Paul Sheehan, Guy Rundle, the death of test cricket, and society at large at the hand of the evil intertubes ...

Now where were we? Before the holey days got in the road and ruined everything.

I seem to remember somewhere back in the noughties having a debate with someone from the Centre for Independent Inanities about a general meaning for "lobby", and "lobbying" and "lobbyist", and "rent seeking", as opposed to their cant recent usage amongst right wing lobbyists and rent seekers.

In the end, I was accused of being "angry", the kind of passive aggressive argument my former partner used to deliver with smug satisfaction. Calm down, would come the pious sanctimonious guff, you're just being hysterical.

Well after I picked myself up from laughing at the notion I'd get angry about someone not having a grasp of the English language - so many syntactical and spelling errors, so little time - I wondered if anyone ever wrote about the anger generated by failures in the private sector, which can of course be as bureaucratic as the public. Here's angry:

And here's a bit more angry:

Oh yes, can I take an Uzi to my next breakfast? Or at least to my next conversation with a bank or IT call centre based in India.

Because when people carry on in a blinkered way about public servants, or the failures of government, always with the derogatory term "bureaucrats" as the Orwellian code du jour (no I'm not going to start the new year by throwing a dollar into the "Orwellian" swear jar), I'm reminded that failure just goes with the human condition. I've worked both sides of the street, and the most "bureaucratic" body I worked for was fiercely private sector in its culture, not to mention its corporate structure.

I wonder if they have a tea lady at the Centre for Independent Studies?

Never mind, just another feather display on the pond, but it reminded me that, next to theological blinkers, ideological blinkers are the worse sin. Because people take words and twist their meaning in Orwellian ways to suit themselves (oh heck, here's a buck for the "Orwellian" swear jar), and that's how you end up with lobbyists who put the name "independent" into a right wing think tank dedicated to research that, almost mystically, always ends up with a confirmed and celebrated right wing point of view.

That's independent in much the same way as the Liberal party can think of itself as liberal, while Catholic tastes somehow get confused with catholic tastes. Next thing you know progressive is a word of abuse, until you decide to get around it by calling yourself a progressive conservative, since there's nothing wrong with progress, even if it's an over-rated vice.

I've always been suspicious of those who come from the hard left to the hard right, such as Keith Windschuttle, and vice versa, since the quest for certainty always overwhelms any notion of ambivalence, uncertainty or existential dilemmas regarding the right course. When you're a raving ratbag, there's only one clear course - over the cliff with the other raving ratbags.

Why on earth - in a democracy - would you be anything other than a swinging voter, unless you happen to want tribal certainty, and join in tribal wars, knowing in a resigned way - as the old Irish joke would have it - that no matter who you vote for, the government always gets back in.

Which brings us to the first loons of the new year, as we head into the traumatised teenage years of the new millennium, and sure enough doom and gloom is the leitmotif.

So many choices, so little time. Over at the SMH Paul Sheehan has taken the opportunity to announce the death of test cricket - Willow's whacking: barmy army can't rescue Tests now - which is a new year perennial. The blame of course lies with the internet:

In an era of internet-induced attention deficit distraction, people are less and less inclined to tolerate the 18th century English absurdities of Test cricket, where matches can take five days but even that is often not enough to produce a result. Play is interrupted repeatedly by drinks breaks, lunch and tea. If it rains, the players depart the field.

Or perhaps video games:

Compare such meandering entertainment with the immediate, interactive, hyperactive video games and omnivorous instant communications gratification to which the young are now conditioned.

Sheehan of course is a refined member of the nobility confronted by the pagan infidelities of this sordid modern digital age and their vulgar taste for the merely physical:

Boom! Bash! Crash! That is the future of cricket. Big money, big teams of international mercenaries, and big hits. Lots of big hits. Twenty20 leagues, like the Premier League of football, will be the tip of the cricket apex, not the Test calendar ...

...This rapid evolution of cricket is not being dictated by Cricket Australia, or the World Cricket Committee, but by the public voting with their feet, their wallets and their viewing habits.

They are deserting Test cricket for the hyperactive new version of the game, the version that better suits the modern attention span.

Oh dear, the French revolutionary peasants are revolting, and I bet they also prefer a three minute pop song to a full twelve hours of Wagner.

But it's not just test cricket being undone by the ravaging horde of attention deficit game playing, internet swilling philistines - it's the whole world!

The internet is sundering the social connections we need, shrieks the header for Guy Rundle's column, which might fill you with alarm until you read the author's note in the comments section that the header didn't capture what he meant, not at all.

Instead, based on the humble fact that customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books from Amazon, Rundle arrives at an amazing insight:

We are in the midst of one of the most fundamental technical revolutions in human history and our minds are struggling to come to terms with it, for the simple reason that the sheer scale of the transformation, its impact on all that is familiar, is almost too large to grasp. It is not simply that every text and image in the Western archive is on the way to being instantly and infinitely transferable, it is also that many of the activities hitherto tied to physical existence - everything from shopping to studying to bill-paying - are rapidly changing from something one can do online to something one obviously does online. Whole areas of collective social being are evaporating.

Yep, you see instead of saying that the internet is sundering the social connections we need, the header should have shrieked "whole areas of collective of social being are evaporating".

What to do? Instead of throwing down my trusty tree based, printer's ink newspaper in angst at the future of test cricket. and having an anxiety attack at the way whole areas of collective social being are evaporating, I immediately took to the intertubes to sound the alarums and alert to the world for the need for imminent panic.

Stay alert, but perhaps not alarmed folks. In much the same way as people got agitated about the printing press spelling the end for monks and their elaborately decorated pieces of vellum.

Weirdly, Rundle manages to sound just like Sheehan, though coming from the other side of the mirror:

... For one cannot simply change the very base of a culture - its material form of existence - and assume that it will remain the same, or even that it will not fall into a very big hole.

Oh no, test cricket dead and e-books as Christmas presents. Stop it, it's only the fourth day of the new year and I'm in an existential free fall into a nightmare vision of a world that's falling apart at the seams. Thanks to the intertubes. Or video games.

I'll bet there are some complacent Pollyannas who don't get the immediate cause for alarm, somehow perversely thinking that maybe life in Somalia or Afghanistan provides evidence of more immediate compelling physical problems:

For the Pollyanna technophiles often associated with the free-market right, who never had a clue how society works, the online revolution is something that can simply be added to the top of an eternal and unchanging order which cosmically coincides with the time and place in which they were born. But this is to misunderstand what culture and meaning is, to take for granted that some things will always be there.

Such an excellent set of strawmen, and so nice to learn that the concept of the digital divide has now disappeared from consciousness. Because Rundle is in the grip of the 'golden age' thinking of the conservatives he decries, and it was all so much better way back when the earth was just like Avatar. Like, you know, tribal:

To put it simply, culture and meaning - a sense of shared purpose and belief - depend a great deal on physicality and necessity. When students begin courses in anthropology, they are surprised to learn that a large part of tribal society is focused on ''the gift'' - the complex exchange of objects, reduced in our era to half-hearted shopping trips. In earlier societies, who can and must give what to whom and when is governed by a dizzying series of rules that knit the society together. By contrast, our social life revolves around chosen connections - a source of both liberation and uncertainty.

Ah, it was so much better when I could fling a necklace of seashells at the rellies for Xmas.

And so society cuts loose from a whole series of relationships that once anchored people to place and a social whole. The profound relief at all the crap - cashing cheques, shopping for lawnmower parts - one doesn't have to do is accompanied by a vague melancholy and unease.

Cashing cheques? Lordy, no wonder I'm feeling uneasy and queasy. I can feel the world disappearing beneath my feet into a maze of credit cards:

That doesn't mean that society is about to disappear.

Phew, that's a relief. For a moment there I was thinking society was about to disappear up its own digital fundament. But do go on:

Indeed, the opposite of the Pollyanna technophiles are the moral panic merchants who believe that Facebook is corrupting the traditional virtues of Hotmail.

See, see. He be down wit it. He be cool, he remember hotmail. He talk the lingo, he be techie, he know of what he speaks. But don't think that gives you a get out of jail card, you Spockian Pollyannas. Because it's time to do a little bit of that moral panic merchant stuff:

But it does mean that the question of how we anchor social life - beyond the family, which has become the last redoubt of social connection, loaded with more weight than it can bear - is coming into play as never before.

Cultures that do not think actively about the conditions of their existence, about the connections and practices that sustain, end up being subject to those processes, rather than in control of them. We may want to use the genuinely wonderful new freedoms of e-books and the online revolution to think hard about what holds us together and shapes our lives, because it is all changing, very fast and silently.

Oh dear, everything's falling apart and it's them e-books to blame. Think hard Australia, and think hard now. Your taste for 20 20 cricket and e-books is killing the very society in which you live, like carp have killed the Murray cod.

Silent killers running fast, running deep. And we're not just talking about movies evoking submarine warfare in world war 11. Or the lyrics of an Iron Maiden song:

The lifeboats shattered the hull is torn,

The tar black smell of burning oil,
On the way down to Davy Jones,
Every man for himself - you're on your own
The wolf eyes watch the crosswire
"Stern tubes ready", "Aim and fire!"
They can pin some medal on your chest,
But in two more weeks - dead like the rest.

Sob. Only a few days into the new year, and the intertubes (or video games - strike out which you hate least) are working away killing off the physical world. Just like the submarines of world war two.

No more the thwack of willow on ball, or leather on thigh, or ball on crutch, no more cheques, no more lawnmower parts, just a relentless invisible silent digital killer cruising the virtual world like sharks in pursuit of human flesh.

Oh god, should I end it all now?

Wait, no, better idea. I'll get the Centre for Independent Inanities to do a study - those Pollyannas will surely be able to find a solution ...

What a splendid year it promises to be for loon pond ...

(Below: time to update this poster? Time for a movie about the digital killers running silent, running deep, killing test cricket and the art of gift giving and printed books?)