Let us Get Huffy and Rejoice in our Doomedness: I, Rambler II

Amidst the rise of surveillance/police states that are no longer just pre-Arab Spring/Classified/Cold War throwbacks (thanks Chelsea Manning) one gets the sense that, as a species, we have gotten no closer to regaining our collective shit than at any point since the Agricultural Revolution. I've become very well acquainted with the sensation of a rapidly accelerating crisis. It's a bit like the Fukushima Daiichi reactor 1 shortly after the tsunami smashed the facilities, when it lay destroyed, creeping by steady degrees out of control... the edifice of control revealed as the folly of unreal maniacs, watched by clueless and frightened idiots, the situation only tempered by the courage and knowledge of those who were once considered alarmist, disposable, and ignorable.

Nobody wants to curb the debilitating spread of convenience consumerism. There is lots of talk. Everyone seems stupefied about the political landscape. We waste our breath to summarize it. Nothing distinguishes our era more than waste. Businesses, governments, and shills are all absolutely overjoyed to be part of a world economy that is premised on the insane principle of unlimited growth on a shrinking planet, of the useless squandering of resources. Profit is king, and governments are its thrall. Moderates are toothless, the countercultures are all dead or miniscule, the relentless march of progress goes on, shitting where we eat and belching poison fumes into the air we breathe. Human potential is squandered and used up at the same rate: who can blame the junkies now? The capitalists stand unchallenged, they who were as evil and soulless as the communist exploiters they reviled and nearly destroyed the world to curb. In the most powerful country in the world, host to the most powerful multinationals you can't even begin to imagine, a corporation is legally equivalent to a person.

The junkies, at least, are honest in their self-destructive pursuits, and probably contribute less to wastage than the respectable classes of citizen-consumers, whose per capita throughput of plastic garbage is enough to bury an entire small property each and every year. Let's not even get into energy or food waste. The wealthy are smug and spit on the middle class, who smugly spit on the working class, who wearily spit on the working poor, who accidentally spit on the destitute. Respect is rarely earned or given to or from any of 'the little people'. Respect is a commodity. Self-interest in the age of individualism has led only to the abandonment of societal and individual progress. Self-denial is less than a relic: it is the ghost of an unheard-of type of human... all else is myth but gratification. We will become lower apes yet, at this pace, while the descendants of humanity spit on us, completing the cycle. Likely they will be too cruel and abstracted to actively exterminate our relict populations.

And in this atmosphere of toxic and vile and inhuman activity, is it really any wonder that cruelty and hatred grow freely? Is it any wonder that laws cannot protect people from themselves, or children from each other? The people who are surprised by the modern world are obviously blind to what it really is. I can't blame anyone for being a junkie, a consumerist whore, or willfully ignorant and distracted (three increasingly similar things) and there are not many who can lay blame for it. What is important is that the entire situation of the world is becoming too alarming, is growing too quickly, and is passing far too quickly out of the hands of common people (you know, the abused slaves and serfs of yesteryear, who stood to gain the most from modernity and progress). With technology as a crutch it is very tempting to see the next generations of humanity as nothing but unnecessary, mentally-truncated cripples ruled by a new aristocracy.

"There is bad, yes, but there is also good in the world." I never declared that hope was dead, I was suggesting that hope itself is currently as endangered as any crumbling, over-harvested species in any pillaged environment. Things like OWS just alienate hope from reality. There are not enough skeptics and too many cynics, but both are outnumbered by shills and apologists. I'd take the world's bitterest cynic over any shill apologist - I prefer honesty to optimism where my entire species, its homeworld, and its livelihood are in question. Nobody has successfully taught the lesson of unity without coercion... true moral and philosophic problems go unanswered while we charge into the minutest details of quantum physics. Values are changing, but you ought to get top value for your dollar. We should take something back, even at this late point, to prove to our doomed descendants that we were not just fickle, feckless, fussy cowards with fine words and utopian ideals.

We are shocked and offended that nature would take anything back that we gleaned from it. Yet, we come from it, and owe our all to it. This is absurd. We consider ourselves entitled to pillage not 'the environment' alone but in fact all of life which we commonly see as nothing but a means to wealth, contentment, and satisfaction. We do not treasure or honor life for its own sake and therefore we will not solve the pathological behaviors behind the ecological and social problems we claim to want to solve. Mostly we have failed to understand nature... we force it into models and theories instead of learning from it. We hate the idea of nature reclaiming its 10% so much that we will stop at no lengths, not even poisoning ourselves, to prevent a weed from growing or an insect from feeding. Meanwhile we make such noise about unborn babies that our callousness in other regards seems schizophrenic.

Why wouldn't I hide in a narcotic haze, or try to buy my way to peace of mind (irony!), or even kill myself? More and more I have no answer, can barely see around myself, and realize that awareness is no substitution for action, for a coherent response to an increasingly incoherent world. It's a pity that radicals are marginalized to the point where they have no alternatives and tiny audiences. It's a pity that the only moderates who are allowed to speak are the ones telling us that we have done no wrong, that we have nothing to regret and a bright future. It's a pity no side in any of the day's big arguments has any respect, any foresight, any capacity to entertain alternative world-views. I guess I should give in, and just passively wait to be subsumed in the coming wave of tech-oligarch globalist worthlessness and wretchedness, into the hopeless and shit hell we deserve, into the ongoing death of the world we barely knew. Lambs for slaughter: I tell you I wouldn't mind being a child again...

Has the Golden Era of Adblockers Passed?

Recently I tried to watch some online video on a television channel's website. The video applet failed to load completely and it didn't take long for me to develop the correct suspicion. I disabled my adblocker and reloaded the page. No fucking video. So I open the page in a vanilla browser and it loads, a wild contrast from what I had, up till that point, been used to. On the vanilla browser there is a banner and large square add. Then the video starts and I am subjected to extra-loud advertising, TV style, with a vengeance. In addition to the other adds. Another advertisement plays, and a third, before my content is loaded.

Adblockers, with the advent of hijacked banner ads and unscrupulous marketing, to say nothing of the paranoid or political users of the internet, are not simply a tool entitled users employ to rid themselves of annoyances. Ad-blockers are legitimately a way of keeping your computer clean, of preventing your oft-used technological distractions from compromise. The fact you don't have to watch commercials (which are basically always: manipulative, insulting, indoctrinating or some shameful combination of all three) is an added bonus to not having your internet-accessing-device fucked with.

I am not a poweruser but I've been adblocking for years - since I discovered it was possible. I understand that advertising revenue drives some smaller sites, and, yes, I'd agree they deserve their due - assuming they police their advertisements for some level of quality. Fine, whatever, have your .005 cents per impression. You deserve it, plucky little website. However, the worst offenders are often large media sites – sometimes even those which already use paywalls. Let me present a brief overview of the galloping trend of online advertising.

In the early 90's during the second wave of the internet, when things became graphical enough that advertisement in the classic sense became possible, it was largely internet entities that advertised for themselves, and certain forward looking companies often related to the tech-sector. It was a simpler time. By late 1999 basically everyone who wasn't under a rock or a dinosaur was getting into online advertisement. 'Hey, check out our website at http://www.geocities.SonnysPizza/index.htm for some coupons' and other types of hilarity abounded. Whatever, wherever you got advertised to, it took a slice of your pitiful bandwidth and generally wasted time and resources, but you had to face it. Eventually MSN Messenger (R.I.P) becomes huge, and eventually it begins to advertise to you.

Side banner; top banner; .gif flames - all of these things were familiar. Between then and now the internet has grown up and come of age to the point where a huge section of people use it. All the troglodytes, termites, attractive well-adjusted people, and infants came out of the woodwork and the internet is full of everyone now. Whatever, other people will tell you about it, and some gigantic nerd could probably make a convincingly venomous deal about it... all I'll say is it drove a wave of advertising intensity that eventually rivaled the notorious realm of television adverts.

Fucking pop-ups were one thing, but there came layers of advertising that would jump into existence around key-words. Video sidebars that glitched out your browser and had to fling their audio payloads into your ears. 'Interactive' commercials made by committees of dullards and shills. YouTube videos became clogged with side, top, and skippable pre-video advertisements for every user account considered important enough to waste your time for their profit. What was once dumb, became even dumber, amen. So it goes, right? Absolutely. Yet there were additions to your browsers that would kill all advertising.

True to form, adblockers were free. They worked, and nobody who adopted them ever looked back. Surfing without them was like going back in time. It sucked, you were exposed to all the reprehensible shit that barely existed in your ideal internet experience. Going back to ads is like hitting yourself in the face with a shoe. Beautiful adblocking programs, released by benevolent and right-minded developers, worked on classic print ads, video ads, and even ads played in video content. It is like a magic balm that drives mosquitoes far, far away. For those who use adblockers, the internet just is that much less shitty. It's less claustrophobic and it can seem like the terminal cash-in state of the world has been opposed.

So of course, it comes to an end, by hosted content ('hosting ain't free, yo') which a profitable broadcaster puts online. Until very recently I had never been blocked for anything but geographical reasons (though nationalization of the internet is another ugly recent phenomenon) but a week or two ago I was denied a show I had been following online. I imagine in a year it will be impossible to skip video-advertisements everywhere, and only the smug power users will know what to do about it. Hopefully the same people who did the good work of blocking online advertising will keep up and their programs will not lapse into irrelevance due to some frightening and monstrous online advertising epidemic.

Because what the hell? You're running a profitable business already, and why not add some more revenue? Why not even more? Why not three advertisements every five-and-a-half minutes on video content? Why not have it be 30% louder than actual content, like on TV? Who cares is the commercial is ideologically loaded or bankrupt of all value? Who cares if it's annoying? 'I like money, gentlemen, and nobody gets a free lunch!'

A browser without an adblocker is a sign of a pitiable person trapped in the commercial arena, a hopeless square, a submissive lackadaisical fuck, a worthless shit hyperbole rapist. This is one fight the internet should not lose.

Deleted Reply to Facebook 'Ecocide Prevention' Status

It's too late to prevent ecocide. Fisheries are depleted, global ecologies are unbalanced and in disarray, and fracking will ruin whatever clean, mass available groundwater North America has left. The Rest are being exploited without any consideration for the future by the global plutocrat class and their lackeys. The oceans are dead zones compared to what they were an hundred years ago and anyone telling you different is trying to catch the remaining 10%, even octopi are becoming social pack animals under the pressure, and cephalopods are not social creatures. In a few thousand years they will crawl from the sickened seas and destroy the traces of our weakened civilization. Apes are in decline and we were the best of them.

Hicks will go on telling you the water's worth drinking while they accumulate gargantuan tumors public healthcare will have to pay for. Special interests will keep on telling you that anyone opposed to exploitation is a communist, radical feminist, or pathological environmentalist liar. Oil is reckless. Car culture is stupid. Earth is under intensive, exploitative attack for the last hundred years in the name of a flawed standard of living that nobody in the West will give up without a fight. Everyone who isn't already suffering from pollution-induced disease has been fooled and when cancer and dementia peak we'll be out of any legacy money and forced to die in the streets like forgetful, hateful animals, drinking plastic leachate garbage water from the sixties, estrogen refuse from the sexual revolution, and antidepressant pollutants from the 80's. We will feel nothing as we decline. Nobody in the west has given up on waste. Waste is killing our chances of survivability. Our weakness is killing our remaining odds. Consumerism is a rampaging lion with no serious opponents.

We fucked ourselves and being hippies is not an answer. We are going to pay for our complacency and the nature nuts will smirk at our dependent corpses and rotting cities, no matter how righteous we feel for being consumers. Then they, too, will succumb to the poison. And life will continue without us, thinking "good riddance". So go out and protest and go home, drive to the gym, and feel like a good person. You are just another sellout caught in a bad deal, another animal caught in the natural process of population peak and decline. Your impotent fury at the truth, or lack of truth, will not outlive the diseases waiting to waste you.