Repost from June 9, 2001
Okay, I promised I was going to do a rant on the senator who defected. But, actually, it occurs to me that I have more important things to say:
To start out with – I don’t know if y’all have been following the news, but Ashcroft is trying to make people who operate porn sites do some hard time. Now I’m not a huge porn fan, but I am a huge fan of the first amendment. I’m not saying that I consider kiddie porn acceptable (though I don’t think there’s much of that served inside the US), but aside from such extremes, as far as I’m concerned people should be free to publish whatever they want. I think this is usually called freedom of the press – one wonders if Ashcroft intends to shut down Playboy as well?
One wonders even more if Ashcroft intends to do anything about the thousands of ads that use sexually explicit symbology to attempt to sell their product? Or is he simply upset because all his dot-com stock crashed out but the internet porn sites are still making money?
In theory, this was a democratic republic – in other words, what we the people wanted mattered. In theory. Okay, so there are thousands of porn sites because people, well, like porn. I can agree that certain types of porn degrade women – but wouldn’t the sensible thing to do be to educate the people better about this, and let them make their own informed decision?
Personally, I’m seriously thinking I’d better reevaluate my pacifist beliefs. Because it may be getting around that time where the sons of liberty (sic) have to fight the bad evil imperialist empire if they want to remain free. Anyone starting to feel like they’re living in 1984?
On to another front – the mass corporate screwing of the current generation. I’m sending a heads up – to investors, to dot-coms, to non-dot-coms.. to all of ya’ll who participate in the great global mass orgy that we call a free market. You all fucked yourselves. Big time. Not only have you gone out of your way to destroy corporate loyalty in the last generation (See Roger And Me) – and not only have you forgot that corporations exist first and foremost as PART OF A COMMUNITY – NOT to make profits – you’ve also managed to alienate this generation so thoroughly that you will never see corporate loyalty out of any of us again. Fucknuts.
Okay, so what we recently saw was a transition from the early scam dot-coms run by con men to the quasi-legitimate brick-and-morterish people. Now instead of actually trying to make music free, MP3.com is working for the man – etc, etc. Okay, we can live with that. You were panning for clue.. But you panned too hard.
Now, not only do those of us who stayed not trust you – the ones who got ‘laid off’ (right. Fired.) _really_ don’t trust you – and will never trust a company again. Smooth fucking move. Bad enough that the first generation had to make all the promises it couldn’t possibly keep – but now you’re making promises that you could have kept, but found it more convenient not to. Right. Well, I’ve got bad news for you – all the people you canned – prolonging their job hunt until the market was saturated and there were no jobs to be found – are gonna be drawing unemployment, living off your taxes – and I hope, takin’ it to the streets.
In the meantime, many of the companies that purchased the dot coms keep buying more companies.. Thinking you can buy solutions and they just snap together like legos – and keeps laying people off (read: firing them – when you ‘lay off’ someone, it implies you might bring them back if you had something for them to do). Okay, so we need to reduce headcount to save money – while we’re dumping millions into all these little dying companies. Right. And the CTO has a multi-million dollar house _why_?)
The problem is that this generation of kids is so far normalized, medeocrisized, and conformized that they’ll sit in front of the TV set mooing and believe that they got a fair shake. Okay, so they were overpaid. Nooo shit. They were overpaid because the tech people wouldn’t work for less, and all the artiste-types got jealous of the tech people. Why wouldn’t the tech people work for less? Hrm, maybe because it’s a really shitty job? Involving waking up at outrageous hours, completely changing your mindset to mate with the computer’s, potential insanity, and the wonderful feeling that any time you could hit the wrong key and (supposedly) cause a million dollars in loss. Oh, but now microsoft’s going to fix all that.. hrm… oops, that’s another rant in and of itself.
Anyway, my point is, they were overpaid – BUT A LOT OF THEM DIDN’T KNOW IT! And, you kept cramming ads for credit cards, cars, etc down their throats – and now you’re about to see the longest string of young bankrupt people in history. I tried to warn them. I really did.. but you’re all going to pay for it now. Every one of you. How many dot coms actually worked on ad-share rev? Did any of you ever stop to question whether ads themselves were ethical?
Hrm. I think I’ve strayed from my original point, whatever it was. But to make the basic point clear again – you all fucked us, because you wanted money so bad. We’re never going to trust you again. And, I hope we’ll all get mad enough to get politically active – because there were a lot of us, and I’m pretty sure we could make some changes..
Maybe we could even shut down Ashcroft. But I doubt it. After all, Bush wasn’t really elected.
We’re living in hard times, my friends.. hard times. And it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Hang in there