Tag Archives: google

The Problem of Mapping an Historically Paranoid Country Like South Korea

Politics, Relationships, , , , , , , ,
Yeah, he's North Korean, but I bet he doesn't like giving out maps either.
Yeah, he’s North Korean, but I bet he doesn’t like giving out maps either.

Today, it was learned that Google is having some problems with its desire to map South Korea. The reasons are varied, but certain little things like an eternal war footing with North Korea (they have a ceasefire, not an actual peace treaty from the war in the 1950s) and a history in South Korea of making sure that maps are a thing for government rather than the people, make it that much more difficult for a company that has a desire to map every kilometer of land that exists on the planet.

Strangely enough, I once dealt with this problem. Decades ago.

You see, I was a young counterintelligence agent working in Tonduchon, South Korea. Tongduchon was one of those tiny towns slightly south of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in South Korea. Basically, the town consisted of peasants who were formerly farmers, newly crafted shopkeepers, and a military post of US soldiers who were tasked with defending the DMZ in case the north should decide to take a trip south. It was my job to assist in countering any intelligence gathering efforts of hostile armies, forces and entities. This meant I spent a lot of time out in bars, getting to know the local population and getting a real sense of the lay of the land.

At one point, I was talking to one of my colleagues in the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) field office on post, and while we were downing a couple of Korean beers at a local bar, he remarked that it was really bizarre that we were both part of agencies that conducts investigations of the local area, yet neither one of us has ever been able to find a map of the area. Stores didn’t sell them. Our intelligence assets didn’t actually have them to give out to rank and file soldiers, although I’m sure they would have emerged overnight if a war was to have started the night before. Basically, if you wanted a map of the local area, you pretty much had to make one yourself.

So, I tasked my assistant at the time to go about trying to become an amateur cartographer. It was more of a joke than anything else, but he was one of those assistants who took a “hey, wouldn’t it be a good idea?” as a direct command, and he set out to start creating a rudimentary map of the local area, specifically the town of Tonduchon. To be honest, it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, like an actual map, but it would at least be enough for us to put stick pins in it to designated what was going on in which location.

Still, for our purposes, and for the purposes of CID at the time, we really needed something a little more official.

So, I did what I normally did. I went to the one place I figured there had to be a working map of the area. I went to the local police station.

I should probably point out that counterintelligence agents back then had a weird relationship with the police agencies of South Korea. We were given national police identity cards that designated us as representatives of the national organization. It was one of those cards that I discovered worked well with some people and horribly with others. Let me explain. A colleague of mine in our office was one of those “America is great and is here to fix everything” kinds of agents. This meant that whenever he met with a local national, he tended to receive really bad results, and thus, determined that the population of South Korea was jealous of Americans and, thus, would rarely cooperate with anything that the US needed. He also spoke zero words of Korean, which meant he was always speaking through one of our translators.

I, however, was lucky enough to have been put through the Defense Language Institute to learn Korean, so when I went out into the population, I could have one on one conversations with the locals. Surprisingly, when you speak directly to people and respect them for being the experts in the fields they represent, you tend to get much different results than those received by others who treat the locals like foreigners. Strangely enough, that’s something we should have learned from the British and their adventures long before ours, yet for the most part, we kind of suck at learning from history. But I digress.

So, I went to the local police department and introduced myself. I discovered at this time that not once had anyone actually come to engage the local police or to ask them what they thought about what was going on. I found this out because the assistant police chief took me into a room where he showed me a ton of files that had been prepared to turn over to US representatives should they ever show up and inquire about what was going on in Tongduchon. I literally had to come back with three agents in order to carry all of the files out of the place and back to our field office. Keep in mind, this was a few years before databases and computer technology would have made this so much easier.

So, I sat down with the assistant police chief and asked him about maps. His answer was kind of surprising. He asked me if I was interested in accompanying him on a raid his people were going to be conducting later that afternoon. I said sure and then asked if it would be appropriate for me to invite one of my colleagues from CID (as I thought this was more their field than mine). He said sure. So, a few hours later, the two of us met the Korean police at a local nightclub and observed them raid the establishment. What I discovered they were doing was enforcing local ordinances and license checks. However, at the end, I noticed the assistant police chief was meeting with a couple of young prostitutes in a side room. Part of me thought the worst thoughts, thinking this was about hooking up two GIs with local prostitutes, but then discovered the reason we were there was to be introduced to these young women. They were informants for the local police, and he thought it might be a good idea to have us make contact with them as well (I discovered later it was more about the fact that I spoke Korean that caused him to think it was appropriate).

Anyway, a few days later, my assistant knocked on the door to my office to tell me that a young Korean man was at our door and wanted to speak to me. After he was let in, I discovered he was one of the local police officers. Once inside, he presented me with two envelopes, each one containing a map of the local area. He said one was for my friend (the CID agent who accompanied us).

That was how we managed to get a map of the local area back then. What I discovered is that sometimes you have to go through extra hoops to get the things you need, and sometimes you have to make friends where you weren’t planning to make them in the first place. What I find amazing is that South Korea is still so closed to revealing information as it was decades ago. I’m curious to see what Google will end up doing to accomplish their goals.

Author’s Guild gains class action status vs. Google but do they really represent all authors?

Books, Business, Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , ,

There’s an interesting case that’s making headlines right now about how Google was attempting to push the Author’s Guild out of the suit to sue Google for its Google Books initiative (where they would be the end all source for practically everyone’s book material with their all-inclusive Google Library). Yesterday, a judge determined that Google can’t push the Author’s Guild out of the picture. On the surface, this isn’t all that big a deal, but there are a couple of things that are probably important to point out.

First off, most of the critics have already addressed the fact that not every author really wants to be part of this lawsuit, as quite a few independent authors have zero problem with what Google is doing. However, unless they personally choose to opt out of the action, the Author’s Guild is going to go forward pretending it has a lot more power and influence than in really does. And most people tend to ignore these sorts of things, so they’re now going to be “included” in this action even if they’re not really interested in what’s happening. This is one of those things that always bothers me with class action lawsuits because in cases like those against Apple and their antenna for the 4G debacle, a lot of us who owned Apple iPhone 4s didn’t really care that much for taking action against Apple. We were kind of happy with our products. Yet, a class action lawsuit moves forward as if it is representing a lot of people who may never actually be a part of the settlement. There’s a lot of presumptuousness that takes place with class action lawsuits, but that’s a completely different story.

A more important issue to me is the one that isn’t getting any attention yet, and that’s the fact that the Author’s Guild, a writer’s advocacy group, is an extremely exclusive club that lets very few actual authors into its ranks. According to their guidelines for eligibility, if you want to be a member of the Author’s Guild, don’t even think about it unless you have been published by an established American publisher, and I mean VERY established. Using a subsidy publisher, Amazon Kindle direct services and such, or anything along those lines, and you’re guaranteed to be turned down by the Author’s Guild that keeps a tight hold on its allowance for membership. While their elitism has dwindled a bit over the last year (Matt Paust, who regularly publishes to Open Salon, updated us with an article on April 27, 2012, in which he pointed out that their new requirements indicate that you can gain membership if you’ve received at least $500 from publishing in the last year, although their web site is still heavily leaning towards pointing out its old archaic standards of exclusivity).

As a writer myself, I’ve been on the fence about the whole Google books thing. I sell books through Amazon Kindle as well as Barnes & Noble’s Nook, so I haven’t been all that focused on Google, as most things Google does tends to be overly complicated and often unusable (like their advertising service that I finally gave up trying to figure out one day after I ended up getting charged $5.00 to make a listing that could never be approved and then left me unable to even remove the ad that wouldn’t ever run). So, I’ll be interested to see what happens with this, as I’m sure a lot of others will as well.

Problem #77 with Adopting Google+

Business, News, Social Networking, Technology, , , , , , , ,

I’ve been experimenting with Google+ since it emerged, and as much hype as I read from the major news sites, I just haven’t bought into the propaganda they keep spewing out. I keep reading how Google+ is going to replace Facebook, but no matter how much I look into the service, it fails on almost every level. Let me explain:

1. No one is on it.

Oh, I know how they keep claiming a gazillon people are on it and all that, but I’ll let you in on a little secret (if you haven’t used Google+). No one you know is using it. And that’s the problem right there. Sure, it’s great that Felicia Day (creator of the web episodic show The Guild), Wil Wheaton (the guy who played the kid on Star Trek the Next Generation and has been pulling cameos on other shows like Big Bang Theory and The Guild ever since), and Taylor Swift (the singer) are all on it, but what it’s really turned out to be is a glorified Twitter account where you get to actually see postings of these people, instead of blurts of words from their Twitter feed. But again, so few “normal” people are using it, which means if you want to use it to follow some celebrity with a one-sided conversation (where they never hear from you), then it’s fine. But what makes it different from watching some celebrity gossip show? Nothing, really.

2. The Interface Lacks Substance

Everytime I use Google+, I’m convinced I’m missing something because I go on it and then wonder why I wasted the time. It’s like there’s a whole other big room that’s part of it, but I just haven’t figured out the secret handshake to get into that other room. I suspect that other room doesn’t exist, but even if it does, what good is a service if you can’t access it? That’s my problem with Google+. It has nothing going on for it that keeps me interested. I’m a news junkie, which means I want to see things going on. Right now, my Google+ feed is filled with nonstop cute cat pictures from the celebrities that somehow think this is interesting and relevant. I’m not kidding. The only other type of posting seems to be from April Summers who shows naked pictures of herself in Playboy, which can be cool, but not really newsworthy. Every other person I follow seems to practically repeat the same information but a little bit different each time. The people I’d like to follow and know more about don’t actually have an account, or they have an account and don’t use it (like Taylor Swift).

3. It’s Owned by Google

Google is a great search engine, but honestly it doesn’t really innovate in anything. It does a really good job of seeing what other people do and then streamlines it. But there’s rarely any innovation or brilliant thought behind it. Or when there is, it’s designed by engineers who still haven’t figured out how to communicate with the masses, so they set up really complicated environments and expect the people to figure out how to maneuver through them (“I’m looking at you, Google Adwords!”). And there’s always the fear that Google, in their infinite wisdom, will just cancel your account because you disagreed with something they had to say, or do, cutting off four or five services you might be using that had nothing to do with the reason you got shut off in the first place, and like Facebook, they won’t speak to you in order to fix the situation because you’re irrelevant to them, as you’ve always been.

The Problems with Facebook & Google No One Talks About: Censorship

Business, Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , , , ,

Some years ago, when the Internet was very young, I was one of the early adopters of the new technology and started building web sites for companies, organizations and individuals who wanted them. In the beginning, it was interesting in that the people who needed web sites tended to be in three categories: adult businesses, churches and social celebrities. To be honest, the social celebrity market wasn’t really launched yet, so you really relied specifically on adult businesses and churches, a somewhat unique duo of activity.

My first web site I built was for a church. So was my second one. And then members of those two churches contacted me, asking me if I could build a site for them as well, as there were no web designers around yet. It turns out that the people who contacted me were professional dominatrices, looking for new ways of attracting clientele. Not really one to care where business came from, I built their sites, and almost out of nowhere, dozens of brand new clients showed up, all wanting my business. What I discovered then, and later, was that I was one of the few web designers around they came across who just wanted payment (not the rest of what their activity had to offer). What had happened to them in the beginning of the Internet was potential clients saw a way to get free sessions from them, and then basically held them hostage (they would have control over their web sites) until they got all of their “needs” met. With me, they paid me money, and they got everything they wanted without any hassle.

This was great for me, and them, and lasted for years until I went back to school and had less time. Then I slowly pushed my clients off onto other designers I came in contact with, and slowly ended doing that sort of business. It was good to do so, too, because that’s when everyone started to learn how to do web sites, and a specialty designer like me was easily outnumbered by paint by number designers who really dirtied the whole industry. I kept a few clients over the years who knew I was a designer first, and not just a spaghetti code generator (the kind of people who used pre-packaged software that was impossible to maintain and change without continuing to use the same pre-packaged software, and it was also impossible to personally configure if you wanted to do something different than the software did out of the box).

Anyway, the reason for mentioning this is that one of my clients was an adult bookstore, and at one point, we were using a shopping cart service (before I learned to design them in php from scratch). In the middle of the night one evening, they shut down her site, deciding that they didn’t like her “pervert crap” and no longer wanted to do business with her. To them, it didn’t matter that her business had been around longer than theirs had, and that we had put a LOT of work into designing the site. They shut her down in the middle of the night because their owner suddenly “found God” and no longer wanted “smut” on his sites. The thought that he didn’t “own” her site meant nothing to him; however, his control of the shopping cart software, which configured the site’s business end, practically ended her business overnight. So I had to learn php, build a brand new shopping cart (when people weren’t doing that sort of thing yet) and then relaunch her site over a weekend during a week of tests at school. It was a nightmare, but I got her going again.

What I most remember about that incident is that the shopping cart manager wouldn’t return a phone call, and when I finally got a hold of him, he was the rudest person I ever spoke to. He really felt that he was talking to scum, so he didn’t have to address that person as a human. It was an eye-opening experience.

Years ago, I was asked to fix a woman’s business site because Google had shut her down completely. She was a pro dominant, and she knew about me through mutual acquaintances who had known someone who had done a site through me years ago, so she contacted me in the middle of the night, crying, saying that Google had just shut down her online business and she couldn’t even get anyone to answer why. She had followed all of their rules to the T, and she was in compliance with everything she could imagine would need compliance. Yet, out of the blue, they shut her down. Which meant everything that was tied to Google for her was also shut down. I tried to contact Google, and kept getting the run-around from them. Finally, I told her she could rebuild her site from scratch with a new Google account, or she could be smarter and just build her site from scratch using a non-Google tied server. So I ended up building her a clean site that had no connection to Google whatsoever. She’s still going strong today, although she’s probably not an early adopter of Google Plus for the crap they put her through.

Last night, I received a frantic phone call from a woman who said that she was shut down on Facebook a few days ago. The person she spoke to wouldn’t even give her a reason, quoting some obscure rule about “compliance with rules” and wouldn’t elaborate. Her gazillion friends are all gone, and much of the networking she designed through Facebook is now gone. She asked me if she should jump to Google instead now that she realized that Facebook is adult-unfriendly. I couldn’t give her a happy answer that she was expecting because I knew what her future would probably be with Google.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about. Two of the biggest kids on the block are fighting for supremacy in social networking sites, and they’re probably the two biggest unfriendly social networking sites around. If you’re doing anything with which they disagree, they don’t just turn their head and disagree, they shut you down completely, forcing their morals upon you because they have the power to do it. Like that shopping cart company from years before, they don’t care that there are thousands who feel as you do. Their personal desires are more important than yours, and if you don’t comply, you lose. And of course, you have nowhere else to turn, so screw you.

That’s what we have to look forward to with Facebook and Google. Now, I know the majority of people won’t ever do anything to worry about being forced out, but honestly, you don’t know that. What it means is that an organization that is trying to gain your business by promising to let you network with people like you is quite willing to shut you down if those people like you are not in agreement with what they personally think is cool, or okay. It’s like the old line of “when they came for the Polish, I did nothing because I wasn’t Polish, when they came for the French I did nothing, because I wasn’t French, and then when they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me.” Now that’s not an exact quote, but you get the idea. Years ago, when there was a huge backlash against the gay community, I was an avid spokesperson against the backlash because even though I’m not gay, I felt that if thugs were able to hurt people who were gay, there’s only a matter of time before someone starts coming after me for whatever weird things I might be into (yes, I know, being gay isn’t a choice or weird, but I’m stretching for an analogy here). For the longest time, I had colleagues thinking I was gay because I was an out spokesperson for gays, and they couldn’t understand why someone would advocate for something they weren’t personally. That’s why that misquoted quote is so poignant. People won’t speak out for others without a personal stake, and that’s why so many atrocities continue to happen in this world.

I’m just saying.

Is Innovation Dead?

Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In case no one’s noticed recently, we seem to have a real innovation problem in the world today. I say this only because we live in an age where people think that innovations are happening all around us non-stop, yet no one really seems to recognize that we’re actually stagnating, doing nothing new and pretty much living in the successes of the past.

What am I talking about? Think about it. When was the last time something truly innovative appeared that has enriched humanity? I mean REALLY think about it.

What are the great innovations of today? The computer? The Internet? The microwave oven? The cell phone? Self-cleaning ovens? Google? Viagra? Honestly, I can’t think of an actual innovation that doesn’t have me thinking, um, that’s just an improvement on a previous innovation. The computer is probably one of the few that might be arguable as an innovation, although I would argue it’s really not that much more innovative than a calculator. It’s a machine that reads numbers in binary and then translates them into an operating system language that then gets used to produce computer programs. Nothing it does is really truly innovative. It’s not even all that useful if you think about it because the old arguments that the computer would make our lives easier were incorrect; the computer has arguably made our lives more difficult and as a result has increased the amount of paperwork we use, although it was supposed to cut down on it at some point.

The Internet is an improvement on the computer and email. The microwave oven is an improvement on the oven, and some people even argue that it’s made us a lot less healthy as a consequence of the types of food that can be produced from it. The cell phone is an improvement on the actual telephone, and I’d argue that it doesn’t make our lives any better as it now forces us to be “on” all of the time rather than letting an answering machine take a message for us so we can get back to people later.

Which brings me to the realization that there’s really nothing new that’s defining our current age when it comes to innovation. To make it even worse, people are no longer innovators either. Fewer people invent things, and fewer people are actually involved in the process of producing things. The rich people of our time don’t actually do anything other than move money around, or even worse, speculate about money. The people who do the most work get paid the least while the hardest workers are controlled by the people who haven’t made anything with their bare hands during most of their lives. Patent lawyers make far more money than the people who make the products that are patented and arguably wouldn’t be able to make the items they’re arguing about even if they tried.

The days of a lone scientist sitting in his laboratory trying to solve the mysteries of the universe are over. Instead, we have academics who sit in university libraries and then write papers that they discuss with other scholars who argue the merits of theories with people who generally don’t make anything themselves. Most current day scientists go into the science without producing new science but begin to theorize upon a foundation of theories that someone discovered centuries ago, and quite possibly that new scientist would never have been able to figure out the logic behind that theory himself/herself if presented with a blank state today. The line is “built upon the shoulders of giants” but we have so few people who are capable of creating the shoulders these days. Everyone stands on shoulders, profiting off the marvels of those who came before us.

Part of this problem may stem from the very nature of specialization, which makes the general theoretical scientist almost obsolete. But without those philosopher-scientists leading us forward, what exactly do we have to say for ourselves when we start to run out of new ideas? Conceptual innovation doesn’t really give us anything new but lets us figure out new ways of using what we already know. Which is why I argue that while Google is interesting and fascinating, it is by no stretch of the imagination an actual stretch of the imagination.

So, no one should be really surprised when we start looking for enlightenment from our world leaders and we keep coming up with the same, bad responses and answers. Instead of some great 21st century logic of how to move the world forward in areas of peace and understanding, we are still sending soldiers into hell holes to kill people who seem to be living in the ways of the 12th century. You see, as much as we like to think that we’ve emerged far better than we once were, we’re still the same barbarians we once were. We just have better toys than we used to have. So instead of pointing a spear at some Visigoth, we point cruise missiles at Libyan SAM missile sites. But in reality, it’s all the same thing. We never grew up; just our weapons did.

In the end, I hope we one day realize that we’ve stagnated in our technological growth because what that means is that our cultural growth is equally stunted. And until we start to realize that, we’re never going to move to the next stage of an evolution we keep thinking we’ve already achieved.

Gaming the System

Social Networking, , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google having to clean up its ranking system because other companies have figured out how to game the system. I find this somewhat interesting because no matter what I do, I can’t seem to figure out how to get more people to read my blog. I guess if I cheated and did all sorts of surreptitious activity, I could probably get a whole bunch of people to accidentally wander onto my site. But that’s just wrong, and it makes me wonder why so many other companies and people would do that sort of thing, when all it really does is piss off people in the long run.

The thing that really bothers me is the amount of “traffic” I receive from people who don’t actually read my blog but submit spam messages as comments. My spam filter catches 99 percent of them, but it bothers me that my spam filter has to actually catch them in the first place. Why would companies and people go through so much trouble to spam the hell out of someone’s random blog site? Why are there people spamming me with stupid comments that have absolutely no relevance to anything I’m talking about? Why would people include fake comments that are designed to fool me into thinking they actually read my posts and commented on them?

I’m talking about comments that say something like: “I really agree with your perspective on this point, and this has caused me to want to keep coming back here and reading your blog.” Fake comment. Not real. Someone bullshitting for the sake of some stupid purpose that has no significance to the bigger picture whatsoever. Why do it? Why expend your energy trying to fuck up someone’s blog with nonstop spam messages that mean nothing whatsoever to anyone?

And they spam the crap out of my spam filters, too. It’s not bad enough that one or two get through, but someone will spend days spamming the same message to my comments that say absolutely nothing but pretend to be actual comments to my posts. Why do it? What purpose does it serve to disrupt the normal postings of someone you’ve never met before, have nothing to do with whatsoever, and have no incentive to make miserable just for the sake of some futile attempt at gaining traffic that you’re never going to get.

Why do it?

The Epic Battle for Your Money

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

There’s an epic battle being fought these days in which the goal is nothing less than your hard earned money. Sadly enough, the only ones not benefiting from the struggle are us, the actual consumers. We’re mainly the victims, the targets and the ones who manage to keep making it so that we keep getting screwed over, cheated and abused. If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny.

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but at one point we went from being consumers who were part of the system to consumers of content who are outside of the system. In the old days, maybe as recent as the 1970s, we were seen as consumers in a big triangular product cycle that started with us working for companies that produced content that was sold by businesses back to the people who were responsible for making the products. It was a closed system where people in other businesses provided products while we sold the products from our revenue stream back to them. Everyone came out ahead because we all made enough to survive, and we all got the products that everyone was making for everyone else.

But something happened that caused a real problem to the system. You see, at one point, those companies that make the products realized they could make these products without the actual consumer production staff being a part of the manufacturing cycle. In other words, they could automate the production without having to pay a production staff and still manage to create enough products to sell to those other cells of the manufacturing cycle. Except, those other cells were also figuring out how to cut out the production people so that they could automate their production and maximize their profits. After a certain amount of time, we cut out one prong of the triangle, leaving basically the profitable company management and the salespeople. However, we’ve kind of cut out the people who used to be the producers of content, figuring we can do it without them.

Unfortunately, those people were also the main consumers of the content. Without them, we end up producing a lot of product for people who can no longer afford to purchase it. This was fine as long as we were only cutting out a certain segment of the production audience, but now that everyone has figured this is the way to profitability, well, we’ve made it so that there may be too few consumers to actually participate in the broken triangle.

This was a problem that has been seen for quite some time, but big companies refused to pay attention because they were making money without very much effort, and they saw no end to it. Let’s examine that for a moment. And we’ll do it by examining the old model and then see where the new model sort of makes everything no longer make sense.

The old model of capitalism was that as long as we continued to produce products, we could always sell them for a profit. This always existed with the necessity that the consumer market was always going to be able to actual purchase the items needed. Well, what has happened is that a lot of the money that is to be made in this area has now been transferred to huge corporations that reward very few people for their efforts. Outsourcing and downsizing was inevitable as companies started to exist for the sole purpose of providing better results on stock market exchanges rather than to a people-driven profit margin. But eventually, outsourcing was going to hit a point where the native population of people within these companies was going to start suffering, with more and more jobs being lost, even though prices for products would continue to go down as the labor became cheaper through the outsourcing process.

What this meant was that one of two things would happen, and the result was really based on what ideology you believed. If capitalism was truly the victor, then the outsourcing would eventually hit a point where there is no more possible outsourcing location, so that eventually the corporations would have to start feeding back on themselves, and that would lead to consolidation to the point of where expansion would have to stop and the products being produced would fall back to a Maslowian base level of survival products rather than those that feed self-actualization. There would be no profit in leisure products, like iPads, because no one would be able to buy them any more. Instead, the main production would fall back to basic necessities as the people who still had jobs would be focusing on survival rather than leisure-like activities. The numbers of elites benefiting from the system would have shrunk so small that the luxury good market would dry up overnight. Where it would go from here is unknown as we’ve never reached this expansion end point before, so anyone can guess as to what would happen next.

The other choice is the old one of eventual communism, which is almost a direct insult to anyone who believes in corporatism and capitalism. Communism needs capitalism, however. Because once we’ve reached what’s called a saturation point (where companies have pretty much grown as big as they can become and profit is no longer profitable), then the system turns inwards, and the mass population that has been forced into corporate slavery then turns on the economic system and takes over its cogs and wheels. Their success would be in direct violation of the system, so this would probably bring on an economic revolution where the state would eventually turn into a police state where the military and police would act in the interests of business, turning on individual workers. The workers would probably suffer a number of defeats, with many deaths and even worse working conditions, until eventually they succeeded and overthrew the corporate entities that maintain control over the dynamic.

That’s if you believe either one of these theories of economics. However, what should be pointed out is that we have hit a point where people with economic clout are trying harder than ever to sell us crap we don’t need, and the crap that we do need is being put into flux, so that we are actually having to fight for these things. An example of the former is the various industries of utilities and intellectual property. Heat and electricity is pretty low on the Maslowian scale, meaning that we generally need electricity and heat. Often, the industries that hold power in these areas see themselves as a necessity and do everything possible to act like they are working in our best interest. Gas companies make really cute commercials about how the cars are all fuzzy and happy, and that they’re our friends. Meanwhile, the executives of these companies make insane profits and even when they destroy our natural resources with bad decisions on their part (like BP and Exxon), they do as little as possible to maintain their hegemonies and then try to make the problems go away by paying off only as many people as they need to do. The clean-ups in Alaska and on the East Coast have been afterthoughts, and already there have been attempts to do the least possible, while lawyering up rather than be the conscientious industries we’d like them to be. In the end, they’ll still manage to pull off outrageous profits, and the ones who were hurt the most will always be hurt the most.

The latter of those two choices (utilities and intellectual property) is even more fascinating in that the consumer isn’t even being considered a part of the discussion, even though the consumer is the one who funds pretty much everything. Organizations like the Recording Industry Assocation of America (RIAA) have been so outdated for so long now, holding onto old technology like record companies, that rather than modernize themselves as they should have done so long ago, they sue anyone they can think of, realizing that if they cast their net wide enough, they’ll manage to bring in enough profit to keep themselves going in perpetuity. The fact that they haven’t been relevant in years is rarely discussed by them; they’re more interested in maintaining a status quo that has been gone for many years now. Let’s face it. People are now getting a lot of their intellectual content (music, movies, TV, and games) for free because the Internet has made that possible. A lot of the potential customers they have lost are young people who have grown up getting this stuff for free for most of their lives. The RIAA and other such organizations should have been catering to these kids a long time ago, not slapping them with lawsuits the second they realized there was a problem already out of control. And even worse, the customer base they already had (older people like me), they abandoned by focusing on that young crowd, trying to sell the ideological equivalent of freezers to Eskimos. Had they continued to support the older class of customers, who were used to buying content from stores, they might have maintained years of profitability while slowly switching over to a model that could have catered to this younger crowd. Instead, whenever I walked into a record store, or an establishment that sold CDs, I see tons of titles that are geared towards young kids who aren’t going to buy any of the stuff because they can get it for free. There’s none of it that caters to me, and I’m sorry, but an occasional compilation CD of music I already own is NOT what anyone my age considers “catering” to me. It’s not even trying.

So, this brings me to what’s going on today. There are all sorts of people who see the rest of us as nothing but blind consumers they can take advantage of because they don’t care anything about us because they either outsourced us, or they see us only as mindless automatons who are only around to buy their junk. Google announced today that they are now going to be giving us the ability to buy books online. Basically, even though Amazon and Barnes & Noble have already done, Google indicates that it’s going to allow people to buy books in e-reader format, but then turns around and pretty much tells publishers that they’re only offering 52 percent of the profit of the books sold. Amazon and B&N have been offering closer to 70 percent profit. Apparently, Google seems to think that it deserves more of the money for a product that they did not create and basically only offer as a reading service. It’s like a tape recorder company demanding half of the profit of all music produced because it provided the tape recorder used to make the music. The only reason Google can offer this is because Google has power right now, and it will be interesting to see how the publishers respond to this insult of an offer, especially when they already have two viable processes for releasing e-reader content. Google is proving itself to be a great successor to Microsoft in all ways Dr. Evil-like.

Another story that has been making a play is also very important to this issue, and it involves reality TV stars the Kardashians, who are basically a trio of tarts who have no actual talent other than being famous for being famous. When their launch onto the public scene was through a sex tape that was sold by one of them, we really shouldn’t be expecting a whole lot more. Yet, they decided to play the profit game by tapping into their fan base and offering a misleading credit card that essentially cheats the living crap out of anyone stupid to ever use one. They’ve suddenly decided to distance themselves from the card AFTER a public outcry came out following the revelation that the card was generally little more than a massive scam, in that it does so many things that a paid for credit card should never do. In reality, the Kardashians backed away from their card because they were found out and it was going to become a headache to have to explain how they were profiting by cheating the crap out of people who were stupid enough to believe in them.

But their case is an example of what is going on today. Companies, celebrities and even governmental officials have no problem cheating the crap out of potential consumers mainly because they don’t see these consumers as a part of the original triangle I was talking about. So many people have been taken out of the equation that we’re no longer considered associates, friends or partners, but potential victims to take advantage of.

So what can we do about it? Stop buying the crap that people are selling you whenever you discover they’re part of this bad group of profiteers. Right now, we have a little bit of say in the future of where this goes, but as long as we continue to act like sheep and get taken advantage of, things will only continue to get worse, and eventually we’ll have little to no say in the matter.