My first thought reading this article is that there are very few people in America today who know what the First Amendment is. Ignore all the other rights that the First Amendment protects (you know, like that pesky religious stuff), it still says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. So if your Internet Domain Provider imposes rules, guess what? They ain’t Congress!
The second thought that the article hit me with was the fact that our culture is so fixated on “the next big thing” that they pretty much ignore everything and flock toward “the big stuff.” You have superstars everywhere, and if you’re not a superstar you’re no one. So if you get kicked off MySpace, in the words of the article: “in a lot of ways you don’t exist.” Yeah, I’m not making that quote up. If you get immaterially booted from an immaterial forum you no longer exist. Descartes might have something to say about that, but since when do we care about dead Frenchmen?
Anyway, it is somewhat symptomatic and it’s not just the internet. I’m a writer, and just go into your local bookstore. What do you see? You see “the bigs” up front. Shelf after shelf of the same ten authors. Then, waaaaaaaaay in the back, you find a shelf dedicated to the other fifteen trillion books that have been written. So it’s not just the net, it’s the herd mentality of our culture. You just get a critical mass and go with it. Everyone follows because thinking for yourself is too difficult.
(Now those who are in the know already know what this post is doing. It’s going after the disenfranchised voice, which has its own critical mass. Yes, diabolical wonders never cease. What would we do without marketers to sell us all the crap we don’t want at prices we can’t afford just so we can keep up with the Joneses?)
Anyway, there is a solution for it all. You can simply buy my books and I’ll go away. Learn to distrust popular appeal. Oh wait. That is popular appeal.
We’re all doomed. Somehow I’m sure Bush is to blame.
