Is the Internet Dying?

Posts and videos like this one are quite common now.

https://youtu.be/3dstGVhEshU?si=ftytETA4smpZ55sh

Beneath it this morning, I wrote,

Data is currency, and only the rich have vaults. The more data you have, the better you can target the user, predict and manipulate their behaviour. But you can't collect data at scale without already being big; so indie creators, small platforms or emergent voices can't compete. Impressions are rationed, not distributed by value but on metrics that favour those already embedded into the system. Brand recognition, click-through history, budget... these things assure that if you're not able to pay for more, or optimised for visibility, you're preset to be ignored, discarded and not allowed at the table.

This inevitably leads to content that is designed to appeal to the lowest, least-offensive common denominator, driven by an algorithm that culls out everything except precisely this. Still, this doesn't describe the "internet"... but the tools that have been built so far that use the internet to drive unimaginative people into cattle runs precisely as they'll allow. The "internet," however, isn't to blame. The dullness of the average person, who still possesses a disposable income, is simply being given precedence over those capable of seeing what's happening. This comment will be ignored, and not receive likes, because it's NOT familiar, simple, emotionally easy or outrage-inducing. It's too complex, and therefore has no value on the internet that has been built, that allows a comment like this but won't sustain or support it.

I'd like to unpack that, because I have a platform here, on a blog that suffers from the precise same issue.

This shouldn't come as news to anyone who isn't self-aware, but since the messaging is never, "Are the familiar platforms on the internet dying?"... because this isn't the click-baity title I stole for this post... it's worth taking a moment and clarifying the following:

The internet is a decentralized communication protocol — a neutral infrastructure designed to connect devices, people, and ideas across distance, without requiring permission from any central authority. It is, at its root, a system of open standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS and others. These allow anyone, anywhere, to publish, to share, to access, and to build.

Yet although the internet was designed to be open, those companies that control the physical infrastructure, its discovery mechanisms, and its distribution platforms are free to decide what can be seen: not based on public or personal need, but on profitability.  Those gatekeepers throttle traffic, they impose data caps, they charge premiums for speed, they create artificial scarcity and they control what platforms can be found through shortcuts not related to actually typing out a site's url.

As I say, for anyone paying attention, this is dead obvious. Yet a video like the one above says nothing about this. The framing of the above video, and others like it, is the usual: the internet as a decaying cultural and technological entity, collapsing due to algorithmic cycling. The conspiratorial tone makes good content, while platform "artificiality" is suitably disturbing for the masses. For those who perceive the present culture as their "identity" — divorced, obviously from the culture of their immediate experience — this collapse is deeply unsettling. What will they do when they get up in the morning and the "internet" as they know it is gone?

I hope they remember how to continue eating food and using the speech-ear language model that's survived for thousands of years.

Yet this is not one of those discussions about how people should get sign off and develop a sense of self away from their computer.  This is simply an attempt to cut away the fat.

In reality, speaking as someone who was not raised with it, the internet has largely been... let me see, what are the words the girl used:

"If you search for anything online now, you just become buried and bombarded with garbage. Honestly, recycled blog posts, SEO bait, faceless robotic Youtube videos."

Yes exactly.  That would be an accurate description of most platforms post-2005.  Lest people forget, this video, when it dropped, was the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen... though, obviously, it does not remotely compare with television or film.  It's cheap, a lot of the moves are clumsy (though granted they rehearsed)... and it's not stage-quality work in a first-class theatre.  But sure, for the internet, it was unexpected.  But no one rushed forward to give them a movie deal or anything.  They're not the Beatles.  Hell, they're not even Lizzo.

This, though, has been the defining element of the internet since its inception.  The internet is a landfill of mediocrity, available in staggering abundance because it's cheap to make and cheap to see.  It is not a revolution in great thought (all of which takes place elsewhere) or a renaissance of creativity. The really "good" stuff — such as it is, though I'm much harder to impress than I was when I was this young woman's age — is still done with lots of money on film, in studios and through old fashioned printing.  The internet is the world of low expectations... which makes it all the more interesting when we're told to worry because the expectations lately have supposedly gotten lower.  Well, you get what you pay for, yes?

I don't know precisely what else there might be to say.  We're not going through the "bronze age" of the internet, nor the "silver age" either... because there never has yet been a golden age.  We're in the stone age of the internet, and we have been since it's inception somewhere in the far off 60s.  Those decrying the "end" of the internet are merely those with so little life experience, and with such short lives, that they can barely comprehend something beyond the narrow, flat dimensionality of their worlds.

Yesterday, I stumbled across this video.  Oh how I laughed.

Supply

 
Sorry about yesterday.  It's my way of sorting myself from those who's motives are grift, grift and more grift.

I've had too much time this week to stew and stare at internet content, catching up on the state of the world and the perversity that has become youtube.  The drive towards abhorrence content had subsumed most of the channels I used to be subscribed to, so that I ended in cancelling some two dozen subscriptions this week simply because I don't want to be told what's wrong with things.  It's all too clear that if I should wish to increase my viewership and presumably my online intake, I should pick something that (a) I know well; (b) deserves respect; and (c) write continuously about how shitty it is and why no one should ever do it, like it, care about it or spend a moment thinking about it.  Dissonance, obviously, since its like the old joke about the Hasidic Jew who spends his life obsessively thinking about how much he hates God, only to find that his constant wrestling with God throughout his life lands him in heaven, because "constant awareness was a sort of prayer."

Following this practice, then, I ought to diatribe at length on why first edition sucks, and by extension why D&D sucks, why it's stupid that anyone plays it, because obviously it's for weak-minded, cretinous, deserving losers who should be laughed-at and vilified for wasting so much of their time buying shit and attending games.  I should write brutal take-downs of every sort of product, belief, cherished ideal or notion that the game — and by extension, every other like game — sucks, the players suck, you the reader sucks, etcetera, while funding the blog with online internet products and such.  Because, after all, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is obviously a grifter, stoicism was invented for immature males, A.I. is on the verge of destroying the film industry, atheism is poison, as is bubble tea, and so on.

It's not that I want to unplug.  I just don't want any part of... this.  The decision to commodify hate, coupled with pandering to the lowest common denominator blessed with a work-job and no dependents, simply isn't something I want to be part of.  The urge to step back, get out of the internet-farming plague crowd and watch it tread by from a quiet, reclusive sideline is becoming desirable.  The act of burning my bridges, pulling up the drawbridges, to stop performing, to cease looking for a public place in this horrorshow, increasingly seems like the only rational alternative.  Every part of me wants to clamp down, close shop, work quietly on  my projects and just not engage.  Because... this... is just awful.

Some history.

Jim Keegstra was a Canadian high school teacher and mayor of Eckville, in Alberta, about 7 miles west of our family cabin on Sylvan Lake.  In the early 80s, when I was 18 and just out of high school, the stories of Keegstra teaching his students anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial and claims of a global Jewish plot, hit pretty close to me.  Keegstra was dismissed form his position, charged, and the ensuing legal case set a significant precedent in Canadian law regarding the balance between free speech and protection against free speech.

In short, I live in a country where free speech is not a blanket right, where "sunshine" is not the best disinfectant, where the vocalisations that has made the American system can't be trotted out and given room to breathe here as they are there.  It's not legal here for people to express themselves as they might wish where that expression is harmful, as judged by people who do not see "hate" as a privilege or a virtue.  Such people need not be muzzled, but it must be made clear that there's a line that needs not to be crossed in a civilised country.

Presently, despite the imposition of an increasingly authoritarian government in El Salvador, the dramatic reduction in gang violence — effectively ending a reign of terror that lasted over a decade and was exacerbated by transnational criminal networks and external demand for narcotics — has led to a significant improvement in public safety.  For those who hav elived under the daily threat of gang violence, the change has been immediate and profound.  Areas once dominated by gang control are now accessible, and many Salvadorans feel freer in their movements, even as legal and civil freedoms have eroded. This perceived restoration of order has earned Bukele immense support, especially among lower-income and rural populations who bore the brunt of gang rule.

Personally, I don't know what to think of that.  On the one hand, I am sick to death of freedom being the watchword of every half-assed moron ready to throw anything and everything on the pyre for the sake of a few bucks awarded by an excessively indifferent trillionaire industry operating without oversight.  On the other, I'm not certain the solution is to kick in doors and shoot the motherfucking hate-mongers in their chairs upon their pressing "enter."  I would like to see some legislation... and not the sort that requires 15 years of "fact-finding" and "investigation," designed to ensure that nothing is conceivably done to those able to continue funding all of the world's elections to their favour simultaneously.

I'm concerned that the Chinese route is inevitable.

Meanwhile, I'm not onboard.  I'm not encouraged to defend any form of D&D at present, especially on a silent stage, while my present investigations into creative writing and youtube on that account are entirely personal.  My wiki is privately connected to the internet and certainly isn't about hate.  This blog has become equivalent to dead air.  My patreon is evaporating, presumably because I don't spew the material it wants to support.  Meanwhile, I have probably another 20-30 years to spend on the planet, doing something with a physical body in a steady state of degredation.

There are going to be many bad days ahead and, I think, in the end, it's not going to matter whether I have access to the internet or not.  There may not be anything here that I ever want to engage with.

What You're Not Being Told about ChatGPT

This is to provide a clear-eyed perspective about ChatGPT for the reader who knows next to nothing, and is perhaps unfamiliar with the program's existant capability.

Starting with this image:

The image is from this youtube video, which includes a note that the above scene is from "6th Ave, 33rd St - 34th St, NYC 1948."

Now, dear reader, using this page from ChatGPT, type in the following:

"Tell me about the artists shops along 6th avenue, between 33rd and 34th streets, in New York City, in 1948"

Then go tap in the exact same query into Google.

ChatGPT, for whatever other uses it might be put to, is a search engine of unbelievable power and clarity.  Google wants to tell me about 34th St, but I didn't ask about 34th St.  I asked about 6th Ave.  But the more search parameters you add to google, the less clear an answer you get, while the more parameters you add to ChatGPT, the opposite occurs.

As soon as someone figures out how to make ChatGPT into a shopping program, it is the DEATH of Google.

Get ready for it.

The Terrible, Awful, Bad Internet

Apologies as I hijack this blog for a post not about D&D.  The below does not fit into the series I'm writing.  It addresses a mutually good-spirited conversation between ViP and myself that begins on the last post and ends up here, so I can stretch out.  You'll need the previous post for context.  Feel free to 
comment below if you have something meaningful to add.

Here are the points I'm addressing:

1. Humans need group dynamics.
2. Once upon a time, people had to deal with disparate opinions; they were not able to live in a bubble. The "social reality" of time and place.
3. The widespread validation of thought, obsession, what have you, is self-harming and — going out on a limb — harmful to others ... and the internet empowers this.
4. The physical instrument of the internet, and the device that connects to it, encourages dark impulses.

Please understand ViP; none of this is directed at you, but at various points you make, that I hear all the time, especially from folks like Jonathan Haidt. I'm extremely not right wing; if anything, I'm left of Haidt; but every once in awhile, to support some point he's made — and this is common throughout the species — some notion is dredged up from the past that qualifies as make-believe.  Contrary to what some believe, it's possible to disagree with someone's premises while completely agreeing with someone's conclusions.  That is my position on Haidt, and generally on the points being addressed here.

Furthermore, I had to paraphrase your statement first, because it's SO easy to be called out on misunderstanding something. So let me make something else clear: I don't think any of your arguments are strawmen, or specious. I've heard every one of these in the last 15 years, so I understand where you're getting them from and why they appear to explain what's happening.

1. Do humans need other humans?  Yes, 100% agree.  Only it must be understood that biologically, psychologically, anthropologically, I need about 30 to 40 humans who think and act exactly like I do ... and that's all I'll ever "need" for the rest of my life.  This is the size of group in which human and pre-sapiens species lived in for millions of years; this is what my brain patterns are designed to recognise; and this is what I actually need to be happy.

I hear this saw dragged out all the time by psychologists who want to short cut through the actual reason we need other humans — to ensure our immediate safety, help find food, keep each other clean, do for each other in times of crisis, etcetera, as FAMILY — straight to an argument that says I should put down my phone and step away from my computer, so that I can step out into the local environment and buy a coffee from a fucking stranger who doesn't give a good gawddamn if I live or die.  I need my partner, my daughter, my friends, the people I have carefully vetted these last thirty years.  If these are not the people at the nearby park, then no, I have no reason to go to the park.  At no time in history or prehistory have human beings obtained a "recalibration" from strangers.  Right from the get-go, strangers are competitors for our food and territory, and are a THREAT.  My lizard brain is built to automatically identify them as such, and warily discount them as persons not of my tribe.

Any notion that strangers exist to "remind me of how other people think and feel" is something barely a century old, and for all of that century has absolutely been ignored as an ideology.

Again, please understand.  I only disparage the argument being made ... that we "need" other people.  No, no in fact we really don't.  And that is the bloody problem.  The tribalism we see is an outpouring of small groups of people acting according to their biological dictates in the highest extreme.  They're sheltering with "their own kind" comfortably because their own kind are the only people they can trust.  If we are going to make this argument, please, let's not argue "communality" for anything other that what it actually is: a dangerous social behaviour that encourages groups of the same mindset to act violently when their den is threatened.

As such, let's ditch this ridiculous notion that the internet invented this behaviour!  The behaviour of violently striking out at humans not of my family and immediate association has been around for literally (using the term accurated) millions of years.  What the internet does is enable these fuckers to speak to the whole world at the same time, and by chance hit upon some other similar group of fuckers to find them, so that something that could never have happened a million years ago can happen now.  We can actually pile up a random tribe of 20,000 like-minded people because we've invented a way for them to find each other and communicate.  Therefore we ought to be very, VERY careful about encouraging potentially psychotic loners to emerge from their bedrooms into the real world, as we don't know what sort they are.

2. Did we ever have to deal with disparate opinions?  No.  Not really.  Maybe it's because I came of age in an upper-middle class suburb in the late 1970s, and this gives me a different perspective on what a "bubble" is ... I don't know.  The reader is free to identify my take on this as a part of my background.

I hear pundits argue all the time, even on the mainstream news, that the internet has made it possible for everyone to choose the media they want to consume, so that today they all live in a bubble where they never have to hear anything they don't want to hear.

This is completely garbage.  If it were true, the present siege mentality wouldn't exist.  But it does exist — because we simply can't isolate ourselves from things we don't believe.  No matter how hard we try.

Examples are a weak argument, but I'm forced to try a few.  For each of these, I'll compare the world of 1955 with the present day, despite my having been born in 1964.  Therefore, I'll have to rely on my Father's personal life, coupled with everything I was told as a youngster was the "way the world worked."

In 1955, owning a gun wasn't seen as a dividing social matter.  People didn't like them, but they existed as a normal, common, everyday thing.  Shooting clubs — my father was part of one until I was 18 — were responsible, public organisations that operated according to what every member believed: guns were dangerous, using a gun had a place, common discussion of guns in social gatherings was unacceptable, if you owned a gun, it was a personal responsibility you undertook.  Those who behaved irresponsibly were ostracised.  Criminals had guns, but no one hesitated to shoot a criminal with a gun in 1955.  Cops were not held accountable for doing so.

Okay, okay, save your opinion a moment.  I'm not arguing this should be the case, or even that it was the universal case.  It's what I witnessed personally as I grew up; and later, when I used to hunt with my father, between the age of 16 and 25, when I gave it up, talking about guns was something that happened all day, especially as we met other hunters, Canadian mounted police, fish and wildlife inspectors on many occasions, in what may be fairly describes as an Mayberry R.F.D. sort of culture.

Second example ... in case the above doesn't sink it.  In 1955, no one way gay.  Of course they were; of course all the choices and motivations that exist today existed then, but as far as the culture went, no, no one was gay.  Homosexuality didn't exist on the media, it wasn't discussed, in the world I grew up it did not appear in books, it was not mentioned in school classrooms and so on.  The only place the matter of homosexuality obtained attention was that every boy constantly accused every other boy of being gay, as a joke, as a vindictive way to hurt, as a means to prove that one was not gay.  By accusing others, one vouchsafed one's own innocence.  The more violently one attacks a potentially gay other, the more assertively one can argue that "I am not gay."

Oh, and the word used wasn't "gay."  It was faggot.

I apologise if that term is offensive.  Once upon a time, I heard it aimed at me hourly ... and what was hard to accept later, as I emerged into my twenties, was that every boy did.  That's not how it seemed at the time; however, by sharing notes with the grown-up versions of childhood enemies, we learned things.

THESE are bubbles.  These are bubbles on a scale incomprehensible in the present day.  I find it strange that the same evils that we fight every day, those into which the mid-20th century invested themselves, all began as social cultures without disparate opinions, of any kind.  There are thousands of books written in the period specifically addressing the lack of society's disparate opinions, yet here and now I regularly encounter university professors and perfectly intelligent people talk about today's "bubbles" as something new and unique brought on by the internet.

Take my favourite: the argument is nearly always applied to those who choose to watch Fox News, as evidence of their unwillingness to consider alternate new sources.  In 1955, there were NO alternate news sources.  Even mentioning an alternative point of view was a jailable offense in many, many cases.  Mention it too hard and you might find yourself shot down in the street.  No matter what colour you were.

People once upon a time weren't forced to deal with a disparate bunch of random people.  Random people were forced NOT to be disparate.  And if you were, gawd help you.  That's what "normality" was.

ViP, you say that once upon a time, "we all had to define ourselves in relation with the actual social reality of our time and place."  This is nostalgic and, I'm sorry, also nonsense.  Thank the internet, and every other media advance that's been made in the last 40 years, that we DON'T have to define ourselves by what other people think.

3. Is the widespread validation of thought and obsession self-harming?  This relates to this video that began these thoughts.  I have to be careful here.  It's so easy to be misunderstood as a monster — which I am, but if the reader thinks so too certainly, you'll stop reading and miss the point.

Present society is founded on the belief that all persons are inherently valuable to the same degree.  The premise began to be incrementally advanced in western culture as early as the 12th century, and found traction progressively with books like Thomas More's Utopia and political units such as that of Switzerland, parts of Italy, certain religious groups and the Netherlands.  Americans like to claim the title, but the reason Jefferson uses the phrase, "by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," is because in his day, he wasn't inventing this idea, he was expressing an idea that already predated him by a few centuries.

It has to be understood, however, that equal inherent value is a philosophy, not an evidentiary fact.  We choose to view it as a fact, because to do otherwise would be, as I say, monstrous ... but nonetheless in discussing anything about human nature and character, we're forced to view ourselves intelligently and plainly, and not as a matter of religious faith.  If your particular take on equality makes it impossible for you to distinguish between something we WANT and something we HAVE, then I suggest you stop reading right now.  You won't like where this is going.

As a matter of society, we are faced with two salient realities.  The first, and most obvious, as it's here on the internet everyday as the mainstream media's raison d'etre, is that many, many people simply refuse to accept inherent value as a philosophy.  I shouldn't have to recount the details here.  Twitter is doing a fine job of proving the point.

The second, and without a doubt the less comfortable, as no one ever addresses it, is that for most of history any single human being, whose name or work we do not know, has been, unpleasantly and for the most part, irrelevant.  I won't say entirely irrelevant.  As an example, there must have been several persons in the 12th century, say, who raised persons whose descendents survived well enough to eventually beget my family and, of course, me.  I can make the same argument about a group of humans living 150,000 years ago.  And two million years ago.  I can even make the argument that some group of precursor primate 60 million years ago accomplished their survival well enough for me to be born.

In short, since this was done often enough to produce all of us today, on the scale of "relevant," it has a number, but that number is very, very, very low.

Beyond this, I know nothing about my ancestors in the 12th century.  I know even less about the others.  On the whole, whether they were bastards, or good people, or kept themselves clean, or burned witches, or acted as whatever counts for the worst behaviour by our standards, doesn't mean a good gawddamn, since none of those things has anything to do with my thinking today.

You, dear reader, may be ready to endure this line of thinking, but it requires one more step.

Nine centuries from now, most everything that's going on right now will have next to no relevance to the people living then.

I make this argument because as a culture, we tend to give monumental IMPORTANCE to every facet of every human being's life, and there's just no logic in that.  In the linked video above, the first six words are, "He'll do great things, that boy."  The implication being that "doing great things" matters on some level ... and as the story continues, we find the boy progressively choosing a path not to do great things.  And we're left with the moral at the end, paraphrased, "Well he could have done great things, if only he'd applied himself."

The premise, right from the outset, throws the human being's inherent value into the trash.  The message is, you're only inherently valuable if you do great things; and if you don't do great things, you're self-harming.  If you let yourself behave experientially, you'll never reach your potential — which, of course, is not defined by you, but by the other members of your village.  What ought to matter to you is that which matters to the people of the town, to the girls, to whomever, who have decided that anything that doesn't live up to their expectation, is self-harm.

Not to put too light a buff on this shine, but this is the toxic bullshit that powered the world of 1955, described above.

If I'm equal as a person to anyone else, then what I choose to do with my time is my fucking business.  If I want to spend that time writing a 4,000 word essay on internet culture, that's my choice.  If I don't, I'm the only judge of that behaviour that I need consider.  None of us here are self-harming by choosing to do something which some tiny segment of society thinks we ought to give a royal shit about.

But ...

We're hyper-aware of the whirlpool sucking a selection of human beings, especially young human beings, into a culture of cutting, suicide, excessive celebrations of violence and the encouragement of causing harm to others.  Psychologically, the path between harming oneself and harming others is very clear.  And so, the mandate for addressing self-harming behaviour is arguably critical as a means of circumventing the darker influences of internet culture.  Earlier I mentioned twitter.  All of us here should be very concerned about the substantially diseased corners of the internet ... and we should be concerned about people, especially young people, finding those corners.   As Dan Olson of Folding Ideas put it on a recent podcast, the internet has industrialised grift.  And young people are not mature enough to understand how a grift works.  Hell, many adults aren't either.

But if we're going to name a culprit here, it's "free speech," not the internet.  Most of those "dark corners" of the internet could have been legislated out of existence 20 years ago, and should have been.  Most of the grifters should have been identified and isolated years ago.  Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have no business being the unregulated grift merchants we've allowed them to be.  Any argument that says, "for the good of an individual, we must encourage them not to self-harm on the internet," has to include an element that says, "Emotional abuse on the internet cannot be allowed to exist."

The problem is not the internet itself.  Radio was regulated.  Television was regulated.  Both were regulated in a manner for decades that held fast to that vicious bubble of 1955 (or any like year that applies).

The internet blew that bubble all to shit.  It gave a voice to millions of people whose existence was ignored and persecuted, and that was a good thing.  Unfortunately, the force of that liberation was applied indescriminately to everything and every person, regardless of their agenda.  And so here we are.  You can have one without the other; but you can't raise freedom of expression if you're not willing to legislate against freedom of persecution, cruelty, grift and hate.

It doesn't work.  Either you crush the personal freedoms pre-internet, pre-cable television, pre-free radio, video recording and every other media advancement post-1955, or you crush the personal freedom of every person today who wants to use the internet to spread lies and social corruption.

Until that's sorted, however, my personal contact with the internet — and that of my anthropological clan — is a matter of my personal responsibility.  But I'll leave how that works for another post, on another day.

I contend that the linked video about the failed young man does nothing to discourage self-harm.  It's not nearly as sophisticated as arguments and techniques being used against it (which, point in fact, even a frank discussion of which must be placed behind a content warning).  We have no hope of educating, or changing the direction of vulnerable persons if we can't even steal ourselves to discuss the subject!  The dark side is much, much better at validating the thoughts of such persons because that's all it cares about.  It couldn't give a damn about making anyone feel valuable or ambitious.  Whereas the so-called positive forces are apparently more interested in making fairy tale stories where young boys grow up to be "great" ... which is exactly the sort of pressure that sends them into the open arms of the dark web, which assigns zero expectation.

I'd agree, yes, validation of thought and obsession is harmful ... but not because the internet as a force supplies these things.  The internet is a tool.  If you use a hammer to bash my brains in, that's not an inherent problem with the hammer.  The internet could just as easily be the tool that rescues such people ... but it won't so long as grift exists, on both the left and the right.  As I see it, every faction, regardless of their agenda, or their self-assessment, is more interested in bucks and support than they are in making any difference in the world.  This is what free speech gets us.

4.  Does the internet encourage dark impulses?  Of course it does.  It also encourages good impulses.  It encourages every kind of impulse.  But it really depends on what you consider a "dark" impulse as compared to another.  I've no doubt that I pursue many so-called dark impulses on the net.  There are things I can read today that I couldn't have 20 years ago; there are experiences I can have here that I couldn't have.

Right now, I work as one of 40 persons for an international corporation whose head office is not in my country.  I've met two of my bosses, once.  I sometimes talk with other people who do what I do; they're located in different countries, with different language skills.  None of us will ever meet in person, I expect.  I've made a very good living from this company.  Hell, they sent me on their dime, for free, to Montreal for a week.  I can't say anything definitive about the company, ever, for the rest of my life, but I don't care.

So I'm quite at odds about anyone describing the "internet," as opposed to a percentage of people on it, as a bad thing.  One might just as well say the PLANET is a bad thing.  And guess what — living on the planet Earth encourages dark impulses.  Much, much worse impulses than can be found on the darkest corner of the internet.  Don't go to Burma, Zaire or Equatorial Guinea, ever.  Just don't.  On a lesser scale, I can also point out alleyways in Calgary that you don't want to walk down.  Seriously.  Those are places you just don't go.

It's a big bad scary world.  Stop blaming the internet.  The only thing the internet has done is to make more people aware of it.  Which is also scary.

It's so much easier to pretend something doesn't exist if there aren't webpages for it.

Banter

Well, there's this.  A group of wits decided to do a 51 minute podcast about this blog.

And honestly, it's flattering.  We don't rise to this level of smarm without having achieved ... something.

Please support my patreon.

We're All Plagarists

Of late, I've been getting the occasional comment asking me to identify the artist of some picture that I've posted with relationship to my wiki.  The signal is to condemn me for attaching an artist to my written work without that artist's permission.

For those who may not know, there are these sites on the internet called Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.  These sites post literally billions of pictures, with new ones appearing every day.  These sites share these pictures with one another, so that any one picture that might appear on one particular pinterest or instagram site, will also appear on thousands of other sites.  The number of pictures that have the artist identified on these sites is less than 1%.  That is because the people who use the internet just don't care.  They find the picture, they share the picture, they download the picture.

When I am looking for a picture for a given page on my wiki -- for example, something about shields -- I go to google search images and I type, "Shield" "Fantasy Art".  This produces scores, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of pictures, depending on the subject matter I've searched.  These pictures rarely, if ever, have any notation as to who the artist is.  Very often, if I don't like the size of the picture, I can right-click the image and select, "search google for this image" ... whereupon, I will find dozens and dozens of source images that are of different sizes.  Again, these images are listed by the website, NOT the artist, and do not make any attempt whatsoever to identify whom the artist may be.

I pick the image I want and I put it on my FREE website, where I keep my pictures, which -- although it isn't Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter -- does absolutely nothing to capitalize on these pictures in order to put money in my pocket, any more than do the millions of other sites posting the same pictures with the same desire for clicks, the same desire for attention, the same algorithm that drives every site on the internet.  There is nothing special about my placing of a random picture on my random site that isn't duplicated on billions of other random sites that exist elsewhere.

The notion that 16-year-old Jinny Pandermiss on the internet can download any of these pictures on her Pinterest page because she likes to look at them and write fan fic about the images for her Facebook group, but I can't, for, apparently, "reasons," is laughable.

I am not the gatekeeper of the internet.  I am playing by the same rules everyone else is playing by.  IF an artist does not want their art copied a million times on the internet, then I suggest NOT posting their image on the internet.

The artist is Li Joshua

If the artist wants to come and break my personal balls, threatening legislation or some such against me personally, when I can point to thousands of other sites with the same picture being displayed, then I'm going to explain to them something called mens rea, and further explain that if they want to win against me in court, they're going to have to bring suit against every other person also doing what I'm doing.  Otherwise, why me?  Specifically, why am I being targeted?  If you're targeting me, and not everyone else breaking the same law, then your intention is to persecute an individual, not to right a wrong.

And yet, if the artist wants to talk about it, I'll listen.

On the other hand, if some dumb troll on the net who isn't the artist wants to talk about it, well ... go fight google.  They're the enemy.  Not me.  I'm just the enemy that's tiny enough to make a troll feel like they can win a fight.

I will not be publishing these comments when they occur.

Lovers Gonna Love

It must be a bitch.

There you are, you're Charlie Rose.  Up until not that long ago, you could enjoy your trips to Aspen, to the Kennedy Center, to events a the Met ... and sit beside the likes of Cher, Martin Scorsese or Bill Gates, knowing that each would have to treat you kindly and warmly, because one day they might want to write a book or produce another album or push for funding.  If you stumbled across Dustin Hoffman, he'd treat you with respect.  But now, that's all gone.  If you could push your way into any such place, you'd be snubbed.

Once you had power, ordering people around, having people kowtow to you, sitting in your marvelous throne of power while the world turned about you.  Each little person that approached you did so with the same obsequious look in their eye, the same tremor in their voice, the carefully controlled vocabulary personally designed not to annoy you.  When a stranger entered your castle, they spoke your name in hushed, reverent tones.  But now, that's all gone.  The castle has evaporated.

But the worst, you must realize, as you sit in your expensive Long Island Mansion that you've managed to keep hold of, is that your world used to be populated with these marvelous, dreamy, lightly clad women of delightful odors and appearance, the very cream of the American crop.  And each of them eager, so eager, for your kind word, your attention, you're willingness to promise something for their career or their success.  My, what wide eyes they had, as they listened to your words, waiting and stupidly young and foolishly desperate to take off something that might bring a little more consideration their way ... and now, that's gone.  That's all gone.  What an awful life that has left you.

Still, it has been 15 months.  15 months.  My god, a lifetime.  Surely, they can't still be mad.  Surely, you've paid your debt.  Surely, you're entitled to have something of the career you've had.  You've suffered, haven't you?  You've paid.  Hey, you're the victim here.

After all, your email inbox is positively filled with supporters.  Mr. Rose, we love you.  Mr. Rose, we wish you could come back.  Mr. Rose, you ought to crowdfund your legal suit against your former bosses.  We support you.  We always believed in you.  Don't give up.  We don't believe you did any of those bad things.  We have received so much pleasure from watching your show, while we never got anything from your accusers.

Just as there are always haters, there are always lovers.  Whatever horrible sins that Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein and Brian Grazer committed, I'm sure they have no trouble finding people who still love them.  I'm sure Bill Cosby gets letters of support every day.

But just as the haters don't amount to much, neither do the lovers.  What matters in the end is what you have.  Not what others think you ought to have.

I've spent too much time today watching the Facebook feed of Frank Mentzer spin along.  Frank Mentzer, who has decided that 16 months following the evaporation of his credibility is long enough.  He's the victim here.  He's the one who's been wronged.  It should never have happened.  Can't we just overlook all that awfulness and move on with our lives?

Maybe we ought to.  Maybe we should just give ol' Mentzer another chance at a Kickstarter.  He's not going to force anyone to give him money, is he?  If his lovers want to give him money, we ought to just let them do it.

And Charlie Rose?  Let's give him his show back.  His presentation was warm and kind, he never did anything wrong to us.  He always did right by us, didn't he?  And all those women whose lives he hurt and whose innocence he crushed, well ... they'll get by.  Won't they?  After all, he's the victim.

Why not just let ol' Harvey Weinstein go back to fucking over Hollywood and the Oscars.  We got rid of him and the Oscars certainly didn't look different, did they?  So what difference does it make.  Why do we even bother punishing these people?  Just look at all their fans.

Oh.  Right.  Because what they did is wrong.  Because claims of being hacked or strangers staying at his house and using his computer to target a message board are fairly ridiculous.  Because 16 months ago, a lot of this happened in real time and the witnesses haven't conveniently died off.

Because the internet is proving to be a very difficult thing to process and having people like this around is a problem for everyone.

We don't live in the Information Age.  We live in the Information Management Age.

So no.  No pass.  Not on the basis that any of these people are "sorry."  Or that they feel they've suffered enough.  Or because they have fans.  Or because while others have taken their steps to move on, the perpetrator is feeling persecuted.

Hmph.

I suppose I better never fuck up, huh?  Not after writing something like this.

Be damned funny if someone hacked my computer and wrote a vicious screed to someone.  Be damned funny if a guest in my place used my computer to write same.  Pretty damned funny.

We'll see if that happens.  We'll see if someone pops out of my past and ruins my life.

Can't say I'm worried about it.

Magic Thinking

On the face of it, this is going to sound like another political post about the web; but if you could bear with me, I'd like to discuss an observation I had recently, while reading reddit strings about Captain Marvel.  This isn't going to be about those strings, or Captain Marvel, I promise.

For some time now, we've been hearing about the "filter bubble."  TED started preaching it in the early 2010s with talks like this one.  Since, I continue to hear about the bubble, and how it is bad for us, whenever I listen to left-leaning podcasts.  I don't listen to right-leaning podcasts ever, so there's that bubble in evidence.  Supposedly.

The talk that I've linked builds a fear-mongering argument based on a few simple assumptions: that google choosing your search results based on your previous search results is bad (speculation); that this is worse than when journal editors chose what sort of news you got on television, because those editors had ethics (delusion); and that bias and prejudice in humans ought to cease following old patterns because a technological breakthrough produced the internet (magic thinking).

Ditch these assumptions and what you have is business as usual.

Google is only doing what television, radio, magazines and newspapers have done in their turn: determine what content you like and sell products according to what persons liked that content.  The only difference is that google is more precise ... but the guy in 1949 who only read trade magazines about cars never saw an advertisement for women's dresses.

Journal editors with "ethics" were called "unemployed."  We only have this nonsense belief in editors because of an endless stream of Hollywood films going back to the 1930s that envisioned the hero newspaper editor and reporter who cracked the case and saved the innocent.  I can give you a quality list of such movies if you'd like.  They're fun, but they're not real life.

And finally, the internet.  That magic thing that some folks still think exists to solve all our problems.  Uh huh.  But 2013 was a long, long time ago.  There are less and less people like this now, most of them dyed-in-the-wool liberals who still believe that if we elect the RIGHT politician, all our problems will be solved.  Ahem, *choke.*

Getting to the point.  Of late, the last couple of years or so, I've adjusted my thinking.  It starts with my looking at a page of commentors griping about something or defending something, just like I know all of you have.  We've all watched a sordid, reprehensible video on youtube, the sort that makes us doubt the validity of human intelligence as a theory, only to drop down the comments and find that every single person commenting agrees 100% with the video.

Rabidly agrees.

And there's the comments section, waiting for me to throw my 2 cents in ... and I don't.  I could say something.  I know what to say.  But there's no point in saying it because no one in that bubble will remotely hear it.  It is a waste of my time.

I'd like to believe there's an argument to be made for stemming the tide against the odiious garbage that is everywhere, that it is an Emersonian imperative for the good man to do something ... but in truth making a comment on the internet is not "doing something."  That is also magic thinking.

I'll suspend where I think all of it is going and talk instead about this blog, Dungeons & Dragons and the gaming community in general.  Because this applies as much to all three as it does to the worst toxic garbage on the internet.

Why should you, dear reader, upon wading through the vitriol of my post on Brie Larson (just as acidic as I could dish it out), feel any reason to comment?  If you agree, it's fine; and if you disagree, you and I both know I'm not going to change my opinion just because you tell me to.  We don't know that because we've talked to each other or gotten to know each other, but because we have already been here, thousands of times, with the whole internet.

I'm just a madman.  Watch the madman dance, but don't bother to tell the madman to stop dancing.

I write a deconstruction about 5th Edition; this is like an open comment to every page about 5th Edition simultaneously.  I may change some minds, but I doubt it.  Mostly, I'm clarifying the thinking of people who already know there's a problem with the system.  I'm not making headway against the believers, who are convinced that any problems they're having with the system is the fault of a DM, a player, the internet, their own intelligence or gawd knows what else they've invented to justify that the system is brilliant and ~ if possessed of flaws ~ is ten times better than any other system.  Or 4 times, or 1.1 times, or whatever ratio they pick.

They're not going to comment here about it, because they know I'm not going to change my mind, though I'm clearly wrong and I just don't get it.  So why bother?  Even if they did, they'd frame their comment is such personalized drudge that I'd delete it for failing to make itself comprehensible in English.

We can make this same observation about the whole community and anyone in it.  We've been compelled to embrace the viewpoint that your bubble is made of stone and my energy isn't up to breaking into it, while quietly renovating the walls of our bubble with a moat and inside wall of bricks.

Understand, I'm not offering a solution.  A solution would suggest that any of this behaviour is "wrong."

This behaviour is normal.  In the real world, you don't actually give a shit about your toxic neighbor except where your personal space is violated by loud music, errant pets, overhanging tree branches and late parties on Thursday nights.  People wrote thousands of years ago (Juvenal, Aristotle) that having a positive relationship with your neighbors was a good idea, but no one listened then and no one cares now.  No one is chiding you for keeping inside your "property bubble."

Nor do you care what work Judy or Chris or Tina are doing, except that its not done so you can do your work or that they won't stop talking about it.  You don't care that the guy who sells you food from the food truck has a wife and kids or that the Starbucks kid has graduated from the 11th grade.  Maybe one of these says something that makes them sound like "your kind of person," so you build a relationship where you shoot the shit with them between breaks or on slow rainy days by the truck, but the truth is your life doesn't need that many of your kind.  A few is nice.  When it starts to cost you too much time, you start going to a different food truck.

And no one cares!  No one says, "Hey, you're retreating into a bubble, ignoring that food truck guy."  No one says anything.  They do it too.

I love the wonder of the internet being reduced to the wan
hopefulness of throwing message-bottles into the ocean.  You're
right.  "Someone" might.  Of course, I know the names of
several people who will read this, so it feels less like "sharing"
and more like having something of interest to say.

But it's the internet, screams some shrill voice, magically thinking that because it is big and new and everyone is hooked up that this is automatically a good thing.  Hooking people up in the past has mostly produced war, disease, famine and death ... you know, the four horsemen.  Mongols inventing the stirrup, Gutenberg starting the ideology wars in Europe with the printing press, shipbuilding and navigation setting off the murder of natives with colonization and predation of property.  Great technologies, bringing people together ... close enough to kill each other.

We're lucky we can't reach each other physically through this thing.  Though I'm sure that will be a technology to happen eventually; instead of eugenics, Star Trek should have talked about the Transporter Wars.  Those were the real bad years.

So go easy on the internet.  Flame wars don't solve anything.  Let them think they're right.  It's all going to get sorted out on the streets eventually, with or without the internet.  The real problems began with the decimation of western towns as manufacturing moved to the Third World, in the 1960s.  That's the one that is choking America and much of the world right now, from both ends.  And that happened years and years before the internet did.

I'm sorry.  I lied.  It turned out to be political after all.

You know, I'm not to be trusted.

The Death of Things Past

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL8h3ri2WN_-IbviBlWtUcQ

The internet is not the same place it was ten years ago.

Methodically, there are voices stepping forward everywhere that are building up a positive wave, such as this youtube channel that I found this morning.  I found it remarkably refreshing to read someone with good things to say about movies that have made billions of dollars by putting tens of millions of butts in theater seats, when what we used to hear on the net was "Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad . . ."

It all stands to reason: some twenty years ago, the development of the public net was dependent upon a small cadre of those who understood what computers were and what they could do - persons who were naturally resentful of a society that steadfastly refused to given any credence to this and who treated anyone with 'knowledge' like crap scraped off the bottom of a shoe.  In 1996, the most celebrated people in the world were sports figures.  Back then, it wasn't necessary to pay any attention to sports to know who Ken Griffey, Andre Agassi or John Elway were.  I've never sat and watched more than five minutes of a basketball game in my life, yet I knew perfectly well who Michael Jordan was before he became a movie actor.

Who is the equivalent today - an athlete that's huge, right now, who got his start no earlier than 2010?  There isn't one.  The sportos will rush forward and name off a bunch of people for me, but I promise: I won't recognize a single name.  Because today we live in a world where if you don't watch sports, you don't give a shit.  Back in the '90s, television still mattered, it had the power to push people down on throats that we didn't care about.  Today, it doesn't.  Nothing that happens on television matters.  Because the internet has replaced it.  Today, if you don't go LOOK for it, it doesn't exist.

In the 1990s, television ignored computers (it still does - but then, computers are the enemy, competing for all that advertising).  This is why a ridiculously innaccurate computer-based movie like Hackers made such a splash: because, among computer geeks, this is all they had.  They had to love it.  After two decades of personal computer use being utterly ignored by the media (I'm counting from the mid '70s), FINALLY someone made a movie.  It is horrifically, hilariously stupid and counterfactual.  Just try to imagine a group of modern day doctors expressing their fandom love of a movie that depicted medicine with this level of accuracy.  But talk to any 'hacker' who was alive and conscious in 1995 and they will gush endlessly about the immortal love they have for this film.

Those computer savvy guys were naturally misanthropic: the media hated them and they hated the media.  It was only natural that, with this perspective, when Dalnet and ICQ got off the ground, it would be filled with a bile of epic proportions.  With only 20 years behind us, this is a generation that is still with us - and will be with us for a long time.  Yet it is also a generation that has lost its grip on the throttle.  No wonder: that generation has systematically set out to destroy every platform that has been made available, from Yahoo, Friends United and Friendster up through Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr.  The only sites that have survived their predations have been those that took an excessively draconian attitude towards outside influence: that is, anything owned by Google, Apple or Amazon.

The war was on almost immediately: and the loudest voices in any chat room has fought that war by claiming "free speech" and "freedom" as their watchwords: that is, the freedom to destroy things, to ruin things, to make things vulnerable enough that a troll can do whatever a troll wants.  Trolls hate comment moderation.  They hate youtube's policy of removing videos.  They hate blocking.  Guess why.

I read comments sections when I want to don my sociologist's lab coat.  There has been a change.  Once upon a time a troll would start something and - in the ensuing flame war - a dozen other trolls would come to a troll's rescue.  More and more, I am seeing one troll and a dozen other reasonable people piling up on him.  Overall, there are less trolls . . . at least in places where there's little or no payback for their efforts.

Television, of course, hasn't understood anything about trolls or the internet.  The news channels gamely put up a twitter feed and delight in having every troll in the universe hammer away in favour of Donald Trump in real time.  I said before that the internet is television's competitor.  There are absolutely less viewers of sports, news, virtually everything today (except porn) than there were 20 years ago:

Not that anyone wants to talk about this.

In light of such numbers, I have my - very reserved - notions that perhaps television executives have an agenda to make the internet look bad.  How else does one explain this incomprehensibly irrational scene?

This would be my vote for the worst depiction of a computer on any media, ever.

Unquestionably, it is in the old school media's interest for the internet to continue to look bad - and promoting trolls, giving them unrestrained access to television feeds and otherwise promoting the fear agenda where it comes to computers is 100% in the television media's interest.  They would like it if we could all just stop this silliness of wasting all our time with this nonsense internet thing and go back to sitting still in front of a box patiently waiting for commercials to finish - something I did casually for the first thirty years of my life.

Hard to believe.

I have enormous faith in the future.  Oh, eventually the governments of the world will use some pretext for shutting this internet thing down - but every year they fail to do so brings us closer to the tech that will enable us to establish this internet thing without any actual need for a "net" - computers will simply piggyback on a general wifi-interlock system in some Tesla air-transfer arrangement that will mean I'll only need to buy a computer in order to get on board the completely free system that replaces the present model.

Okay, I don't know how it will work - but trust me, it will work and the government won't be able to do a thing about it - not even if we have to buy our computers from "pushers" on the street corner.

By then, the internet culture will have washed the bad-blood generation out of its system and, while trolls will never be a thing of the past, the unwanted will be no more a problem for the internet than the asshole who's had too many beers and now must be shown the door.

Hm.  Bars will probably have a lot less of those when national-level broadcast sports finally lays down and dies.

No Escape from the Pillory

"An escape from the pillory was a rare event, but the general chaos and disorder that were associated with its use was not, and reports of punishment at the pillory abound with tales of an angry mob only scarcely under control.  Two culprits taken down from the pillory at Chelmsford, for example, were 'begrimed with rotten eggs' and as they were escorted back to the gaol 'assailed with the indignant shouts and execrations of the populace.'  At Charing Cross, a man convicted of assaulting a drum boy was pelted with 'mud, eggs, turnips, and other missiles' until he was 'completely enveloped with mud and filth', and it was only with 'the utmost difficulty that the peace officers could prevent him from being torn to pieces by the mob.'  Not only did unruly spectacles such as these fit ill with new ideals about civic decorum, they also tilted perilously close to a breakdown of order.  The pillory was sure to attract a large crowd of men and women, drawn largely from the lower sections of society, with the consequent risk that disorder was never far away.  It was all sharply at odds with the neat and ordered market-place that civic elites were attempting to fashion."

Emma Griffin, The 'Urban Renaissance' and the Mob

Structures and Transformations in Modern British History

At some point in history, the pillory came down.  Not, as some would argue, because we became a more enlightened people; but because the pressures of urban life was creating something new with the late 18th century, which the above quote describes - specifically, an intense, dangerous, unbridled hate, seeking a target that could be attacked without fear of retribution.  The old-fashioned punishment of placing people in stocks, cages and other pillories offered just such an opportunity.  Their decline was not marked by a general distaste for anger or brutality - as Ms. Griffin points out, capital punishment even as a public spectacle was quite safe from reproach.  No, the decline had much to do with where it was happening - the market place - where violent crowds were both a matter of threat to the established order and bad for business.

We'd like to think we invented 'haters.'  It has been here all along.  We've simply reinvented the market place, let the same old people rush on in and make what new torments we can devise for ourselves.  It is at least pleasant that we are all so far apart from one another that the market place can go on letting us hate as much as we please.

I've heard a number of older people argue, "There were no haters in my day."  That's dissonance for you.  What that really means is that in their day, hate was organized and largely state-sanctioned. Today's hate is somewhat less directed, somewhat less ordained by the priests of power.  It's personal, from the hip.  Spontaneous. 

Hate is a hard thing to talk about because, yes, while we are all victims of it, we are also all perpetrators.  All innocence is pretense, the disguise behind which our turning minds justify things we dislike, things we think others should dislike, things we judge as lacking on merit and our sacred quest to ensure that lack of merit is understood, vilified and stamped out - as much as we can manage, at least.

I write here not to argue innocence; only to explain what's happening.  We were all raised with an agenda, some of it acquired from our upbringing, some from the media, some from our own experience.  Most especially from the bitter experiences we have had, those experiences where people and forces humiliated us and made us feel less than those around us.  In so many ways, it is the steady battering against our egos that make us envy, resent and despair over things we will never have, things we have but cannot appreciate and things we never wanted but which we're stuck with, forever.  This is what makes us hate, the sense that we are trapped.  Trapped in our limitations, trapped in our distaste, trapped in our company, trapped in our frequent and helpless addictions to things that have ceased to satisfy us.

Yet humiliation is a tricky thing.  It does not only lay us low, it also produces a craving for approval, as we cast about for someone who won't hurt us, who won't hate us, who won't take advantage of our shame and our doubts.  In the deep dark misery of that craving, too often we don't care where that approval comes from . . . and all too often that approval will come from the exact same people and origin as the humiliation itself.  The very friends and family who will take malicious pride in smashing down our character will, in the same instant, reach out with a hand and hoist us out again with condescending tenderness.  Our tormentors and our saviors are so often the same person.

While we, in turn, do the same for others.  Condemn and spare, hate and reprieve, the endless cycle that creates the dependency that returns us again and again to the source.

Hating and humiliating is the steam that drives us, at the same time denying us the will to make our own decisions, encouraging the will to subordinate ourselves to others, subverts our strength to make demands or take a stand and leaves us terrified of abandonment.

We do not need to worry about that.  We have plenty of tormentors for company.

Blemished Frame

Zoe Quinn.

Having written that name, everything I now say is suspect.

Legitimately so.

I have no opinion of any kind on Quinn except those opinions offered by the woman herself on the site linked.  I take her entirely at her word.  That is because her opinion is the only relevant one being put forward by anyone who's name, history and investment in the matter is actually known to me.

I had never heard of Quinn until reading the Cracked article.

Yesterday I wrote a post on the difference between fame that is given by others and fame we give to ourselves.  Those 'others' need not be managers or talent scouts, they need not be publishers or patrons.  'Others' can be a horde of prideful, inventive internet whores desperate for any target that can be identified, aimed at and exploited.  Just as I am doing right now, merely by starting this post with her name, the link and my disgust.

This, for those of you who may not be aware, is the fundamental principle of journalism.  The ideal is to take something that has happened, conveniently so far as your use of it is concerned, determine a few so-called 'facts' that can be twisted to entice the reader or viewer, then exploit the ever-living shit out of it.  The less personal involvement you have with the actual event, the better, for this entitles you to claim an 'unbiased' viewpoint.  See?  I have nothing invested in this particular lurid murder, car-crash, impending war or evidence of bodies strewn over the desert.  I'm disinterested.  Now allow me to tell you what I think.

This ludicrous perception that, once you've chosen to write about something, that you are in some way not tainted by it simply because you don't know the victims personally has sustained journalism for four centuries.  It allows newspaper reporters a semblance of self-respect, even piety, as they shove mics into the faces of hapless persons recently bereft of their family members or as they glory in the downfall of the mighty.

There are still many 'traditional' journalists today who express distress and fear that 'responsible' journalism is dead.  I put these words in quotes because these are totally bullshit words, invented for the purpose of egotistical puffery.  There is a difference between old timey journalism and what we have now.  Newspapers and television exploited pain for money.  The average, ordinary person exploits pain from petulance, priggishness . . . and boredom.

There's no real way for an ordinary, puritanical snob to make money from repeating the phrases or making up shit about viral content.  At best, all one has is their internet connection and the number of facebook friends they've accumulated through hours invested in the creation of interesting spam. Unlike Fox, there's very little advertising money to be made in a few hundred viewers willing to let their eyes glaze over while staring at someone's facebook or google+ page.  It takes the FCC or some other approving government agency before you can get your dick in a knot and be paid for it.  Small-time journalists have to make due with the warm, glowy feeling of seeing the number of likes or +s climb.

Small-minded people in the world have rebuilt the system so that we're all salesmen now - as sickening as that reality is once it's fully realized.  The real plunge, however, comes when you comprehend fully what it is we're all selling:

The certainty that the buyer is just stupid enough to believe we know what we're talking about. Especially when we don't.

Wikipedia Fades to Black

For those who may not know, wikipedia is a lifeline for my world.  I would hate to have to go back to encyclopedias and ordinary websites for my data.

You may also not know that Wikipedia is going to black itself out for the 18th of January.  You can comment on the matter here - I suggest you make your voice heard.  My comment is number 4348.