Every week, Draynd drops by to go all Chicken Little on some new fad or trend or actual catastrophe. He doesn’t really like anyone or anything, so everything is fair game. Unfortunately, in honor of George W. Bush’s farewell address, Draynd self-inebriated.
He was three sheets to a strong gust before dinner and passed out between the couch and coffee table before seven. Needless to say, he neglected to hand us his post on time and missed the entire, brief, speech. We forced him to read “my cat doing cat things” blogs as punishment.
This week: But what if we want to look way back?
I, as a mediaphile who travels amongst the digital more than the analog, don’t have much need for looking back. Memories are for middle-age. (Or retirement if you’re one of the few that aren’t hit with neuron degradation after receiving that first, too-little-to-survive-on Social Security check.) Which is why the blocking of the “Way Back Machine” has me slightly irked. It was my main source of recollection.
I was quickly over it, as is the way of the Facebook generation, until I saw this the same day. YouTube is muting videos with copyright-infringing tunes on them? That this silences half of their video archive aside, doesn’t this seem a little… overbearing?… to anyone else? Now that people have realized the power of the Internet, it seems some are trying to slice that power pie up into the largest pieces possible.
There’s no way silent film will make a comeback is there? Is there!?
First you could share music with your friends. Not just by handing mixed tapes to that hot girl you worship, but over the digital streams to that 43-year-old paralegal who you worship via his daughter’s pictures he has on “his” MySpace page.
Then people started spending four hours compressing terrible, should-have-been-straight-to-DVD movies and putting them on the same networks. Apple makes a fortune through their iTunes Store and is removing DRM protections. Television has moved on-line tsunami-style. Your grandmother is on Facebook.
The Internet (first almost completely democratic and “free” technology in the history of man) has ruffled some feathers. Those that had the control in the previous vertical models are still rich. And they want their power back.
Groups like the one blocking inappropriate content (as they see it) in the UK go global. Offensive content, a side effect of such diverse access, will be censored. The definition of “offensive” will shift and soon large swatches of what was the Internet will be inaccessible.
Raised on the Internet, suicide rates among high school students skyrocket. Prescriptions for anti-depressants and ADD treatments double record numbers, leaving pharmacies without supplies and heavily guarded. The next generation cannot deal with an analog world and slowly shuts down.
Most corporations crumble. We, social creatures, become isolationist. We stop adapting, stop interacting and slowly wait for extinction.
You can find Draynd freaking out on a regular basis at Thought Chasm.
