There are humans in the world, adult humans, in their 40s, who do elaborate prank calls just for the fun of it.
And the internet has allowed them to create a gathering place, to feed off of each others ideas and be even greater oozing pus boils on the ass crack of mankind.
Listen to this podcast for the story. But to summarize, a guy had a problem with comcast. He tweeted about it. They resolved it and gave him a discount. Story that happens all over the internet.
A few months later, he gets a call from a comcast rep asking him to delete the tweet. They go back and forth, with the rep comparing keeping the tweet up to keeping a mean tweet up about your girlfriend which you posted during a fight. The rep eventually calls him a dickhole and then he deletes the tweet. Eventually she’s mean enough that he hangs up.
It was a prank. For fun. Not to steal anything, just because this person finds prank phone calls entertaining. Manipulating people is entertaining to her bored self and so why not choose a random stranger and make them severely uncomfortable for awhile.
I’ll be honest. I find prank phone calls with no other purpose than self gratification to be SEVERAL rungs lower than some asshole who would con someone for money or ID over the phone. And I think those vermin are the shit stuck in the butt crack of dirty heroin addicts. But the shit vermin are at least working toward a productive end, not just idly entertaining themselves like the oozy pus pranksters are. It does not justify the behavior, but as a motivation for doing vile things, the search for money is more understandable to me than the search for entertainment.
Humans have always been terrible, but the internet allows us to find other people who enjoy our worst selves. And they create subreddits and websites and skype and then – poof – we have a club of people who support and grow this terrible behavior. Its the dirty underside of all the good things that are the internet. And sometimes I worry about it.
I follow the astronaut Scott Kelly on twitter. While he was in space he did this thing with earth pictures where he likened them to art without identifying the place in the picture. I could never figure out the place – although sometimes I think a cartographer would not have been able to. Because he’d focused on a gorgeous pattern but it didn’t have an easy reference point.
But sometimes he challenged people to identify the place and it did have something you could reference if you knew something about geography. I could NEVER identify it.
EVEN when he said what I was looking at, I was at a loss for several moments because it’s not oriented the way my schooling taught me the earth is oriented.
I think we do a big disservice to kids in constantly orienting maps with the north at the top. It makes us internalize the idea that there is a top to earth. AND THERE ISN’T. No up. No down.
North at the top is just a function of tradition. Yeah, I know the magnetic pole thing – but honestly – in space its just a ball floating in a whole lot of vacuum. And while the planets are on a sort of plane with the sun, AGAIN, is that really related to how the continents are on our sphere?
This is a Dymaxion map designed by Buckminster Fuller. Its designed to give land masses their proper ratios. Notice that Greenland is NOT the same size as Africa. Of course this means none of the water is accurate. Maps, man. Can’t be trusted.
Anyway, I guess I think that if you taught geography as a kind of wild puzzle, without orientation to the north, it would be far more captivating to kids. If you showed them all the crazy ideas that cartographers have come up with to map the world that challenge their ideas of how the world is actually carved up – it might wake them up a bit. They might actually learn where Malaysia is vs Madagascar
I been thinking about some of the implications of smart cars. Because it wouldn’t actually play out like the comic says. In all probability the car would only respond to the voice command of the person it currently thinks of as the driver, otherwise it would randomly react to conversations in a car.
Think about it. The cars come linked to the owner with a voice or the fingerprint or something. So, lending a car – You don’t just hand the neighbor the keys to your truck so he can run to Lowes and pick up something too big for his Prius. You have a glitchy app, probably, that gives temporary access to the neighbor, which probably fucks up after he parks in Lowes and now he can’t get back…
Imagine if the Owner dies. You have to get the dealer to reset it or something.
The car will probably have some government access so that they can impound your car as necessary. Also the loan company will have that access.
In fact the loan company could just send a message to a self driving car to come in to their lot. A whole group of people whose job it is to repossess cars will become slowly obsolete.
Police chases will end as soon as a cop sends a message to the self driving car to pull over. Probably no siren needed in those cases. Its not like the world needs to be aware of what can be communicated through the car. And the cars themselves are going to go about pulling over in the safest possible manner with all the cars around them cooperating.
From a law abiding stand point all these things are good things. Less cost, less injury, more socially acceptable behavior.
So, why do I feel like we are losing something?
Choice, even the choice to do something illegal, seems so paramount to me. And so when I think about a world in which the speed limit is always obeyed and the stolen car will never be missed in traffic and will always pull over safely, and the interest rates on car loans go down because the repossession of default is cheap and easy… all I can feel is sad. It feels dystopian instead of utopian.
But it is in fact utopian. Right?
Well, not completely. How do you make sure the loan company gives up that access when you pay off the loan? How do know someone won’t hack the loan company and now some random asshole has potential control of your car. Because there is always an asshole.
There are lots of things like that. But like most things, the convenience and effectiveness will out weight the outlier negatives. And we will numbly hand over control of our cars to corporations and governments because it now is easier to stare at a smartphone on the commute to work.
And if you are thinking, as I did for a moment, well, I just won’t buy one. This is what I think is going to be the most insidious part of it. At some point the saturation of self driving cars will be say 75%. And the vast majority of people not using them will be people without enough money. And criminals. And we will then place a stigma on non-self driving cars.
And then people will begin to say it won’t be truly effective until EVERYONE is using a self driving car. So they will ban the old ones because only criminals use them (because who thinks people won’t oversimplify it to that?). Which will effectively take a huge amount of mobility and freedom from a whole lot of lower income people who can’t afford a self driving car or to take a self driving taxi everywhere. And the likelihood of public transit being pervasive enough to fix that, especially in rural areas, is unlikely.
The net effect 100 years after that will probably be positive and no one will do more than comment in history books on the social implications of the change. Those people won’t know what we lost, because they never had those choices, can’t see why I would think the ability to choose to do something I would never do is important. They will feel distantly that the plight of several million people who lost mobility was sad but they won’t understand because we will probably have solved that problem with a wider net of public transit. But during the change, which will happen in our lifetimes, it isn’t going to be so nice.
A few days ago, #WhichHilary was trending on Twitter. It was highlighting the various inconsistencies in Clinton’s current position vs her past positions and actions. It was used heavily by Sanders supporters and various Republican Supporters. It had A LOT of traction.
It was started by an activist twitter @guerilladems. That account was suspended soon after the hashtag started trending.
The trending references were removed from Twitter. Upon realizing that it wasn’t working, an alternative hashtag sprang up #whichhilarycensored. That one disappeared too.
Twitter later said it was a mistake.
The Twitter CEO hosted a fundraiser for Clinton.
But it was a mistake.
Right.
Twitter and similar social media have been very powerful agents for change and political focus. Everything from the Arab Spring to Ferguson gain energy and inclusion and focus through social media.
But these things happen on a very limited number of websites. And those websites control the content. So essentially what happens in the world is now controlled at the pleasure of the website. At the pleasure of a very small number of people.
Its a terrible power to place in the hands of a human.
We like to think that the web is, for better or worse, a truly democratic place. Where the voices of the many can come together and express their similar views. Voices that used to never be heard.
But ultimately they can only be seen if that website allows it.
People will blame Clinton and it is not unfair to do so. I have a hard time doubting that someone in her camp didn’t make a call. But the real power in this situation isn’t from the person begging the favor. Its in the person who had the ability to grant such a favor. A very powerful favor. That favor represents more power than should be given to anyone.
I have always been a proponent of the idea that a website has the right to control the comments that happen on their website. I would NEVER allow any sort of hateful comment to live on my blog. I would censor it in a heartbeat.
But I have to question whether places like twitter or facebook have grown beyond the bounds of private gardens where individuals can control what happens on their sites. Perhaps they are now a truly public forum, as much as a public park is and as such, perhaps it really is a place where the rights of free and uncensored speech apply.
As a reminder to those in bad relationships, those between relationships, those who think that there is “only one person destined for me and I can’t find them.”
There are no soul mates. To read the logical analysis of that, click on the link. Or just take my word for it.
I think this myth is one of the most destructive ones persisting in the world today. On a personal level, not, obviously, on a global one.
The amount of expectation you put on another human being when you expect them to be the one and only person who can be your one true love is terrifying.
The expectation itself is almost guaranteed to destroy the relationship.
When we expect to find our one true soul mate we tend to think that all of the loneliness and general feeling of restless unhappiness in our lives will go away once this person arrives.
Studies show that mutual love does temporarily makes us giddy with happiness, but that levels off and the underlying problems in our lives do not disappear.
Then we worry that this person is perhaps just someone we love, but is not THE ONE. Should we move on and keep looking? How will we know? Is there a guide?
So we leave them because we are still feeling not happy in life generally and the soul mate was supposed to solve that.
Or consider the scenario where we feel like so much caca when a relationship doesn’t work out and we felt sure this person was our one true love. What does that mean for the future? That we have to settle? That we are so broken even our soul mate can’t stand us?
Or worse than leaving a potentially good relationship, we stay in a destructive relationships with thoughts like – “it’s a volatile relationship, but I still love him. He’s my soul mate.” When the reality is that it’s more like a soul sucking mate.
There are no soul mates. It would be a mathematical impossibility to find a soul mate, if such a thing existed. Refer to above link for the proof.
Stop worrying so much about it and enjoy the happy moments with the person you are with. If you aren’t getting enough happy moments, ditch them like dirt water and find the next person who makes you feel happy and comfortable most of the time you are with them. Or choose to be happy alone. But don’t let another person drag you into a never ending bog of unhappiness.
