No Comment

The Daily Banter: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: "Popular Science" Shuts Down Its Comment Section/9.25.13

Taking on the Mob

Today's extended column for the Daily Banter once again examines the subject of the good and bad of our internet outrage culture. Over the past week, we've seen two restaurants attacked through social media for business decisions they've made -- and one story of a really stupid move by a pop star publicist.

Yeah, we love it. But has it gotten out of control? Or was it never under control to begin with?

Here's the opening shot:

"I caught a decent little documentary on Netflix last week called Heckler. It attempts to document the contentious relationship between comics and comic actors and those paying comedy club patrons who take it upon themselves to confront them during their sets, hoping to, I guess, get the upper hand in a battle they’re sure never to win. At least that’s the way it starts. What the movie eventually evolves into, though, is an examination of every kind of criticism those who put themselves out there as performers have to endure in the internet age: from the traditional art of criticism that’s degenerated into an 'anyone can do it' mentality to the legion of snarky anonymous trolls who turn the comment section of every internet post into an ugly flamewar.

Keep in mind, given that Heckler was made all the way back in 2007, an eon ago in terms of social media development and proliferation, it barely scratched the surface of how vicious it is out there. These days, internet outrage is an everyday fact of life — one that’s been honed to a scalpel’s edge. If anything you do is public, you need to understand that your good reputation, success, even personal respect in the community exists solely at the mercy of the largess — or at least ignorance — of the internet millions. And here’s the catch: Everything you do is public — thanks to the internet. Whether you know it or not, you’re likely under surveillance, a permanent self-sentenced inmate in a digital version of Bentham’s Panopticon. If you’re not sitting alone in the panic room you built in your basement, making the mistake of thinking no one’s watching you can be a near-fatal one."

Read the Rest Here

Picture of the Day

Posted to Reddit by an Applebee's waitress named Chelsea who has since been fired for doing so.

The receipt was apparently signed by a local pastor who, as you can see, removed the included tip and wrote, "I give God 10%, why do you get 18?"

The original title that went with the Reddit post read, "My mistake sir, I'm sure Jesus will pay for my rent and groceries," which is pretty good.

My comment would've been more like, "Because I actually exist and was able to take care of you."

I have no doubt that Chelsea, as a budding internet sensation whom many already believe was unjustly canned, will be the beneficiary of a massive Kickstarter campaign or something like that, inadvertently making her just as insufferable as the asshole who took away her tip. But for now, she's got my sympathies. Besides, once people figure out who the pastor is and begin personally bombarding him with the abuse he deserves, it will all have been worth it.

Instant Update: That took no time at all. The pastor is 37-year-old Alois Bell of St. Louis -- he's a she, not a him, by the way -- and she's now apologizing and kind of groveling for forgiveness from an entity even mightier than God: the internet. "My heart is really broken," she says. “I’ve brought embarrassment to my church and ministry.” She goes on to say that the stiffing was a lapse in her usually good judgment. By the way, Bell was the one who called Applebee's and got Chelsea fired when she saw the receipt online.

Net Worth

Today's column for the Daily Banter deals with the lost promise of the internet.

Here's the opening shot:

"Last week on the podcast I regularly do with Bob Cesca, I mentioned, only half-jokingly, that there are times I wish the internet would just go away. Obviously, there’s no denying that the internet as a global public forum, marketplace for the exchange of ideas, and tool for researching and networking is truly one of the great wonders of the world, a creation so culturally significant that it’s almost impossible to remember what our lives were like before it came along. Also, I won’t deny the irony of the fact that I made my little negative comment about the internet — and am making this one — on a platform that wouldn’t exist were it not for the hyper-connectivity provided by the internet itself. Still, while digital media have allowed us access to an unparalleled amount of information which should, by any measure, make us the smartest our society has ever been, they’ve also allowed idiots access to an unparalleled amount of misinformation and elevated it to the point where the moron hive-mind can become just as powerful as the intellectual one. I realize I’m not breaking a lot of new ground by saying this, but rather than making us smarter as a culture, I’m pretty sure the free and instantaneous exchange of ideas provided by the internet is actually making us dumber because so often those ideas we’re freely, instantaneously exchanging are fucking nonsense.

Case in point: A YouTube clip called 'The Sandy Hook Shooting — Fully Exposed,' which advances the theory that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting last month was at least partially a hoax, has garnered almost nine-million views in just one week."

Read the Rest Here

I Can Haz Stoopid Fuhkin Cheezburger?

The description of this video from comedian Mike Polk, Jr.: "People like to look at cats on the internet. Why not look at my stupid cat?"

Memed Corn

Behold the result of a project dreamed up by the students of Michigan's Grand Valley State University and the nearby Clark Retirement Community. May as well watch this now and get in on the ground floor of the mania. By tomorrow morning this thing will be everywhere, and these "singin' seniors"* will be the latest insta-celebrities the entire country will be fawning over.

You can practically hear the morning show bookers knocking over their coffee as they rush to their phones.

Not sure it's gonna be such a good idea, though, to tell anyone this old that he or she has "gone viral."

*Local news copywriters, you don't have to thank me.

Net Brutality

Allen West is a freshman congressman from Florida. He's a Tea Party darling who, among other noteworthy achievements, retired from the Army after taking a shot at an Iraqi civilian in order to intimidate him, compared President Obama to Hitler and encouraged people to arm themselves against the government, and named as his chief of staff a far-right talk radio host whose lunatic rhetoric was connected with a credible threat that led police to lock down every single school in Broward County, Florida last November.

In other words, Allen West is a real peach.

So maybe it's not surprising that he sees the AOL-Huffington Post deal as the end of all life as we know it.

From Media Matters:

"You look out there, you see that AOL has purchased the Huffington Post. Now all of a sudden a very far left liberal blogger such as Arianna Huffington has a huge influence in the Internet world," he said. We cannot allow ourselves to be suppressed. We cannot allow them to take over the Internet."

Three things: First of all, Arianna Huffington just sold her wholly independent, "very far left liberal" blog to the most conservative, milquetoast internet media conglomerate in America -- and pocketed $315 million dollars for herself and her partners in the process. If that doesn't win her some street cred from the big business-fellating crowd, what the hell will?

Second, is there anything more comical than listening to a right-wing blowhard feign victimization at the hands of the supposed liberal juggernaut bent on quashing his or her views? The constant cries of "we will not be silenced or suppressed" from a group whose media bullhorn is positively deafening these days is the stuff of cheap farce. That said, the conspiratorial "encroaching threat" argument is one that's been used by the most unimaginative political talking heads on the right -- to great effect -- for the past few years, so it's not surprising a hack like West would bust it out.

Third, you wanna know why the conservative movement is losing the internet? Media Matters goes on to nail it: What has the avowed right got in terms of new media that's truly groundbreaking? Sure, it owns the talk radio medium and it's correct when it boasts that as of now progressives don't stand a chance of breaking its stranglehold -- and there's even an argument to be made that the left can't put a dent in Fox News's adamantium hull on television. But the internet is an entirely different beast; it's a place where innovation and imagination triumph and it's one that lends itself to the non-linear way the left and center-left tend to think. In much the same way that conservatives look down their noses at any attempt by progressives to match the success of, say, Rush Limbaugh, progressives can rightly claim that their political adversaries haven't even come close to smacking it out of the park on the internet the way HuffPo has. Yeah, there's Drudge, but that's almost 15 years old and it's barely evolved since its inception -- and there's no way in hell a major corporation of any kind would get near Breitbart with a pair of rubber gloves and a cattle prod.

Don't like what you see when you "look out there," congressman?

Maybe you need to take a harder look at who your audience is.

Quote of the Day

"Okay, so I haven't been covering Egypt here. I'm a shitty blogger, etc. The reason I haven't posted anything yet is chiefly because I'm ambivalent about the end game -- as I am with any large scale uprising. We simply don't know whether the potential new government will actually be far worse to its people and a greater threat to America. The potential for there to be a radical, theocratic government that replaces the Mubarak military government is -- what? -- 50/50? So while the goals of free elections and liberty are noble, and worthy of our full throated support, what are the real odds of that coming to fruition in this transfer? I don't know yet. The only thing we can hope for, perhaps, is a strong western influence (us) pulling some stunts behind the scenes to swing the outcome closer to our favor."

-- Bob Cesca

Speaking of shitty bloggers, I admit that I lazily pulled Cesca's explanation for why he's stayed silent on Egypt over here because it kind of nails my thoughts on the head. Unlike Fox news, which can't even find the fucking place on a map (sure it was likely a mistake by one guy in graphics, but oh was it a good one), I don't pretend to know enough about the decades and even centuries of political and social machinations within Egypt that have led to this one moment of epochal upheaval. And the last thing I want to be is one more dilletante American asshole offering ridiculous commentary from half-a-world away. I know that if we hope for every new government -- or even ones that already exist -- to embrace our ideals or at least be friendly toward our interests, we're going to be waiting a long time, so maybe it's myopic and culturally narcissistic to look at this revolution only in terms of how it might benefit the U.S. It may, it may not; freedom grows in unpredictable and sometimes ugly ways. That's why we have a State Department (and why I took offense not long ago at the idea of Wikileaks unleashing internal State Department cables and claiming they revealed nefarious skulduggery; that's what the agency is there for, to negotiate and smooth things over with countries we otherwise wouldn't be able to, and to do it sometimes by any means necessary).


The only angle in all of this that I think I can comment on, because I've done it before, is the way that social networking has become so powerful -- the instantaneous worldwide communication and transparency it provides so dangerous (as evidenced, actually, by the Wikileaks saga) -- that it can organize a revolution and prompt governments to try to look for the internet off switch.

It really is a brave new world out there.

Quote of the Week (Honorable Mention)

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet. Period"

-- Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO and apparent Asian midget porn-hater Michael Lynton