Post-Bullshit America

I’ve noticed an interesting tendency amongst contemporary Russians, from reading some of their articles and blogs: their long Soviet nightmare seems to have given them a very deep and very healthy disregard for anything that smells of utopian social experiments, and indeed of activism or politics at all. All those generations of propaganda have made them very, very cynical. Good on them.

I’ve said for years that the American “all-bullshit, all-the-time” system of continuous marketing– global corporate consumer capitalism– is just as doomed as the Soviet system. And that’s caused me to wonder aloud  about what post-bullshit America will look like. I think I can guess now what will be its defining quality: a deep and healthy disregard for any kind of sales or marketing, indeed of anything that looks “slick” or attempts to sell. I think all these generations of sales and marketing bullshit and mass-media infotainment are already starting to make at least some of us very, very cynical. This is a very good thing.

 In short, I predict that post-bullshit America will look a whole lot like the Free Software and Open Source movement, or the “reality-based” blogosphere.

Stock SPAM

10 years ago, all the SPAM I received was for “herbal Exctasy” and fly-by-night patent-medicine diet and “health” products.

A few years later, it was all from fly-by-night VIAGRA and CIALIS suppliers and similar boner-enhancement rip-offs.

Nowadays, every single bit of SPAM I get is hawking some fly-by-night stock.

What exactly does that say about the stock market?

My grandmother used to say, “Tell me who you hang around with, and I’ll tell you who you are”. It sounded more melodious in Italian, but its wisdom is just as solid in any language.

Are people now figuring out that the stock market is just as much of a fly-by-night shell game of ripoff artists and sleazebags as are the VIAGRA/CIALIS market and the patent-medicine hucksters?

I’d think that if the 90’s dot-com bubble didn’t make it screamingly obvious, then the crap in everyone’s inbox touting “big upturn on FCYI.P K look through the email” will do the job rather well.

It’s over

We are now the Soviet Union.

Welcome to Guantanamo Bay, where the army of liberty imposes absolute freedom on the minions of Antichrist with courage and compassion, though they deploy their antisymmetrical capacity for suffering with the subhuman cunning of the damned.

Thanks to CT commenter "AA" for that perfectly apt bit of sarcasm, the inspiration for which  was the actual official quote:

 I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.

That's beyond chutzpah, it's outright insanity, of the totalitarian kind.

Shill Out

Whenever I stumble upon an opportunity to do so, I shill for a friend's business, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. In addition to being my web hoster– and a damn good one–, I believe in their philosophy, and I've become even more convinced of the vital need for the service they provide whenever I see crap like the telecom industry's attacks on net neutrality. The Internet is not a broadcast television, and must never be allowed to become one.

For the last 4 years, I've included NearlyFreeSpeech.net's tagline as my email .sig; since I know how hard it is to compete with huge MegaCorporations and their massive ad budgets, I figure a little guerrilla marketing goes a long way.

I sometimes felt guilty about being such a shameless shill. But then I read this:

They had 12 people working there full time, and were hiring 10 more. You do the math. No wait, I'll do it for you: that's 880 posts a day (if minimum was met). However he said the better ones could do around 8 or 10 an hour.

So I guess a lot of guerilla marketing goes an even longer way. The idea of some mega-corp renting out a boiler room of paid shills pretending to be actual members of some community or other… eek. I've seen those ads that said "GET PAID TO SURF THE INTERNET", and went, heh, yeah, that's funny, who's gonna fall for that. Well, maybe it's not so funny.

Invasion of the credibility snatchers.