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October 22, 2001
Hani
Shukrallah
Capital
Strikes Back
October 21, 2001
Donald
Rumsfeld
The
al-Jazeera Interview
Mark
Scaramella
Nuclear
Anxiety
October 19, 2001
Mohammed
Sid-Ahmed
Bush's
Palestinian State
Michael
Colby
A
Mailroom Manifesto
October 18, 2001
Mahajan
and Jensen
Avoiding
a New Cold War
Patrick
Cockburn
US
Planes Pound Taliban
Jamey Hecht
Gerald Ford
and the CIA
Mokhiber
and Weisman
3
Arguments
Against This War
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Aftermath
Diary
Ashcroft's Onslaught
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Ridge Long Groomed
for
Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids
Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
Tom Ridge's
Vietnam
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A CounterPunch
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A Word About
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas
Valentine
Al
Gore:
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by Cockburn
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October 24,
2001
Welcome to Web Hell
By David Vest
Practically every major mainstream web site I
like to visit has gotten significantly worse over the past few
months.
By worse I mean slower, uglier, more
cumbersome, more likely to be down, and more intrusive.
Even trusty old Yahoo, long known for
speed and simplicity, is noticeably slower. Worse, like many
other sites, Yahoo now opens a second, unwanted, browser window
whenever I go there, which I have to close before I can read
the news.
I have no idea what is in this second
window. I refuse to look at it. So far, not one word of text,
not one image has registered in my consciousness.
But I am pretty sure it is nothing I
want to see.
Even newsgroups have become minefields.
They are full of devastating traps for the unwary. You click
on a header to download an innocent-looking message. You quickly
discover that not only have you opened a new browser window that
very much doesn't want you to close it, you have also detonated
an infernal graphics-laden program that won't go away. Opening
the browser means you have ingested "cookies" that
tell whoever dropped this "smart bomb" who you are
and what sites you visited lately, and who's dumb enough to click
on this message twice.
A short while later you will of course
begin to receive e-mails from these fiends. Opening the message
(or just seeing it in the preview window) opens a hard-to-close
browser window that in turn opens a program that in turn ...
etc.
Sometimes the e-mail contains an "opt
out" link, inviting you to click and remove yourself from
the mailing list. Usually, clicking on this link does nothing
but inform your tormentors that your e-mail address is indeed
valid. This information encourages them to send you more spam
and to sell your e-mail address to other spammers.
If you have a slow Internet connection,
you are essentially immobilized. If you have broadband, as my
brother Mike has observed, you have basically just bought the
ability to download the spam faster. Not to mention the Bots
and Spiders.
It's enough to make you sorry you ever
went online.
All you ever wanted in the first place
was quick access to what the tech industry contemptuously regards
as "content." You look at "content" as "what
I want." They look at "content" the way home-building
contractors look at the foam insulation they spray between the
walls of attics with big hoses.
It's as though the whole idea was to
use our own technology against us.
That what-you-are-looking-for is what-you-in-fact-want
seems never to have occurred to these people. Simply giving it
to you is much too modest an undertaking for their grandiose
dreams of stock options and mergers. It's true even on subscription
sites where big companies sell data to each other. To look at
the information they've already paid for, they make each other
watch inane Flash presentations, then download tons of JavaScript
and bizarre graphics (you'd think they were selling graphics
or licensing the right to watch menus load).
What's next? Mandatory corporate beeper
implants? Contact lenses that show commercials? Free hearing
aids for people willing to listen to jingles all day? Guide dogs
for the blind that lead only to the Outlet Mall?
Communicable computer viruses that can
jump the gap from machines to people, the way Ebola jumped from
monkeys to human beings?
The web will soon be worse than magazines.
(You are in the doctor's office. You select a magazine. Three
or four loose cards and inserts fall out. You have to pick them
up and do something with them. Finally, you locate the Table
of Contents -- and that's not easy. There is an article you find
inviting, on page 71. Try finding page 71. After page 70 come
pages and pages of ads. You flip through these and find page
132 but not page 71. Perhaps you made a mistake. You go back
to the Table of Contents. Muhahahaha! Just try to find it again!)
My theory is that this spammeling of
America all started in department stores, on the day someone
decided that leaving you a direct path from the entrance to the
escalator (or to whatever you wanted to look for) was bad business.
"We have pampered these people long enough," someone
must have said. "Let them enter the labyrinth."
My fear is that what we are seeing on
the web, in stores, in magazines, on CNN, with its frantically
jumbled screen, is merely the reflection of what has happened
to our politics, our public policy, our very lives, where the
simple search for a direct path has led us, finally, somehow,
to Afghanistan. CP
David Vest
is a writer, poet and piano player for the Cannonballs. A native
of Alabama, he now lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit his webpage
for samples of the Cannonballs' brand of take no prisoners rock
& roll and other Vest columns: http://www.mindspring.com/~dcqv
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