I love the blog post “Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr”

99% Tumbler is a web site with a zillion pictures of people holding up their signs that say things, and in many but not all cases the thing the sign says is also presented as text on the site. So, Mike Konczal of Rortybomb parsed out the text and came up with some very cool stuff.

For one thing, he found a classic example, rarely seen in the wild, of an unambiguous bimodal distribution of sociological data. The age distribution of the sample as two moes, one about 17 – 21 and the other about 25-29. There is a long tail that is almost uniform.

Mike did an analysis of the text to see what words are most common, and then extends this analysis to a more thoughtful and nuanced study of what people really want, and came up with a startling and important conclusion.

The … ideology of modernity … is absent. … no demands for cheap gas, cheaper credit, giant houses, bigger electronics all under the cynical ”Ownership Society” banner. The demands are broadly health care, education and not to feel exploited at the high-level, and the desire to not live month-to-month on bills, food and rent and under less of the burden of debt at the practical level.

…Anthropologist David Graeber cites historian Moses Finley, who identified “the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land, the slogan of a peasantry, not of a working class.” … The overwhelming majority of these statements are actionable demands in the form of (i) free us from the bondage of these debts and (ii) give us a bare minimum to survive on in order to lead decent lives (or, in pre-Industrial terms, give us some land). In Finley’s terms, these are the demands of a peasantry, not a working class.

Biblical, as Mike points out.

Anyway, go read the post!!!

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