Never in my entire life have I had so many different and disparate methods of being informed, whether that be about a particular subject or a particular region or a particular technology.
Contrarily, never in my life have I been less informed, because there simply is no news or discussion or information out there.
Yesterday I had an email from someone (there were a few cc’s) about USB devices dropping out, no problem, I thought, I’ll just google a couple of quick links to the USB spec and schematics and so on.
Nah, page after page of adword algorithm pimped crap, some of it going back to 2013, in fact there have been three instances in the past couple of months where someone asked me something, and I spent 5 minutes trying to google it because basically I knew *what* I was looking for, just not where to find it, before giving and and saying fuck it and reverting to the 243 gig 69,717 files 9,888 folders PDF library on the local nas box, and finding what I wanted there… a library that I amassed a few years ago as a what if shtf thing, rather than any real immediate practical use.
To be able to do that ONCE on one specialist subject that I cared about is feasible, to be able to do it three times in a few weeks over three entirely separate subjects is astonishing.
It’s not just news, it is data, it is information, the “web” had died and gone to a place where is a marketing playground a bit like those old dead tree computer books that were 300 pages long with 240 pages of adverts and 40 pages of sponsored / promotional articles….
40+ years ago in the Uk we had a weekly think called the Exchange & Mart, it was a small format small ad national thing, just adverts, you could find listings for anything you wanted, used cars, air guns, hifi, garden sheds, you name it.
Think of it as dead tree amazon + ebay + gumtree + craigslist
Of course a lot of it was shit, a lot of it was crooks, and a lot of it was scams, but there was enough real shit in there…. lots of people like me bought it every week, but never bought anything FROM it, because it gave us prices that we could use to compare, and some times it gave us products or things we had not seen before, audio amps with toroidal transformers is one that springs to mind, and that company is still going.. http://www.crimsonelectronics.com/
So, all very well, but if you were a seller, you’d probably be better off putting an advert in the window of a local shop.
For a brief time there in the early 2000’s fleabay and such beat the local option hands down, I bought and sold many things, all the way up to cars and motorcycles on fleabay, nowadays it has all gone.
If I don’t give a fuck and want it in 24 hours I’ll go on amazon, if I do give a fuck I’ll put the word out and wait for someone to get back to me, hey jimbo, you still looking for a set of wheels and tyres for your volvo shed?
Increasingly I am doing business with other businesses and I insist on dealing with board level management or better still the director in person, if I can get along with that individual I have no issues, if I cannot deal with them directly, the business is probably more trouble than it is worth.
We are fracturing along fault lines that 99% of the public are not even aware exist, and it is all more or less related to stuff that is fundamental to being able to live in a technological age.
Not being able to find how many times men bit dogs in the archives of the local newspaper will not kill me, but I have talked in the past about a nearby town/city where a guy did a throughly excellent project / website about local history, and I used it as a source for executions through the ages… so imagine my surprise to read in the daily fail today that a professor from the university of sussex has a book out and has discovered previously unknown things about witchcraft in the south west roman town / city of Exeter / Isca… http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5032595/Exeter-hub-witches-sorcerers-England.html
Or you could go to the source http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/executed.php
Interesting how both the prof and the daily fail can not be aware of the real treasure trove of info about a particular town / city and pretty much everything that has gone on there since roman times.
In a sense I can’t blame them, it *is* feasible, after all I can type “exeter witchcraft” into google and the first three pages of hits are MSM or commercial crap, so it all provides a nice proof of what I have been saying for years, that whatever comes up on a computer screen is fact, and nothing else exists…..
Perhaps if the “prof” from sussex had, you know, got in a car and driven down to exeter and done some actual research he might have found the answers and also found that the answers were in plain sight, not something otherwise unknown that he had just discovered.
As I said, not knowing how many times men bite dogs, or not knowing about witchcraft in exeter (a local town / city that I personally associate with bloody awful traffic and student flats being built everywhere) isn’t going to kill me.
What will kill me, and you, is people who have never actually gone to a place and just walked the streets and talked to people, telling everyone else about that place and what is going on here, and at this point it could be Exeter or Damascus or Kiev, it doesn’t matter, if everything we can find out about these places is written by people who have never actually been there, or who are selling something, be it the Exeter chevrolet dealer or damascus knives or chicken kiev.
I used to fucking laugh, back in the day, when all the Assholes On Line grabbed their CD-ROM and came online, me too, lol, ribbit, what a bunch of wankers, but even though they soon became the majority, they weren’t significant, any more than baseball fans were significant if you looked at the USA in the wider picture, sure, they were a large demographic, but it didn’t mean much, and it didn’t get in the way of much.
I’m not laughing any more.