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Life in the Empire

Comment by Mark on August 24, 2009 at 4:53am
A friend of mine just wrote, and sent to our local Green Party's public mailing list (you don't have to be a Green to subscribe or post) an excellent article about the Mexican guy who was framed for the murder of Brad Will and who is still in prison. The article explained that Obama is giving the Mexican government a pass on human rights that it doesn't deserve, for political reasons. Reading it, I wondered if there was anyplace on the web he could publish it. At the end, his brief bio stated that he is a contributing writer to MediaLeft.net, a website I help with.

It is unlikely to go any further than that. There is a huge web, but there are very few places that an article based on the morality Weinberger explains, can be posted. And those places get few viewers. My friend is an activist, but the web is not activist-friendly. Like the newspapers, it is dominated by the big money interests who can afford bandwidth, and most of what passes for news on the web favors those same interests.

If my friend's article is posted to a large website, it will get few readers and quickly disappear. If it draws any sympathetic comments, it will be attacked by hordes of astroturfers who are paid to oppose and suppress anything that criticizes the big money interests.

Websites that share Weinbergers' morality based on living in a shared world and caring, like GlobalResearch, often do not allow reader comments so as not to have to deal with mobs of regressive trolls and disinfo agents.

The websites that get the most hits are still the porn sites, and they really don't care if they live in a world that is 50% women, how those women see the world, or what they might be feeling. The rocking chair on the dog's tail is semantically apt, because when it's a piece of tail that patriarchy is after, you can yelp all you want and they couldn't care less.

I see the web as fundamentally amoral and immoral. Not just because every computer contains coltan and other minerals that can only be obtained through genocide, but also because it is not the level playing field that it theoretically could be. I've lost track of how many "free speech" websites I've been banned from, so I know that the web is of no more use in speaking truth to power than more traditional media.

Weinberger's point about links being the new punctuation is correct. I've often posted something ostensibly innocuous so that I could insert a subversive link. But in a cyber-utopia, one wouldn't have to resort to guerrilla tactics in order to express one's concern about others with whom we share the world.

This clip brings back a vague memory of Bill Gates trying to give a power-point presentation to a large audience and having his laptop crash. Yup, three times.

While nukes may be immoral, some of us don't see western pharmaceutical based medicine as being any better. The internet had a lot of potential. But since the advent of the web, there has been increased poverty, more war, and less stability than previously. It may be technology's greatest underachiever.
Comment by pan on August 24, 2009 at 7:50am
There is something interesting about the fact that this lecture, that focuses on links, is delivered in a linear, non-interactive fashion (and, of course, his technical difficulties in accessing his linked slides just accents the paradox).

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