Orangeness 9: Infogarbage
The Internet is a vast ocean, spanning the whole globe, even where it is land. It is an ocean of electronic information, not water. There is a reason why moving from site to site is still called “surfing the Net.” Every time you turn on that computer and connect, you are exposing yourself to the endless circulation of metaphorical water and allegorical salt.
And, just like the real ocean, the Net-Ocean (fishing nets, that is, to snare you and your fellow creatures) has regions and seas, some clear and balmy, others polluted and full of harm. The bottom is lined with the shipwrecks of “dot-com” companies, start-ups, service providers, search engines, and the remains of once massive lords of the sea….Compuserve? Altavista? Geocities? Whale carcasses, all of them now.
There is now so much plastic and other pollution in the ocean that it has spun together to form artificial islands and a permanent layer of compacted material, harmful to fish and sea creatures. And the Ocean of Internet is going this way too, but the polluting material is not physical but informational. I call it “infogarbage,” and by now there is no place either in the ocean or on the Internet that has not been somehow compromised by it, even if it is tiny and hard to see.
Much blather, sometimes true blather, has been written about the “monetization” (lovely word, that) of the internet, and the frantic competition for people’s attention. The oil of the information age is attention, that “made-you-look-and-click” thing. See where I’m going with that metaphor. Oil, fossil fuel, is so essential that people will drill the bottom of the sea to get it. On the internet, monetized sites drill to the bottom of your brain and suck out the oil of your attention. Their sole ambition is to get people clicking on the site and sharing it on social media in international cascades of infogarbage, “going viral,” and thus showing that it is a suitable drilling platform for more attention, more ad space, more info garbage. And it’s cheap and can’t break and exude awful goo all over the shoreline.
What, you say, my time is my own, and if I want to click on celebrity facts or cat videos, why shouldn’t I? Yeah, don’t we all. But then I discovered that these obsessive little entertainments are provided by an enormous industry of spammy sites, which underlie the ubiquitous ads. Back in the ancient days just after the millennium, reams and reams of spam was delivered to us under a bubbling coating of word salad, shredded civilization aimed at defeating the spam filters which kept the pollution manageable. Now there is no need to elude the spam filters - we readers have BECOME spam, and we take it in every moment of our blenderized attention span. An enormous industry uses thousands and thousands of pseudo-informative sites to extract from us. You are a resource to be mined and exploited. If petroleum had consciousness, it would be you, bubbling up the pipe along with countless exploitation web sites.
They have names often compounded with “buzz” and “viral.” ViralRecall, BuzzBombed, BlitzLift, Lifescript, Bite the Buzz, Mindbuzz, PeekWorthy, ViralWorld, Mind Pause, Distractify, Viral Hog, Buzzify, PopnHop,Viral Recall, ViralIgniter, CoViral, Viral Scoop, Shareable, BoreBurn, Bored Panda, Boredom Therapy, DamnBored, Lifebuzz, SetViral, GuiltyFix, Flipopular, Viral Mega, and on and on. This protozoic proliferation of infogarbage sites is managed by a few “content management” companies such as “Taboola” or “Outbrain.” From these sources, massive rivers of info sludge pour into the Net Ocean. They deliver the basic output of tabloids from history: celebrity gossip and facts, grotesque freak shows, lurid crime stories, cute animals, sports, medical quackery, and of course, female cheesecake. Boobs, ass, and more boobs. The more you click, the more boobs you see. And eventually you will be set upon by malware, the hook under the bait.
You can see the evidence of these myriads of catch-you sites as “by-lines” under “sponsored posts” or even in supposedly legitimate “news” posts on Yahoo or CNN. You have probably seen and consumed material from millions of them. These sites can MAKE MONEY by renting ad space, and may be the basis of what is advertised as “how to make a fortune working only four hours a week.” Yes, if you create and manage 100 or 200 garbage sites, you’ll get royalties from the ads. Maybe only one dollar per site or 1/10 cent per click, but you’ve got a lot of them and it mounts up, so let’s create ViralBuzz and its permutations and go off to our warm beach in the Caribbean! More celebrity boobs, baby. What is notable about this industry is that it produces NOTHING. No craft, no food or drink, no helpful gadgets, no books or medicines or furniture…nothing except money.
So we are back by the ocean. It’s clear, blue and sparkling, and the rum drinks with the fruit in them are on the table, and your laptop showing the output of your 700 info garbage grab-you sites is hidden under the pillows. That’s the same ocean you’re polluting, but in an informational way. In the world of information, there are no limits. It’s jaw-dropping and mind-blowing. You’ll never believe what can happen next.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Epic House Clearing
It’s been a while, we know that. My last “Orangeness” entry was in early October of last year, 2015. A week after that, my mother broke her hip in a fall at home. Twelve days later, despite attempts to repair it and rehabilitate her, my mother passed away aged 94.
Since then my life has been seriously disrupted since I am the only heir and executor of her estate, and she left a load of stuff behind which has to be taken care of. So in these months since then I haven’t had either the time or the energy to post to the Orange. But it’s 2016 now, and February, the dreariest month of our year, so I need to get back to what I like. A sip of orange juice if you might say, though orange juice reminds me of my late father who was rather unsavory in his addiction to orange juice.
Let me tell you about what was left to me in this epic passage of generations. Plenty of money, enough to pay a lot of taxes on, so I am now for the moment one of the greedy parasitic inheritors of unearned wealth. And a decrepit house in a Boston suburb, filled with 60 years of hoarded parental material, ranging from ancient decaying coats and clothes and shoes, to 60 years worth of financial statements and check stubs proving that my mother bought a bottle of milk in 1974. And my father’s piano, which a piano technician has proclaimed un-repairable. It sounds like an otherworldly dulcimer and I have recorded some untuned piano sounds to use in later ambient compositions. Last but not least there is the archive of my parents’ musical and artistic careers, which includes my father’s music and media recordings. With great effort on my part and Maggie, the archivist at Brandeis University, we were able to stash all of my father’s music material into the Brandeis Department of Music archive, where it can be accessed by anyone interested in the music of my old Dad.
Much more difficult to curate is the large collection of unsold art of my mother’s. My mother created a large amount of art with no intention of selling it. She just made it because she was compelled by talent to do so. Talent unfortunately does not mean money and in her day it was considered completely crass and low for an artist to market his - or especially her work. So my mother’s output is sitting slowly falling apart in the two back rooms of the rather small house. I have gotten a couple of them placed or promised to museums or collectors but the majority remains with the old house…and the mice.
Yeah, I haven’t mentioned the mice yet. Not computer mice, real rodents, in their numbers, infest the house. I heard them scampering in the ceiling and behind the furniture. I did not see one, which is good because if I had I would have immediately decamped to the less infested Hampton Inn. The mice were feeding on old birdseed left in the room behind other things we couldn’t see. Even when we removed the birdseed the mousies kept coming because they had left stashes in their nests which they built all around the house in hidden hoarded places. Now mouses are cute, right? Mickey and Minnie? Three Blind Mice? They are NOT cute. They are vermin. And what I didn’t know about mice is that they pee and poop all over where they go, for territory and path marking. And this mouse effluent stinks unbelievably - worse than a skunk, if you have ever smelled that. Mouse effluent is also transferable. In that it contaminates whatever touches it, which in turn contaminates whatever touches that, etc. etc. I have been spraying Febreze and other stink relievers and I still smell it more than a month afterward.
It was Christmas time and I was re-enacting the Battle Against the Mouse King, but I had no Nutcracker or Toy Soldier Army to combat them. My helpers set up traditional snap-traps baited with peanut butter and seemed to put a dent in their numbers, but what we really needed was a fierce cat who would rid the house of them gladly.
Work has been done. I need to de-clutter my own place, and every time I remove something, I either stupidly buy something new, or find more stuff. I’m like my mother. I have check stubs from 1987 in a big space-filling box. 1987, you are going to be history, if I can get to you. That’s almost mid-century, though I think my mother beat me in the long-term hoarding department.
The old living room still looks mostly as it was when my parents lived there, mid-60s style. But the antique dealers are at work. I am selling off furniture pieces one by one, though I can’t do that while I’m not there. I managed to get rid of the most well-known piece, the chair known as the “Womb Chair,” designed by the famous Finnish architect and crossword-puzzle fill in word Eero Saarinen. This chair is a famous mid-century modern design but I always disliked it. Once you got in it you couldn't get out. Sort of like being in a womb I guess. You would struggle to get your butt out of the deep back of the chair and then you would pop out wet and screaming to pick up your drink from the round cocktail table which my father built to go with all the other mid century stuff.
As I have stuff removed from the house in advance of selling it, I offered the chair to a local antique store specializing in mid-century modern housewares and furniture. It is supposed to be worth some money but there has been some deterioration over the years so maybe not so much. At least someone will buy it and it will find its way to a better home. I'm still looking for a home for the art, which is large and difficult to display, and also smells of mouse pee.
I guess you’re up to date now.
February 14, 2016.
Since then my life has been seriously disrupted since I am the only heir and executor of her estate, and she left a load of stuff behind which has to be taken care of. So in these months since then I haven’t had either the time or the energy to post to the Orange. But it’s 2016 now, and February, the dreariest month of our year, so I need to get back to what I like. A sip of orange juice if you might say, though orange juice reminds me of my late father who was rather unsavory in his addiction to orange juice.
Let me tell you about what was left to me in this epic passage of generations. Plenty of money, enough to pay a lot of taxes on, so I am now for the moment one of the greedy parasitic inheritors of unearned wealth. And a decrepit house in a Boston suburb, filled with 60 years of hoarded parental material, ranging from ancient decaying coats and clothes and shoes, to 60 years worth of financial statements and check stubs proving that my mother bought a bottle of milk in 1974. And my father’s piano, which a piano technician has proclaimed un-repairable. It sounds like an otherworldly dulcimer and I have recorded some untuned piano sounds to use in later ambient compositions. Last but not least there is the archive of my parents’ musical and artistic careers, which includes my father’s music and media recordings. With great effort on my part and Maggie, the archivist at Brandeis University, we were able to stash all of my father’s music material into the Brandeis Department of Music archive, where it can be accessed by anyone interested in the music of my old Dad.
Much more difficult to curate is the large collection of unsold art of my mother’s. My mother created a large amount of art with no intention of selling it. She just made it because she was compelled by talent to do so. Talent unfortunately does not mean money and in her day it was considered completely crass and low for an artist to market his - or especially her work. So my mother’s output is sitting slowly falling apart in the two back rooms of the rather small house. I have gotten a couple of them placed or promised to museums or collectors but the majority remains with the old house…and the mice.
Yeah, I haven’t mentioned the mice yet. Not computer mice, real rodents, in their numbers, infest the house. I heard them scampering in the ceiling and behind the furniture. I did not see one, which is good because if I had I would have immediately decamped to the less infested Hampton Inn. The mice were feeding on old birdseed left in the room behind other things we couldn’t see. Even when we removed the birdseed the mousies kept coming because they had left stashes in their nests which they built all around the house in hidden hoarded places. Now mouses are cute, right? Mickey and Minnie? Three Blind Mice? They are NOT cute. They are vermin. And what I didn’t know about mice is that they pee and poop all over where they go, for territory and path marking. And this mouse effluent stinks unbelievably - worse than a skunk, if you have ever smelled that. Mouse effluent is also transferable. In that it contaminates whatever touches it, which in turn contaminates whatever touches that, etc. etc. I have been spraying Febreze and other stink relievers and I still smell it more than a month afterward.
It was Christmas time and I was re-enacting the Battle Against the Mouse King, but I had no Nutcracker or Toy Soldier Army to combat them. My helpers set up traditional snap-traps baited with peanut butter and seemed to put a dent in their numbers, but what we really needed was a fierce cat who would rid the house of them gladly.
Work has been done. I need to de-clutter my own place, and every time I remove something, I either stupidly buy something new, or find more stuff. I’m like my mother. I have check stubs from 1987 in a big space-filling box. 1987, you are going to be history, if I can get to you. That’s almost mid-century, though I think my mother beat me in the long-term hoarding department.
The old living room still looks mostly as it was when my parents lived there, mid-60s style. But the antique dealers are at work. I am selling off furniture pieces one by one, though I can’t do that while I’m not there. I managed to get rid of the most well-known piece, the chair known as the “Womb Chair,” designed by the famous Finnish architect and crossword-puzzle fill in word Eero Saarinen. This chair is a famous mid-century modern design but I always disliked it. Once you got in it you couldn't get out. Sort of like being in a womb I guess. You would struggle to get your butt out of the deep back of the chair and then you would pop out wet and screaming to pick up your drink from the round cocktail table which my father built to go with all the other mid century stuff.
As I have stuff removed from the house in advance of selling it, I offered the chair to a local antique store specializing in mid-century modern housewares and furniture. It is supposed to be worth some money but there has been some deterioration over the years so maybe not so much. At least someone will buy it and it will find its way to a better home. I'm still looking for a home for the art, which is large and difficult to display, and also smells of mouse pee.
I guess you’re up to date now.
February 14, 2016.
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