I work for the internet?
Having been thus far too lazy to properly unfollow the defaults, this was on my dashboard today. Allow me to respond, then, and say: Good for you. I, however, my dear tumblr, do not.
I mean, if you want to be cute, I technically do, and have done so for more than a decade. But being just another neckbeard in the tech sector, the reality is that I work for a paycheck. The internet is a medium. The internet doesn’t care if I eat today, if my heating oil has been delivered or how my day has gone. The internet is an extension of business, and as with the computers that run it, a good portion was largely developed as a function of military application and not a cross-collegiate computer sanctum. Truth. Words on the internet are ultimately illusory, and censorship is just as likely from the media providers as it is from the government. (The irony of a wikpedia link for this reference is not lost on me.) Truly free speech is a constant battle; archives are as likely to disappear as the original source. Never-mind the vagaries of ebooks and the like; Amazon updates pushed out via whispersync can just as easily update a textbook to false facts as new facts.
Ah, but the promise of the internet. Technology will conquer all! Just ask the OLPC project, who plans to drop laptops from helicopters. It makes me positively long for the time when there were actual, professional cynics to the cheerleaders of technology. When everyone’s living hand-to-mouth, it’s much less easier to scorn the bubble, any bubble. Gone is fuckedcompany. Valleywag was since absorbed into the gawker ur-amoeba wholesale, and for reasons too numerous to list here, I mostly swore off the Gawker brand some time ago. That said, this is as good a response as any, in a world devoid of the “why?” needed for the boosters of cyber-triumphalism. It’s positively wallowing in justified snark. The opening in particular should sell it: Lo, white male computer nerds have discovered political injustice!
These companies need to use their lobbyists. True grassroots is the poor man’s methodology, and I suspect most people in the real world have bigger concerns these days.
