I was loitering outside of a particularly well-appointed Starbucks tonight, waiting for my wife to use their bathroom, and observing the random assortment of people sitting at the tables in the outside courtyard. I was positioned on the edge of a stone parquet beside an elderly homeless woman who appeared to be sleeping, slumped in her chair. It was around nine o’clock in the evening, on a Friday night, and there were an assortment of mostly middle-aged people milling about in slow motion, reading at the tables, chatting quietly and sipping coffee.

Across from me was a fellow who appeared to be my age, well-kept if slightly overweight in the sedentary fashion, with an appropriately well-trimmed beard. He was reading the New York Times – just finishing a section, actually, which he was carefully folding and placing beside his small round tabletop. The next section lay crisply on the table in front of him. It looked like it might have been the arts section, or maybe metro. The cover page contained only a large picture of someone I recognized; annoyingly, i can’t for the life of me remember who. This guy looked smart enough and probably is, but I knew he wasn’t.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the renegade critical economist who predicted the recent stock market crash, writes in Fooled by Randomness, his book about the idiocy of orthodox economic theory, you have to be stupid to read the newspaper. Stupid. Of course, this is not to say that reading newspapers and magazines can’t be enjoyable, lots of stupid things are enjoyable. I hear, for example, that huffing glue lends a very pleasant buzz to otherwise dull mornings. The reason given by Taleb is simple: everyone reads the newspaper, therefore any ‘news’ that you might gather from it will be obsolete by the time it finds you. The relevance of this shows up starkly in the context of finance: when financial ‘news’ organizations publish ‘hot tips’ on stocks, a savvy investor will only take interest if he already happens to own shares in those companies. Otherwise the information will be, of necessity, useless.

Taleb however, extends his argument effortlessly to cover the gamut of the so-called popular media. To paraphrase his thinking: high risk investments pay off disproportionately in comparison to low-risk investments. The latter draw the majority of investment capital because of their reliability in the short term. The former, though exceedingly risky in the short term, occasionally yield at orders of magnitude in the long term. These kinds of risks, Taleb emphasizes, are worth taking. On the other hand, the ‘blue-chip’ -type, low-risk investments – those that pay little, but with good short-term reliability – are the kind of risks that for Taleb are emphatically NOT worth taking. The reason for this became the title of Taleb’s second book, published just before the mortgage market really started to tank in early 2008. It’s called The Black Swan. A black swan is a highly unlikely event; one that is unpredictable from preexisting models of the system it impacts, and whose impact changes the structure of the system unpredictably and irrevocably.

Much of this book amounts to Taleb making the profound and persuasive case that all the major historical events that have shaped the world as we know it were black swans for the world that preexisted their occurrence. This is obviously a pretty major claim, and here I am without a citation. Fuck it: read the books. Taleb’s argument gets even more spooky when you follow his assertion that once black swans occur, they become precisely those conditions of which it is most difficult to imagine the world in the absence. In other words, not only can we not imagine them before they occur, we can’t see them after they occur either! They become part of the architecture, part of the unquestionable firmament; the defining characteristic of a black swan after it has occurred is that it is taken for granted. Retrospectively, they take on the appearance of things that could not have happened otherwise.

So what the fuck does this have to do with the popular media? Easy. The third major characteristic that Taleb clarifies with regard to the black swan is that its disproportionate impact on events is accompanied by its disproportionate absence from the ‘popular media.‘ What does this mean? It means that the black swan is precisely that event in which these initial characteristics of huge impact and tiny prior knowledge are combined; the effect of the black swan is definitively augmented by the lack of familiarity that precedes its invention. The popular media is precisely that spectrum of omni-communicable information into which no inkling of black swans, no matter how relevant or immanent, can penetrate. For Taleb, infuriatingly, this is all just a simple consequence of the incomprehensibly chaotic nature of the environs that we inhabit. If we get our information from ‘the news’, we will certainly not receive any information about impending black swan events. Taleb offers a number of convincing historical examples of this, including both World Wars, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, et cetera, and et cetera (fuck you, Wharton), up to the most recent stock market crash, explicitly predicted in the pages of The Black Swan.

-Blake Victor Seidenshaw