A final thought

The internet doesn’t really exist – at least not as a distinct culture. It’s just people exchanging thoughts, information, good and services, as we’ve always done. It’s never going to be anything but a perfect mirror of what we are individually and collectively. It’s not going to change us, make us better, more charitable, more honest, more courageous or compassionate. The internet is not “rewiring our brains”. It’s not going to make our lives more exciting or interesting or satisfying. There’s no evidence that it’s made us any happier or unhappier. It’s not going to redefine privacy, or identity, or copyright or ownership.

The internet is not going to do away with national borders or poverty or tyranny or censorship. There was a famous adage which bravely proclaimed that ”the internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it”. But the CEO’s of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft saw censorship as an opportunity and they leapt at it, like a Wall Street banker would leap in front of a subway train if you tossed a dollar bill onto the tracks. It was the “cost of doing business in China”. The internet never has and never will stop the firing of  so much as a single bullet. Ask the residents of Burma, the first national insurrection to have a global online audience of concerned spectators. No new tool or technology is ever going to accomplish revolutionary – or even evolutionary – change  for us because everything we create can only be a projection of our fundamental characters and natures. That’s as inevitable as the laws of thermodynamics. I think it’s going to apply to the artificial entities we create later this century as well.

Our creations may be fascinating and superficially exciting. They may make certain aspects of our lives more convenient, but they’re never going to change who we are  in any meaningful way. We can change our natures, improve ourselves and strive to create a better society. But as always, we still have to do that ourselves. That’s the real meat of science fiction for me – it’s not about technology changing us, it’s about us having the vision to change who and what we are. A future in which every child can read, in which poverty doesn’t exist and no one ever goes to bed cold and hungry, a future of universal equality and opportunity and liberty – THAT is science fiction to me, much more “out there” than a future of warp drives or mind uploads, hyperlongevity or “spiritual machines”.

That future is just as achievable as any technological utopia. But no technology is going to get us there any faster. Not by so much as a single day. I think it’s even dangerous to assign hope in technology to facilitate an evolutionary role for us because that hope ultimately diminishes our sense of personal responsibility in creating a better world- a responsibility we will never be able to escape no matter how far our technology and our ability to “connect” with each other develops.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this blog. If you’re interested you can look me up on Facebook, where I’m spending most of my online time these days. ( Do a search for “Chris Wren, Ajijic”) I’d love to hear from you!

Relax

How to lose in 2012 – and KEEP losing

Defend tax hikes and profligate increases in government spending and power simply because the “other side” is opposed to them and broadly dismiss critics of high taxes as self-interested paleo-conservatives who hate poor people and don’t want the economy to recover (while offering a smattering of insincere “Of course no one likes paying taxes, BUT…” qualifiers.

That should keep your tribe out of power for about the next 20 years – which I assume is the goal, right?

Update: Oh, I almost forgot: make sure to provide your opponents with plenty of long-lasting moral ammunition by making cruel, tasteless jokes about the tragic suicides of wealthy corporate executives.

Hope these help. If you need any more suggestions, you have but to ask!

As a gay man, I’m supposed to hate Amazon now

So I’m going to order a few things from them today.

Boycott

I refuse to read any American news sites or blogs of left or right orientation until the words “Tea Party” have fallen out of usage for at least a year. I don’t expect my little boycott to accomplish anything - beyond preserving my sanity by limiting my exposure to the dumbest fucking issue in the history of  modern culture since the argument over “Freedom Fries”.

Oh, and there’s another solution – but I promise, you’re REALLY not going to like this one…

A non-intervention policy with regard to other cultures. Even when such intervention seems to be humane and charitable and motivated by the best of intentions. At least at the level of the state. If individuals want to help others and fight for causes in other societies, no barriers should stand in their way.

Once again, I warned you. But did you listen? Don’t blame me if you just had to keep reading.

There is a solution, but you’re not going to like it…

Phase corporate and personal income taxes down to a flat 10% rate across the board over a five year period.

See? I told you you weren’t going to like it.

Piracy

In the past, we had a very sensible method for dealing with pirates. We sent them to the bottom of the ocean along with their ships. Is there any reason that wouldn’t work this time around?

Oh, right. It’s not so simple. It’s complicated.

A bad idea on paper

The trouble with the idea of the “global village” is that the world isn’t a village and is never going to be. It’s a huge, diverse, incredibly complex planet. And much as I might wish that it was a better place, not every distant corner of this world is my backyard and I am not in any way obliged to think of it as such. And if I am obliged to treat the whole world as though it’s my personal responsibility, if I don’t have the freedom to choose which parts of the world I care about and which I’m indifferent too, then what does any kind of freedom matter?

Actually, it’s NOT “All Connected”

Media has a vested interest in promoting the idea that everything in the world that happens has the power to affect me directly and shape my world, my destiny, my fate. Like Iceland going bankrupt. I’m still reeling from THAT one.

I mean, I don’t celebrate the bankruptcy of every country in the world the way Jeff Jarvis does a little jig whenever a newspaper closes its doors, but not every sparrow that falls is necessarily my concern. That’s God’s gig, if I remember my Sunday school correctly.

Friday Quickies

Is Google too powerful?  Yes. It’ll eventually broken up into at least 6 smaller companies. Perhaps dozens.

Is Obama a Fascist?   No, you’re just crazy, and a sore loser. You keep threatening to “Go Galt”. So do it. No, really: do it.

Will the financial crisis get worse?  Yes. Much worse. We haven’t even entered the personal credit default stage. We’re going to lose at least one, possibly two major credit card companies.

How long will the financial crisis last?  Impossible to say. Until we stop pretending that the economic model of cheap shit made by wage slaves in China and shipped all over the world in giant tankers for people to buy with credit cards can ever be resurrected – that’s how long.

Is Capitalism doomed?  No. Globalization is doomed. They’re not the same things.

Can we fix climate change? Not in this century, and probably not in the next. We don’t have a FRACTION of the technological prowess or knowhow required to stabilize the world’s climate and maintain it in some permanent  idealized state. Not even close. We have the ability to adapt to climate change, and that’s what we’re going to spend the next 2oo years doing.

Hey I’ve got an idea:

If  you think it’s a great idea to give your work away for free online, go right ahead and do it. And if you don’t like the fact that I want to make money selling MY work, get the fuck out of my face. How’s that work for you?

Are blogs dying/dead?

Oh, probably. Or not. Who cares? Why must we continually ask these sorts of questions? Why are we so obsessively curious about what media other people consume or create?  I think it would be stating the obvious ( this  blog’s particular speciality) to say that young people use social networking tools more than they blog and people who think blogs are the NEXT BIG THING are generally squares my age or older.

And that’s the only aspect that would interest me about the question of whether blogs are dead or not. The irony of a younger generation looking on blogs as “old  media” is just so delicious, it’s heavenly. After a decade of relentless, obnoxious, triumphant crowing from the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Ann Althouse, Jeff Jarvis, Glenn Reynolds and the rest of the “Army of Davids”  brat pack – for them to be seen by generations Y and Z  as old-fashioned and frumpy as bloggers themselves consider newspapers – now THAT’s my definition of sweet!

But really, the entire question is just silly. It takes a particularly banal mind to think that each new development must necessarily displace the thing that came before. In other words, social networking is about as likely to kill off blogs as photography did away with painting. And to Glenn Reynolds and the Army of Davids political blogger crowd – I can assure you, the reason newspapers are having trouble is most certainly not because people are reading YOUR blogs.

“Unwitting New York banks”

Well, we like to assume they’re unwitting at least. But haven’t bankers already proven they’re pretty much morally capable of anything?

All the king’s pundits and all the king’s bloggers…

Remember Watchmen? Remember how for at least six months before the movie came out sites like io9 and Digg among others were nothing but a non-stop deluge of buzz about how it was going to be the most awesome movie in the history of cinema? Then it bellyflopped so badly at the box office the director had to go online and beg – BEG – fans to go see it again the second weekend to get the numbers up.

Then there was the finale of Battlestar, hyped by the same crowd for months as THE television event of the decade. And it ended up pulling in a mere 2.5 million viewers – a pathetic turnout, even in the age of Hulu, Tivo and and DVR.

For once, my point in this post isn’t about the relative quality of Watchmen or Battlestar – it’s that when people talk about how advertising is failing on the internet, it’s not just banner ads they’re talking about. What’s scaring the shit out of a lot of people is that the internet is failing as a viral marketting tool as well. And stealth viral advertising was really the last “ace up the sleeve” of the ad business. Now that we’re immune to it, they’re out of tricks. Not even Matt Drudge, arguably the  net’s most powerful blogger could exert the slighest influence on the US election – not even after a two year concerted campaign of slander and innuendo paid for by the GOP ( You don’t actually think Drudge makes his money from the two or three little banner ads on his page, do you?)

Yes, the internet will always be a useful promotional tool. The upcoming Trek movie has a Facebook page but it’s main purpose is to maintain a heightened level of interest among people who are already fans and were committed to seeing the movie in the first place. But after all the wasted effort that’s recently gone into hyping everything from Watchmen to Sarah Palin, I think that those who fancy themselves the master puppeteers and opinion-makers are finally clueing into the fact that the internet is never going to be the magic hype machine and societal control room they once dreamed it would be.

Two weeks without Battlestar Galactica

God, I’m so glad that show is gone. Scifi can finally become scifi again, and leave the Left Behind/Touched by an Angel shit in the vast unmarked grave of  Televisions self-indulgent wankfests. I’ve spent the last two weeks arguing with people about the relative merits of Ron Moore’s ham-fisted grade 10-level religious melodrama and my mind hasn’t changed. However well the show started off, it ended up being the worst thing to happen to scifi television since The Great Vegetable Rebellion.

The Boy who cried “Revolution!”

Again, I don’t hate Twitter. That would be like saying I hate the yellow pages, or ethernet cables. But having watched 13 years of one internet phenomenon after another be enthusiastically adopted and then hastily discarded, it’s impossible for me to take people seriously when they describe every new thing that comes along as “revolutionary”.

I didn’t take people seriously when they told me that MySpace, Friendster, or Tribes were the greatest things since sliced bread either, and not taking them seriously never did me the slightest amount of harm or left me behind the curve. Because none of those things were even on the curve. Fads are just fads. They’re not milestones in technological progress and I’m sorry to have to tell you that each and every scholarly syllable that’s been written about the significance of Twitter as a transformative social phenomenon has been a tragic waste of time and energy. It’s not my fault that an entire class of intellectuals have arisen whose expertise is talking about people talking. But  that doesn’t oblige me to pretend that they actually have anything meaningful to say.

At this point listening to people blather about how amazing Twitter is and what it means with regard to our evolution as social animals is like listening to someone talk about how microwave ovens are going to turn modern human societies upside down and make national borders and currencies obsolete. If you like using Twitter; if you find it useful, then great. But please, for your own sake, just stop for a moment and try to realize what an idiot you sound like when you talk about it as though it’s something that has even the slighest importance in the grand scheme of things – especially when you and I both know perfectly well that you’ll be raving about something else a year from now.

It’s not Twitter: it’s Twitter USERS

I’ve got nothing against Twitter. I don’t use it, because it seems fairly pointless. But being pointless isn’t enough to make me have a negative opinion about it. Everything’s pointless from some perspective.

What annoys me about Twitter is the fact that all you people who are raving about how awesome it is today will be abandoning it tomorrow, whining about how it’s been “ruined”,  and how cool it USED to be before it got too popular. Just like you’ve done with every other social network you’ve ever been a part of in your endless, desperate, ever-more-frantic quest to stay ahead of the crowd, lacking even the self-awareness to grasp the fact that you ARE THE FUCKING CROWD.

“Makers and Takers”

Every so often power-blogger Andrew Sullivan proves what a total and complete dick he is. And by “every so often” I mean on an almost daily basis. He half-heartedly tries to backpeddle here, but it’s too late. Once the mask slips – as it did when he lately wished that the evil publishing industry would DIE! DIE! DIE! – it never quite fits back on properly again.

Which just goes to show that when it comes to these self-important 21st Century Ellsworth Tooheys, these would-be shapers of public opinion, the best thing is to just let them keep talking. Eventually they reveal themselves for the elitist monsters they really are.

Top two reasons why top ten lists are so popular

1/ Top ten lists appeal to people whose brains suffer from structural/developmental defects that only make it possible for them to process information about the world around them in quantifiable, compartmentalized terms. Without guidelines like “popularity” or “importance” established by authoritative sources, it would be impossible for them to organize information into hierarchies of relevance on their own and the world would just collapse into data noise, leaving them paralyzed.

2/ Top ten lists can be broken up into ten individual pages (11 if you have a lengthy introduction)   forcing the reader to look at 10 times as many ads as they would be exposed to in a single post –  and they also multiply by 10 the amount of metadata/keywords the post generates, improving the site’s overall Google ranking. People also tend to linger for longer periods of time on site entries that are lists, thereby increasing the amount of time they’re exposed to onsite advertising.