The InternetJoin now to read essay The InternetRight now Im thinking about the Internet, the all-pervasive medium through which Ive published my thoughts and work Ive 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.
In addition, I’d like to ask about the “Pentagon of America” (PIA), a project that has morphed into a movement that has evolved and morphed to a mass media campaign. According to a recent article in The Intercept, that was the focus of a recent PIA. The article focused in particular on President Obama’s visit to New York last May. That visit was sponsored by the Partnership for Prosperity, a global community that supports a free and open global education system. PIA leaders have, in recent months, gotten a little more attention for their efforts with regard to the “new Pentagon.”
In a recent interview, Obama said, “I had some good ideas for the PIA that we, at the end of the day, would like to see used to the fullest with the media. I don’t see it being used to any greater degree than it’s used to a lot of other programs. To the extent that it is not being used to the fullest, I hope it’s not. That is up to the Department of Justice in that regard.”
Speaking to this group has taken on more significance now than ever. I’ve been able to see it as a part of an effort by Obama and the media to force some semblance of a “yes or no.” He has proposed that he would give an extra $5 billion to expand the “secret” Military Police force, which will consist of 1,700 new officers every two years. This would mean, instead of just hiring a whole bunch of federal prosecutors & military prosecutors, it would let them spend $100 trillion for the military force. So, to achieve this, Obama wants to use the $5 billion to bring 1,600 more police officers into the army. And I believe that one of the many things that has really fueled the Obama campaign in this election cycle is the need to stop the Department of Justice from being the “gatekeepers” over the military.
In other words, they’ve been putting their full weight behind the Pentagon in the Obama White House, trying to keep the military from becoming a big player in the national media. As that is happening, this is not only happening, but it’s happening in the more than a dozen newspapers and online media outlets that I have read. More than 100 have followed Obama’s lead. And yet the Obama campaign has been using it as proof that the new military “experiment” is just some sort of back door government experiment.
How does one get there without having the military use the Pentagon?:
The Army is supposed to be where the world is at any given moment, at any time and at any time. The military is responsible for building, maintaining
“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 worlds goods. The way to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity, the way from empty phrases to actualities, lies through power” – Henry Ford Heres something which should not be news: the entire .com insanity was a crock from the start! Thats 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 lifes 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 publics ability to come to their senses (I know, I know – its 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, lets 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. Its 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. Lets 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.