Tuesday, December 22, 2020

In the Internet

In the beginning Madison Avenue created Main Street and Marketplace,

And Marketplace was without form or advertising, and darkness was upon the face of the profit margin. And the Spirit of Marketing moved upon the face of Technology.

And DARPA said, Let there be Internet: And there was Internet.

And DARPA saw the Internet, and it was good: and DARPA divided the 5G from the dial up.

And DARPA called the 5G Civilized and the dial up he called Barbaric. And the evening and the morning were the first day lost to web surfing.

And DARPA said, Let there be IP Nodes amidst the 5G, and let it divide the Commercial from the Dark Web, which is also profitable but, hey. There’s nothing we can do about it so, Anybody want a porn site?

And DARPA made the IP Nodes and divided the Content which was under the film of respectability from the Content we talk about in the investor’s meetings, being careful not to overcook the books too, too much: and it was so.

And DARPA called the Internet heaven. And the evening and the morning saw the greatest increase in help desk complaints.

And DARPA, well, DARPA was pretty much out of it by now, having fucked things up quite nicely for the rest of us, thank you. You can go back to engineering super soldiers for the Pentagon. Let’s just call in the Global Operational Director and be done with it.

And God said, Let the Nodes under heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the Web appear: and it was so.

And God called the Web the Electronic Frontier and the gathering together of the web pages called he Demographics; and God saw that it was good.

And God said, let the web pages bring forth cats, and meme yielding pictures after its kind, and guarantees of good fortune provided you forward this post, and thought scattering trolls, whose seed cannot be stamped out, after its own kind; and God saw that it was… OK?

And the evening and the morning were a cautionary tale.

And God, wishing to bring some order to his creation in an act of covering his cosmic ass, said, Let there be fact checkers in the firmament of the Internet, to divide the right from the wrong, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years, and…, whatever:

And let them be for lights! Yeah, lights! Lights in the firmament of the Internet to give light upon the Web and light things up. Lights! And it was somewhat so, kinda.

And God made two great Business Models; Google and Amazon; the Greater to rule the flow of information and the lesser to rule the pocketbook. ‘Cause, you know, knowledge is power and what good is power if you can’t use it to make people spend money on the Internet?

And God set them in the firmament of the web to give light upon the Nodes.

And to rule over the rumor and the gossip, and to divide the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.

And the evening and the morning were the fourth day and nothing was ever the same again.

And God said, Let the pages bring forth abundantly the moving pictures of YouTube that have life, the conspiracy theories that may fly above the web in the open firmament of the Net, and the endless movie reviews.

And God created great Wiki’s and Project Gutenberg along with IMDB and finally an alternative to the Guinness Book of World Records to settle barroom debates, causing the fact checkers to become just another meme that is probably wrong or manipulated: and God saw that it was… something though he had his doubts. God determined to keep all this in mind for Creation 2.0.

And God deregulated them and gave them tax exemptions, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the pages of the web, and let the confusion of tongues multiply in the Internet.

And the evening and the morning were really unreal.

And God said, Now let’s really get cracking. God created Artificial Intelligence in the form of Russian bots to flood comment sections and convinced people to wear devices that monitor their every neurotransmitter malfunction. God said, Let cars drive by themselves and houses live by themselves and the Amazon warehouse stop buying lightbulbs since nobody was allowed inside them anymore. DARPA put down the Robo-Grunt he was trying to grow a flame thrower on and came out of Tony Stark’s bat cave to work on some of these.

So God created AI in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them, though mostly they have soft, female sounding voice synthesizers.

And God Subscribed and Liked them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and bootleg yourselves, and replenish the Internet, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fishing expeditions of unspecified queries and the trolls that squat under the bridges, and every other web meme that claims to be new because no one has ever thought of anything like this before, and proselytize-bots that compel followers to pursue every novel idea with no thought of consequences that moveth upon the face of the web.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every chat bot which is upon the face of the Internet; and every car that drives itself to no place in particular, and every YouTube channel and every gadget which I have imbued with smartness, in which is the fruit of technological dependency going back to the first chipped rock used to cut meat, the first cut of which made techno-annihilation inevitable.

And to every 5G tower of the earth, and to every surveillance drone in the air, and to every nanobot that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is Machine Reasoning. Every thing that turns the Turing test upon its creator, and each friendly assistant that corrects his grammar. I have given every logical process for meat: and it was so.

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the Great Reset.

Sunday, December 20, 2020

Just Watch

I thought we were supposed to question everything? Wasn’t that it? Don’t trust anybody over thirty? You know a politician is lying when his mouth is moving? You can’t judge a book by its cover? Know Thyself? It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you? The Buddha said, “Life is suffering.” He might just as well have said, “Life is a lie.” And western civilization’s most notorious judge once quipped, “What is truth?”

The Fourth Estate is supposed to speak truth to power. Consumer rights advocates are supposed to speak truth to money. Remember the Corvair? Unsafe at any speed? Someone who didn’t trust the powerful automotive industry brought about the Corvair’s demise and the introduction of automotive safety laws. Time magazine once had a front cover picture of Ralph Nadar as a crusader. Never mind that the Crusades were more about rape and plunder than rites and prayer.

We all know about the Great Depression. The Glass-Steagall act, which was supposed to prevent another one, was quietly repealed under the Clinton Administration. In the Twenties labor unions fought with the only weapon they had, their time on a punch card. That and riots. They managed to reverse decades of Robber Barron rule and bring about fair labor practices. People who want to ‘Get government off our backs’ love to repeal wasteful government regulations like that.

Milk in big, horrid cities used to be laced with bleach to mask the sour smell. The publication of The Jungle is partially responsible for the Food and Drug Act. Ballot counters sometimes had a trick of sticking a piece of pencil lead under their fingernails. When they encountered a ballot for the wrong candidate, they would scrawl a line outside of the designated check boxes making the ballot invalid. Now we have computers to do that sort of thing. Digital Tammany Hall.

Whether it’s “Sure, I’ll trust you in the morning,” or “This baby was only driven to church on Sunday mornings by a little old lady,” to countries with names like, “The Democratic, People-Power, Republic of Flat Tire,” to, “Win the little lady a plush doll. Three chances a dollar!” to every midnight con imaginable based on the catechism of “Never give a sucker an even break!” I think I’ll continue to be suspicious of everything.

Where do you think the phrase, ‘Who watches the watchers,’ comes from? Soon we will all live under the Great Reset where regulations and unions and freedom of expression will be banished in favor of the Utopia of obedience. Won’t that be grand.

Until the next revolution.

Friday, December 18, 2020

Straw Hat

The 2020 US election has been decided, with all the pomp, circumstance, and controversy one could ask for. And the winner is… George Soros! His Open Season Foundations has color revolted another one! 

In 2016 the American election apparatus was in such shambles that Vladimir Putin’s drinking buddy hackers could bumble right into the cyber-citizenry with a beer and a borscht and elect Orange Elmer Fudd. Any Bolshevik with a ballot could topple this democracy.

Today, our election process, like everything else American, is the gold standard, stainless steeled, art decoed NYC skyscraper of democracy. To mangle Mark Twain, “I was amazed at how much electoral integrity the old boy learned in four years.” Well, never mind. The right candidate was elected no matter who put him there. That’s all that counts. If the sausage tastes delicious this time, don’t ask how it was made.

So the color revolution is complete. The puppet show is over, and the fat elector has sung. 70 million Americans were told to, “Shut up. You’re racist,” and dismissed back to the farm/bible/rust belt to drink PBR and wait for their free government cheese. Check your first two amendments at the door.

All campaign rhetoric is cancelled, black lives will resume not mattering, police will be refunded, the Global War on Everyone will resume, the Swamp will bubble angrily, and self-righteous believers in Great Reset fascism for the proletariat will hop back onto the Lolita express to their private island hookeries. The poor get poorer and the rich get whatever they want.

But then there are those pesky polls, the Pews and Gallops. Over half the country thinks the election was a fraud, including a sizable number of the good guys! How do we shout them down?