Homage Edvard Munch

The Tunisia, Egypt, et cetera thingee has rekindled the Internet as empowering the people meme.  I've long disagreed with that meme.  Guess it's my education and experience that thwarts the lemming instinct.  Cringely has a post about this.  I keyed a particularly trenchant reply, presented for your amusement.

I've argued for some time, and then I found the writings of Nick Carr which sent my dream of a juicy book deal up the pipe, that the Internet (in the form of blogs as this, and such) has quite the opposite effect, on the whole. What Internet does is disperse discontent into little, teeny, tiny silos. Millions of angry voices screaming into /dev/null. That's what the Internet does.


OK.  For those not computer geeks, some explanation.  On unix (and similar, aka linux), everything in the machine is treated as a file, and looks like a file to any program.  Early on, the developers of unix noticed that a universal garbage can would be handy.  So, they defined a file in the /dev directory (the slash in MicroSoft is backwards; that's another long story) called null which simply ignores any thing sent there.