Category: The Net Takes You Nowhere

The Net Takes You Nowhere. 30 years later this damn computer still won’t write my paper. The only sure thing technology advances is Carpal Tunnel.

May 12, 2010

Ocean Beach Dog Wrangling

Go vote for Margarita, Ela and “The Critter” at the New York Time’s Lens project “A Moment in Time“! Rotate the planet to look around. We’re in the California “stack,” closest to the top in the “Community” sort. It’s more fun to hunt through and see the range of pictures people thought representative of “a…
May 13, 2005

Zarazi, Troll Priestess of the Horde

Friday the 13th May 2005 What do you do, when a seemingly sensible woman confesses to have become “Zarazi, Troll Priestess of the Horde, 2nd Level,” but doubt she was every really that sensible at all. (Sensible is vastly overrated. Zarazi) And search for proof… Thus, having long wanted to “out” myself and other adult…
December 24, 2004

Why bother about WhyBother.org?

What a pain, a nuisance, annoyance, what trouble, what a bother and botheration it is to inconvenience oneself, to overstrain, extend oneself, to get all hyped up, psyched up, to overexert oneself, all set to trouble oneself, almost kill oneself just to maintain a “vanity” web site year after year after year! Now in the…
November 29, 2000

Our Bad Attitude

Isn’t it bad enough that your word processor knows how to spell MacDonald’s but not Gramsci?"
November 28, 2000

Beyond Information

Technology has killed the "killer copyright." In technologically sophisticated markets around the world, music CD sales have plummeted, as kids raised on computers turn to Napster and its more untraceable successors to stock their music libraries.
June 13, 2000

The Shape of Webs To Come

The most recent attempts to measure the Web’s dimensions (May 2000) have produced not so much interesting results as a new wave of metaphors to “naturalize” the predictable effects of mass media advertising, specifically the last two seasons of site-pumping TV ad campaigns.
April 14, 2000

Outlaw Programming

The issue is NOT piracy. Pirated digital and audio CDs, and endless knockoffs of every other kind of brand-name consumer good have been black-marketed in America and elsewhere for decades. The current uproar is fundamentally not about this kind of piracy, because what now threatens Hollywood profits also and equally threatens the large-scale, established pirate businesses throughout the world: the prospect of a global grassroots network of theft and distribution, with no centers of production or points of sale to target.
April 13, 2000

Decimal Point Dyslexia

I had a hard time sleeping tonight, and I woke up, read a bit from a book titled "The Victorian Internet" about the history of the telegraph, let my mind wander, and felt compelled to rise up from my bed and check the financials on Yahoo!
October 31, 1999

Things That Go Bump

The Great Unbelievable Thing: In September 1999, as millions of pimple-popping adolescents and college kids presumably left behind all thought of sunshine and the great outdoors to return to school and the midnight glow of interminable computer screens, "the number of active Web consumers dropped a slight 2.81 percent from 66.8 million to 64.9 million."
October 24, 1999

Like Herding Cats

For more than a year now, the media have enthralled us with the threat of anarchy on a global scale: the total breakdown of crucial informational, financial, commercial, social, governmental and even physical infrastructures directly caused or indirectly precipitated by the Y2K Millennium Bug.