(Above and below: xkcd. And more xkcd here).
Reasons to be cheerful part four:
there is always
something to be thankfulfor you would not
think that a cockroach
had much ground
for optimism
but as the fishing season
opens up i grow
more and more
cheerful at the thought
that nobody ever got
the notion of using
cockroaches for bait
Which inevitably brings us to The Punch, Chairman Rupert's gift to the intertubes, and its current righteous campaign against Facebook.
This time it's Michael Lund, who's fast out of the blocks in a bid to descend into absurdity as quickly as possible as he pens What next for Facebook after its nightmare week?
To which any wag might respond, What next for Chairman Rupert's MySpace after its nightmare years?
Lund is determined to prove the Gittins thesis, covered in a previous post on these pages, which is to say that when people get talking about personal responsibility, the only solution is to demand tough action by government. Imagine a nation of 400 million trying to operate with no pro-active policing, preferring self-regulation, he bleats, as if the intertubes is somehow immune from policing.
Lund of course isn't worried about Chairman Rupert and his MySpace cash splash folly, even if he scribbles for The Courier Mail.
He's worried about the whole damn thing, and the answer isn't 42:
It may be time to rethink and rebuild the web from scratch, argues Dr Mark Gregory, an expert in computer engineering at RMIT in Victoria. He says the web was originally built with few security concerns.
“Everything we have been doing since is trying to retrofit security on a thing that doesn’t have security to start with,” he says.
“Everything we have been doing since is trying to retrofit security on a thing that doesn’t have security to start with,” he says.
Was it just coincidence that my google quote of the day came from Bertrand Russell?
This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.
But it did get me thinking. God surely has had humanity in beta format for long enough. Isn't it time for Human 4.0 to land on the scene, with a totally revised operating system, masses of space in the hard drive, and a tremendous set of codecs to imbibe data and programs to make sense of it all?
Surely all the problems of the intertubes would go away if we just re-built humanity from scratch. Not only would all those problems in the virtual world go away, we wouldn't have any problems like organised crime in the real world.
Come to think of it, if we could just get rid of the notion of sex being pleasurable, imagine how much better things would be.
Not content with rebuilding the web from scratch, Lund also hares off down the rabbit hole with Paul Wilson:
Criminologist Paul Wilson, from Bond University, says police should have the same powers to act with abuse on digital networks as they do on any other communication network.
However, he says such powers should be limited only to people who commit a crime.
“If they are notes or something which are unpleasant but not criminal in any way I don’t think you can use the law,’’ he says.
What? You mean I can publish defamatory or offensive material and get away with it? Splendid news. But if I call someone a gherkin in a way which is unpleasant but not criminal, I can't be done over by a plod with a telephone book? Wonders will never cease. Why that almost sounds like the avatars might be influencing real world behaviour.
By golly, they breed deep and insightful commentariat columnists on The Punch.
There's a lot more Lund blather, but very little by way of insight, but rather than just rabbit on in a negative way - though it is tremendous fun if you're facing a manic Monday - I thought it might be worthwhile commending a piece by Charles Petersen In the World of Facebook.
A lot of The New York Review of Books lurks behind its paywall, but this one escapes the cash curtain, and Petersen has a lot of interest to say about Facebook's origins, its ambivalent relationship to its users, and its problems in relation to privacy and the conceit of "friending":
It's true that Facebook can lead to a false sense of connection to faraway friends, since few members post about the true difficulties of their lives. But most of us still know, despite Facebook's abuse of what should be the holiest word in the language, that a News Feed full of constantly updating "friends," like a room full of chattering people, is no substitute for a conversation. Indeed, so much of what has made Facebook worthwhile comes from the site's provisions for both hiding and sharing. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that some things shouldn't be "shared" at all, but rather said, whether through e-mail, instant message, text message, Facebook's own "private message" system, or over the phone, or with a cup of coffee, or beside a pitcher of beer. All of these "technologies," however laconic or verbose, can express an intimacy reserved for one alone.
Okay, that's his last par, but it's offered not so much as a spoiler as a teaser for the rest of the read. You'll find a lot more to chew on than offered up by Lund, who prefers never to rise above the tabloid.
In the meantime, here's a few more archy maxims to mellow out Monday:
hair restorer follow
every dram with some
good standard
depilatory
as a chaser
if you get gloomy just
take an hour off and sit
and think how
much better this world
is than hell
of course it won t cheer
you up much if
you expect to go there
And here's one for all those gherkins who want to fix the Intertubes so it reflects their narrow vision of the world:
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