The Internet

Right now I'm thinking about the Internet, the all-pervasive medium through which I've published my thoughts and work I've done in my free time for several years now. Like mostly everyone else, I communicate with others using the Internet, play games through it, read news, and learn about things. (Except, sadly, I am not convinced the general public is interested in learning.) And we are all familiar with the "dot com mania" and the insane rise in the NASDAQ - and, sadly, the subsequent fall of the NASDAQ. People have been wondering exactly what was behind all of this, and if the Internet - which once seemed so enticing - is now bogus.

"What we are entering is a power age, and the importance of the power age lies in its ability, rightly used with the wage motive behind it, to increase and cheapen production so that all of us may have more of this world's goods. The way to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity, the way from empty phrases to actualities, lies through power" - Henry Ford Here's something which should not be news: the entire .com insanity was a crock from the start! That's right - the entire New Economy was founded on delusions and misinformation all along. But just as people were overzealous then, they are overly pessimistic now (at the time of this writing). The Internet is not intrinsically a crock. But the general public got a taste of what the Internet can do, and warped and distorted it into a magical cure-all for all of life's problems. The Internet cannot produce material objects; only industry can. The Internet can near-instantaneously transport information from any location to any location, but it cannot transport atoms. And while information is fun and happy, many other things we enjoy (such as books (for now), pizza, and computers!) are made of heavy, sluggish atoms. Throwing up a web site does not automatically mean instant wealth, nor does a name that ends in ".com". This has always been true, and will continue to be true (for a while...), but for a short time most everyone deluded themselves into believing the exact opposite. And even technically knowledgeable people (such as myself, and many others who knew what the Internet was before everyone and his uncle came onto the scene) were caught up in the hysteria, because the Internet is indeed really cool, and it seemed it was the time when everyone was becoming aware of that fact too. We always knew that advertising on the Internet was a crock, but we underestimated the general public's ability to come to their senses (I know, I know - it's still just a little unbelievable that they could have figured it out eventually). We live in a power age. The Information Age which we are entering enhances power; it makes production more efficient, communication more efficient and widespread, organization more effective, and a myriad of other things. The Internet lubricates our current system, and makes things easier. It is not magical, though, and we all have to confront reality.

Take, for example, advertising on the Internet. But first, let's look at a simpler case (assume the cow is spherical): advertising in magazines and television. Now, we all can agree that almost all advertising is evil and useless. In my case, I hate cars - I hate driving cars, hearing about cars, or thinking about cars. Now, a disgusting amount of advertising on television, and in magazines too, is advertisements about cars. I presume this is done because while few people at any one time are looking to buy a car, any individual car purchase makes large profits for the companies, so it is worthwhile to advertise the things. But such advertisements are worthless when directed at me, because I have no desire to buy the things, nor will they kindle such a need in me. It's a waste of their time, and my time. So the first lesson: improperly targeted advertising is worthless. In television and magazines, the things advertised happen to be what most of the people reading or watching that medium want to buy, so the advertisers make money, the TV shows and magazines make money, and the general public gets their TV shows for free and their magazines and (especially) newspapers for trivial sums of money. All is well. Why does it fail so badly and so spectacularly when applied to the Internet?

This is, of course, for reasons that I and many others (but not enough of them!) have seen for quite a while. Internet advertising has been a crock from the start. First of all, it is almost always spectacularly horribly targeted. Let's focus on banners (the most innocuous form) for a while. If I am visiting, say, any web site, and I see a disgusting animated GIF that blinks a bad imitation of a link, and it tells me "if this link is blinking, you have won a shopping spree! Click to claim your prize", I am not just bored, or annoyed - I am offended and disgusted.