We shouldn’t turn our backs on social media, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, because social media is Lindy:
Lindy means that there are things that are robust in time, like some basins that are robust in time.
OK, the book is 500 years old under this form, and maybe several thousand years old under a different form. So Lindy means that they’re robust in time, and they come back. Until they disappear, they tend to come back.
Now, it so happens that at no point in history, except during the postwar period, did people receive news without being conveyors of news. That nuclear family, where people — pop, mom, 2.2 kids, one dog — are watching TV, receiving information and not transmitting.
The solitude of big city blocks — that was the idea. Well, it’s gone because traditionally, you get the news and you purvey the news. So you’re a recipient and a purveyor, with a little bit of alteration in the process.
There, we get back to the social media. I knew very quickly to learn to identify that there was a false alert yesterday in Saudi Arabia, as if there was a coup or something. You can figure out that there are some people you can trust, others you can’t trust. Those you can’t trust, you quickly identify them — those who cry wolf all the time.
Social media is bringing us back to a naturalistic environment because, say, in Athens, what was the newsroom?
The newsroom was the barbershop — you go in, you give information, and you take information. Or a fish market — you go in, you get fish, you get information and give information. And funerals, where you go in and chat, fake like you’re crying, and then you’re getting all the gossip.
We’re gossip machines. Social media is great in that respect. I love it.