Commonplace book: Bees and Social Media

A few things to consider in tandem with one another — placed here in juxtaposition because I think that such bricolage indicates something important. And there’s a beautiful prayer to Artemis at the end from Diotimus.

From Jennifer Larson’s Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore, p. 86:

The folklore and mythology of the bee is extensive, and this insect is regularly associated with the civilizing virtues of order, cleanliness, and continence. The antiquarian Mnaseas’ account of certain bee nymphs gives a good picture of their function in this respect. He says that in the Peloponnese, melissai (nymphs) stopped men from eating human flesh and convinced them to eat instead the fruit of trees. At the same time, a certain one of these, named Melissa, first found a honeycomb, tasted it, then mixed it with water as a beverage. She taught others to do this, and thus the creature was named for her, and she was made its guardian. The scholiast quoting Mnaseas (FHG fr. 5) adds:

“Without nymphs there is no honoring of Demeter, for they first showed men the use of produce (karpos), how to avoid cannibalism (allelophagia), and how to contrive coverings for themselves from the woods for the sake of modesty. Nor is any marriage celebrated without them, but we honor them first as a recognition, because they were the originators (archêgoi) of piety (eusebeia) and observance of divine law (hosiotês).”

From Thoreau, page 229 of this book:

The tree resounds with the hum of bees, bumblebees and honey-bees ; rose-bugs and butterflies, also, are here, a perfect susurrus, a sound, as C. says, unlike any other in nature, — not like the wind, as that is like the sea. The bees abound on the flowers of the smooth sumach now. The branches of this tree touch the ground, and it has somewhat the appearance of being weighed down with flowers. The air is full of sweetness. The tree is full of poetry.

From Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, somewhere in Chapter 6 of the ebook:

This is one reason that BUMMER naturally promotes tribalism and is tearing society apart, even if the techies in a BUMMER company are well-meaning. In order for BUMMER code to self-optimize, it naturally and automatically seizes upon any latent tribalism and racism, for these are the neural hashtags waiting out there in everyone’s psyche, which can be accentuated for the purpose of attention monopoly. (I’ll address this problem in more detail in the argument about how social media makes social improvement hopeless.)

Not only is your worldview distorted, but you have less awareness of other people’s worldviews. You are banished from the experiences of the other groups being manipulated separately. Their experiences are as opaque to you as the algorithms that are driving your experiences.

This is an epochal development. The version of the world you are seeing is invisible to the people who misunderstand you, and vice versa.

[…]

Sure, you can monitor at least some of the typical content that other people are probably seeing. I keep up with conservative news sites, for instance. I always seek out personal contact with people who disagree with me if they’re willing to give it a go. There’s even a nice community on Reddit devoted to this quest, but it’s drowned out by an ocean of chaotic poison.

The degree of difference between what is shown to someone else and what I can guess is being shown is itself unknowable. The opacity of our times is even worse than it might be because the degree of opacity is itself opaque. I remember when the internet was supposed to bring about a transparent society. The reverse has happened.

From Dance of the Honey Bee, a multimedia piece in Emergence Magazine:

The honey bee colony operates as a female-run society, descended from one fertile queen and sustained and managed by her thousands of daughters, the workers—all oriented to the well-being of the nest. With the characteristics of a superorganism, this multi-generational family is engaged in a complex, ongoing conversation, comprised of movements, chemical signals, and scents through which each daughter adjusts and coordinates her actions according to the well-being of the queen and the changing needs of the colony.

And on the much-neglected solitary bees that are overshadowed by their complexly-social cousins:

While the world worries about honeybees, originally imported from Europe, baseline data on bee species native to the U.S. are in shorter supply, though they may hold the key to understanding pollinator health. Nearly all reproduction of wild plants is aided by nonhoneybees. Wild, native bees also pollinate domestic crops. But unlike tamed honeybees, scientists can’t keep them alive for study in a box in a lab. Their diminutive size, loner habits, and brief life spans have helped the land keep their secrets, and research on wild pollinators has been slow to progress.

From Madina Tussupov, “Bees Are Not Declining Everywhere: A Global Perspective on Population Trends,” Earth.Org:

For years, media headlines have depicted a dire situation regarding global bee populations. While it is true that honey bee numbers in certain areas, especially in North America and Europe, have plummeted due to habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change, recent data reveals a more nuanced picture. In fact, bee populations in some Asian countries have been steadily increasing. This contrasting trend prompts important questions: why are bees flourishing in some regions while facing challenges in others?

Tristan Harris, “Opinion: Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology,” New York Times, late 2019:

Let’s imagine that we managed to solve the privacy issue. In this new utopia, we would own all our data, and tech giants would be forbidden from tracking our online whereabouts; they would have access only to the data we agreed to share.

While we might see fewer creepy ads and feel less paranoid about surveillance, the troubling trends connected to the online world would remain unaddressed.

Our addiction to social validation and bursts of “likes” would continue to destroy our attention spans. Our brains would still be drawn to outrage and angry tweets, replacing democratic debate with childlike he-said, she-said. Teenagers would remain vulnerable to online social pressure and cyberbullying, harming their mental health.

Content algorithms would continue to drive us down rabbit holes toward extremism and conspiracy theories, since automating recommendations is cheaper than paying human editors to decide what’s worth our time. And radical content, incubated in insular online communities, would continue to inspire mass shootings.

Perhaps the collapse of the bees in North America is a mirror image of our own hives’ dysfunction.

Diotimus, “Prayer to Artemis,” Greek Anthology 6:267, reprinted by the Poetry Foundation:

Goddess of culverts and lighthouses, goddess

                     of burrows and coves and safety in narrow escapes,

stand where you stand and shine

                     like kindness on our children.

From you they learn right and wrong, and how to wear capes

                     for hunting or self-concealment, how to find

a turtle’s egg-cache, or a rabbit warren,

                     how to distinguish a dangerous

impulse from a lovely whim,

                     when to keep a flower or a friend,

and where it’s safe to swim.

                     It’s hard work, I know, to shine all the time,

but it’s never pointless.

                     Sometimes it’s divine.