Simon Fraser (IV)

I found myself watching a YouTube video that I didn’t really want to watch and I clicked away from it. But because I’d watched the first few seconds of it, the recommendations that then appeared on my YouTube home page contained content similar to the video that I didn’t want to continue watching.

While this bit of automated programming functions if I’m enjoying the content, it did not today.

Watch out!

Why is it that the political right always castrates itself? Given that all they really have is balls, it seems painfully ironic.

Yesterday, in response to the recent electoral protests in Iran, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i addressed a circus tent full of men who all looked relatively the same – much like a Republican convention, where even the women look like stodgy Caucasian men desperate to hang on to their semblance of Old World power. But I digress.

Thomson Reuters reported on the speech by Khāmene’i, excerpting several pieces of the monologue that seemed noteworthy, such as, “… I am urging them to end street protests, otherwise they will be responsible for its consequences, and consequences of any chaos…” and “… If there is any bloodshed, leaders of the protests will be held directly responsible.”

While – yes – Thomson Reuters is a Western news source that is not necessarily friendly to the Iranian establishment and – yes – these quotes are excerpted from their original context, neither of these facts affect the point I am about to make.

Cause watch me now; I’m going to except them even further.

“… they will be responsible for its consequences…”

“… leaders of the protests will be held directly responsible…”

Did you catch that? Did you hear what just happened?

Essentially, what Khāmene’i has done is placed all the responsibility for the outcome of these protests – all of it, positive and negative – on to his adversaries. No matter how many people are killed by riot police or secret police, no matter how many are left maimed or made into refugees, no matter how much bloodshed results, there ain’t no flies on the Ayatollah.

But if his adversaries have all the responsibility, then Khāmene’i must have no responsibility. And if Khāmene’i has no responsibility, then dig this – he has no power. Allow me to italicize this for emphasis – the Supreme Leader of Iran has abdicated all power. In much the same way, the wielder of a gun has no power if they cannot take responsibility for (i.e. control) their weapon. Eventually, they will shoot themselves in the face.

And like most right-wing extremists, he did it to himself. All that’s left to happen now is for several thousand individuals to be murdered so that these fundamentalist numb skulls can express their fear with bullets. Because the Ayatollah has no responsibility, I assume the triggers will simply go off by themselves. Good luck to all those in their line of sight.

Sayyid Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i, the Ayatollah of… fizzle fizzle ssssssssss…

Going after Pirate Bay for sharing BitTorrent files that refer users to copyright-infringing files is akin to going after the Yellow Pages for publishing the phone number to a restaurant owned by the mob. They are both nothing more than technologies that can be used either legally or illegally.

Everything any of us does online involves file-sharing. By sending an email, you’re creating a file and sharing it with the recipient. By surfing to a web page, the file that marks up that web page is being shared with you; the JPG and GIF files on that page are being shared with you. By viewing a video on YouTube, a Flash video file is being shared with you. The code of this web page now exists both on the computer that holds this website AND on your computer AND, unless they’ve all cleared their caches, on the computers of every other person who has read this web page.

The Internet was borne out of Arpanet, a Cold War system for information redundancy during the event of a nuclear attack. The Internet IS file-sharing.

Copyright is nothing more than a social agreement about who has control over the supply of an item. Because media conglomerates – studios, record labels, etc. – have in the past relied wholly upon supply control to achieve their goals (X copies going to Y outlets in Z territories) and are stuck in that archaic mindset, they are having difficulties with this new medium which exists solely through a lack of supply control.

The only thing media conglomerates have going for them is deep pockets, but all the cash in the world won’t make an iota of difference when you’re going up against the very essence of the medium itself.

As soon as the media conglomerates picked up their swords, they lost their battle. And somewhere Sun Tzu thought to himself, “Told you so.”

I remember a day several years ago, shortly after a few hopeless Nike-friendly computer geeks covered themselves with purple shrouds, I was sitting on a sofa at my friend’s downtown flat. The Chancellor and I were watching his two piranha take some goldfish to task as we ruminated on the coming turn of the millennium.

“I’m going to be in a cabin in the woods,” I told him, “with a woman, a dog and an assault rifle.”

“Why?” asked the Chancellor.

“You think the crime rate is high now? On December 31, 1999, it’s gonna go through the roof! From September on, people are gonna be losing their minds. They’re gonna be coming in through the windows!”

“Who’s going to be coming in through the windows?” asked the Chancellor.

“Everybody!!!”

Since that day, a few more wars have sprouted up, a few have shut down, some embassies have been bombed (some “on purpose”, some “by mistake”) and a few more kids have shot up the schoolyard. However, I must admit that the prophecies I made on that day with the Chancellor, his piranha and their goldfish have failed to come true.

Certainly, there are some who also believed in the encroaching world riot and went the cabin-lover-dog-rifle route but the need for such action has simply not materialized. And frankly, I must say, I’m disappointed.

There have not been enough mass suicides, not enough prison riots, not enough social breakdown. What would have been the perfect display of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection (accelerated and condensed for consumption) has become the biggest Molotov dud that my paranoid mind has ever concocted.

You call this the turning of a millennium?! The teams haven’t even showed up! I guess the anarchists just don’t have their sh*t together. Perhaps they’re too selfish to be martyrs.

So what was it that turned the tide? What took the fight off the streets?

One word: THIS.

Since the Internet became a commercial entity, millions of us have turned on, typed in and dropped out. We have replaced our mailboxes, conversations, libraries, shopping malls, newspapers, and ourselves with the binary P’s & Q’s of a central processing unit. Mind your 10000′s and 10001′s, McLuhan-San!

Since it was developed post-Sputnik, the Internet (née Arpanet) has had mass media written all over it. No doubt its many creators and legal guardians expected an eventual trickle down effect which would open the medium’s doors to the public.

For those of us who’d been hoping 1999 would be the year that the effluvium of humanity would find its way into the gutters of history, the timing could not have been worse. The murderers, thieves, psychos and scum will not be coming in through the windows – they’re too busy playing Yahoo! Checkers.

The riots have been replaced with a computer bug. How fucking pathetic.

If it seems to anyone that this is not the case, if it seems that there is more crime, more conflict, more struggle than in the past, it only seems that way because of the overwhelming speed and intensity of the numerous mass media. The world has become more difficult to decipher than a Jethro Tull lyric.

Before the teletype, it would have taken weeks, perhaps months, for some lost Pony Express rider to inform me about a mass killing or civil unrest on the other side of the country. By which time, the answers to the questions one naturally asks about such an act would have already been answered. I would not “need” to concern my compassion with the event. I could stay focused on the job at hand – standing in a cold Alaskan stream, trying to get more gold in my pan and avoiding grizzly bears.

The truth is, nothing about us has changed. It is only the methods of mass identity delivery (AM/FM-TV-WWW) that keep morphing into stickier and more distracting forms, until, eventually, many years from now, we’ll all be mucked up in each other’s bee’s wax and any sense of a personality will be, at best, an anomaly. A small price to pay for “peace”, I suppose; though dear Huxley might not agree.

As for me, I’m now most concerned with how the Chancellor and I are going to get the jump on the million other people traveling I-15 to Vegas for the turn of the “man-made abstract measurement”.

All the best to you and yours on this perfectly normal holiday season.