It’s For Porn I Tell You!
I saw a link to this excellent blog post: What the government doesn’t understand about the Internet, and what to do about it.
Even before I went to read the post (which you should do, too, even though it has almost nothing to do with normal ErosBlog topics) I knew that there would be something in the “the government doesn’t understand” category that the (mainstream) article wouldn’t mention; namely, the fact that the internet is for porn. (Sing it with me, normal people: “The internet is for porn, the internet is for porn…”)
Turns out I was technically right — the word “porn” nowhere appears — but not right in a clever way, because the post does say this:
These [internet] services are reducing traditional institutions’ ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.
And that’s internet porn right there, unnamed but encompassed. The repressive institutions, including governments as well as the churches that once went around my little town offering wads of cash to any store that would permanently remove its dirty magazine rack, have pretty much utterly lost their power to suppress writing and photography featuring naked people fucking. And this power is gone not just in the perennially-damned urban centers, but even in the tiniest and most repressed of farming hamlets.
Nor can government put the erotic genie (um, may I have one of those, please?) back in the bottle. As the post goes on to say:
Any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public).
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=3483
I just woke up so I’ll link later to the entire article because it does seem interesting. I completely agree with your premise–in countries that have a basic level of ‘freedom’. I know this isn’t a political blog and I’m really not a political person so my examples aren’t to set off a firestorm of ‘but this political system is inherently better than that one’ crap. My personal gut feeling about religion and politics is–’I don’t need no stinkin’ badgers!’
That said the past month has been very bad for people like me who care for personal freedom. I don’t have a great personal stake in Tiananmen Square but I know a little about it and I’m aware that it was a lynch pin point like the assassination that started WW1 and the battleship Potempkin and all sorts of other recent human events. What disturbed me was how effective the Chinese government was about putting up umbrellas so that journalists couldn’t report from Tiananmen Square on the tenth anniversary a few days ago. This is a government that clearly has a lot of time, energy and resources for figuring out how to suppress what it wants to suppress for whatever reasons.
And a few days later the two U.S. reporters were sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp. My point isn’t to start a political rant my point is that now more than any other time that I’ve been aware of there are different worlds that are coexisting. Chinas great wall and the Russian government isolating returning ww2 soldiers who were ‘tainted’ were attempts to ‘protect’ cultures from outside influences. I’m imagining that the Chinese official who came up with the umbrella idea feels he succeeded, but it just made me, a fairly unconcerned bystander, more interested in the event. They failed–they piqued my interest. And I hope they piqued the interest of a lot of younger people with more energy to look into events like this and swing the tide in a different direction. Same with the reporters in North Korea. Kim Jong IL was mostly a funny puppet in the ‘Team America’ movie a few years ago. I hate to think now that the puppet in that movie was like Chaplin playing Hitler in ‘the Great Dictator’, a funny joke gone terribly wrong in the real world.
Bacchus if you want to excise the above I have no problem with that what so ever. In real life I usually try to avoid discussions about politics and religion because they tend to be pointless and sad.
Perhaps more to the point of this blog–the internet has killed Hustler, Penthouse, Playboy etc and they don’t seem to have a clue as to why this is the case. Those mags and others like them served specific purposes but the internet has made them superfluous. Like Helen Gurley Brown and some other publishers from that era I think Hef was an important figure–but seeing this dinosaur on ‘the Girls Next Door’, well, is it presumptuous of me to feel embarrassed for him? Clearly he isn’t embarrassed. Since my thirties I decided that how I want to die is from a massive heart attack brought on by having passionate sex with three twenty five year old women on a sunny beach when I’m seventy five. (yes, yes…I assume my family will be embarrassed to see the photo of me with the big rigor mortis smile on my face–ho hum, life is for the living after all) Maybe I’m not embarrassed for old man Hefner but just jealous?
I liked Hustler back in the day But Larry Flynt (bless his heart) never had the weight of Hugh back in his intellectual prime. My observation is that Larry was mostly in it for a buck, the rest was just a fluke. But it seemed like they all have tried to cash in on the internet and none of them can because the new model really has done away with the old. The head has been cut off and it is still taking time for that information to travel through synapses and nerve endings back to the dinosaur body.
And you can blot out this ending paragraph if you need to. Neither Republicans nor Democrats understand yet that Obama wasn’t and isn’t about ‘being black’. I think he is the first ‘modern’ politician. McCain made self deprecatory jokes about being a Luddite who couldn’t use e mail. Obama was fretting about not being able to have his blackberry when he assumed office. Pundits in our country are having trouble landing effective blows on the president because they continue to see his surface. Individual people can be physically arrested or assassinated but the ideas are out there. No matter what your political stance the genie really is out of the bottle, as was said.
Deal with her navel, folks.
Jaguar