The good news is I’m back on proper internet as opposed to Egyptian stone tablet nonsense. The bad news is, the new laptop was manufactured after Androido Tableti, and thus wants me to Gettheapp. There is a fortune awaiting the person who finally perfects and markets an app whose sole purpose is to block f**kwits persistently trying to persuade innocent bystanders to Gettheapp.
On a rather more serious note, I do feel the need to warn those with older pcs that the world’s need to be committed to an asylum is becoming more urgent with every passing month. There is much talk among opinion formers and blogistas about “financial repression”, and it is indeed real enough; but since working in the tablet space (and then configuring a new laptop) I am more than ever convinced that commercial terrorism is now part of the landscape – and looking increasingly at home in it.
The following explains what I mean: I’m on an Acer machine, but within ten seconds of the setup commencing, my space was invaded by It Who Must be Obeyed, Microsoft.
What The Gated Community then proceeded to do was hide every trace of alternatives to Internet Explorer from me for the best part of half an hour. Further, it said none of the information I wanted was obligatory….but if I failed to fill in the panel, it simply took me back again until I had obeyed orders. Thus, when I used Bill’s app to get into my Gmail account, it looked very pretty…but didn’t work. Ironically, I went back to the android tablet to plot a way round the Gatesfried Line, and only when I’d downloaded Mozilla Firefox (which I think is, relatively speaking, on our side) did I feel that I’d come through the Wild Wood, and was out the other side.
My point here is relatively simple. Today, crap products address their teething troubles in our homes, not in the manufacturer’s test-bed area. When the software screws up, there is no after-sales service…there is only a forum in which purchasers sort out their problems by comparing notes like so many Chateau D’If inmates.
When one enters the ‘neoliberal’ internet region, there is no freedom of choice: there is only a succession of monopolists determined to get one’s business by coercion rather than cooperation and competence. There is little to tell us anything, only an incessant desire to sell us everything. People smile when I say this, but I insist in all seriousness that the day will come when citizens will be served with fines and an ASBO order for “unconsuming in an anti-social manner”.
Distributors cheat us on price claims and relative value, legislators cheat us on their expenses, media barons lie about the truth and spy on us illegally, while finance ministers and Treasury mandarins misrepresent fiscal reality. Banks lie about their commercial situation, steal from innocent entrepreneurs, and plot to steal our financial capital. Politicians renege on electoral promises, take bribes from anyone with the means to keep them in power, and conspire with media gargoyles to bend reality. Bourses claim to give every investor – large or small – access to the business of financing business, but serve up only markets riddled with blatant manipulation.
So: on a financial, fiscal, economic, political, informational and social level, almost all of us are being scammed, fleeced, robbed, misled and scorned as consumption fodder.
But here’s the rub: the people at this game are winning hands down. And the reasons are threefold:
1. The smug soft Right continues to believe that all accusations of malfeasance are “left wing poppycock”
2. The anal Left remains ideologically stuck in 1958, and completely unwilling to make common cause with decent infidels, because they abhor anything or anyone boojwarr, mate
3. The Blogosphere Resistance remains fiercely independent (to the point of libertarian self-indulgence) and unwilling to contemplate any collective opposition to those who march in goggle-eyed grinning lines of triumph towards something ill-defined beyond their 3% owning 98% of our wealth.
Over the last seven years, I have tried in vain to engage all three of the above navel-gazing, bonce-up-arse groups, but to no avail. Reporting back to The Slog’s readership about those abject failures evokes predictably snide comments from the Armchair Emperors: “he’s sulking, he’s taken his ball home, cor-what-about-that-fascist-shit-about-baby-factory-underclass-mums, he’s just another closet Commie, he’s obviously a Nazi presenting a false flag” and all the rest of the solution-free fantastical bollocks puffed out by those who have helped hand an open-goal to the Hunts,Goves and Shapps of this world. Oh how they love to mock….but oh, how they fail on every dimension of courageous realism as I understand it.
Well folks, there comes a point at which sane bloggers must regrettably (but inevitably) reach some introspectively healthy conclusions. Put simply, it would be in the very best of worlds an uphill 1:3 task to stop The Bastards, even if there was a Common Front along the lines of Republicans and Communists in 1936 Spain. But in the context of a Resistance hopelessly splintered by sloth, arcane theories, archaic beliefs, tired old solutions and eclectic 0% creativity, then those of good heart, common sense and reasonable intelligence are likely to eschew the Blogosmear in favour of other media.
I’m not about to close The Slog – it has a loyal following and I suspect that most of that following prefer humour and accessible life-philosophy to rants. I can’t say I blame them: I much prefer writing that more positive stuff to the brain-bashing process of trying to persuade Viennese Jews that Herr Hitler is not for turning.
It’s good to be back. But what’s going down here is many light years from good. Good night and enjoy your Sunday.
The Slog 