March 30th, 2005

So companies have started to clamp down on bloggers, eh?

Example:

The chief architect for some software product expresses his opinion about the program he is working on and suddenly finds himself fired, in the shadow of a nasty lawsuit, maybe ostracized by his coworkers and pets, or any combination of these. He knows his software is crap. Eventually, anyone who buys it will know it is crap, but he will get punished for letting people know the ugly truth about it too soon.

The simple fact is that we'd do better in life to remember that we do not live in a free society; that we are always subject to censure and marginalisation. That's all of us, whether we want to admit it or not.

So, when I write something unpleasant about the company I work for into my Rant-o-Rama (and, let's call a spade a spade here: it's a blog, after all) I run the risk of Big Trouble if anyone ever monitors it and decides (usually fairly arbitrarily) that I might be a good source of revenue. I know this because people have gone through my website looking for negative things I may have said about former companies. They did Google searches using my website in the Google Website Search Tool and I just know they were scouring the Internet looking for evidence of former employees blogging that company to death. They didn't find anything on my site, by the way, but it is just the kind of paranoid mindless stupidity that results in huge efforts expended for little or no gain.

One of the things that makes this so insidious is the idea that corporations aren't happy just controlling the actions of its workers. Corporations contain enough people stupid enough to think that they can control what the other employees think as well.

Hunh, you can hold a gun to someone's head—hell, you can even pull the trigger, and you cannot control what someone thinks. No matter what, people will think what they want. So, the only way to change how someone thinks is to somehow convince them that they want to think a certain way. Well, that requires people with a lot more intelligence and subtlety than most Corporations employ. I mean, there are only so many people in the world, and the bell-curve nature of life ensures that there will always only be a few people around who are smart enough to consciously make real changes.

But a corporation moves and dances to its own, single-minded, set of rules. There are many many resources for the interested:

* * *

OK, and that leads me to something about myself that I shouldn't have to defend, but—thanks to an email—here goes:

I am not a Liberal and I am not a Conservative. I have opinions that originate from all over the so-called "political spectrum" but I am not the enemy of anyone except extremists. I can see that the far left and the far right are exactly the same thing, and that the whole "left wing right wing" thing is a convenient set of words to help the less intellectual folks out in their definitions of themselves. They're just like coat hangers bolted to the walls: You hang your coat where the hangers are.

<YetAnotherChildhoodReminder>

When I was a child, I would sometimes go into the kitchen and disturb my mother as she made dinner. In those situations, I was usually told to set the table. Because I did this so often, I learned that if I wanted more elbow space around the table I only had to move the placemats, plates, and cutlery slightly further away from my own spot. The other members of my family would sit down and adjust their chairs and themselves to match the location of the plates. Instant elbow room for me.

I once told this to a friend and she said, "God, you were a manipulative little bastard, weren't you?" She called me a bastard because she knew that this was sneaky and a successful way to get what I wanted without other people realising it (at least at first ... I can't actually remember if anyone in my family ever caught on, though I doubt that they did). And she also knew that if I sat at the dinner table and said, "I need more elbow room, can everyone move six inches thataway? I would just be met with reasons why they couldn't or wouldn't move ... even the dreaded, "Well, Brian, we all get the same amount of space at the table and it wouldn't be fair to give you six inches more ..."

</YetAnotherChildhoodReminder>

But back to my point: I honestly don't know how people can live their lives adhering to only one corner of the political map. I can't. It's not human, it's not even natural. It's got to be slowly toxic to the thought processes ... heck, even politicians aren't political anymore. (Well, at least the ones that last longer than a single term.)

And here I've finally stooped so low as to start quoting Dilbert ... but only because what appears this week in Scott Adams' strip is appropriate:

I don't hate it. I simply mentioned the pros and cons. People are so conditioned to take sides that a balanced analysis looks to them like hatred.

But if history is my guide, you will abuse the next hour of my life by insisting that I defend your misunderstanding of what I think.

And I'll end with my own point: "Why do you even care what I think?"


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