May 17th, 2005

The other day I mentioned that I am not right wing and I am not left wing ... that I have opinions from all over the so-called spectrum (and I further rejected the notion that the "right-wing, left-wing" spectrum was even a natural phenomenon). It's the second half of my rant for March 30th.

Like many others, I vastly enjoy telling others my opinion, but if they don't agree with me, I don't argue incessantly and I don't descend to personal attack.

But folks like me are not very helpful to the furtherance of Free Enterprise and the White Western Way of the World. What I mean is this: I don't suffer fools, I can't stand posing and social artifice, and I have a healthy distrust of authority for authority's own sake (though I am quite thoroughly law-abiding and willing to do what I'm told just as long as I can see a reason for it—even if I don't agree with that reason). If someone has authority over me, I will obey that authority right up to the instant that it is suddenly abused, and then my respect for that person is instantly gone.

I and folks like me are also not interested in being told what we like or told what to buy or do. Believe me, we don't "recognise" the "authority" of mass culture or advertising. Although we can't entirely beat it back, we are much less inclined to be susceptible to somebody's advertising campaign. It amuses me to see men both older and younger than I driving cars that are advertised to them. Or seeing young people wearing certain fashions or drinking the latest drink. Watching the latest movie and listening to the latest music ... gawd, Paul Simon told it to my generation in the 1980s: "Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts." It's all part of a culture created by advertisers, and they sense the anxiety that comes with not being a part of it.

In fact, advertising does just that, doesn't it?

Advertising instills in us an anxiety of exclusion by showing us an imaginary path into the Promised Land.

Or, paraphrased for those folks who don't like big words: "We suddenly feel uncool when we are shown that we would be cool if we bought their crap."

We can buy their junk, but all we are doing is avoiding a confrontation with our own sense of not belonging. Once we've got their shiny new toy, we feel better for three minutes until we realise that we still haven't arrived in Paradise. So the next advertising campaign will continue to have an effect on us. What a treadmill! What an addictive life-long consumption binge we are hooked on!

And we are all affected to some extent, but for people in my untrusting, opinionated, and rebellious (under certain circumstances) category, the kind of things that get under our skin are much more subtle than can be conveyed by a television commercial or a internet banner ad. We cannot be swayed by the noise of regular advertising (though everyone can be swayed somehow ...)

OK, this came about because I have been noting, with shock and horror, how utterly reprehensible Internet message boards are becoming. I mean, the most innocuous story by Yahoo! or a SlashDot link, and let the irrelevant and off-topic vitriol pour!

I already posited a self-serving rant about this a while back, but I still continued to wonder why, and I think I've come up with an answer which is, at least partially, correct.

Put simply, message boards must encourage (feed) trolls so that their advertising gets looked at by the people most susceptible to it.

Now this ain't a new concept: Television has realised this for decades. It is why you get situation comedies and a steady stream of "police dramas" and—ulp—sporting events. It is because the boobs watching the tubes are the dudes who dole out the dough.

Well, message boards are no different: The idiots who jump into every single conversation telling the other idiots who jump into every single conversation (normal discourse is almost entirely gone now) how this is a result of stupid liberals, or how this is the result of stupid "neo-" conservatives ... or how Al Gore invented it or how they were the first to post on whatever particular topic ... they are all just being given a bit of rope by the owner of the board so that the advertising it sold can get its tapeworm teeth into the brains of the posters.

The only people left posting messages on these public boards are the dolts with the overpowering urge to shout something rude into the cybervacuum as a way of somehow reminding themselves that they exist; they can't tell the difference between bad attention and good attention. They are pathetic little people wallowing in their self-perceived inadequacies, and therefore ready to intellectually spread their legs and let the advertisers have their way with them.

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