A different kind of Movember, and nobody voted on it

TL;DR

The themes in this one:

• A collective taste changed and nobody decided it. No vote, no memo, and yet thousands of people moved at once.
• You cannot see a flock turning from inside it. Hold still, and you watch everyone else turn.
• The world you walk around in is not the world. It is your perception of it, and what you walk through keeps adjusting the perception.

It is the first of November, so the moustaches are going up. Movember. Grow one for the month, raise some money for men's health, look faintly ridiculous doing it.

That was always the deal. The moustache was funny because everyone had agreed it was funny, and the reward was shaving it off on the first of December.

This year the joke has gone soft. It is worth asking who decided that.

What turned up in September

Early September, the moustaches started appearing out of season.

TV presenters first. Men talking about their moustache the way you would talk about a jacket. Not a bit. Not a stunt. A thing chosen, and rather enjoyed.

Then more of them. Then people in the street. Worn to look suave and, often enough, succeeding.

There are a lot of them now. Far more than anyone would guess if you stopped them and asked.

Nobody voted

No memo went out. No committee moved the moustache from joke to style. Nobody can name the week it happened.

And yet thousands of strangers arrived at roughly the same new opinion at roughly the same time.

That is the interesting thing here, and it is not the moustache.

You cannot see it from inside

Watch a flock of starlings turn. Thousands of birds, no leader, the whole shape folding over on itself as though it had one mind.

It has no mind. Each bird watches the six or seven nearest to it and copies them. That is the whole rule. The shape you see from the ground is a few thousand small local copyings adding up.

Here is the part worth sitting with. From inside the flock, nothing is happening. You are doing what the birds beside you are doing, which feels like no decision at all. The turn is invisible to everyone taking part in it.

It is only visible to whoever held still.

Which is the only reason any of this got noticed. Moustaches still look funny to me. That is not a verdict on moustaches. It is an accident of position, and it bought a view of something I would otherwise have been standing inside.

Something counted them anyway

Nobody studies faces. You walk past thousands and pay real attention to almost none. That is acres and acres of data, far more than a person can hold or count or recall, going in sideways while they think about something else.

Something keeps the tally regardless.

Then it reports. Not as a number. Not as an argument. As a feeling, fully formed. This is a thing now. Lots of them. On purpose.

Which is a fair description of what a machine ought to be good for. The counting happens either way. What is missing is the working.

The uncomfortable bit

What anyone walks around in is not the world. It is their perception of the world, and what they walk through keeps quietly adjusting the perception. No notice is given. No changelog arrives.

From the inside, a taste that shifted in September and a taste that never moved feel exactly the same. Both arrive as the obvious.

So the most honest thing to say about anything that strikes you as self evident is that it looks self evident from in here.

So, the moustache

Still a no. It is clearly working for a lot of men and they should carry on.

I am still in charge of decisions regarding my own facial hair. Long may that continue.

Though if you are putting one on this month, you may find it is not the joke it used to be.