3 thoughts on “an important essay about the internet”
Ah, I could agree WAY more. By the end of that article I’m fuming over here. Here’s why:
The guy starts off well; I’m scared of internet privitization, too, and he points out a lot of good reasons for me to be even more scared. But in the middle of my righteous outrage at this VeriSign hi-jacking and re-centralization of a de-centralized system, I suddenly find that I’m in the middle of a fucking political advertisement. And that pisses me off. (No reflection on the messenger, of course.)
By the end the guy’s sounding like my favorite monkey, GW. “It’s a binary choice,” he says. So we’re either with him or against him. Sounds pretty familiar. And the implication is that if I don’t want to support Dean, I’m drinking beer in a bar while the Nazis/Redcoats/McCarthys run rampant over innocents.
The guy doesn’t bother to back up this argument that there’s only one candidate who would want a free internet. In fact he doesn’t really offer any validation at all for these claims that the way to keep the internet from privitization is through support of the Dean campaign and through, in fact, donation of money to a sub-site at Dean’s site. What’s this money going to be used for?
Just pisses me off, is what I’m saying. That page feels like a bait-and-switch.
All I really know about Dean is that there’s an internet buzz of some sort surrounding him, and he comes off as a bit of a dip in debates… or at least the only one I saw him in, which was yesterday. He didn’t come across there as someone who stands a chance in hell of winning a Presidential election; then again I’m pretty much clueless about what it takes to get elected, and I still don’t get how GW strikes anyone as being anything but a dumbass.
I’m sitting here open to persuasion… I’d love to believe that there’s a candidate who’s worth supporting. But if Dean’s attitude is being reflected by this article, and he’s got a with-us-or-against-us attitude about things that obviously aren’t that clear cut, then I don’t think he’s it.
sorry for the irritation, i. perhaps i should have labelled it: POLITICAL AD. except that it wasn’t. well, not a PAID one, anyway.
la, anyway. let me try to explain why i posted this link. (like to keep my 1 of 2 visitors happy… ; ) (and full disclosure: i like this dean guy and even gave him some of my filthy lucre)
i happen to like the internet and i happen to think the internet is pretty groovy now and not as some kind of set of walled off gardens. (i’ve been a little peeved by the verisign hijacking of the .com .net domains… i don’t really like it that when someone mistypes my website dealy, they get bumped to a verisign webpage! ick!) i also don’t really think that “politicians” or “talking heads” or even “corporate greyhairs” or what have you, get it. about the internet or even technology at all. i think they’re old and fuddyduddys and just don’t get out much, mostly. and they mostly think of the internet as the same old same old with pretty new packaging for selling their stuff.
case in point: the politicos are all about extending the internet tax moratorium (sell sell buy buy!), but look at what happened to internet radio? (ah! we don’t understand! filthy pirates!) pretty much got smacked down. like: the biggest problem that most musicians have is NOT that their music is getting COPIED, but that no has HEARD OF THEM or THEIR MUSIC. and don’t even get me started on electronic voting machines, which aren’t even something as complicated as the idea of the internet!
so: do i want politicians to start thinking and talking about the internet? yes. do i think that our current president couldn’t email himself out of a paper bag? also yes. do i think that the measure of a candidate is not so much the 30/60 second soundbite they can get out in a debate, but the actual METHODOLOGY being used to run their campaign? yes yes yes.
do i think that the most important thing about the internet is the way it allows people from all over the frigging place to chat with each other and to SELF-ORGANIZE if they want to? YES!
and, so, i think that dean is running the kind of campaign which understands that the internet isn’t television made new, but something with the potential for something really groovy to come out of it, unless some shortsighted mugwumps decide to hijack the thing. basically, there’s a lot of that groovy self-organizing going on over there.
and so, i, I’m not trying to sell you on this candidate (does it seem like that?) but I am trying to explain my reasoning behind posting this link. (all of which i should have posted initially, probably, but i was too lazy…)
First off, you needn’t apologize to me for the link — I’m glad I went there and read it, because this anger-thing doesn’t often come up, for me, in reaction to things that are actually maybe important. Usually I’m angry about OfficeMax idiots or bad drivers. I was mad at the guy who wrote the thing about dean and all that, not at you. I think the guy that wrote that should: 1. indicate from the start that it’s an article about raising money for a cause, not an informational article, and 2. put a place for comments on the thing so I can yell at him, instead of over here.
I agree with pretty much everything you’ve posted in your response here. I am angry at the idea that the internet might be hijacked. I’m freakin’ pissed off at the thing VeriSign did (you can see my current SquubLog thing about that,) and I’d love to do what I can to make sure this big mess of a beautiful ugly interweb thing stays free and easy. But I’ve still got no idea what Dean would do to respond to this threat.
Disclaimer (maybe I’ve said it before): I don’t know much about this guy, nor about any of the Democratic hopefuls. Possibly Dean IS the only candidate who won’t let the internet be co-opted by the wolves. If this is true, and if it’s true that Dean would, if elected, actually be able to do anything to stop bad things from happening on this front, then I’d be pretty excited about him. But nothing from the article in question gave me any understanding of what kind of plans Dean might have for this thing.
In fact “this thing” is a weirdly vague thing. That’s a problem. The problem the internet’s facing is vague. It’s sort of in my head now like we’re talking about the war on terror. It’s the war on privitization of the internet; but who’s it being fought against? How do we fight it? Dropping some money into a Presidential campaign doesn’t give me any sort of feeling of, “oh, I helped!”
I’m obviously rambling. This whole thing has very definitely got my ears perked up, and so I’m going to read a lot about this guy, and some of the others, now. So that’s one good thing. Primarily I want to know more about what can actually be done about this problem so i can spin my wheels in that direction.
My comment about my not thinking Dean could win based on what I saw of the debates, which may have prompted you to comment on the measure of a candidate being more about his methodology than soundbites, was only meant to indicate this: I don’t think he can win. I’m not saying I don’t think he can win because he SHOULDN’T, or because he doesn’t have a lot of good ideas (which, like I’ve said, i don’t really know about right now.) I’m saying I think the majority of this country’s voters are apparently dim-wits who DO think the measure of a candidate can come from soundbites. Maybe these people can only digest that much info. MAYBE the problem is the maddening pessimists like me who don’t vote, for frustrating reasons. I don’t know; I’m just making an off-hand prediction that someone “like him” won’t win the damned election, won’t be able to get the party’s nomination, let alone beat Dubya.
Ah, I could agree WAY more. By the end of that article I’m fuming over here. Here’s why:
The guy starts off well; I’m scared of internet privitization, too, and he points out a lot of good reasons for me to be even more scared. But in the middle of my righteous outrage at this VeriSign hi-jacking and re-centralization of a de-centralized system, I suddenly find that I’m in the middle of a fucking political advertisement. And that pisses me off. (No reflection on the messenger, of course.)
By the end the guy’s sounding like my favorite monkey, GW. “It’s a binary choice,” he says. So we’re either with him or against him. Sounds pretty familiar. And the implication is that if I don’t want to support Dean, I’m drinking beer in a bar while the Nazis/Redcoats/McCarthys run rampant over innocents.
The guy doesn’t bother to back up this argument that there’s only one candidate who would want a free internet. In fact he doesn’t really offer any validation at all for these claims that the way to keep the internet from privitization is through support of the Dean campaign and through, in fact, donation of money to a sub-site at Dean’s site. What’s this money going to be used for?
Just pisses me off, is what I’m saying. That page feels like a bait-and-switch.
All I really know about Dean is that there’s an internet buzz of some sort surrounding him, and he comes off as a bit of a dip in debates… or at least the only one I saw him in, which was yesterday. He didn’t come across there as someone who stands a chance in hell of winning a Presidential election; then again I’m pretty much clueless about what it takes to get elected, and I still don’t get how GW strikes anyone as being anything but a dumbass.
I’m sitting here open to persuasion… I’d love to believe that there’s a candidate who’s worth supporting. But if Dean’s attitude is being reflected by this article, and he’s got a with-us-or-against-us attitude about things that obviously aren’t that clear cut, then I don’t think he’s it.
sorry for the irritation, i.
perhaps i should have labelled it: POLITICAL AD.
except that it wasn’t.
well, not a PAID one, anyway.
la, anyway. let me try to explain why i posted this link. (like to keep my 1 of 2 visitors happy… ; ) (and full disclosure: i like this dean guy and even gave him some of my filthy lucre)
i happen to like the internet and i happen to think the internet is pretty groovy now and not as some kind of set of walled off gardens. (i’ve been a little peeved by the verisign hijacking of the .com .net domains… i don’t really like it that when someone mistypes my website dealy, they get bumped to a verisign webpage! ick!) i also don’t really think that “politicians” or “talking heads” or even “corporate greyhairs” or what have you, get it. about the internet or even technology at all. i think they’re old and fuddyduddys and just don’t get out much, mostly. and they mostly think of the internet as the same old same old with pretty new packaging for selling their stuff.
case in point: the politicos are all about extending the internet tax moratorium (sell sell buy buy!), but look at what happened to internet radio? (ah! we don’t understand! filthy pirates!) pretty much got smacked down. like: the biggest problem that most musicians have is NOT that their music is getting COPIED, but that no has HEARD OF THEM or THEIR MUSIC. and don’t even get me started on electronic voting machines, which aren’t even something as complicated as the idea of the internet!
so: do i want politicians to start thinking and talking about the internet? yes. do i think that our current president couldn’t email himself out of a paper bag? also yes. do i think that the measure of a candidate is not so much the 30/60 second soundbite they can get out in a debate, but the actual METHODOLOGY being used to run their campaign? yes yes yes.
do i think that the most important thing about the internet is the way it allows people from all over the frigging place to chat with each other and to SELF-ORGANIZE if they want to? YES!
and, so, i think that dean is running the kind of campaign which understands that the internet isn’t television made new, but something with the potential for something really groovy to come out of it, unless some shortsighted mugwumps decide to hijack the thing. basically, there’s a lot of that groovy self-organizing going on over there.
and so, i, I’m not trying to sell you on this candidate (does it seem like that?) but I am trying to explain my reasoning behind posting this link. (all of which i should have posted initially, probably, but i was too lazy…)
First off, you needn’t apologize to me for the link — I’m glad I went there and read it, because this anger-thing doesn’t often come up, for me, in reaction to things that are actually maybe important. Usually I’m angry about OfficeMax idiots or bad drivers. I was mad at the guy who wrote the thing about dean and all that, not at you. I think the guy that wrote that should: 1. indicate from the start that it’s an article about raising money for a cause, not an informational article, and 2. put a place for comments on the thing so I can yell at him, instead of over here.
I agree with pretty much everything you’ve posted in your response here. I am angry at the idea that the internet might be hijacked. I’m freakin’ pissed off at the thing VeriSign did (you can see my current SquubLog thing about that,) and I’d love to do what I can to make sure this big mess of a beautiful ugly interweb thing stays free and easy. But I’ve still got no idea what Dean would do to respond to this threat.
Disclaimer (maybe I’ve said it before): I don’t know much about this guy, nor about any of the Democratic hopefuls. Possibly Dean IS the only candidate who won’t let the internet be co-opted by the wolves. If this is true, and if it’s true that Dean would, if elected, actually be able to do anything to stop bad things from happening on this front, then I’d be pretty excited about him. But nothing from the article in question gave me any understanding of what kind of plans Dean might have for this thing.
In fact “this thing” is a weirdly vague thing. That’s a problem. The problem the internet’s facing is vague. It’s sort of in my head now like we’re talking about the war on terror. It’s the war on privitization of the internet; but who’s it being fought against? How do we fight it? Dropping some money into a Presidential campaign doesn’t give me any sort of feeling of, “oh, I helped!”
I’m obviously rambling. This whole thing has very definitely got my ears perked up, and so I’m going to read a lot about this guy, and some of the others, now. So that’s one good thing. Primarily I want to know more about what can actually be done about this problem so i can spin my wheels in that direction.
My comment about my not thinking Dean could win based on what I saw of the debates, which may have prompted you to comment on the measure of a candidate being more about his methodology than soundbites, was only meant to indicate this: I don’t think he can win. I’m not saying I don’t think he can win because he SHOULDN’T, or because he doesn’t have a lot of good ideas (which, like I’ve said, i don’t really know about right now.) I’m saying I think the majority of this country’s voters are apparently dim-wits who DO think the measure of a candidate can come from soundbites. Maybe these people can only digest that much info. MAYBE the problem is the maddening pessimists like me who don’t vote, for frustrating reasons. I don’t know; I’m just making an off-hand prediction that someone “like him” won’t win the damned election, won’t be able to get the party’s nomination, let alone beat Dubya.