The printing press originated in 1493.
Up until that point in human evolution, literature was composed by hand,
Stories were exchanged by word of mouth, using actual human mouths.
The news was what you heard around the well at the center of town,
As you passed the crudely garbed townsfolk in your ox drawn carriage,
On the way to market with your turnips.
Journalism was literally what people wrote down in their journals,
Often found, and written into history much later, long after their demise,
Wrested from the rusty hulls of sunken ships,
Lessons learned too late to save the crew.
The mechanical press became THE standard for information recording and transmission,
And held that position for centuries,
Disrupted only slightly by the telegraph with it’s higher speeds but limited range,
It was still the preferred way to communicate with large groups,
Until the invention of radio.
In very short order, a method of word of mouth storytelling,
Now writ large by being broadcast far and wide,
Came to dominate the airwaves,
Literally and figuratively.
Bombastic and melodramatic caricatures best served the medium’s visual limitations,
And if you were a politician who had a message to share with his constituency,
Or a businessman with a product to sell,
You could ride your horse down the dirt road,
Past the row of telegraph poles and the constable,
To the local radio station.
Or you could float there in your hydrogen balloon,
With gold coin tumbling out of your pockets all the way to and fro.
But the po’ folks had slightly more limited access
Soon enough, we invented automobiles to enable moneyed people farther away from the nearest station to express themselves periodically… And put radios in those same automobiles…
However, by this time,
Some mad scientists were cooking up some really hot shit.
Motion pictures!
Like those fancy new regular stationary pictures,
But even fancier cuz they move!
Shortly thereafter, the industry figured out how to present audiences a moving picture
WITH SOUND!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWkJ86JqlPA
Then they were really off to the races.
AND we invented powered flying machines,
To put radios in and show moving pictures on.
I mean, not specifically for that,
But they’re good for that too.
Not being satisfied with flying around in the sky like birds and racing around on the ground at literally breakneck speeds (because seat belts wouldn’t be invented for another few decades),
We proceeded to adapt,
Improvise,
And invent the Colosseum of all transmission mediums:
Television!
Television grew faster, and came to be even more dominant over public thought than newspapers and radio combined could ever hope to have been, and we simultaneously learned that sanitation is really helpful in preventing surgical deaths, and not shitting in the water supply dramatically reduces the rate of deadly diseases.
Presumably unrelated.
TV owned the sky for decades,
Until the internet swatted it down,
Like a fly buzzing around obnoxiously.
And here we are,
We’ve got internet that gives me two way television where I can talk live to somebody in Kuala Lumpur with a lag time measured in milliseconds, while TV anchors are still sitting in grim silence waiting for the last part of their teleprompted speech to be delivered to the reporter on the scene by fuckin’ carrier pigeon, apparently.
We’ve got hoverbikes and self driving cars,
Computers with fingerprint and facial recognition software with high quality audio and video recording equipment, connected to the network,
Amounting to more power and sophistication than any 1900’s radio or television studio,
Literally in our pockets,
And print news agencies are breaking amazing stories like:
“THE PRESS”
An industry that made its name writing on dead trees using dead fish,
Is an antique,
A dinosaur,
“Old News.”
When people die of food poisoning, they still blame it on ghosts,
You’re never so sick that some leeches and a nice bloodletting won’t fix you right up,
And if that doesn’t work,
You must be a witch!
Somebody prepare the bonfire!
I don’t hear anybody demanding freedom of the hand loom,
Or the spinning wheel.
I’m not writing a blog post asserting my constitutional rights to a wood fired stove,
And insisting that the modern technology of the future be bridled to comply with my notions.
Anti-gun lobbyists are not trying to revoke my legal ability to carry a musket.
If you want to dredge the stone age for your political terminology,
You might as well call it:
“Freedom Of The Big Rock We All Carve Our Names Into.”
“Ug say man with biggest chisel dominate shared rock,
No good for community involvement.”
“Atouk request floor!
Atouk think need larger rock, accommodate democratic process!”
“Ug say, let man with smallest chisel, carve first stone.”
You may find, if you drag your knuckles all the way to the edge of our electric town square,
And find your own rock to carve e-hieroglyphic dicks into,
Probably… No one is going to read it.
Maybe not for thousands or millions of years,
Like the ancient mariner’s log, encrusted with rime and lost to time,
For so long that its discoverer assumes you must have belonged to a primitive phallus worship cult of some kind,
And yet, they’ll never find out,
How close to the truth they really were.
It turns out that the big rock in the middle of town is the most popular rock simply because it was there first, and it’s right in the middle of town. It’s not the prettiest rock, it doesn’t have the ideal, flat, smooth surfaces for etching names and penises, but it’s always been there.
“Ug think traditional rock values good for everyone in cave.”
“Atouk take survey, some commentators say best thing for whole cave is,
Break rock into small pieces, share with neighbors,
Each get equal piece.”
“Ug know central rock most convenient rock,
Stand test of time.”
There are some inherent flaws in reducing the complexity of the global web of communications technology to two troglodytes in a cave waving their primitive dicks, arguing over a big rock.
It’s not an ideal simile for modern media,
However,
“UG FIND IS PERFECT METAPHOR WHEN COMPARE JOURNALISM OF TODAY WITH PRINTING PRESS. OOH, OOH! AH!”
I am carving this message in an electric rock,
The biggest rock — Google.
My intent is to chisel it out and post it on the second biggest rock,
Facebook.
Are these the best rocks for chiseling a message about electric rocks? Surely not.
Are they my favorite rocks?
The rocks I trust?
Nope. Neither.
But they have this… Advantage… Over the other rocks that might be better suited to my task.
They’re already right here in front of me. Very convenient.
As far as I’m concerned, they’re infinite,
I could chisel away till I die and they won’t fill up.
And I’ve tried chiseling things into that smaller rock at the edge of town,
But nobody ever goes over there and reads them,
So there’s not much point.
This is where my analogy wears out like the elastic band on three year old underpants,
Because it just can’t stretch any farther:
There’s really no comparison between slowly and methodically carving characters one by one on a pretty rock with a chisel,
And firing off Latin characters like a machine gun with an electric keyboard, directly into a practically infinite electronic window that anyone in the developed world can read without getting up from their chair.
There is no edge of town; all distances on the internet are equal.
And perhaps most importantly,
There is no need to compete for or argue over space used by anyone for anything.
There’s plenty of room for a thousand websites that cater exclusively to seeing-eye dogs.
There’s room for literal MILES of tentacle hentai, hentacle tentai, and pretty much any other arrangement of vowels, consonants, and perversions you can imagine.
Freedom of “The Press” does not apply in any meaningful way to the present,
Because we all have devices in our pockets that outmatch the production speed and reach of the most advanced physical printing press — even by today’s technological standards of printing upside down,
Sideways,
Backwards,
Underwater,
And in 3D.
There are questions that go with that:
When was the last time you bought a newspaper?
And,
When was the last time you read something in a newspaper that was directly related to or had an impact on your life?
When was the last time you learned something valuable from a newspaper, and what was it?
An actual, paper, newspaper.
Made of real live dead trees.
You stained your hands a bit.
Maybe you folded it into a boat afterwards,
And set it off on a journey down the storm sewer drain.
For me, it was at least a decade ago, probably longer still.
And the only things of value I gleaned from the paper in the halcyon days of my youth,
Came from the funny pages.
The comics contained the only information of value to my young mind,
And that’s still true, decades later.
“Ug say, get to point!
Expecting company, have to club goat for dinner.”
According to similarweb, as of today, Monday 5/13/2019,
Google is the most popular website on the internet.
Youtube (wholly owned subsidiary of Google) is number two.
Facebook comes in at number three,
Amazon fourth,
And Yahoo fifth.
To put it all in perspective, rounding out the pack at #6 is PORNHUB.
I want you to consider that for a moment;
On the internet,
THE INTERNET,
WHICH IS FOR PORN,
ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY,
FACEBOOK IS BEATING PORNHUB IN THE RANKINGS.
And probably its own narcissistic meat,
At just the thought of being more popular than fucking.
I can’t quite wrap my mind around this,
Because how could facebook be bigger than the appeal of the combined swollen and leathery genitalia of all the professional fuckers and fuckees on the entire planet of Earth?
The pinnacle of etching cock into rock that is
HD-ADHD-1080pp
Pornograph-y,
Cannot compete with the cyberpunk narcissus piss pool that is
Zuckerbook’s Faceberg.
So let’s say you just want to carve your amateur cock into a plain rock,
And compete for the gaze of millions,
With this
MONOLITHIC MILE HIGH OBELISK
That Fuckberger proudly waves about as if he grew it himself.
Good fuckin’ luck.
Do you think the behemoth,
Half facebook bath-time buddy,
Half demonic Cerberus,
“Google,”
Is going to route traffic around the Zuck-o-lith to your tiny, flaccid blog post?
If so, by all means,
Trust the wolves to guard the hen house while you’re away etching dick pics.
I’m sure everything will still be in working order upon your return…
BUT,
EVEN IF IT ISN’T!
EVEN IF THE BARBARIAN HORDES COME THROUGH WHILE YOU’RE AWAY AND SACK THE WHOLE VILLAGE, RAPE THE HORSES AND RIDE OFF ON THE WOMEN,
You can rest easy knowing that google won’t bother you with any of that.
There are still pictures of dogs and sunsets and kim kardashian’s Ass you haven’t seen yet,
There are angry birds you haven’t clicked on,
That are a much higher priority than informing you about the world in immediate proximity to you,
Where you live,
In your town,
Your life,
And the lives of your neighbors.
I’ll bet a lot of them have blogs, and post regularly,
I’ll even lean more optimistic than my usual bent, and assume,
Several of them actually have interesting lives,
Three of them are good writers,
And those groups intersect to result in at least one well written interesting local blog.
MAYYYYYYYYYYBE two,
But probably just the one.
You’ll never see that blog.
Not ever.
Even if the best writer with the most interesting life lives right next door to your house.
Even if you’re looking for it.
He’s not being repressed, or suppressed, or censored.
No one is stopping him from expressing his opinion to the whole world.
Well,
In the direction of the world…
Pointing at the world,
But missing, and floating away through space.
Never reaching the target audience of Earthlings.
Today, I am aiming at you Earthlings,
And the target is a myth I’d like to dispel:
“In the free market, consumers get to choose what companies and products they consume.”
Let’s use a visual example, I find those helpful.
We’re gonna play “Where’s Waldo?”
It’s a familiar corporate symbol,
But I don’t want to infringe anybody’s delicate little copyright,
So Waldo is the name I’ve given to this green plastic bottle:
This is Waldo.
Okay folks, are you ready to play?
FIND WALDO!
He’s right there, trust me.
Never mind those other misleading green plastic things,
Waldo has a distinctive green lid.
Have you found him yet?
Or did you immediately become discouraged at the prospect of digging through a sea of garbage to find something that’s not terribly interesting in the first place?
THE POINT BEING,
There’s so much crap in view,
It’s difficult to find the thing you’re looking for,
Even if you know what it is,
And you’re absolutely sure it’s in there somewhere.
You may notice, father in the background, is the open ocean,
With plenty of room for anyone to splash and frolic and express themselves freely,
All they have to do is wade through a tide of refuse to get there.
No problem!
So, why specifically will you not see that one interesting local blog?
Because that person didn’t pay any companies huge amounts of money to plaster their blog across your eyeballs 24 hours a day till your eyes were seared like kebabs by the neon blast furnace of corporate logos.
What marketing really means is to artificially manipulate demand through advertising.
They don’t need to sell you what you want,
If they can make you want what they sell.
And they very obviously can.
Otherwise, it must have been some nine year old kid somewhere that said,
“Gee Mom, I really wish I could shoot string out of a can!
If only I had a proprietary mixture of components dispersed throughout a liquid solvent in an aerosol can, including a polymer resin that provides the string’s structure, a plasticizer to tune the physical properties of the string, and a surfactant that promotes foaming of the product. Other ingredients might include silicon fluid (to make the strands easier to clean up), flame retardant, and a pigment for color. With just 12.2% of the synthetic resin poly(isobutyl methacrylate), 0.5% of dibutyl phthalate, 2.5% of sorbitan trioleate surfactant, 0.35% silicon fluid such as dimethyl siloxane or methyl phenyl siloxane, 5.6% of flame retardant hexabromobenzene, and 2–3% pigment (all percentages by weight), the majority of the can could be filled with a compressed gas like freon!
So what if it’s carcinogenic, non biodegradable, and punches holes in the ozone?
I could accidentally light my sisters hair on fire by blasting her next to her birthday cake!
That would be AWESOME!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOw8CmyP6zo
I’m fairly confident there was never a pronounced consumer demand for
Toxic,
Flammable,
Non-Biodegradable,
Obviously Very Silly, Therefore Redundantly Named,
String In A Can.
It serves no useful function of any kind.
It’s a product that turns immediately into hazardous waste you have to dispose of promptly.
If you really want to upset your sister on her birthday, you can just jizz in her hair,
That way you can skip over costly medical bills from the burn ward,
And get right to the incarceration and legal fees.
That’s one example of what must be a million products that have no real function, use, purpose, or demand. They don’t solve a problem. They don’t fill a niche.
They just create mountains of crap that no one really wants,
Or knows what the hell to do with.
As I watch today’s children struggle to play on playground equipment seemingly designed by a team of Jackson Pollack genetic clones, with masters degrees in post-modernism, on LSD,
I think of my own youth, and how much more fun I had with a branch broken off a tree.
Or a bunch of sand, and a tiny trowel.
But sand is no longer safe for children’s playgrounds,
Not nearly as safe as foam backed recycled rubber aggregate and mystery pigments!
I walk into a convenience store, and am assailed by no less than a dozen screens,
Only one of them functional, and showing the complexity of the thousands of dollars worth of surveillance apparatus in place to prevent me making off with a $2 bag of Cheetos;
The rest trying like hell to sell me a $1.99 bag of Cheetos.
So what you’re telling me is,
The customer wanted fifty screens shouting things at them in bright flashing red and yellow, like banner ads from the internet
TRANSPOSED INTO REAL LIFE, and
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!
This technology is meeting a consumer demand?
Get right the fuck out of my face with that bullshit.
This technology meets corporate demands.
Advertising and marketing demands.
You are no longer the consumer.
You are the fucking product.
So,
When the number three most popular website,
ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET,
ON THE ENTIRE PLANET,
Decides to “no-platform” someone because of political speech,
Even if they’re stupid,
Even if they’re wrong,
Even if their head is all the way up their ass,
But they’re not breaking any laws,
And you respond with “Who cares? Private company.”
My retort is,
CNN says sunscreen additives may be ineffective and toxic, but don’t stop using them…
“Who cares? Private company!”
Blackwater sure does seem to be extrajudicially killing a lot of people…
“Who cares? Private company!”
I.G. Farben manufactured really a lot of Zyklon B…
“Who cares? Private company!”
As with the expression “freedom of the press” some things do not age well.
The first amendment to the constitution was written LONG before smartphones, the internet of things, the regular internet, the TV, motion pictures, and the radio.
The protected right to speech extended as far as you could yell across the town square, and only presuming you could yell louder than the guy on the other corner.
It wasn’t really an option for them to crowd the town square with a thousand and one bots yelling through megaphones about pills that will make your dick hard for the entire afternoon.
There were no multinational corporations in existence, so the founders surely didn’t consider their “personhood” or what rights of speech should be extended to them.
A lot has changed, not the least of which, the size of companies,
And the extent, and power of their speech.
But it has been considered since, in Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976.
That was when campaign finance contributions became a protected form of speech.
Then you give corporations personhood,
And suddenly a million dollars given by Facebook to a congressman becomes free speech,
Instead of what it really is:
Buying representation.
Facebook is not a person.
It has no right to protected speech,
Or to restrict speech,
And as far as its function is concerned,
It is much more akin to a public utility than a private corporation.
In essence, facebook has created a platform where individual users can choose what they want to see, and what they don’t want to see — make a number of informed decisions about the content they want — and exclude the rest.
It is an echo chamber by consumer demand, and it already meets that demand,
Without the need to directly censor anyone.
I can’t remember Alex Jones ever assailing my facebook wall with his screamo jargon, because I didn’t go out of my way to subscribe to any of his feeds.
I’m not particularly interested in what he has to say,
So I don’t go through youtube looking for “Alex Jones”
Or “Gay Frogs,”
But when I do, youtube takes me to France’s channel,
So that’s a different kind of discrimination…
This private corporation, in this specific instance, censoring this one obnoxious character, does not serve the needs of its users (which were already being met), and actually runs against their primary stated goal: Making lots and lots of money!
Alex, love him or hate him, is good at marketing himself.
He’s got a big audience, he’s loud and sensational,
He brings in a lot of clicks. A lot of ad revenue.
The only reason to silence him is political,
Since if they tried to silence all the loud wackos on their platform,
For being completely full of shit and also completely out of their minds,
It would be awful quiet.
Who cares if a giant, multi billion dollar multinational corporation, with the third most public influence of any media company on the internet (and probably the planet), wants to practice selective overt censorship of speech for political reasons, based on unexplained ulterior motives using secretive moderation processes?
Me!
I care if they do.
Even if they censor someone I disagree with.
Because the line between corporations and government has disappeared like a pinto bean fart in a tornado, along with the American middle class, regulatory agencies with teeth, ethics, virtue, and common sense.
They’ve been replaced by giant billboards explaining how this is the greatest time to be alive ever, in the greatest, freest country ever, and how that makes it the best time ever to have a jumbo Coca Cola at McDonald’s.
Because,
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist… “
And when they came for Alex,
SINCE
I AM ALSO A LOUD CRAZY WACKO,
I TOOK IT PERSONALLY.
As for the free market facebook consumer experience,
Here you sit, the consumer of this essay,
With all the tools at hand to agree,
Refute,
Add to,
Or share these ideas,
WITH THE WHOLE WORLD!
The miraculous powers of Facebook!
Does the platform work?
Will you speak out?
Contribute your ideas and observations to the great pool of human knowledge, here, today?
Leave your mark upon the town rock for all to see?
Will you share such a message?
Probably not,
Because then everyone in your feed can see it!
You’ve got P.R. to do, and that’s much more important than journalism.
Surely, you don’t want to be thought of as “that guy,”
A.K.A. ME,
The one asshole who’s always pointing out mistakes we’re all making,
Alienating the docile public with their ape-like gazes, by etching something disagreeable into the town rock… I should be banned!
Shit, you probably don’t even want to be the hominid who carved a little thumbs up next to my post. You might get associated with the gay frog conspirators and be blacklisted.
You better just lay low, and play it cool.
After all,
The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
“Ug say, SHHHHHH, enough talk.
Now time for roast goat.”
END TRANSMISSION.
