Atheist Meditations

I'm just drifting through a day on the web, as I'm demarcating some boundries at the new job; Taking a sanity day.


Anyhoo, I've been thinking more of late on the nature of online community. Bloggers everywhere would benefit from thinking of ourselves more as a class with a rather coherent ideological position. Bloggers are bloggers. I really don't like how some tech companies have ratted out bloggers to oppressive governments so the can be imprisioned. That's pretty shitty. In general, I think we all agree on a promotion of technological education as a means of improving overall civilization, and we know a lot about the value of free speech. The internet is the greatest collective action in the history of humankind - it blows organized religion out of the water when it comes to having meaning - and thus it shapes our souls even as we shape it. Those of us who are in love with the internet are a class.

I'm not pleased with the effort by agents on the right to use the same 'divide and conquer' tactics that have largely precluded television and radio from being great instruments of collective spiritual growth. A jackass to bray in front of cameras is no scarce commodity. Bloggers, those who rack up hours a day reading blogs and updating their own - not such a common entity. Those who can write and are actually engaging to read, those who got the sort of eloquence where over time readers actually feel like they know him or her personally, pretty gosh dang rare.

Like, I totally dig commenting on conservative or christian blogs encouraging them to engage some facts and grow in their understanding of the world. I always figure if someone is on the internet at all, then they are already half-way to atheism. I know I've saved some souls, and I've been banned from a whole lot of blogs and forums. What enrages me, however, is when I get the feeling that the site I'm at is not run by an actual human being. The manner which fascist structures disseminate 'talking points' from the top down bears telling resemblence to a computer, but when talking points are arranging themselves into code and furthering their distribution accross the internet, we should take note. Even if a human is involved in the process in some trivial way.

I'm certain that right wing institutions have 'bloggers' that they pay to contribute to the content of the blogosphere, just like they pay media and marketing companies to contribute to the content of radio waves and television waves - in ways that benefit the institution. These 'bloggers' are not you and me, reading blogs, feeling blogs, putting our own souls out there to be either ignored or attacked. These 'bloggers' look at it as a job, they put in their ten hours a week on their ten blogs, each with a similar format and content. Usually they have titles that are quite abrasive, then a paragrab or two of talking points (logical flow rarely necessary) followed by a lengthy cut/paste from a conservative columnist. In this way the most valuable investment, that of the paid columnist, gets successfully replicated in this media. The 'blogger' who repeats some of the talking points he absorbed in the car listening to Rush and friends, maybe shows a bit of flair for making commentors look stupid. Over and done in twenty minutes, easiest two bills a month you ever made.

If the battle does ensue as the more primitive media has, the market will be controlled by a small group. Billions of people, only and handful of radio frequencies. You got huge internationals buying them up and loading them up with meaningless crap, quickly the voices of those who want to challenge a corporate ideal for the future of mankind are drowned out. Can the internet become so overloaded with content that statements regarding reality, like schools of fish, overwhealm a young mind as an unquestioned truth?

If I wander the internet and find fifty bloggers who all feel that something is pretty important, I'm inclined to reconsider my own stance on it. That's a weakeness (in the eyes of conservative propagandists) us liberals have, we will frequently reconsider our opinions and modify them occassionally. If a republican party that spends hundreds of millions in self-promotion, can pay one 'blogger' two hundred bucks a month to produce twenty blogs of technological competetency and ideological consistency - how many thousands of blogs do I have to sift through before I get to one that has a human being on the other side.

I'm spending hours of my life every day engaging with others on the internet for the purpose of contributing to culture and perhaps civilization. They are hammering out a few hours a week in the production of a product, one that meets certain specifications. What my bloggers and their 'bloggers' are doing is completely different. I don't want to waste my time online engaging with them.

Technology keeps moving like a shark. We've all seen 'bots that comment all over the blogosphere with the grace of a spammer, but they are going to improve. How long before the menial tasks of a 'blogger' can be automated? One writer can take the days talking points and parse them into fifty or so phrases, which gets entered into a database. Macros assemble random phrases into all the potential permutations, with duplication aplenty. These become titles and opening content on millions of blogs, with hundreds of approved newspaper content being pasted in for further ideological fortification.

Young bloggers everywhere could soon be railing against virtual enemies.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that only the canon of Literary Criticism can save us. Only a sheer insane amount of literary complexity can assure us that the producer of said message is actually a human being. I'm seeing a whole new species of solipsism.