Why I hate the internet
=======================

Thursday 30 July 2009 21:53

Based on Jessica's six main categories of
"opportunities for prosperity and pleasure". Or,
"You must be new here? I can't believe you admitted
to working in advertising."


Be fascinated, engrossed, delighted

As long as it's not NSFW. Nice politically correct
compact content that is usually viewed during work
hours by media professionals when waiting for a
download or software update or anything with
coffee. The quality isn't that high that you will
waste your own time watching it, is it? Or when you
come home after a hard day at the plant you'll
relax and watch a couple of hours of stuff like
that? Sure, some of that internet stuff is nicely
done, but the fascination of the internet is more
going on in downloading terabytes of popular full
movies and pr0n through The Pirate Bay or
something. Not some middle of the road PC RT to
show you're in the loop. And even then, if you
professionally need to provide a steady stream of
such content you'll realize soon it's not even
enough to fill prime time with it on a daily basis,
and it stays popular because new generations are
fascinated, engrossed and delighted by it, not
because a single person is fascinated, engrossed
and delighted by it again and again. It's sometimes
good bubblegum, but still bubblegum.


Research/Analyze/Fan

Until one day you get "I must find this out
today!". Then you'll soon notice most of the
information on the internet is useless crap. It's
like that phenomenon where if you see something in
mainstream media that you know a lot about, you'll
notice they get most of it wrong. And you start to
wonder how they will get the subjects you don't
know much about somehow right? And that's usually
in an environment where people can get fired for
being wrong. On the internet nobody cares. It might
be nice to find a non-covered area in the
OpenStreetMap project and fill it, but are you
going to maintain that data? Check it all to see if
something has changed every once in a while?
There's no glory in that, so why bother? Just leave
it to the people who are stupid enough to use the
data and find out it's wrong to update it. When the
internet was new all the information was up to
date, a couple of decades later you're mostly
looking at something that's way past it's sell by
date.


Play/create/remix

Cheap, quick, easy? Even if there are thousands of
movies doing about the same thing on the youtube,
that doesn't mean about a hundred times more people
tried it and failed miserably. A lot of stuff that
might pretend to be done by amateurs is done
professionally, semi-professional, or by media
students who have all the knowledge and resources
to pull it off. And probably in more than one take.
The average internet user doesn't have a chance,
and doesn't have Adobe Premiere skills. And this is
closely linked to the previous chapter. A lot of
tutorials advertise themselves by claiming how easy
something is to achieve, but forget to mention the
background needed to make it easy. And that
background usually is that you'd have to have
written a tutorial on the subject yourself to see
how the tutorial makes it easy. Is there a Howto
for your job? Or is your job the only job in the
world that can't be covered by a Howto?


Express yourself/build identity/curate your
personality

Make stuff up. And most people are bad at making
stuff up. I can't find the quote right now, but it
was something like "I use my real name because I
don't want to reveal to much about myself". I can't
hate somebody for what they are, but I can for what
they made themselves to be. Joe Six-pack will
probably end up with an identity worse than in
reality. It's Google who decides who you are, not
yourself in some profile form. And coming back to
the tutorials, you might find some that explain how
easy it is to fake what you listen to on last.fm.


Make friends/connect

Friends are part of the showcasing of your own
identity! That's the most powerful part! That's how
you build your echo chamber. Connect to people who
share as much as possible and don't bother you with
different views. Friends that you can rely on to
answer every one of your questions with the answer
you'd expect. Friends that understand that deep
down you are in an un-hip rural or suburban
existence, feeling isolated and alone, and
encourage you to go for that spectacular school
shooting. That will show them fucks not to fuck
with Frank Sinatra!


Have your say/Achieve Change

Well, it's like before a match both teams are
praying to have some god let them win. You never
hear the losers complain about that after the
match. And John and Hillary didn't have an active
online community supporting them? How do the
members of those communities feel about achieving
change? About the same as how the people on the
streets of Tehran feel now?


What does this all mean?

Read all the Terms of Service and the legalese of
all the stuff on the internet you are using to see
how liberated you really are. You're not paying for
those services because you are not the customer.
You are the product. You're the piano.

Via mon petit vole.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/dull/2009/07/30/why-i-hate-the-internet/