Monday, January 8, 2018

The Barbara Streisand Effect

I thought I had detailed this, but I looked back and see I only had one off hand comment. Before getting rightfully targeted for misusing it I'm pointing out this doesn't apply yet. I can easily see how it could apply, which I'll get to.


What it is:
The direct attempt at suppression of information leads to unwanted interest in that information, the result of which is more attention than would have been paid in the first place.


History:
Barbara, being a rich and famous person, did a lot of rich and famous person stuff in her life, including buying fancy houses that the cost rivals the debt of entire cities. (Smaller ones, yeah, but still). One such property was a nice beach home in Malibu, California which nobody would know about know, but mentioned all over the internet. Which is entirely the point. The California Coastal Records Project took aerial photos of (almost)the entire coastline, including Barbara's multimillion dollar home. For reasons I don't know, she objected and asked that her home to not be included in the records. The resulting publicity made otherwise uninterested people wonder what all the fuss was about. Including making it popular enough that if you start to type "Streisand E" into Google you immediately get an autocomplete suggestion for the Streisand Effect.


The concept existed long before Barbara's not well thought idea to have her home's airspace be considered sacred. In its purest form the Effect applies to internet attention. My parents had to deal with me watching every single horror movie I could sneak in because they didn't want me watching them. Mom and Dad don't want me seeing them, hey they must be cool. Eventually they gave up long before I was "old enough to know better" hoping that once the fruit was no longer forbidden I'd lose interest. That didn't work. And although I haven't turned into a serial killer (yet) I might be a bad example since I'm obviously not the most stable isotope on the periodic table. Just ask Wollongong what they think.


One immediate application to the gematria world is one of the reasons not to argue with them directly, and more so that I wish YouTube would find a better solution than deleting videos. To them channel deletion equals censorship instead of simply what it is, violation of the stated community guidelines agreed to when signing up. You sign a rental lease, you don't pay rent, you get evicted. Your landlord has a lease that bans pit bulls, like me you may adore your pit bull, but if you sneak it in to the apartment - right or wrong about the nature of pit bulls bring inherently vicious- he's got that magic piece of paper that says you are wrong. It has your signature on it.


Every video that gets deleted make these gematria narrators double down and make more videos. Even though I've seen a screen shot of the termination message that says something like* "You're not allowed to create new accounts" they obviously don't take it seriously. New channels are being created after a couple of strikes in anticipation of the old channel being deleted, even before official notification that you can't upload to the old channel any more. Now we have to still put up with their horror movies including the inevitable "Google is out to get me, I'm being repressed!" video.


Google has to put up with this system because the majority of users prefer to put up things like their cats doing funny stuff or tips on how to make a better lemon meringue pie. So the rest of the world has to put up with a constant assault of two and three digit numbers that mean nothing.


The other application is people like me. My own defiance makes me double down. It took me about two weeks to figure out some specifics about what was wrong which are detailed thoroughly here. I trust that since I'm still doing daily updates a year later that I've proven I'm not ready to go away yet.


So now let's see if Hubbard's book has any plans to address the countless things that are bound to be wrong in it. Compared to pointing out the fallacy of painting the target after you've emptied your gun versus "33!" most people will be on my side.


*Here the HLN news mentioned Barbara in Yentl. By the time I was done Twilight Zone with the Rance McGrew character was described as a "phoney baloney" is on. Shappens.







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