It’s inevitable, I suppose, that anything good will ultimately be destroyed. We as humans have a very low tolerance for beauty and a nasty habit for violence and the dismantling of grand structures. Yeats says that “All things fall and are built again,” and it’s the continual rebuilding, the necessity of rebuilding, of what we once had that drives me to tears.
All in all, this internet thing is pretty cool. I feel connected, I can read the latest news from my desk at work (but only during my lunch break—honest!), I can post silly bits of drivel and feel as if I have expressed myself in some important way. It may be delusional, but it is easy, effective, and universally available. All good things. The problem is that people want to destroy it. They want to exploit and co-opt the easiness and effectiveness of this medium to make money (a reasonable goal in itself, I suppose), but without regard to the cost of their actions. These people, we call them spammers, and they’re evil. They consume bandwidth with alarming voracity—bandwidth that you and I pay for, they clog the search engines with irrelevant and undesired pseudo-content, and they’re always trying to do it in more subtle ways.
It’s vanity, I know, but I scan through my referrer logs from time to time to see how visitors to my site are finding me, what they’re looking for, and where they’re coming from. I don’t get many visitors, should the truth be told, but they do come from all over the world. It’s fun sometimes to see the crazy phrases that, when typed into the great Google beast, will receive this site in return. In the past few days, I have noticed several referrals from what on first examination looked to be personal weblogs. The problem was that they failed to reveal anything personal about the individual behind them. No “about” page, no self-indulgent or self-absorbed discussion, no silly photos of friends and family. Just headlines and excerpts from strange news articles. A quick ctrl-U to View -> Page Source showed unrevealing, almost standard blog mark-up, except for one very odd feature at the bottom the page, in every one of these links I followed. Always at the very bottom there was a hidden link to an /adult-webcam/ location. Not surprisingly, this link leads to a sign-up page for an “adult” website.
The fake blogs all seem to have been registered with Stargateinc on November 8th or 9th. Each is registered to a different person, but they all resolve to the same IP address. Evidently, some pr0n company is registering these domains, plopping up stolen designs with presumably stolen content, and visiting a zillion websites to spam their referrer logs. Because numerous sites publish their most recent referrers, this strategy leads to numerous links to the bogus sites that may then be catalogued by search engines like Google. With all these self-created links, the page rank in the search engine goes up, and they are more likely to be returned on searches. What this means for you and I, of course, is that the next time you go to find information on your favorite band or the latest news or a synopsis of last night’s episode of The Bachelor, you will have to sift through a ton of porn sites to find what you want. It also means that sites specifically targeting weblogs (e.g., Technorati) will be much less informative when this method of spamming takes hold.
All this is really just a long-winded way of pleading, “Why, oh why won’t you develop some self-respect, and some respect for humanity and what is good and human in you, and stop trying to wreck the great things we have?” Is it really too much to hope that people will one day wake up and wish to be decent to each other? Even Bill and Ted caught on…why can’t we?
On the other hand, Yeats also said that the fallen are built again, and that “those that build them again are gay.” These people helped me to solve my dilemma, to figure out why these sites were showing up, and how to deny them from accessing my site. I hope that they are filled with the joy of rebuilding, comforted in the knowledge that what little dignity we retain collectively as humans is promoted and passed on with each act of defiance and construction. My thanks to: net warriors, Nuisance Value, Adam at idly.org, Milo, AndrewU, and Vigilant.tv.
NP: Alsace Lorraine, If This Were the Past
Mike,
Seeing as how porn operators have already done what they can to wreck and ruin human sexuality, one of the most beautiful things in creation, what makes you think they would give even an nano-second’s pause before endeavoring to ruin the internet?
The pronagrapher has lost his soul. He cares nuaght for the good and the beautiful.
Comment by ben—November 20, 2003 @ 10:51 am
Well, you’re right, I suppose, and I have generally written off most porn creators and distributors as lost souls (though I do think we do, on the whole, repress, starve, and torture our sexuality far more than could possibly be healthy or wise, and a liberalization of sex in our public lives might just be a Good Thing). The spammers, though, aren’t themselves usually, as far as I know, the creators of the pornography. They’re the computer programmers and marketing guys who, rather than coaxing some young thing to disrobe for the camera, sit around and try to think up ways to use someone else’s bandwidth for free or how to exploit some cool and useful new tool to funnel unsuspecting websurfers to their employer’s website. They are often an entirely different animal—but I have written them off, too.
Comment by Michael—November 20, 2003 @ 11:15 am
You are right, of course. We do repress, starve and torture our sexuality far more than could possibly be healthy or wise. But I’m not sure that calls for a greater liberalization of sex in our public lives. Rather, it calls for a recovery of largely lost possibilities of thinking about sex in a non-disordered way.
I assume you, and most reasonable people, would have no difficulty stipulating to the fact that the human person’s sexuality has not always been so repressed, starved, and tortured. At times it has been downright orderly, although these times are by definition historically unremarkable.
A reasonable first step might be some sort of reduction of sexuality to its fundamentals. Such a reduction would serve to re-establish the centrality of reproduction to sexuality. Everything else pretty much follows from there; even a cursory examination of our current cultural mores concerning sex reveals that most of the disorder results from trying to separate sex from its Natural end (children & family). This is even and especially the case with the difficulties and struggles faced by intelligent, competent, and stable young men who are lonely. Such men are lonely BECAUSE having internalized the divorce of sexuality from reproduction; they do not seek sexual partners with whom to build a family. Instead they seek men who are BAD FOR THEM. You know this. What you might not have noticed is that men do the same thing. Take a look at your truly for a case in point. Just who was I pining for in college, and just how would that have lead to the good life (Eudaimonia)?
What is needed in a new naturalism–a return to an idea of sexuality as a natural thing with a natural END.
As the father of 5, I can tell you there IS a real fulfillment in raising your Progeny as a result of your expressed sexuality. Sexuality is in this way neither repressed, starved nor tortured. It is free (in the traditional sense, not the libertine sense), sated, and natural. In a sexual sense I have achieved Eudaimonia. Now if I could just get my finances worked out.
Comment by ben—November 24, 2003 @ 11:16 am
There is an egregiuos error in above post.
Where is reads:
Such men are lonely BECAUSE having internalized the divorce of sexuality from reproduction; they do not seek sexual partners with whom to build a family. Instead they seek men who are BAD FOR THEM.
it should read:
Such men are lonely BECAUSE having internalized the divorce of sexuality from reproduction, Women do not seek sexual partners with whom to build a family. Instead they seek men who are BAD FOR THEM.
Comment by ben—November 24, 2003 @ 11:20 am
odl.
Comment by Stephenhero—November 24, 2003 @ 11:52 am
Well, Ben, you know I can’t go down that road. I don’t know in what sense it is “natural” to have sex for the purpose of procreation but not “natural” to have sex for the purpose of sensual pleasure alone. The distinction is entirely lost on me. Also, you set up a false dichotomy: seeking sexual partners for family-building and seeking partners who are BAD FOR ONE are neither mutually exclusive nor totally exhaustive of the possibilities. Casual observation would lead me to think the two are often found together—and often lacking together as well…
Comment by Michael—November 24, 2003 @ 10:51 pm
Mike,
You say:
I don’t know in what sense it is “natural” to have sex for the purpose of procreation but not “natural” to have sex for the purpose of sensual pleasure alone. The distinction is entirely lost on me.
I answer that:
Consider if you would, what the understanding of sex would have been more than 60 years ago (how people thought and acted with regard to sex then), when contraception wasn’t effective and was universally illegal. This is a simple thought experiment, and should get you in touch with the “normative” understanding of sexuality for the bulk of human history, around which human societies and cultural institutions developed.
For the moment, please ignore questions about whether or not this understanding is “natural,” just try to get at what would have been normative for THEM. Try to get at what the understanding would have been for the best and brightest of them, the ones dedicated towards building a better world. Be honest, or the thought experiment won’t work.
Then compare this understanding to a modern/contemporary understanding of human sexuality. Use your own thoughts and feelings about sex as your guide. I’m guessing they are at least close to the mark of what is normative for a modern, educated, and thoughtful person, who is interested in improving his community.
Are the uderstandings different? They should be.
That is the distinction.
Comment by ben—November 25, 2003 @ 11:04 am
Voltaire lived more than 60 years ago, as did Stendhal, and Cervantes, and Schopenhauer, and Chamfort, and Oscar Wilde. All of them, presumably may be counted among the “best and brightest,” dedicated to building a better world, etc. An honest evaluation of what these individuals might have considered “normative” (apologies for the quotes, but I despise that word) would lead us all over the map of possibilities. Schopenhauer thought all love bound up in sexual impulses, and all sexual impulses a manifestation of the will to life. He writes in The World as Will and Idea, “For the state of being in love, though it may pose as ethereal, is rooted in the sexual impulse alone,” and later, “What presents itself to the individual consciousness as sexual impulse in general, and without being directed towards a specific individual of the opposite sex, is, in itself and over and above the phenomenon, simply the will to life. But what is manifest in the consciousness as a sexual impulse directed to a specific individual is in itself the will to live as a quite specific individual.” I am unaware of how he might have dealt with homosexuality. Cervantes writes in Don Quixote on the virtues of pimping, “…the office of a pimp is not a slight business, but an employment fit only for discreet persons, and a most necessary one in a well-regulated commonwealth; and none but persons well-born ought to exercise it…” If the risks and dangers of sexual congress were greater in the past, so much more impressive then the prevalence of courtesans, mistresses, gigolos, Casanovas, gentlemen and people of all persuasions who regularly engaged in extramarital sex for pleasure or profit rather than for procreation alone.
You seem to think that an educated, concerned citizen of today thinks differently about sex than does his counterpart from earlier times, and if I’m not misreading too severely, you seem to think that our predecessors had it right. What has changed, beyond our biological and physiological understanding of sex, and the materials we have at hand for dealing with disease and pregnancy? Not our concern for building a better world, presumably—that has never been a serious practical concern for more than a few individuals in any era. Our honesty? Who yet is honest about his sexual impulses in public? Our modesty? Our metaphysical commitments? Our reverence of authority?
If I may indulge in that honesty to which you so conspicuously impelled me: what was “normative” 60 years ago and what stands in its stead today don’t ipso facto concern me. He honors his teacher poorly who remains always a student. I hope to be the beneficiary rather than the slave of history, and to learn from history’s follies as well as its wisdom.
—
Comment by Michael—November 30, 2003 @ 12:50 am