In this last post is two days late, partly because I didn’t want to rush it out but mainly because life has interceded and taken attention away. Today, in this last post on a brief period of peace, I would like to discuss contrariness, negativity and the culture of refusal, and their immense and unrecognised value to humanity. Many of the ideas in this post might come as a small shock to less-travelled American and Australian readers who are not accustomed to the British manner of parsing disaster, of holding out a tarpaulin to plummeting morale and yanking it away at the last minute just for a laugh

As I was walking down the street one day
I saw a house on fire
There was man, shouting and screaming at an upper-storey window
To the crowd that was gathered there below
For he was so afraid

Jump, you fucker, jump.
Jump into this here blanket what we are holding
And you will be all right
He jumped, hit the deck, broke his fucking neck –
There was no blanket

Laugh? We nearly shat.
We had not laughed so much since Grandma died
Or Auntie Mabel caught her left tit in the mangle
We are miserable sinners
Fi-i-ilthy fuckers

Ahhhrrrr-soles

–Derek and Clive, Live, 1976

As the American tendency to amiability and good cheer spreads through that part of society that benefits from the pretence that everything is always for the best and that all it takes to live a happy life is a smile and a ‘can-do’ attitude (a phrase which should earn any non-ironic employer of it a stint in a re-education facility and twenty years suspended upside down in salt and scorpions) spreads through the world, carried on the back of globalised TV, those who are minded to look will see value in the contrary and the negative. Culture and public life over the last 10 years has been so anodyne, so glued to the search for superficial consensus, so firmly fixed to action – or inaction –  without rocking the boat that we forget that there was a time when mainstream politicians stood up for their principles rather than submerging them in a warm bath of populist politics until they emerged, drowned and bedraggled and unrecognisable, useful only for cattle feed. It is this sort of damp and warm environment in which fiery and passionate leaders germinate.

Europe has been here before, of course, most recently during the interbellum period. This tranche of European history is one that half of Europe wants to forget and the other half desperately wants to keep alive. It was a time of economic hardship, when the financial misfortunes of one country could be traced directly to the actions of another. France’s war reparations were so unreasonable, deliberately,  as  a means of seizing the German industrial heartlands which were forfeit to France when Germany could no longer pay. By 1923, Germany was bankrupt and a sinister political movement was well on the way to seizing power in Europe.

I know. This hardly sounds like an argument in favour of adversity, but the crucial point is that the Nazis – in common with all totalitarian movements –  pursued a strategy of imposing order on the chaos of the time, and of imposing consent where there was dissent. In fact, they knew as well as any illegitimate authority that the most effective tactic was to move hard and publicly against those who dissent only weakly and who have no power in order to discourage the power bases of stronger opposition.

It’s startlingly similar to what we see at the moment. Argument has never been more political, the stakes never higher.

So this is a post for all those who are tired of the cosy cohabitation between powerful financial interests and politicians, of this idle assumed consensus foisted on us by politicians, newspaper editors, TV companies and employers. This is a post for those who know that the free market is just another human construct, no more fundamental than taxes or justice, and that humans can change it if we really want to. It’s for people who know that power should never be trusted, truth should never be assumed and authority should always be challenged.

It’s a message to the contrary.

As the British built the Gateway Of India in Bombay and the Victoria monument in Calcutta, so have ARPA, the architects of the internet put in place a testament to mankind’s intellectual development and sophistication which has colonised and dominated information channels in most parts of the world. It is an essential tool in the struggle for self-determination in China, Burma, North Africa and the Middle East, but has also brought a form of cultural imperialism into these previously diverse cultures. The internet and the world wide web were developed by English speakers using a Latin alphabet: even now workarounds are used to handle accented letters and non-standard Latin characters and only last year was support for non-Latin characters baked into the web but it has taken decades and in the meantime, many of the fundamentals of the internet and its culture have been, and remain, Euro-American in flavour and substance. Japan has contributed enormously, but Japanese developers and designers still need Anglophone skills to spread Japan’s bounty outside its own borders.

It’s pleasantly destructive of the mindless clichés about the US that their greatest monument and furthest-reaching contribution to human history is an intellectual one. Long after Reaganomics, Clinton’s illegal wars and GHWB’s internecine election rigging (oh, yes, and his illegal wars) have faded into history, the Internet will stand as a reminder of the vibrancy, innovation and spirit of that great and peculiar empire. And just as we’re about to abandon cliché entirely, we are reminded that the sons of Britain have been instrumental in this victory in the battle of hearts and minds.

Of course, it could be argued that the innovation that constitutes the bulk of the giant upon whose shoulders we stand was the English language. As the US Empire’s legacies have been Internet protocol and the pre-emptive retaliatory strike doctrine, so has Britain’s been concentration camps, wide-area imperialism and the English Language. If it’s true that every empire’s greatest achievement turns into its own undoing, that seems to be the case for the superpowers of the 20th Century. Without the English language, would there have been an internet? I’ll leave you to ponder that because I’m not a sufficiently skilled linguist to know. But what I do know is that English, with its combination of analytic supremacy and easy application to humour and irony, has ruled the world for nearly 400 years, a pliable, powerful tool of ruling establishment and rebel iconoclast alike.

On Day 5 of what has become  hate mail and a love letter to the internet, we shall see how it has become an  interactive Rorschach test.

I’ve come to view the internet as a kind of flawed monument to the human intellect. In a time when our culture is increasingly accessible, it’s a relatively open, participatory medium giving everyone the chance to have a say. It has democratised information flow, to the extent permitted by inequities in wealth: those with marketing budgets always shout louder. This democratisation has led to a de-authorisation of authority and a devaluation of expertise. The new reality created by an opening up of information has driven people to find new paths and solutions, rejecting obsolete and outmoded forms of information distribution. every day, software developers do things that have never before been attempted and people with vision commission projects that would only have been discussed in the pages of science fiction novels only twenty-five years ago. It has led those who profit from the status quo to defend their business models with a viciousness and ruthlessness that has been breathtaking at times: the litigiousness of the recorded entertainment industry who seemed to lose their cool when they became the establishment that they once fought against is a very obvious example. This, largely, is my perception of the internet.

And I think people are panicking. Deeply-held beliefs are challenged. Axioms which, before this globalisation of discourse were set in stone over the cooking fire are ridiculed, flamed, attacked and defeated. The internet has become a place of conflict and a place of peace. It has promised the earth to many, but has only given them another way to waste their time. Compare the Chinese and Libyan activists fighting for their lives and their liberty to your average messageboard argument consisting of petty point-scoring, tolls, flames and the ubiquitous fake libertarians (almost always Boomers who want to keep their loot but increasingly infecting younger generations with their form of institutionalised sociopathy) who don’t like the idea of having to pay road tolls but will be fucked if they’re paying more tax, and would rather throw their money down the drain of inadequate, often criminally duplicitous private health insurance policies than entertain for one second the idea of universal health care.

The clash of ideologies is getting louder and nowhere more than in the print media, who clearly see the massive threat that the internet represents to their business model. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a tabloid with an internet scare story on the front page. The Daily Mail, whose ethos and philosophy seems to rest on keeping their readers in a constant state of terror and rage, barely seem to be able to pass a week without printing a story with (to be diplomatic) a non-zero deception content about some crime in which Facebook was ‘implicated’, or an expose about how Facebook is hiding in the boot of your car waiting to mug your house price while you’re asleep. The newspapers look at Fascebook, and on the internet in general (although many newspapers seem not to know the difference) and see fear, and they reflect that back at their readers.

We know what we expect from the internet, and we seek it with varying degrees of conscious awareness.

I finished yesterday rather abruptly on the subject of flamebait and Channels.nl, which was a useful and informative board before it became a troll’s paradise. This might have been because I accidentally posted it from my mobile. So, I’ve got through the first three days without getting into those pointlessly snarky internet squalls. I haven’t stopped posting, even on Channels, which was something I was sure I would have to do.

I’ve always loved the internet. I’m a massive technology geek, and the idea that so many apparently diverse systems could be connected in such a useful and meaningful manner still astounds me to this day. I remember vividly the first time I sat in front of an internet-connected computer, I remember signing up for my first email account and especially the first time I ever used IRC.

It’s difficult to imagine, now that many of us have unlimited SMS and real-time chat services on our phones, how magical that experience of talking to someone live on the other side of the world felt. Back in 1995, it was like a private club, a meeting place for people with shared passions. Arguments happened but weren’t too disruptive because on the rare occasions when politics varied enough to cause significant friction, they were always overruled by a shared passion for the internet and the technology that made it possible. We were like a group of travellers, weary with the tourist resorts of the world, who had chanced upon a private lagoon secreted from prying eyes that was ours alone. It was The Beach, but without Leo. It was our place. It couldn’t last, of course: it never does. Five years later, in the year 2000, internet penetration had increased by almost twenty times the 1995 number.

Our oasis had become a Benidorm, a Hawaii, a Faliraki, a Bali. No longer could we sit by the harsh, dim light of the digital campfire finding gentle friends, all but anonymous and free to invent ourselves. The chains had moved in and they demanded. They demanded data, verifiable identities; age/sex/location had become name/location/income. The internet was becoming faster almost by the month, but what were we losing for that extra bandwidth? Dare I use the word ‘soul’? This new commercialisation coincided with a new brashness on the internet. In a few short years, it progressed from what was fundamentally a largely text-based document-retrieval system with rudimentary communications systems and a few low-quality images to a full-tilt multimedia web of sound and fury, a participatory experience where everyone could have their say, a place where a news organisation without a comments section wouldn’t last long.

And now we get to the point of all this.

From its roots as a democratic, flat-field space where everyone’s opinion counted equally until shown otherwise, the internet gold rush has spawned another space that favours those who shout the loudest, those with the biggest marketing spend, those who can afford to monitor and lobby 24 hours. People and organisations who never give up on pushing themselves. Politicians, corporations, lobby groups, one-issue nutcases who think that their deeply held convictions somehow give them the right to hold political office…they’re all here. And they’re all shouting louder than you.

And they’re shouting longer and louder than you because they have nothing better to do.

And Channels: I don’t suspect that it has corporate trolls – I don’t think its influence or readership are sufficient for corporations other than the occasional misguided SpamBot to bother – but it is peppered with people who cannot and will not change their views even when those views do them no credit and in many cases actively harm them.

Cruising with it now. This is generally the thought process:

1. See preposterous flamebait argument posted somewhere;
2. Immediately think of solid rebuttals;
3. Think them through to their conclusions;
4. Remember that it doesn’t matter and think about something else.

So, day 2 of the ceasefire. Things I’ve noticed on day 2:

• I’m reading things more carefully: whereas before I’d read something and jump in with a quick response, I’m tending to digest a lot more.
• I’m not, at the moment, missing posting responses. That might change as the week goes on.
• The scope of this decision is becoming clearer and clearer.

I’ve given up arguing on the internet.

I’ve always been an outspoken sort of a chap: rarely do I bite my tongue. I think there are some things that one has not only a right, but a duty, to speak out on. I often challenge strangers talking about newspaper articles that I know to be lies and misrepresentation and even if I’ve just met someone, I will try politely to correct misapprehensions and challenge faulty memes. No-one alone can stop a powerful meme, but it’s vital at least to impede its flow as much as possible. This, of course, extends to the internet. Almost everyone on the internet argues. It often seems as though everyone is doing it all the time, although I know that this isn’t true: every message board, group, social networking service and email mailing list contains a minority of highly vocal people who are passionate about certain things, and a tiny ‘nutter’ core of people who will argue about pretty much anything, twist the discourse around to their favourite hot-potato topic and generally make everyone suffer for their convictions. If you need a primer on the subject of trolls and trolling, the warm and witty Lucy Pepper has a series on this very subject

Troll or not, though, it seems that it’s extremely rare that anyone ever changes their mind because of something said on the internet. Is it all a waste of time? Would we (or more precisely I) be happier without the constant point-scoring, friction and constantly adversarial attitudes? Would I be more likely to seek out and stick with peaceful, consensual, soft-focus social media communities rather than the retro shit-flinging every-man-for-himself phpbb thread boards that, like an ex-speed-freak, I know I will never entirely eschew for deluxe Brave New Web soma. I know why the punks hated ecstasy now.

Or would I become depressed and frustrated, dissociated from the defence of principle and having derelicted my duty to stand the barricades against the vocal, the sharp-elbowed, the gullible and those who would steal from and injure their poorer brothers under the banner of fairness and freedom?

Well, we’ll see. I’m giving up online bickering. For a week.