Thursday, August 12, 2010

Some late night musings

Two quick things:

One, I had a weird realization this week. I don't know what brought it on, maybe thinking about Inception, maybe this stomach bug I seem to have. But what I realized is that Return of the Jedi doesn't fit properly into Star Wars. I have never really given it a lot of thought before. I haven't seen Return since the re-release in '99. In the mean time, Lord of the Rings came and went and I had sort of lumped the two together in my understanding of trilogies. Lucas has peddled the idea that Star Wars was meant to be a trilogy from the beginning (which this article dispels). But LoTR has a definite goal and in pursuit of that goal, the stakes keep getting raised. Return gives us another Death Star and Ewoks. Also, Han is a caricature of his former character and Luke is a caricature of Obi-Won. I don't know what to do with this. I'll just table it for now.

Two, concerning net neutrality. I don't know what to do with this at all. A quick primer to those not familiar with it. Net neutrality is where everything on the internet can be accessed as quickly and easily as everything else. If net neutrality were not in place, internet service providers could give priority to certain sites or even block them all together. Pretty much everything I have come across on the subject (admittedly not much; maybe a dozen articles over several years; here are a couple good ones I have read recently) has viewed the loss of net neutrality as bad, that it would destroy the internet. But aside from generally disbelieving doomsday scenarios, I am starting to think that the loss of net neutrality could be good. Now, I highly doubt this will be read by anything like a hostile audience, but all the same please let me list off my reasons before lynching me.

Here is why I doubt it will much effect me to begin with. I only use the internet for a handful of tasks, mostly involving the reading and submission of text. For text and image based entities, I doubt that bandwidth is a serious problem. I do listen to a lot of podcasts, I do use YouTube and a few other video sources, and occasionally I play games online. There might be some problems there but all in all, the difference for me if I lost them would be mostly in novelty.

Here is why I think it could be good. Precisely the reason the internet works the way it does now is that it is free of interference. And I have to ask, is that a good thing? What that means, on the clearly bad side, is that most of the internet is porn. There is a rule of the internet, Rule 34, which states that if you can think of it, there is porn of it on the internet. And the existence of it, along with the ease of access, feeds the national addiction to it which in turn increases the demand.

But that is a subset of a larger problem, which is that the internet creates virtual communities as substitutes for real ones. Porn is just a part of this; it is fake, simulated intimacy. This is not to say that talking with people online is not real interaction or that a relationship is only significant if you can meat face to face. What it is to say that humans are physical beings and that there is depth in looking someone in the eye, shaking their hand, giving a hug, that the internet cannot supply. Which is where I think the porn comes in. I know this is a bigger discussion than what time I am devoting to it but I will just say this: how many times have you heard a story about an online affair that became a physical one? We long for presence along with conversation.

But the biggest thing is that the internet is a place lacking in justice. There is little accountability and no rules. And mostly, I just gloss over that. It's like walking through a bad part of town on the way to the theater. If you keep your eyes forward and don't dawdle, you should be fine. Just stay in the dim light from the street lamps and you'll make it. And eventually, you just stop caring that the internet encourages the worst and vilest kind of language and discourse, that it is filled with filth, that it facilitates theft, and generally just makes it all around easier to sin and harder to be righteous. Because that is just the way it is and I like my viral videos.

Well, so much for quick.