On Availability Cascades

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” -- H.L. Mencken

The most important idea and paper I’ve encountered in the last 20 years is “availability cascades”. The paper is here: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=public_law_and_legal_theory ; the authors are Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein.

What’s an “availability cascade”? It’s a combination of:

• “Availability” — short for “availability heuristic or availability bias, a pervasive mental shortcut whereby the perceived likelihood of any given event is tied to the ease with which its occurrence can be brought to mind”.

• “Cascade” — short for “social cascades through which expressed perceptions trigger chains of individual responses that make these perceptions appear increasingly plausible through their rising availability in public discourse”.

An availability cascade is what happens when a social cascade rips through a population based on a more or less arbitrary topic — whatever topic happens to be in front of people when the cascade starts.

This immediately answers three nagging questions that a lot of people experience in daily life — “why are people worked up about THIS topic?”, and “why are SO MANY people worked up?”, combining into “why are SO MANY people worked up about THIS topic?”

Why THIS topic? The topic happened to be (literally) available; it happened to be in front of people at the start of a cascade. (Why not some other idea? Who knows? It wasn’t in front of people — available — at that moment.)

Why SO MANY people? It’s a cascade; people copy each other; they want to sound smart and with it and don’t want to feel left behind. “Have you heard?” “Haven’t you heard?”

Why are SO MANY people worked up about THIS topic? It’s an availability cascade; they’re in it, and so are you.

Now, this is not to say the topic of the cascade ISN’T IMPORTANT — just that whether it’s important is secondary to whether it was AVAILABLE. Many important topics never trigger cascades; many unimportant topics do trigger cascades. Crucially, you cannot judge the importance of a topic by the presence, or size, or absence, of a cascade. The topic’s main function is as a Schelling point for generating and holding social cohesion; actual importance is secondary or even completely unnecessary.

Kuran and Sunstein then define the other critical component of the idea of availability cascades: “availability entrepreneurs”.

Availability entrepreneurs are “social agents who understand the dynamics of availability cascades and seek to exploit their insights. Located anywhere in the social system, including the government, the media, nonprofit organizations, the business sector, and even households, these entrepreneurs attempt to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their own agendas. They do so by fixing people's attention on specific problems, interpreting phenomena in particular ways, and attempting to raise the salience of certain information.”

Availability entrepreneurs try to make their preferred topic AVAILABLE by highlighting it in a way likely to start a cascade, and then WIDESPREAD by fanning the flames of the cascade however they can once it starts to go.

As with any other area of entrepreneurship, the competition is stiff; most availability entrepreneurs fail to get their topic to trigger a cascade. But some do, and sometimes they really lucky and the resulting cascade really runs. Then you get a fad, a trend, a movement, a boom, a landslide election, or a revolution.

By now a number of conclusions are probably clicking for you:

• What is the purpose of the news media? To propose and propagate availability cascades. Availability entrepreneurs compete to get the news media to focus on their particular topics, in hopes that a cascade forms, which the media will then help propagate via followup coverage — of the topic itself, and of the cascade.[*]

• What is the purpose of a politician? To propose and propagate availability cascades that resonate with voters with enough volume and ferocity to motivate votes. You see this most clearly in primaries and early in general election cycles when politicians and their surrogates rapidly riff through many possible issues and messages in search of the few that really resonate — the few that catch fire as availability cascades. Are those issues the most important? Who cares?

• What is the purpose of activists, experts, professors, nonprofits, and various other kinds of pressure groups? To propose and propagate availability cascades, to put their unique topics front and center in the public consciousness, in hopes of triggering availability bias and sparking availability cascades — and the resulting money and prestige and influence and power.

• What is the purpose of social media? To propose and propagate availability cascades, both top-down and peer-to-peer. This is what happens when something goes “viral”; an availability cascade has formed and is running. Every original post or tweet is hoping to trigger the availability heuristic and generate a cascade; every favorite, like, reply, and retweet speads a cascade.

• What is the purpose of a startup founder? A startup founder is an availability entrepreneur too! The purpose of a startup founder is to trigger an availability cascade around the company and its product — to put the product front and center in the popular consciousness in hopes that the availability heuristic is triggered and a cascade runs. Being “bad at marketing” means bad at doing this. Being “good at marketing” means good at doing this.

• What is the purpose of an individual person? To be the target of an unending onslaught of availability cascades; to be the vessel for the hopes and dreams and anxieties and fears of many thousands of availability entrepreneurs on any given day; to not ask too many inconvenient questions about whether any of the underlying topics are actually IMPORTANT.

• What am I doing with this blog post? Trying to spark an availability cascade about availability cascades.

Are availability cascades new with the Internet and social media? Certainly not. History is replete with cascades ranging from Communism and Naziism to individualism and democracy. Availability entrepreneurs have been trying to hijack human minds in volume — for better and for worse — since primitive man started gathering around campfires. In fact, without availability cascades, we would not even have societies or cultures; availability cascades are how societal and cultural ideas form and spread.

Have availability cascades proliferated and accelerated and intensified with the Internet and social media? I think the answer has to be yes. In particular, social media has torn down the remaining barriers between local and global cascades; now we are all exposed to availability cascades for topics and events originating literally anywhere in the world. And of course the resulting cascades can now spread purely laterally, without gatekeeper approval. And can spread fully worldwide. Five billion people hurling availability cascades at each other 24/7 — what a time.

Does this new liquid peer-to-peer online availability cascade environment explain “the Great Weirding” that so many people feel, including me? I would say yes.

Is this all going to intensify further in the years ahead? Most definitely. Strap in. This is the most normal and placid things are ever going to be, the most innocent and naive we are ever going to be. Things are only going to get stranger from here, as availability cascades whip through the experience of our lives with ever greater velocity and force.

There’s a lot more to come just on this topic; stay tuned.

[*] A cynic — not me, of course — would say that the news media itself consists of availability entrepreneurs. The implications are left as an exercise for the reader.