Results and conclusion

This blog-post concludes the experiment

Tuesday 2/6 21:30:

Clothes for Monday. Twitter loves clothes and seems to consistently prefer skirts - more elegant than girly. Voting participation reaches an all time high. (about 60 people voted)

I feel relieved to not have to choose my clothes. By choosing clothes is also a manner of choosing which aspects of the personality to display, so it is not as trivial as one might think.

Twitter also decides to not send me out running for the fourth day in a row (8 against 4). Apparently there is a limit to how much you think I should be training. I was a bit worried there for a while.

On the 3 of June, I have an errand to a nearby city. I spontaneously decide to spend the early evening there browsing shops. There was not much point in asking twitter (I was already there). Interestingly I felt guilty. I have at this point internalized an expectation of democratic rule and done it to a duty.

Wednesday 3/6 20:20:

I ask twitter if I should go out to a bar in a nearby city and see a friend or stay at home. I have really no idea what I want. Twitter tells me to stay at home with 13 votes over 8, and I feel a huge relief over not having to decide. I also can blame twitter when I tell my disappointed friend. (Also a relief).

The side-effect of handing over a decision to some other entity is that you never have to doubt if you did the right choice. So many times is our joy of our current situation tainted with the suspicion that it could have been better if we had chosen otherwise. I have a good discussion with one of my followers about how we are ruining the here and now by second-guessing our preferences. In this experiment, regret is not possible anymore. The extent of the relief this absence of self-doubt brought me is surprisingly large.

My conclusion is that unless you can fully accept and embrace your choices, they will not be good, no matter how good your alternatives are. All kind of choices require a degree of submission, and conversely, submission is just the act of removal of doubt.

We also had an interesting question about if the choices build the individual or if choices are just a display of our personalities. For grown-ups I tend to lean towards the latter. The liberal I spoke with rather empathised that our choices continuously build who we are. From that perspective, the experiment that I am doing becomes much more controversial.

Wednesday 3/2 23:00:

A question associated to the use of a drug (a non-addictive, non-neurotoxic drug of which I am not a current user). This was by far the most problematic question during the whole week. Particularly people in law-occupations were very provoked by this question. I had to answer to if this was meant as a pure provocation. Well, the whole experiment is bound to provoke people in one way or another. Though I knew this would be an absolute no-go, I chose to ask anyway, because I was curious about participation and because I honestly considered it. There was a surprising support for the drug (9 votes, 20 votes against)

Thursday 4/2 14:00:

Twitter sends me back out actively dating with 9 votes for and 1 vote against. I remark on that it is very Swedish to combine this very permissive attitude to sex with a restrictive attitude to drugs. We also conclude that this permissiveness for promiscuity is strictly limited to situations out of a relationship and that the strong norms of the monogamous relationship over-rules all of the sexual freedom women otherwise may have.

The remainder of the experiment is not very interested. Twitter sends me out to meet someone in town wearing some skin-tight and violet dress (neither would have happened unless for Twitter), and Twitter told me to work rather than exercise excessively.

A final interesting conclusion of the experiment was how much the voting participants have revealed about themselves in the process. This has been a two way process. I have not done the analysis of individual voting-behaviour, and I will not, but the memories of who voted for what are hard to erase. What is easy to erase is the tweets from the votings this week and that is what I will be doing now.

This experiment has been incredibly productive. The experimental approach has exposed new angles on choice, democracy, power, privacy and submission I don’t think I would ever have seen otherwise.

My conclusion is that I would rather have other people chose between good alternatives than myself be responsible for making choices between bad alternatives. And I like my followers.