? Why do they enlist in nonsense wars? Why do we keep digging up evidence of human sacrifices — sometimes in the thousands like in the Jonestown massacre?
In observing the world and how people behave, one must ask oneself why do people go against themselves, or else one lacks curiosity. In the South American jungle, explorers recount running into indigenous people tripping on hallucinogenic drugs. They claim to be able to see spirits. Before they developed the wheel, these ‘primitive’ people gained an understanding of behavior as a viral thing — jumping from person to person, affecting them, animating them, perhaps defining them.
The idea that our behavior does not come from within, from some proof-of-benefit kernel, but from the outside is a painful thing. Something long ago called the Enlightenment informed us we have to say we have agency, or else we’re stupid. If that’s true, why do we go skydiving? Why do we take risks where there’s nothing to gain and everything to lose?
Let’s take a look at a fair comparison to a social virus: the humble Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus which is known for infecting ants, somehow convincing them to climb to a high altitude, where its spores break out of the victim’s skull and travel in the wind until they find another ant and repeat the process.
We can break this fungus into two parts: the vehicle, which is the spore, and the payload, which is the behavior of finding a high enough altitude. A social virus, though it is informational and not physical, can be broken down into the same constituents.
The vehicle
For a social virus to copy itself, the first step is to call attention to itself. Since it’s just information, it only needs to be observed. What are the obstacles to this?
The first problem is that there are too many things to pay attention to. Think about the problem of vision alone. Which pixels does your brain care about? There’s a million things happening all at once. Which one of them, as they say, has meaning?
The second problem is that paying attention isn’t free — simply existing has a cost. There’s the metabolic cost of passing food through oneself. The cost of paying the rent for your apartment. The cost of opportunity — what else could we be paying attention to?
The logical conclusion is that, the thing we should pay attention to should result in paying the price of paying attention to it. The happy part of this is all people have this problem, so we can observe those people and see where they invest their resources.
One could read a book about finance — let’s say a rich guy published a book on how he made his money, and he said he did it by buying Apple stock. Satisfied with how to get rich, you visit the corner store for a beer and find the man himself, feverishly scratching lottery tickets. Ah, you say to yourself, he’s a liar and simply got lucky playing the lotto.
Dejected, you walk home with your six pack, thinking if only I could emulate the success of stock traders. It’s so difficult. You imagine the traders on the exchange floor, and you see them taking multiple bets in a split second. As you imagine them in your minds eye, what do you see? What is interesting? The risk.
Proof of risk as a vehicle
Imagine you are driving and there are people holding signs on the side of the road trying to distract you with advertisements. On the left is one dressed as the statue of liberty, on the right a naked person. You look right of course, because naked person. Well I am a sexual person, after all, you say, of course I’m gonna look. Next comes a naked person the left, and a man setting himself on fire on the right. You look right again — what the hell is he doing? Of course you look, how can you not. Finally, you have two people walking a tight rope 1000 feet off the ground. On the right one has a safety net, the one on the left does not. Where do you look?
When you looked at the naked person, were you looking at their anatomy, or at their risk? The risk of course. Risk is a perfect vehicle because it takes so little time and processing power to observe, and yet tells the story of how somebody attempts to win in life.
Social virus payload
If risk ‘makes you pay attention’ to somebody’s behavior, what does it do with your attention once it has it? It can deliver something similar, but perhaps more computationally complex like proof of work. An example of this is a novel, where the first page is either literary or narrative risk, followed by hundreds of pages of the author’s laborious interpretation of the world. We’ll cover this later on, for now let’s concentrate on the simplest forms of viruses.
The simplest payload of all is of course the risk itself. The simpler a social virus is, the faster it replicates, and a lot of our behaviors can be described as proof of risk social viruses. For instance, when people observe somebody getting naked, they are more likely to get naked. People call themselves social drinkers because the risk of inebriation simply copies itself into people near each other. This may pull in other behaviors, but it does not need to — we’ve identified a certain subset of behaviors as vPOR, or viral Proof Of Risk.
The problem, you may have noticed, is that vPORs are risk for the sake of risk — how in the world does an organism evolve such an idiotic behavior mechanism? Wouldn’t we all just follow each other off a cliff like sheep? Ah, needless risk can be seen as a bug in our swarm intelligence.
Swarm intelligence
When we look at difference types of organisms, one way we categorize them is collective vs individual animals. Bees vs tigers, for instance. Bees can be observed to work closely together in separate lanes, so to speak. Different bees have different jobs — queens lay eggs, workers work. Even down to the worker, they often have very different work to do — some workers guard the entrance to the hive while others are out gathering pollen.
Tigers on the other hand live far apart and all seem to do the same job. However, they mark their territory with smells and sounds — is it that they are far apart, or are they essentially very large bees, about the size of their territory? If a female tiger kills a deer, does the sound of it communicate to a nearby male where the herd of deer are? He is bigger and stronger than her, so he can simply encroach on her territory and eat. Perhaps this will also instigate mating. Did she just ‘do her job’, like a forager bee would?
All organisms on earth are a part of some swarm intelligence, it is not really possible for us to think on the individual level. Let’s say a male peacock has the brightest tale, and stands out from the rest. Is he an individual? Doesn’t he do it in the same way all other peacocks do? And isn’t he doing it as a way of serving the female peacocks, or a swarm?
It makes sense that, if we had a swarm intelligence, messages broadcast to its members would be the behaviors of the members. Somebody can talk your ear off, but proof of risk is more believable. Seeing is believing, as they say — though not without bugs. Sheep really do follow each other off of a cliff — what possible benefit can a swarm intelligence provide that is worth it?
Computational complexity of a swarm
Imagine being a sheep. You are on the outside of your flock, which means a wolf close to you may target you. You want to go closer in, to put other sheep between you and any wolf, but in your way is another female sheep. She is your competition, so is less likely to let you in. You spot a male a little further back, so you try to get by him, but his girlfriend thinks you’re stealing her mate and gives you the side eye. Oh crap, why are those sheep over there running?
How do you make progress in the face of such complexity? For instance, the flock has to move in unison. How do you get the sheep to take just enough steps to move the flock along? According to the idea of agency, the sheep has to stand aside, ignore any threats and carefully think through the problem of the best direction to go in.
If some part of the brain is responsible for enabling a ‘social virus’ mechanism, then simply: the leader of the flock takes a step, and that step copies itself down the flock until everyone is about one step further forward. This simplifies the complexity of swarm movement. We know we have to step forward pretty much now, and pretty much in which direction. We don’t have to think much, and can still lookout for predators or resent my boyfriend’s other girlfriends.
That there is some risk in the step — a change in surroundings that could or could not result in danger, is the point. Remember, it’s a vPOR. Doesn’t this also explain sheep following each other off a cliff?
The argument against this, from the perspective of agency, is that the sheep move to compete against one another for resources. In other words, the sheep went deep into thought, said it’s best for me to move over there where there’s more grass, but still stay with the flock for protection.
This sets up a social virus vs competition argument, but what if there is no argument because they are both the same?
Competition from viral replication
In 2016, a group of college students protested their least favorite politician by walking into traffic. One of them was hit by a car. How did that happen? If walking into traffic is risky, we can bet it may copy itself into others. It starts with one student, then two, and then four. In this case it was in the tens. Why not a million? Why not one?
The key is in the degree of risk. The more risk, the stronger the signal. Something like the height from which a fungal spore is released. There is a positive feedback loop between the amount of risk and the strength of signal. More risk, more replication. Stepping once into traffic is somewhat careless, stepping ten times is suicidal. So there’s a minimal amount of risk which causes replication, and a limiting bound of too much risk — will this virus kill more nodes than it replicates into?
Are we watching students compete for clout, or are we watching a vPOR replicating itself, evolving in real time to increase the risk and therefore increasing the rate of replication?
Let’s take this a step further. Imagine two chimpanzees both looking at an apple. They both reach for it, but one is faster and gets the prize. The classical explanation here is competition for resources. But given that time is limited, and there’s something at stake, do our chimpanzees have the time to compute a risk-benefit analysis?
Imagine what the loser saw. There’s an apple, and a fellow chimp. The other chimp begins to move quickly toward the apple — risk. The risk copies itself into the observing chimp, so he does the same. The other chimp bares his teeth, which is a sign of aggression and therefore risk, and so that copies itself as well. There is no need for anything resembling agency in this case. One chimp put in greater risk than another, or in other words, proof of risk social viruses copy themselves faster into him.
As far as how did these chimpanzees learn this specific behavior — imagine the younger chimps observing them fighting. Did the fight create a commotion, or in other words, did it send a strong signal? Did their vPOR copy itself into the rest of their tribe? Did the other members ‘learn’ that they should fight, or signal proof of risk, when they see food?
This is all fine and good. We have come upon a way of learning that is much more efficient than before, though we already know anecdotally kids copy the behavior of others and learn the consequences later. The more interesting question is: what if they bared their teeth at a different tribe. A smaller tribe. You would then have coercion.
Coercion from viral replication
A lot of thought has gone into the mystery of how our brains tripled in size very quickly. No one has brought up selective breeding, or in other words, the ones with the bigger brains killed everyone else. The question is why would they do that? The answer is: social viruses.
We have so far brought up how social viruses affect individual people, but since a virus can replicate into a group of people, let’s think about what that means. Let’s say there’s a vPOR called “Red shirts”. This virus is simple — its members wear red shirts, and they also say “We don’t like people who wear blue shirts”. This virus claims 5% of a population. If you are wearing a yellow shirt, you are safe, and that is a problem. There is no risk, so wearing a yellow shirt won’t go viral. Wearing a blue shirt however involves the possibility of danger, and therefore could start replicating.
Let’s say the “Blue shirt” virus springs up and begins to replicate until it reaches 5%. Who do you think will win? All else being equal, which ever virus has a faster ROR (rate of replication) will win. This happens quickly, and there is a positive feedback loop of producing the loudest proof of risk on both sides. Some members will in fact be compelled to sacrifice themselves. A virus is willing to shed members if there is a positive affect on ROR — if one members dies, but in doing so replicates the virus into 10 people, of course it is a good idea. Remember, the greater the risks observed, the higher ROR.
This is an extreme example. People tend not to get into wars over shirts, however fashion does seem to play a role in ‘identity’. Why do some people stick to wearing some things, and others completely different things? Why do people speak differently? Why do insignificant behaviors cluster with one another — for instance rap artists vs country singers. They not only sound differently, but they wear different clothes?
There’s two ways of being wrong: the first way is that someone has a superior solution to a problem, the other is you’re gonna get beat up if you don’t admit you’re wrong.
Viral coercion: the secret meaning behind word salad
Let’s state five easily observable truths:
- All behavior should map to some form of leverage
- There’s two forms of leverage: usefulness and coercion
- If the behavior is not useful, than it must be coercive
- If it’s coercive, there’s incentive to pretend otherwise since we may be too scared to admit it
- We often do things that are not useful to us or anyone else, and say that we don’t know why we do them
We previously mentioned that wearing a certain colored shirt meant that you were in a certain group of people and that others should be scared of you because of that. What if, instead of being explicitely coercive, the coercion was implied. What if we were talking about gold earrings — gold is expensive, and so your family must be connected. What about high healed shoes — to walk in those takes practice, you must be not be in a hurry. A certain style of hair, or a certain type of dress also have implications that could speak to relative social status.
So, where a man sees a ‘beautiful’ woman, the woman herself is signaling that you should do as she says because she’s a valued member of important tribes. The same can be said of word salad, or words strung together in a sentence that don’t actually have a useful purpose. Has anyone ever said a bunch of words passionately, and you know their meaning doesn’t matter?
Those same words can be used differently, where their useful meaning is at play, but at other times they are used as in casting a spell. We can give two groups of definitions for words — magical, which is their tribal affiliation, and useful, which is their actual practical meaning.
For example, in the early 2000s an advertisement from Volkswagen claimed ‘On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted.’ Looking at the useful definitions, what are they saying? Of course there are those things. If drivers are wanted, should I apply? Is this a job ad?
In the magical definition, there is a tribe of people who call themselves ‘drivers’ and a tribe of ‘passengers’. Supposedly there is a conflict between the two. This cannot be said out loud, because now we have entered the arena of coercion and we are a little scared, so we have to speak in implications. The implication is that the ‘drivers’ will win against the ‘passengers’, and driving a VW is one of the traits of the ‘drivers’ social virus. Wanting not to lose the upcoming war, you clearly should buy one of their cars to associate yourself with the winning virus.
VW is selling cars by creating an association between two behaviors— saying that you’re a ‘driver’ in life, and owning a VW. If viruses can associate with one another, can viruses ‘like’ other viruses? Or ‘dislike’ other viruses? If our heads are filled with a bunch of viruses that compete for our neural time, and our society is itself a platform where viruses evolve to wage ware for resources, is this really what motivates our decisions? When you decide to do something, is it because you ‘logically’ came to a conclusion that ‘made sense’, or did a coalition of viruses that occupy your neural space pull in another virus due to viral affinity?
No way, we are clearly rational and logical beings!
We talk about this in the part 2: Your mind as a coalition of social viruses, in the meantime please check out my other articles.
