Space Junk, Highway Litter, and Content Marketers
Humans and Junk
I wonder how long we have before space junk in low orbit is so dense that satellite activities will become nearly impossible? From what I’m told by people pretending to be smart, not in my lifetime.
We are a junk-producing species, meaning we create refuse, or garbage during our normal, day-to-day affairs. Open wrappers, used paper products, leftover food, obsolete motor or electronic parts, we leave a lot of shit behind.
Fortunately, we have systems in place to handle this potential problem. We bury stuff, and someday will probably be able to incinerate our trash, leaving very little residue or waste in the process.
Of course, some junk and clutter escapes these measures, ending up along the highway systems, in rivers, the ocean, and elsewhere. Like the junk orbiting our planet, this earthbound litter continues to accumulate and is difficult to fully clean up.
All this kind of sucks. These are real problems in need of solutions, and they are largely the fault of stupid, careless, lazy, nihilistic, even willfully destructive people and groups.
Humanity’s Biggest Repository of Garbage
Perhaps the largest human repository for junk is also the most voluminous archive of content, information, and data in the history of our species, as far as we know. The web, and now the cloud, or just cyberspace as old fogies like me once called it, is the biggest cache, library, etc. to ever be assembled by humans.
By default there has always been some junk emerging from this virtual system. In the natural course of construction, maintenance, and use, the digital environment is subjected to the same kind of dispersal and proliferation as our physical backdrop.
Cancelled downloads and improperly added or removed scripts might cause fragmentation and scattering on a hard drive, just as heavy workloads or software behavior might cause discontinuity or sparsification on a server or within a cluster. These issues can cause slower user experiences and less than optimal performance.
Furthermore, items in cyberspace aren’t subject to the same kind of deterioration as objects in the real world. The bits and bytes don’t rust or decay naturally, which leads to a different form of persistent junk — obsolete websites, abandoned files, and forgotten workflows. the digital equivalent of dust bunnies and loose debris.
The most striking difference between cyber-junk and irl (in real life) trash is the ease or difficulty involved in cleaning up the mess. As alluded to previously massive piles of garbage, oil spills, and inorganic flotsam can be really hard to totally remove from the environment. The digital counterparts of such pollution can be cleared up readily with the right equipment and skillsets.
Web Garbage of the Foulest Kind
There is a more insidious kind of web-garbage, and one that is not only disruptive to a productive user experience, but also inherently dishonest and detrimental to the consumers, advocates, students, and enthusiasts of every industry or niche unfortunate enough to be exposed to this contaminant.
I will go as far as to say this pollutant even damages the integrity of the ecospheres it invades and is potentially harmful to the reputation of the experts and authorities native to the affected space.
The trash I’m referring to blends in with useful elements and valuable assets of a market or sector and is most often encountered by users in search of information regarding a specific topic or product. The assholes who produce this refuse take great care to also disguise it as a digital product or paid subscription, and it is only discovered as the rubbish it is once hard-earned money has been exchanged for access to it.
If you’re on Amazon browsing books and e-books, looking for audiobooks on audible, or even using Google to find specific info to help you tackle some problem, you are at risk of encountering this junk-disguised-as-information and paying good money for it. So-called content marketers or information marketers are, as I write this, dumping their garbage alll over the web in a calculating manner.
In fact they are doing so PROUDLY and charging hefty fees to train other people how to replicate their atrocious “business model”.
The perpetrators of this pollution have ads all over You Tube and social media pitching their free live webinars (that are of course not live at all) where they demonstrate, specifically and in great detail how to go about trashing up a particular digital landscape in order to deceive the associated paying customer base and extract revenue.
This Isn’t Just a Rant!
The quality of content you and I have access to at the time of this writing through services like Audible and Amazon has already been significantly compromised by the proliferation of garbage content. Self-styled gurus like the Mikkelson twins and Carly Marie are teaching students how to spot a niche and hire a college kid to create “expert” content on some random topic they chose for its keyword popularity.
It’s a simple rinse-and-repeat method:
- Identify trends in keyword searches, category popularity, etc. to find out what customers actively seek. Good thinking, for sure.
- From these trends choose an area where you have some knowledge and expertise… BAH! Just kidding LOL. Screw that, hire a college kid or Indonesian ghost writer to crank out some 100 page piece of shit based on a keyword list you handed them at time of payment.
- Hire graphics designer to create an attractive cover, but only use the underpriced services. In fact, the shit bags selling the $1000 training at the end of the webinar (hey that’s marked down from the $9,997 real life value!) will hook you up with their graphics team, a dirt-poor village in Vietnam who only charges $1.50 to all the students who buy the marketing course.
- Slap your e-book up on Amazon, or your audiobook on Audible, or sell your own info product on Facebook or whatever. The point is, get the low-grade bag of shit material some 20-year old wrote over the weekend on the basis of a few Google searches and a conversation in front of consumers seeking legitimate information and expertise.
- Usually the course comes with training on how to promote the finished abomination as well.
I tell ya, sounds like a great model that is really gonna serve the greater good. So what if nobody will be able to trust a god damn bookseller in five years because we’re all tired of buying worthless horseshit? What matters is the story of this little punk-ass turd who is now a millionaire from ripping off the public with his junk books.
Yes sir, it’s heart-warming to hear the success stories of folks like Matt, a crybaby pussy who didn’t want to support his family any more by way of his construction job or Brenda, a single mom who wasn’t satisfied with the size of her state welfare check. It’s totally worth ruining the Internet for everyone else so long as these people can lie around on their asses for the rest of their days on the profits they never deserved… because they peddled CRAP, worthless JUNK to people looking for useable information.
Holy shit this is enraging. Not the part about lazy, entitled people getting rich, good for them. I mean the intentional and wanton murder of content by those claiming to be champions of the same content.
The relative value of any search results page has been potentially deflated over the past decade and stands to fall further the next time blogging and article marketing take the lead in the race of home business trends. Now the same damage is being done to paid content like books and audiobooks. It makes me really hate certain people.
At least Sophie Howard tells her students to hire college kids to write fiction. It’s hard to bitch about that. Maybe the kids can roll out some good stories, and if so I say hell yeah and well done. The consumer isn’t getting screwed in this scenario, they are getting what they damn well deserve for funding the market sector, namely VALUE.
Screw any “entrepeneur” who advocates, enacts, and taches others how to enact the selling of junk, valueless wares in the name of getting rich. I can’t publicly wish such folks harm, but I can say I hope they fucking burn in hell for their lowlife, self-centered practices (I’m looking at you Rad Zeus and Christy Ann Milkyousome.).
