L. M. Lloyd

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Recently I saw a car drive by, and wondered what kind it was. Upon looking into it, I found it was a KIA Soul. Now, being a KIA, I assume it is a bottom of the barrel junk car, as most KIAs are. Here is what struck me though. This KIA is, as far as I can tell, about as cheap as a car gets these days at $13,000. Now I know that to all my friends with their $60,000+ leased cars, this seems like quite a cheap little ride. However, once you step outside of car culture, you see $13,000, and wonder what else you could do with that kind of money?

The first thing that came to mind was that I could buy any one of a number of 3D printers! Now, that might sound like an odd thing to want to most people, but to someone who spends as much time modeling 3D objects as I do, it is like buying a magic box of faeries who make things for you at your every whim. That is a lot cooler than a KIA Soul, and a lot more useful to boot.

Someone sent me a link to an article recently. I am not a fan of the site, nor do I care that much about the content of the article, but in the comments I found something I have been wanting to address for a while. Actually, I addressed it a while back, but since that article, the new Apple tactic is to say that rather than being the first smartphone, the iPhone is just the first smartphone to matter. Now I went over this particular tactic of Apple's, as well as several other slimy rhetorical tricks Macheads use, in great length some time ago, but I would like to address it in particular in this case, as exemplified by this very real comment to the previously mentioned article.

Now normally, I would just whistle and say "ok nutjob" to this guy. However, I have seen this argument all over the Internet, to the point that is clearly the newest but of spin coming out of the head office. So, I guess I will go ahead and break it down, since no one else seems to be so inclined.

Back in the late '80s there was a big push to pass laws to require seatbelts in automobiles, and helmets on motorcycle riders. At the time, as an angry teen, I screamed fascism and decried the end of freedom in America. I painted doom and gloom scenarios about how this would lead to a curtailment of all personal liberty, and a loss of even the most basic freedom of choice in our lives. I was, of course, written off as a kook, and eventually learned to shut up about it, because people just couldn't get their head around what I was talking about. Funny thing is, 20 years later, most of what I was talking about has come true, people just don't see it.

To really understand what has happened here, you have to remember what life was like 20 years ago, because it was very different. Not only was it your choice whether you wore a seatbelt or not, but you could let your dog run around your neighborhood without a leash, without supervision, and without worrying about one of your neighbors calling the dog catcher. You could ride your bike or skateboard without a helmet, and no one could give you a ticket. It was legal to drive around in a car with a bad muffler. You could tell an off color joke, and just be called an asshole, instead of worrying about losing your job. Your employer was not allowed to test you for drug use. You could smoke in any restaurant, at your desk at work, even in stores. Drunk driving was a slap on the wrist which would get you a ticket, rather than a five year suspension of your license. It was unconstitutional for police to demand that you show them identification. You could get a job, cash a check, take an airline flight, and even rent a hotel room without photo ID. Your credit rating had nothing to do with getting a job or renting a place to live. Businesses were required by law to accept cash for any purchase, no matter how big, instead of being required to report any big cash purchase to the FBI, and allowed to demand a credit card for some purchases. The government needed a warrant to tap your phone call or computer communication. Being a bad parent just made you a bad parent, not a criminal. Most importantly, there were fewer than 800,000 Americans incarcerated, as opposed to the more than 2.5 million incarcerated today. It was a country with all around more freedom, at the cost of allowing a lot more 'bad behavior.'

One of the more striking things about the distopian urban sprawl called simply The City in Warren Elllis' wonderful work Transmetropolitan, is how people have become so obsessed with the now, that they have lost all sense of history, to the point that they don't even know what year it is anymore. When I first read about The City a decade ago, it seemed like an unnecessarily dramatic flourish that no one knew what year it was. Today, the real world often makes me feel like Transmetropolitian is an amazingly optimistic feel-good story. A prime example of this is the what is going on right now in Iran, or more specifically how what is going on in Iran is being covered. All over the web, and even in traditional media venues, everyone is repeating over and over again the, honestly schmaltzy, catchphrase the revolution will not be televised — it will be twittered. In these articles, invariably citizen journalism, and by proxy twitter, are credited with completely changing how we relate to the events, and offering something revolutionary and new to our culture. Some, even go as far as to use this as proof that the social network is actually the reason for the existence of sentient life. No seriously, I only wish I was kidding. Plenty of stories actually mention twitter more often than they mention the people in Iran.

Problem is, this storyline goes back to before most of the people telling this story were probably born. I'm sure there are probably stories back before I can remember about ham radio operators, and then CB radio operators, but the first time I remember this particular "citizen journalists use new technology to circumvent traditional media and get out a story of revolution to the rest of the world," was back during the Tiananmen Square massacre and not to long after that with the fall of the Soviet Union. Back then, the disruptive technology was the fax machine and the computer BBS. Later, with the WTO riots in Seattle, the same exact stories would be written about the blog. In just about every notable international event in the past 20 years, there has been someone, if not groups of people, earnestly writing about how technology is "for the first time" changing how we report on international events. See, thing is, you can't be amazed at this 'new development' every single time for two decades. After a while, it really isn't a new development anymore, and the story is no longer what an amazing shift this is in the history of the world, but rather more a story about how colossally ignorant you are of anything that hasn't happened in the past two weeks.