Tag Archives: Internet

The Future of America is in its Past

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In case you haven’t noticed it lately, America has stagnated and isn’t really moving forward anymore. I know most people don’t want to face that possibility, and most people reading this (which means anyone aside from my stuffed animals and imaginary friends) will probably just ignore it and hope for the best. Unfortunately, we’re a bit beyond that option, and even though most people will attempt to embrace that plan, we’re kind of screwed if we do.

You see, according to Tyler Cowen’s thesis, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, we’ve pretty much exhausted all of our free ranges for expansion and exploration, leaving us with pretty much nothing but what we already have. And America was never designed around resting on its laurels; it was designed to expand and develop out, something it can’t do if there’s nowhere else left to go. Now that we’ve entered this inevitable recession, we’re hitting a point where we start to realize that there’s nowhere else for us to go, and that all of those jobs that we expect to come back might just not, and thus, we’re going to have to figure out how to make lemonaide out of already eaten apples. Yeah, I’ve run out of metaphors, similes and allusions. I’m a lot like my country.

Americans live in a system that promises that anyone can do wonders with little as long as that someone is willing to put forth a bit of elbow grease. Unfortunately, that’s kind of a lie, something we’ve been telling each other for generations, even though the lie relied on a lot of extra room to grow that we figured would always be there for expansion. Once that land started running out and the resources as well, we felt we could keep telling the stories long enough to pull a bait and switch, figuring no one would live long enough to really ask any important questions, at least not before we retired and/or died first. Well, we’ve reached the saturation point of that possibility, so now we’re kind of stuck in a future that relies on the lies of the past never being called, like markers in a poker game where we’ve been holding two aces, hoping its the best hand in the game, even though someone else may have had three twos showing all along. Yeah, more bad analogies, metaphors and similies. I’m just full of it today. Or them. Whatever.

Which leaves me with an observation that is probably important because we’re now hitting a point where we’ve already been called on our bluff. Everyone wants to see the hands of the cards we played, and all of the money is already on the table. Man, I’m just going to push this bad analogy all the way to the bank.

So what do we do? We’re in the middle of the unending recession, and we’ve been pushing forward with the belief that it had to end eventually because that’s what recessions tend to do. But if our economy doesn’t really have the power to pull us out of the doldrums, then where do we go from there? What if the recession we’re in happens to be the harbinger of doom that we should have been expecting from the beginning? What if all we have left is that Pandoran conclusion and hope just isn’t enough? Where does a rapidly expanding nation go if there’s no more room within which it can expand?

Part of the solution was the possibility of an untapped area of manifest destiny that offered a never-ending canvas for exploration. By that, I mean the Internet and the ever-expanding territory of a cyber universe. Unfortunately, even that has its limits, as we’ve realized that eventually everything explored in that world has to have some ties to the old world as well. While it might be fascinating to think one could live within a cyberworld, in reality, one still has to maintain a certain existence within normal society, even if to fulfill certain Maslowian needs. Forever expansion means little if someone still has to eat, drink and sleep in normal civilization. The days of Matrix-like exixtence are not yet achievable, so we’re still stuck with having to full basic, simple needs.

Which leaves us with having to find ourselves new frontiers in a walled garden of our own civilizations. The United States could offer endless expansion in the days of praries that went on forever, but once we hit the Pacific Ocean, we started to limit our ability to travel further. Now, everything has been spoken for, so any further expansion comes at a step backwards, a sort of inward despansion, for lack of better word. Much as cell growth is halted and the cells begin to collapse within themselves, feeding off one cell to sustain another, our future is now a tendency to cave in on our progress and trade resources amongst our already established infrastructure as we consolidate and seek to find new frontiers within those already explored. Our future expansion then becomes within, rather than out, mainly because we are without.

If we’re going to survive this change in perspective, we need to realize that we can no longer cannibalize upon outside resources to which we no longer have access. For territory, we must look at that which we already control. For fuel, we can no longer just take from nations that have weak military forces as the world is becoming savvy to that approach and compensating to it as well. We are going to have to consolidate amongst our own people to determine new ways to fuel our movement by either designing new technologies that allow us to use our own resources or to lessen our movement. The simple endothermic physics involved should go without saying, but we’re often not that intelligent when it comes to such matters.

If we’re ever going to figure out our future, we need to look to the rest of the world and see how it has compensated for our future situation already. When Europe ran out of space, it sent colonists to the new world to explore. We are a result of just that. However, when we rebelled and declared ourselves independent, we cut off an avenue of expansion for Europeans, and thus, forced them to realize that their expansion was forever finished, that they would have to learn to live with what they already had. We didn’t think about their reactions or thoughts because we were too busy thinking about how unique we were in comparison to the rest of the world. But in reality, all we were was lucky enough to still have room to grow. Now, we don’t.

So, our future should very much be the same future that was faced by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries. When they ran out of space to explore, they consolidated. They began to move back over themselves and create from within. They didn’t just stagnate and disappear as we seem to think will happen to us if we stop expanding and growing. If we’re smart, and sometimes we can be, we would realize that we need to start looking to our future by examining what others like us did in the past. If not, we’re going to continue to try to expand as Germany tried to do in the 1930s, before the rest of the world rose up and stopped them. We might not see ourselves in this light, but if we believe that our expansion is never-ending, and we see ourselves as exceptional to other nations, it’s hard not to see us moving that way. That’s never a good thing.

Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will really listen, and we’ll go that direction regardless of any common sense or rational thinking. American exceptionalism relies on the very nature of believing in irrational outcomes to rational thinking. Think of it as a game theory where the result is an expectation of the highest payoff with the least possible chance of happening, but expecting it nonetheless. That’s kind of where we are today. I’d say more but American Idol is coming on soon, and we all know what’s more important.

Is it Possible for a Freelance Writer to Make it Today?

Writing, , , , , , , , , , ,

This is one of those questions that has been going through my head lately. I’m one of those enigmas of writers who has written a lot of stuff, yet never really managed to break into a writing career. At one point, I had a good start, and then I just stopped, giving up writing, before realizing what a mistake I made. And then I realized I wanted it back more than anything. But I did it at the strangest time, when the Internet was just coming around, and suddenly the old way of doing things was no longer the way things were done. Now, I’m an overwritten writer who has pretty much nothing of a writing career, realizing that I’m probably never going to have one.

So, like most struggling writers, I tried to do the whole e-book thing, and I’m averaging about $25 every three months of sales. Not exactly the illustrious career to get one away from one’s normal day job. And when one has all desires to be a full-time writer, that gets extremely frustrating.

So I find myself wondering if there’s really a future for an unpublished writer who doesn’t just get lucky or happen to be in the right writing school at the right time. Again, being lucky.

I put my book of poetry on Amazon, and it’s done absolutely no sales. I’m not a salesperson, so I really don’t have the ability to figure out what one has to do to interest anyone in buying one’s writing. So the only other option is to just release all of my writing for free, which then still leaves me with the realization that that probably doesn’t make a difference either. People are less willing to read your stuff for free than they are if they actually went to buy it. Sadly, that’s kind of true. They find it has less value if you tried to give it away, so even if it was Hemingway trying to get bullfighters to read his latest book, it wouldn’t make a difference because the stigma is already there because of the whole free thing.

Which leaves me with the wonder if I should just give it all up. My career is going nowhere, and I honestly don’t anticipate it going anywhere in the near future. The only reason I haven’t given it up already is because I really don’t have anything else in the wings to replace it. My job isn’t going to make me happy. Watching TV isn’t going to give me any satisfaction in life. I don’t date and probably couldn’t recognize a woman if I ever saw one (as it’s been so long). Which leaves me with something I’ve been talking about for some time now. Nothing. Writing was pretty much it. And without it, I’m not sure I really have a reason for sticking around anymore. I mean, what’s the point?

Is There a Cure for Spam?

Economics, Politics, Social Networking, , , , ,

Years ago, when the World Wide Web was still a few years away, one of the hottest communication tools available was a thing called Usenet. Sadly, some people may not know much about it, know it only from its current, sorry state, or had experienced it and fondly think of all of the potential that was destroyed. It was the forerunner of message boards, in that everyone connected to the Internet was able to go to a non-graphical environment and communicate messages with each other on various topics. There were different boards set up that ranged from soc.tennis (social networking about tennis) to alt.sex.bondage (alternative sex about bondage). Yeah, at one point there was a message board for practically everything out there. And it was showing us that the future of the Internet was going to be place where everyone could discuss things, and the alienation of one’s own desires and habits was no longer going to be a problem in the future.

This worked for several years, and it was a lot of fun talking, arguing, flaming and networking with so many people across the planet that you would never get a chance to meet any other way. The global community was finally upon us.

And then something ugly happened. People trying to sell things, mainly scams, realized that this was a far better (and cheaper) process than sending out letters to people at 23 cents a pop (the price of a letter back then, or at least somewhere back then in the past). Quickly, they started sending out hundreds, and then thousands, of messages to these message boards on Usenet to the point of where people could no longer read the actual messages because there was nothing but spam. The more popular boards were destroyed almost overnight. No one could write there anymore because it was nothing but spam.

So people started moving to moderated boards. But they found ways to start spamming those as well.

This was during the time that the Internet was making its transition from word text to a World Wide Web, and unfortunately we didn’t do anything about the spammers during this period, so they moved along with us. Realizing they could do the same thing with email, they practically have destroyed the very concept of email today, much like they did with Usenet.

Spam is starting to destroy the next frontier of the net as well. I have a blog on my own web site that I maintain. Every day, it receives hundreds of spam comments on every post that I write. I have to catch every message that comes through by a spam filter that makes it really hard for me to even try to read through messages for approving. I do it, and it takes time, but the spammers don’t care that they’re sending fake message in hopes of getting me to advertise their crap for free through my posts and messages. Oh, they think they’re intelligent by writing little comments like: “I really loved your post about a generic topic that I care a lot about, but perhaps your readers should check out my pictures of girls with tits for more information” and they’ll include a link to, yes, pictures of girls with tits (which will most likely lead anyone stupid enough to go there to a site that is designed to try to take over your computer).

Recently, I started posting a lot of my writing on several different mainstream sites that allow you to maintain blogs. A good example is Open Salon (where I’ll probably be posting this as well). Unfortunately, you can’t post a story or article on the site without being innundated with spammers trying to sell crap. The moderators try to do something about it, but they’re overwhelmed, much like the Usenet people were, so the spammers are probably going to win. Eventually, the site will either do something seriously draconian to cut down on spam, or the site will become overwhelmed and people will stop visiting there, causing Open Salon to eventually just close up shop cause it won’t be worth the effort for the eventual non-payoff.

So, what can we do? It doesn’t seem that there’s any way to stem this tide of shit that comes from some really sinister people who don’t care that they’re doing everything to destroy the potential marketplace of ideas by turning it into the marketplace of crap. What’s even of more concern to me is that I don’t think anyone even has the problem in their cross hairs, thinking that eventually the problem will go away, or something better will come along that makes it no longer a problem.

That’s the problem. That’s what we did in Usenet. Those of us trying to fight it were ignored, and then everyone eventually just left, thinking that it wasn’t worth their time. Instead of fighting back, they cave in and lose the very foundation of what brought them there in the first place.

Is that what’s going to continue to happen? Are we going to lose every great thing on the net because some really stupid thinking people feel it is their right to destroy whatever comes along? Why isn’t this a much bigger issue for people? It affects so many people, yet no one seems to give it any real attention. And those that do are completely ignored.

What more must we give up before people finally say enough is enough?

Is Craigslist Really the Enemy They Claim It Is?

Politics, Religion, Social Networking, , , , , , ,

Craigslist recently announced that it is going to be suppressing its listings for sex ads. Instead of the adult listing, it now shows up as “censored” on their site. Public interest groups are now high-fiving themselves because they seem to have won some sort of Quixotic victory that they believe has somehow made things better. Others, of course, still say that it’s not enough and want pretty much the universe when it comes to compliance. I thought it would be interesting to examine this and see what’s really going on.

First off, let’s look at the original problem. Craig Newmark started Craigslist back in 1995 in San Francisco. The idea was to give people a one stop marketplace where they could take care of their every need. You could find an apartment, get a job, sell that old TV you could never get rid of, and yes, even hook up with a potential partner, if that should be your current desire. Not surprisingly, that latter option has opened up all sorts of controversial issues with the online distributor of trade.

In 2002, according to Wikipedia, because of complaints, Craigslist started adding warnings to some of their personal ad areas, such as “men seeking men”, “casual encounters”, “rants and raves”, and “erotic services”. Already, these areas were causing problems with the mainstream segments of the population.

From this point forward, Craigslist has been on the attentions of quite a few public interst groups, and not surprisingly, law enforcement officials.

Up until this time, erotic services were pretty much an entity you had to search through some pretty creative methods, often involving a lot of bait and switch circumstances that one had to navigate solely on the hope that the next time would be better than the last time. Massage parlours were often a place men would go to seek prostitution, and after a lot of false leads and deception, it was not unusual for a man to pay hundreds of dollars to receive absolutely no desired experiences. Some got lucky, but most didn’t, and it was quite often a very discouraging experience.

The Internet was supposed to change all of that. At one’s fingertips was now immediate access to all sorts of information. Craigslist jumped into the game, and people were now following want ads for what they were seeking, and in conjunction with a lot of other erotic services on the Internet, people were actually finding what they were seeking. It was not unusual to see someone’s want ad on Craigslist, then check out the profile on one of the other erotic feedback sites, and then decide whether or not to book a session with that person. Very hard to find erotic services were now being much easier to find because they could now be found on Craigslist. Many people may not realize it, but there are a lot of people out there looking for some very specific types of encounters, and having everything in one place made it much easier for these people to connect.

Well, this didn’t bode well for the industy when there were people who would do everything possible to make sure that such people could never make any such connection. But this probably wouldn’t have been that much of a problem if another entity did not show up, which made things even worse. I’m talking about the scammer.

People may not realize it, but the entity of the scammer has pretty much destroyed every good thing that has ever come across on the Internet. Porn didn’t hurt the Internet, as the fuddy duddies would like you think it did (it actually served to fuel the Internet in its infancy, which is somewhat ironic if you think about it). Scammers did. Most of your email is now pretty much worthless because scammers found out they could profit off of naive people. You are required to buy special software to protect your computer because scammers discovered they could infect your computer just by hosting evil programs on sites where you wouldn’t expect them to be. Ebay used to be a great place to buy things; scammers and thieves put a wrench in the trust factor of that entity. So it is not that much of a surprise that scammers showed up and pretty much destroyed Craigslist.

Some of the biggest crimes that have rallied people against Craigslist have been people who have been cheating other people on the Internet. Call them scammers. Call them thieves. Call them the mob. Or whatever, but it’s this group of people who have caused all of the problems that have made Craigslist the cesspool that it can often be.

Because face it. Women being prostitutes has never caused all that much of a problem, unless you’re Tiger Woods. But people forcing women into prostitution has. Child predators looking for children for sex causes problems. Again, those same people are the ones that make this sort of thing available. These people are criminals who care little for the activity but everything for exploitation and making a quick buck. Unfortunately, they serve to diminish an activity that others might be providing in a more positive way, and unfortunately, there’s often very little way to separate the two.

There are a lot of honest people who are into the sex business who aren’t trying to steal from other people or to hurt other people. They easily get pushed aside whenever the bad class of people show up, and unfortunately that bad class shows up way too quickly and way too often.

All of the issues that have caused public interest against Craigslist have come from these bad elements of our societies. No one rallies around a leader seeking to stop prostitution. But everyone rallies around anyone seeking to stop child exploitation and people who wish to develop nonconsensual slavery circumstances.

This is the problem that Craigslist has fallen into because the owners of that site really didn’t care who was posting on the site. They were more interested in developing a site that brought in money. I can’t see that I blame them, but because of this, they have become the victim of their own success. With great success comes great responsibility, to steal and destroy a great line from Spiderman, and unfortunately Craigslist hasn’t really come up to the plate for the responsibility thing. It played a lot of shell games in hopes of getting people to think it was on the right side of morality, but when it came down to it, it was really only thinking of itself. When the public finally started to become a hammer to be used against them, they censored themselves and then tried to act all First Amendmentish and posted “censored” where they censored themselves.

The fact is: They could have dealt with this a lot easier by actually policing their ads in the beginning to see how much exploitation was going on. Instead, they dropped the ball and lost the whole game. But for lack of stupid analogies, I’ll take this one step further and say that they haven’t lost the whole season yet. They can still do something about cleaning up their site without destroying what they set out to do in the first place.

There are a lot of sex workers who do rely on Craigslist, and unfortunately because of this action, they are forced to start using more exploitive sites out there that are much worse, and that’s sad. Craigslist could step back up to the plate and decide where it wants to be in this debate. It can kowtow to the Bible thumpers and give in completely, like it’s doing right now, or it can bite back and work hand in hand with the communities that have grown up with them, making sure that the evil ones are ostracized, but the ones who are there for the right reasons still have a forum in which to do what they do best.

Unfortunately, it looks like Craigslist may take the easier road because it is filled with fewer obstacles. In the end, it may be a road that leads nowhere.

Facebook Is Lawsuit Happy & Trying to Rule the World

Social Networking, , , , ,

Eventually it had to happen. A company becomes so powerful that it decides it pretty much owns the world. Just the other day, a teaching company attempted to file a trademark for the name Teachbook, which pointed to its online identity as a company that provides lesson plans and other teaching related materials to teachers. Well, of course, this was obviously a ploy designed to steal the identity of Facebook, because they turned around and sued them, stating that

“If others could freely use ‘generic plus BOOK’ marks for online networking services targeted to that particular generic category of individuals, the suffix BOOK could become a generic term for ‘online community/networking services’ or ‘social networking services.”

This can loosely be translated to: “We use the word book in our name, so we own it forever and ever, and we’ll sue the crap out of you if you think otherwise.”

Not surprisingly, we visited this topic a short time ago with the brilliant mind of Paris Hilton, when she trademarked the phrase: “That’s so hot” or something as stupid as that, indicating that the phrase was never popular until she came along. As if.

But Facebook is doing something much more dangerous because it’s attempting to pretty much shut down the use or specific words that have any similarity to the one they use in their title. But the process of trademarking also involves the concept of “intent” and I seriously doubt that Teachbook was really planning to steal market share away from Facebook. I’m waiting for the inventor of the netbook to sue Facebook and stop them from using their name. Not going to happen because most other people, aside from Facebook, AREN’T STUPID enough to do so.

Well, the sad part of this is that because Facebook has gazillions of dollars to spend and Teachbook is a small launch with two employees, Facebook may just use its corporate clout to completely clobber them in legalese, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because no one really backs the underdog except to cheer and say “attaboy”. So, if they go down in this fight, that just means that we’ve made the demon that much stronger.

It’s only a matter of time before Facebook turns around and says that everyone must stop using the word “.com” in their titles, because Facebook uses it and Facebook is much bigger than they are. It’s not that much different than forcing people to not use the word “book”. Think about it because soon that may be all you can do.

Is there life after Facebook?

Uncategorized, ,

The Internet is all ga-ga (not Lady Gaga) over the fact that Facebook is getting ready to make another announcement today. The crazies on CNN.com (the fans, not the reporters) are now getting into a huge argument over what the announcement is, but not surprisingly the biggest parts of that thread cover two areas:

1. Should Facebook create a “dislike” button?

2. What will be the next Facebook to follow Facebook?

The first question is kind of funny because it’s basically a “I hate the features of Facebook, but I am too absorbed by Facebook to stop using Facebook” complaint. In other words, people want a way of controlling what messages they receive, but in reality the messages they receive are set by the type of friends that they have, so the easy way to fix that is to change the types of friends you have, and well, that doesn’t happen so easily.

What Facebook probably could use, rather than a “dislike” button, is a “I don’t care” button, so that when someone sends you a message about how many farm animals they’ve found on their imaginary farm, you could click, “I don’t care” and hopefully NEVER receive another message of that type again. I say this realizing someone is probably reading this post thinking, “man, I wish there was an “I don’t care” button RIGHT NOW.” But I digress….

The second thing is more significant because Facebook is slowly reaching it zenith of useability, meaning that there’s only so much more you can do with it before someone builds a better mousetrap, and we all go somewhere else. It’s what happened to Myspace (remember that dinosaur from SO LONG AGO?), and it’s probaby what’s going to happen to Twitter once people realize that following someone’s 120 character (or whatever) post is really not all that interesting.

But that means people will start gravitating towards something else. Most likely, the kids are already using it, but the rest of us haven’t discovered it because we’re all not as cool as the kids. By kids, I don’t even mean the college kids, so most of you in college reading this thinking I’m talking about you, I’m not. Sure, you’re cool. Cooler than me, obviously, but we’re talking about a demographic that is generally not in our midsts. Which is what cool is all about anyway because “cool” is always that area of the Internet just out of our reach, and once we reach it, it’s not cool anymore.

That’s what happened to Myspace. And that’s what’s going to happen to Facebook because everyone already uses it, and CNN is talking about. Remember Gundrum’s Law: If CNN is talking about it, it stopped being cool a long time ago.

So, what’s next? I don’t know myself because I’m not cool, and I won’t find out about it until it’s a few months away from not being used anymore. So, when I get around to telling you what’s cool, remember that it’s time to jump ship because I’m only a few hours ahead of CNN, and that doesn’t really say much.