Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
Last week ABC News—obviously not clear on the concept—promoted the idea that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made the internet the center of U.S. foreign policy! I hope the ABC News watching public understands that "the center" and "a centerpiece" are very distinctly different concepts. But make no mistake about this, Washington believes that the internet is crucial to modern American jingoism—the promotion of American values and our form of government (corrupt and otherwise ... certainly not the model of representative democracy that the Framers had in mind ... certainly the form that best suits a nation reduced to selling guns and peon-izing its citizens) across the breath and length of this planet.
There is more than just a cynical thread of truth in this notion of the importance of the internet, but Washington in its hubris misses the point that the internet, whatever its sources of funding, is essentially two things: it is democratic to a fair-the-well, and it is fragile.
I shudder when my computer crashes and I imagine millions of computers "crashed" because government has gotten control of the hubs and nodes and closes us down. Absolutist Control is a work in progress in China, of course, and that is the putative model for this notion that ABC has misunderstood. When the internet goes down for political reasons, there is no substitute for what we have evolved over these last twenty years. Commerce will plummet, in fact, there will be a depression, panic, and political upheaval. The internet is extremely important, but there is one thing that it is not.
The democracy of the internet is not a form of government. It is the democracy of three billion voices and ears and eyes. The internet is what we make of it, and sex is what we have made of it. This may speak more to the weird notions we have about the sexual nature of our species, but it is what happened. Sex and political propaganda, then commerce. The American ideal, if you are to read ABC News straightforwardly, is that people have the god-given right to access (and even contribute to) the array of sexual content, the political propaganda, and especially to buy stuff. ABC believes (and maybe Hillary does too) that the motives energizing the internet are "manageable" in the same way that television audiences are "managed" into bogus "reality shows" and news media that express corporate interests. ABC and Hillary may be right, for the facts are that the vast majority of people do not stop to question authority, assertions, or much less the psychology of presentation on TV. Why would they on the Internet?
We come to the conclusion that the "centerpiece" of American outreach to the rest of the world is for the rest of the world to emulate the American way of being docile and managed citizens. The hubris of this idea is astounding, and the possibility that it is accurate utterly horrifying.
The internet has been around since the 1970's, but certainly for most of us only since about 1990 when the WorldWideWeb quickly supplanted Gopher. I have been online since the last moments of Gopher and the first of the Web, and it has truly been a fantastic journey, a breathtaking revelation, and (even) an excellent lesson in human nature. If there is one point that the internet has made, it is that human beings are human. They have biological and personal urges and these express themselves quickly ... even on the internet.
Society through its various means of exerting controls over our appetites has been virtually (no pun intended) helpless as pornography and politics rapidly spread out across the cyberscape of the internet. Parents have been justifiably cautious (or horrified) about letting their children have unfettered access to the web because of the pornography ... and rightly so, for graphic displays of bestiality and subjugation of human beings for sexual purposes are all too available. But politics is a different matter. Politics is by definition public and argumentative and emotional, with emphasis on public and free.
The Tri-Cities News of Monmouth County, New Jersey, has successfully bucked the trend of print media to go into various kinds of fatal skids and collapse, according to an International Herald Tribune article by David Carr today. The Tri-Cities Newsshuns the web. All of this reminds me of how important real newspapers on the internet are to us, especially websites like ALP and other value-added aggregators.
I am not very worried that the Times or Post or other prominent newspapers will go this way, but I can see how Tri-Cities manages, since it is likely that major newspapers do not cover Monmouth County sufficiently well that residents of that garden spot in the Garden State can find out what they need to know from the majors. Likely also is the lack of competition for the niche market of Tri-Cities.
As the decline of the majors continues, though, it may come to pass that a tariff will be imposed by their internet versions. I was against Salon doing so and I bridled at the NYT charging to read their headline columnists. But that was then, and now I see the number of persons reporting for traditional paper newspapers dwindling (L.A. Times, Washington Post and others), so maybe coughing up a little money might not be a bad idea.
In some ways I am an internet junkie. I think the internet is at least the equivalent of the automobile in terms of its pervasive effect on society -- worldwide. Yes, there are places where the internet does not reach (and the same places are inhospitable to automobiles). Yes, there are people right here in America that do not have computers or access to the internet. I have a cousin, a college grad, an engineer, a pretty good guy, who does not yet have a computer. Yes, he lives in New Hampshire and is as stubborn as they come.
I spend lots of my time on the internet running the ALP website, but also some other websites as well, such as my community website, my oldest website on the Silent Generation, and my high school class, as well as some others. My high school class was about 400 kids, some of whom were in school together for 12 straight years, but many of whom were military brats or civil service brats whose parents were in the Washington, D.C. area for two years and then off to the next assignment, family and all.
No. This story did not get by me. Yes, the Russians are trying their hand at cyber warfare against the small but plucky nation of Estonia, due west of Putin's St. Petersburg.
Putin got away with a couple days of this harassment and a couple of weeks could have made quite a difference for the valiant Estonians. The Europeans have told Putin to knock it off, but Washington has been silent, as far as I know.
Since 1981 my life has been shaped by computers and computing. I was an early adopter and scared the bejesus out of my various bosses, one of whom viewed my activities much like Falwell views the antichrist. It turns out that anything that is as democratic as computing cannot be all bad.
Bad is relative. Things could be a lot better in computing after all these years. We have moved along a technological trajectory that seems to be boosted from time to time by additional booster rockets we did not know were there to ignite. Windows version 3.0 was such a boost and before that the original IBM PC with a hard drive to keep track of ever expanding machine competence. Google is such a booster, and U-Tube, and CDs, flash drives, and so on. But the basic software still seems to be self-indulgent, balky, and hard to use outside the box, where most of us are.
Bill Gates and his friends created the behemoth Microsoft and nearly captured the world-wide operating system market. In a very real sense, the computer revolution needed a standardization back in the 1980's and early 1990's that Windows and Office provided. But, they were compromise products and the enduring legacy a standardization below the bar set by better products.
Two articles today on Microsoft and its latest product:
The Washington Post has a chilling article this morning about cyber crime on the rise. Interestingly, they point out the hole that existed in Symantec's anti-virus product for six months before it was fixed. A discussion of infections on one of my computers last summer revealed that my Symantec product had let a vicious worm through to my computer. I dropped Symantec like a hot rock. I had previously had trouble with McAfee. The local computer guru and his gang of kids recommended Avast! and I am using that still. I also use CA Anti-Spam and neither work well with version 7.0 of Internet Explorer/Outlook, which after a couple weeks of tryout I deinstalled. Early reports on MS Vista are not encouraging, since this newest version of windows has a completely new graphical interface, something I don't need right now.
Last night on Bill Moyers he discussed the problem of corporate interests trying to take over the internet. This article in CommonDreams summarizes the program and points to a truly horrible outcome for this most democratizing technology. It is imperative that Congress not bow to the massive lobbying to break the back of the internet.
