The process is increasingly divorced from real-world events. Amessage is fine-tuned and tested. Feedback signals are fed intostatistics engines. Just as big data in business can function with lowerstandards of veracity than big data in science, so can big data inpolitics.

Perhaps we should expect to see more elections that are eitherextremely close or extremely lopsided from here on out. If opposingSiren Servers are well run, they might achieve parity, while if one isbetter than the other, its advantage ought to be dramatic. It’s too earlyto say, since big data and politics haven’t mixed long enough togenerate much data as yet. It’s like climate change was for a long time—not enough data yet to really say—though it does look like we’reseeing this pattern.

In our digital revolution, we might depose an old sort ofdysfunctional center of power only to erect a new one that is equallydysfunctional. The reason is that online opposition to traditional powertends to promote new Siren Servers that in the long run are unlikely tobe any better.

While we have yet to see how Google’s book scanning will play out, amachine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill,decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers. Inthis approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and theauthors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost. Needless to say,this approach would hide its tracks so that it would be hard to send a nanopayment to an author who hadbeen aggregated.

But the problem with freestanding concentrations of power is that you never know who will inherit them. Ifsocial networking has the power to synchronize great crowds to dethrone a pharaoh, why might it not alsocoordinate lynchings or pogroms?

Siren Servers are not interchangeable. While they allshare certain traits (narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, andextreme information asymmetry), they also represent particular, morespecialized philosophies

Individual Siren Servers can die and yet the Siren Server patternperseveres, and it is that pattern that is the real problem. Thesystematic decoupling of risk from reward in the rising informationeconomy is the problem, not any particular server.

At least oldmedia, even in its decline and with all its problems, still offers a careerpath.

You are to be the neutral facilitator

Make Others Pay for Entropy

if you want to build a world-class, persistent Siren Server. In addition, you have to inject some sortof punishing network effect.

network effects tend to create a single Sirenic presence,a monopoly for that particular kind of data or pattern of use.

Whenever there is a networked race to the bottom, there is a SirenServer that connects people and owns the master database aboutwho they are. If they knew each other, comprehensively, they mightorganize a union or some other form of levee.

This is a key sign of a Siren Server. The lowly non-Sirens are asresponsible as possible, while the Siren Server presides from an arm’slength.

It’s not always necessary that the data be made absolutelyunavailable; sometimes data can just be decontextualized enough tobecome less valuable. Facebook provides a fine example. If a greatdeal of personal creativity and life experience has been added to thesite, it’s hard to give all that up. Even if you capture every little thingyou had uploaded, you can’t save it in the context of interactions withother people. You have to lose a part of yourself to leave Facebookonce you become an avid user. If you leave, it will become difficult forsome people to contact you at all.