
The ‘Loser Edit’ That Awaits Us All - benbreen
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/magazine/the-loser-edit-that-awaits-us-all.html
======
supercoder
Starting to suspect my loser edit is just hundreds of time-lapsed hours
reading HN.

------
fsk
If you tape someone for 24 hours and broadcast their 5 worst minutes, you can
make anyone look like a loser.

Those shows also have "loser sound cues", when you can tell that the person is
not doing well.

~~~
ubernostrum
Cardinal Richelieu is alleged to have said:

 _If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I
will find something in them which will hang him._

~~~
hnnewguy
> _If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I
> will find something in them which will hang him._

This is what scares me about the permanence of internet commentary, and why I
laugh when people say, "use your real name!"

After 10, 20, 30 years of commenting around the internet, it's likely you can
paint any picture of me you'd like.

------
chime
> Taken from the surveillance camera of the gas station where you bought a
> lottery ticket like a chump.

Of all the things, this is the least I'm worried about in the long term.
Storing video is expensive and rarely makes sense for businesses beyond 30
days. I setup a 64 camera network for a client and 20TB of space stores about
15 days of footage. Sure, disk space is cheap but at over 1TB/day, 500TB/year
would cost about $15k in just HDD and triple that if you want redundancy with
proper maintenance. I'd find it hard to justify the ROI on everlasting storage
unless the store's selling diamonds.

Even for a small mom and pop store with just 6-8 cams, it can be $2k/year just
in cost of storage. Pretty sure they would rather spend that on inventory,
marketing, or staffing.

~~~
mason240
Making cops wear body cameras is the big fad issue right now, but it's kind of
weird how no one is pointing out the public access to all police cam footage
means _ever interaction you have with the police will available to the public
forever._

~~~
maxerickson
I regularly advocate for giving them discretion as to when the camera is on.
Of course the rest of the process should be designed so that they want to turn
them on in charged situations, but there's lots of situations where taking the
choice away from them is going to be harmful.

------
mathattack
My 2 cents...

There are many people running the US (Congress + Presidents + Supreme Court)
who:

\- Failed out of school

\- Got fired

\- Lost elections

\- Had IRS problems

\- Couldn't pay the rent

\- Got cheated on

\- Cheated on their spouse

\- Had drug/weight/gambling/booze/sex/spending problems

What's the significant common denominator? They didn't dwell on a few minutes
of failure.

~~~
pjc50
It's not up to you whether you get to dwell on failure if someone else has a
record of it and decides to use it against you or monetise it to the tabloid
press. We're already seeing the phenomenon that when someone goes over a
threshold of public visibility, their entire social media presence is scanned
for objectionable comments.

[http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/03/phone-
hacking...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/03/phone-hacking-
widespread-mirror-titles-court-told)

~~~
sthreet
It seems weird that people (or maybe media) act like they want honesty, but if
someone were to say "I messed up that time" that seems like a pretty big
headline.

"<horrible person> admits to <mistake>"

~~~
pjc50
I'm annoyed that even _changing your mind in response to criticism or
evidence_ is loudly condemned as a "U-Turn". There's great pressure to pick a
position early on and then stick to it, no matter how indefensible it is.

The media aren't interested in honesty and wouldn't recognise it if they
tripped over it in the street. They're interested in feeding the scandal
machine. If there isn't any scandal, make one.

------
kazinator
This is just another name for "hindsight is 20/20", which is a facet of
"confirmation bias". If you look back at the tape, you can pick out whatever
shred of evidence that supports the already known conclusion, and ignore
anything to the contrary. Confirmation bias is more general; it's not just
about hindsight, but about seeing false associations anywhere due to cherry-
picked observations.

------
ChikkaChiChi
Popular culture thrives on gleefully parading around the failures of others in
a vicious 'They are just like us!' cycle that gives celebrity to people purely
because we find them unbearable. We're all guilty of letting it in at some
point; right from the first moment you laugh at watching a man get hit in the
balls with a football.

Saying 'I don't pay attention to that' is simply not enough. Your lack of
participation does nothing to solve the problem and like it or not, culture is
not going away.

Engage and promote entertainment you find valuable. Engage and promote
advertisers that fund things you believe in. Engage and contact advertisers
that fund things you believe are detrimental to society.

And if you have something to say that you feel is important but is not
supported by anything in popular culture, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE find a way to
generate content so that the rest of us that want to back you can engage and
promote your voice!

------
habitue
I think the appropriate term for this article is "overwrought"

~~~
mirimir
I'd say "ironic". The author writes as a loser would.

------
tinkerdol
Well that was strangely pessimistic...

>The winner edit, even in its artifice, is a gesture toward optimism, the
expectation of rewards waiting for that better self. Whenever he or she shows
up.

Shows up? I'm right here.

[http://www.ihighfive.com/](http://www.ihighfive.com/)

------
cheriot
I've never seen an email from them that I was glad I read. I appreciate
they're facing a hard problem, but they really need to find a way to filter
out low quality content or improve notification targeting.

------
detcader
I think the writer's points are clear enough that he shouldn't have to refer
to the group of Bill Cosby's victims as an "army of accusers" to get through
to the readers. Maybe I am wrong and this is a necessary step to demonstrating
the overall thesis?

~~~
ryanobjc
You're nitpicking a rhetorical effect and it makes no major difference on the
article as a whole.

~~~
detcader
The implicit objection in my comment is similar to other HN user's objections
that start discussions every day, assuming my objection has merit. Your
comment makes no difference to my comment.

------
kelukelugames
Isn't that just called rationalizing?

------
dredmorbius
A few comments from the perspective of having worked in and around tech for
over a quarter century, much of it involving data acquisition and analysis
(largely industry, not government).

First: the "loser edit" isn't just about video, it's about _any_ narrative --
text, images, audio, video -- and how it can be construed. There's a reason
I've enshrined the infamous words of Cardinal Richelieu, Armand Jean du
Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac, on my G+ Profile: "If one
would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would
find something in them to have him hanged."

For an example I rather admire, see this:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/15o08h/redditors...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/15o08h/redditors_who_had_an_incestuous_relationship_how/c7obfwy)

Second: Sensors and storage are proliferating like mad. If earlier ages were
largely notable for how much _wasn 't_ noted (as in: recorded in any fashion),
the present age will be notable for how much that _is_ noted is never
accessed. How many hours of YouTube video are uploaded every minute?[1] Which
means there's a tremendous trove available for mining.

Third: Search of non-textual data is becoming vastly more effective. Being
able to first utilize metadata to restrict your search space helps, but as
Google is demonstrating, the ability to _describe_ video and search for it is
pretty scary.

All of which means that the ability to collect, edit, and distribute a
narrative which trashes any given individual, with their own writings, images,
spoken word, and video, is tremendously high. We've been seeing that in the
area of political discourse as a growing factor over the past decade or two:
Declan McCullaghs false story of Al Gore's role in developing the Internet
(Gore _did_ play a significant role in establishing legislative support[2]),
the Dean Scream ("In a nutshell, you are not seeing that Dean's speech fit the
tone of the room."[3]), or in the past few weeks, John Travolta's "awkward"
kiss[4] -- a single instant gives a much different view than the context in
which it occurred.

Which is a point that media commentators have been making for a long time:
that information _devoid of context_ isn't meaningful. See Neal Postman's
_Amusing Ourselves to Death_ [5]. Written in 1985, it includes a _very_
Twitter-ish sounding description of randomly-arriving extremely short
decontextualized texts -- the telegraph wire. There's a story behind the term
"telegraphic".

And there's a fifth point as well: with a putatively comprehensive record,
it's quite possible to either bluff or fabricate stories, with increased
credibility. While that's a timeless tactic itself -- I believe it was during
the _second_ Presidential campaign in the United States, supporters of John
Adams spread the rumor that Jefferson had died (or vice versa) -- it was a
profoundly dirty campaign.[6] But with an archive, it's possible to claim, or
fabricate, or construe a story that is very, very, very difficult to refute or
combat.

And that's going to be a growing problem going forward.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. It's 300 hours per minute:
[http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html](http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html)

2\. "[F]ormer Vice-President Al Gore never claimed that he "invented" the
Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that
way."
[http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp](http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp)

3\. "Dean's Scream: Not What It Seemed" [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/deans-
scream-not-what-it-seemed/](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/deans-scream-not-what-
it-seemed/)

4\. [http://fixyt.com/watch?v=bY9YMGM-hm](http://fixyt.com/watch?v=bY9YMGM-hm)

5\.
[http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780143036531-1](http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780143036531-1)

6\.
[http://www.lehrmaninstitute.org/history/1800.html](http://www.lehrmaninstitute.org/history/1800.html)

