The Internet Has Failed Us

The Internet was billed as a way of bringing people together.  It was billed as creating a level playing field, a place beyond the constraints of editorial limitations, a place where people could have real freedom to express themselves.  The problem is that most content people put out is terrible and would better not have seen the light of day.

Lest you think me too harsh, witness this: many major news sites- folks as varied as the milquetoast 'conservatives' at National Review Online are from the hard- core Bolsheviks orchestrating the propaganda machine at NPR - do share one thing in common - they've shut down comments on their websites.  Yes, comments, where 2002's thoughtful if slightly longwinded inveighences from the effete intelligentsia had morphed into 2016's profanity-laden tirades by the millions of angry unemployed dudes of all political stripes.

Even sites dedicated to commenting - and I'm looking at you, Twitter - merely add jet fuel to the fire of comments about comments that becomes a form of anti-information, replacing what little we knew with a vapid stream of consciousness that benefits nobody.

Wikipedia, the notoriously unreliable, inconsistent, frustrating, and often plain wrong "encyclopedia" website features mostly rambling, politically stilted, decontextualized "articles" that, by virtue of being free, have killed off the once-revered print editions of encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia Britannica.  To the Internet's, or at least, the electronification of data's list of crimes, I add the elimination of card catalogues and the serendipitous discoveries using them brought about.  Having to know what you're looking for and needing to type in a specific search query into a library computer is absolutely nothing like browsing through a physical card catalogue and stumbling across something you didn't know existed.  In fact, to all the Digital Age's (ironic) destruction of information and discovery, I think the elimination of the card catalogue is the worst.  Sure, I can still physically wander around a library's shelves, and I often do.  But it's not the same as having the entire catalogue literally at my fingertips.

Don't even get me started on the Agent Smith properties of Google and Facebook, documented here.  And yes, I've long wondered if humans are actually mammals.

As those who know me best will probably reflect, I've been against the Internet from the beginning.  And yes, I'm aware that there's a certain irony of using the Internet to complain about the Internet, but check this out if you've got the time - it shows you ten more ways the Internet is probably bad.

I'm not saying abolish the whole internet.  There is a certain use in distributing great literature and other important works across a massive number of servers, and the Internet has probably made good books like the Bible slightly more available.  But on the whole I think the Internet has acted like an ideological cattle pen - driving us actually toward uniformity.  As information consumers, we used to be free-range.  But how can you really explore if you have to start by knowing what you need to type?

The Electoral College - Preventing Panem (For Now)

Trump also won one electoral vote in Maine

It is among my core beliefs that both political parties have gotten far too materialistic and now largely exist to hand out benefits to their given supporters.  What, pray tell, does this have to do with the Electoral College?

Well, let me put it this way.  Politics have become a bread and circuses giveaway carnival like in Imperial Rome.   Since America now lacks a compelling intangible telos, or reason for being, politicians simply promise the most tangible benefits to their key supporters as possible in a vapid, materialistic zero-sum game.

In other words, without the Electoral College, a populist candidate could simply juice up the voting totals in any given highly populated state with wild promises, win the popular vote going away, and make American political culture even more of an unfullfillable promises arms race than it already is.  The next election cycle would simply see the next round of candidates trotting out even crazier promises, and so on.  The results of this are clearly seen in debt-shackled Europe and unstable Latin America, both of which have this problem.  Don't even remind me of the Roman Empire, which bread and circused itself out of existence more than 1,500 years ago.

What the Electoral College does is solve this - sometimes.  I don't think the Founders quite realized they were going to make things better by doing this, although it may have been in the back of their minds.  But the Electoral College carefully cordons off the bread-and-circuses phenomena into 50 individual boxes.  It doesn't matter if a candidate wins California by exactly one vote or with 87% of the votes - they get the exact same number of electoral votes either way.  Thus, because even American political candidates are still bonked into some semblance of responsible behavior - or, that, at least, there are tangible limits placed on their promising - we occasionally get the less irresponsible party as a result of this quirk.  Arguably the popular vote shouldn't even be tabulated except in individual states, but because the media wants to gin up the "social justice" crowd, they do.

Comme ci, comme ca - until we get someone even wackier than Trump, this system will have to do.