*This screed probably should be printed out and stapled on telephone poles.
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Did anybody notice that the RE/Search monthly newsletter stopped being sent to over 5,000 email addresses? (Blame comcast.net for labeling it "spam" & threatening our wonderful service provider, Laughing Squid.)
() If you'd like to receive the future iteration of the newsletter, once we find a magnanimous host, please email me at: [email protected] ! - Thanks, V. Vale, RE/Search founder
July 2011 editorial by V. Vale, RE/Search and Search&Destroy founder:
HOW MANY JOBS HAS THE INTERNET KILLED? (You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!)
If I were an alien from Outer Space wanting to ruin life on Planet Earth, I think I'd invent the Internet.
I'd get every earthling constantly connected via some electronic wireless gizmo to an ADD-creating, creativity-sucking, time-wasting, globally-exploitative hive-video-brain offering:
- massive discounts no "local" merchant could afford to give
- "free" illegal downloads of the entirety of the world's cultural output, thus chopping off at the root any chance of lengthy artistic development and maturation
- billions of shocking / titillating images, films, videos and words whose net effect is even more passivity-inducement and lethargy
- fake social networking whose RESULT is: nobody gets together in the same room anymore – too much trouble. Everyone's at home consuming images and audio on an electronic screen, writing inconsequential fluff, and twittering their lives away...(Yes, a few who can still afford it, sit "alone together" in coffeehouses, glued to their electronic devices).
- in sum, constant, hypnotizing distraction so that silence and solitude have become unthinkable, obsolete and positively quaint...
Then I'd sit around and watch 99% of the earthlings get fat and insane as every possible place offering "real social contact in real time" goes out of business – most never to return. The 1% left are like the actors in the ancient Roman Games, living the "real" lives while the other 99% act like the zombie spectators they are, each unemployed spectator telling themselves they're truly unique and "special" and deserve to be celebrities...
Meanwhile, none of the 99% ever suspect that the Internet was the cause...
(Ironically, since this is posted on the Internet, this "rant" will doubtless be ignored... Oh yes, it was written by a luddite BOOK publisher - almost forgot what a "book" was - I once saw one, long ago... )
