Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Bread Winnings

For those of us get­ting paid monthly, the end of the month is a good time. Unless of course it comes as a reminder of how much we’re get­ting whipped by our employers.

Today I received my payslip for last month’s work, includ­ing the com­mis­sion from the month before. Having not received com­mis­sion before I was expect­ing some­thing in the region of £50 to £100, but was instead greeted with… £19.

Yup, for a sales­per­son receiv­ing between 15 and 30 phone calls (requir­ing tech­nical know­ledge, good man­ners and an IQ higher than room tem­per­at­ure) and pro­cessing around £3,000-worth of orders a day (a con­ser­vat­ive estim­ate) for 3 days a week for 3 weeks, I appar­ently have to settle for… 0.05% of my con­tri­bu­tion to the busi­ness turnover — the grand fig­ure of 0.05 pence in the pound. There’s noth­ing like mak­ing your employ­ees feel like a Valued part of the Team.

devi­antART: One Toke Over the Line

The art com­munity web­site devi­antART, with whom I’ve hos­ted my online pho­to­graphy port­fo­lio for over 18 months, has been through some ups and downs in the time I’ve been on-board. The recent trend has been for the artists to take a back seat to money-making, and I have put up with this as I didn’t think it was that much of a prob­lem. My pho­tos were still get­ting viewed, cri­tiqued and pub­li­cised, and that was fine.

Today I am angry. A few weeks ago the techs at dA caved in to pub­lic pres­sure and released their much-lauded “v5”, a fairly com­plete over­haul of the present­a­tion side of the site. Unfortunately they made the fatal mis­take of not wait­ing until the fuck­ing product was com­plete before they pub­lished it. Thus, a whole bunch of stuff on the site was broken or looked bad for some time until they got around to com­plet­ing those bits. This, it seems, is still ongo­ing, with many issues remain­ing unfixed.

Beyond the “reg­u­lar” side of devi­antART there is the Prints Service, a fairly pro­fes­sional and highly regarded ser­vice that allows mem­bers to sub­mit high-resolution cop­ies of their art­work and have the whole print­ing pro­cess handled for them. For this dA takes a cut of the face price of a print, but it’s a reas­on­able deal and mem­bers can set their own prices. The styl­ing of each member’s “Store” was dif­fer­ent to that of their main dA page, offer­ing a far more pro­fes­sional appear­ance to poten­tial clients.

Until a few days ago. Now, it seems, the Store pages have been tarred with the same shitty brush as the rest of the site, remov­ing the last vestiges of pro­fes­sion­al­ism from the oper­a­tion. There used to be a simple “Store” link from each member’s page to his or her Prints Store area, this is now gone. Instead a “Prints” link takes its place, which takes the user not to the store­front, but to a page list­ing the member’s prints without any other inform­a­tion at all. Nothing. Fuck-all. To get to the artist inform­a­tion that used to be present, the user must click a print, then click the artist’s name at the top of the dis­play, beside the title. This then shows the “redesigned” store­front. Are most users likely to do this? Fuck they are. And even when the artist inform­a­tion is dis­played, dA have deigned to show only the “bio­graphy” sec­tion entered by the user, not their edu­ca­tion inform­a­tion, nor their awards inform­a­tion — even the “email the artist” link has been removed com­pletely, leav­ing no way for cli­ents to get in con­tact. So full marks to dA for help­ing com­mu­nic­a­tion between artist and poten­tial client.

It used to be that the Store car­ried a more refined, business-centric atti­tude and style than the rest of the site, and this is now gone. For myself and other artists who relied on devi­antART as a chan­nel through which to sell art, the rami­fic­a­tions are not good. I have been con­struct­ing another web­site in which to show­case my pho­to­graphy, as I thought that the “gal­lery” side of dA wasn’t pro­fes­sional enough — but I was hop­ing to link inter­ested cli­ents to my dA Store to com­plete any sales. I am now very reluct­ant to do this. It’s great to see that sites like dA have the interests of their users at heart as they pub­lish unfin­ished site builds that com­pletely tear up the struc­ture and ideas that the pre­vi­ous site used to represent.

Thank You, Facebook

For allow­ing me to be spoon-fed my opin­ions via a invit­a­tion sys­tem where I can be bom­barded daily with appeals from parties right, left and centre want­ing to induct me into their neatly com­part­ment­al­ised mind­set. For mak­ing it so easy for people who think I might be vaguely inter­ested in sup­port­ing their beliefs to invite me, along with whatever other unfor­tu­nate souls hap­pen to be con­nec­ted to them, to join their I-wear-my-opinons-on-my-sleeve Facebook Group, because remem­ber: if you said it on Facebook, It Can Really Make a Difference.

A Three-Step Plan for Facebook Groups
1. Get to know me first, so you have some vague idea as to my beliefs and opin­ions. Want to know what I think? Ask me.
2. Don’t bother invit­ing me any­way. Unless your Group is incred­ibly witty, chances are I’m not inter­ested. My join­ing a Facebook Group is not going to influ­ence who becomes the next US President; it is not going to stop war in the Middle East, and it sure as fuck isn’t going to resolve the cur­rent AUT strike.
3. Should I — for some unima­gin­able reason — decline your invit­a­tion, have a guess at what the most annoy­ing thing you could do would be. That’s right, invit­ing me again. Please die.

For those unsure who this applies to, fol­low this simple test: Are you con­tent to select your polit­ical stance from a drop-down list of eight options? If you answered Yes, you have a career wait­ing for you as a Facebook Group spammer.

</rant>

This Doesn’t Prove Shit

The BBC repor­ted this even­ing with some gusto that the US Justice Department had released “the first video” of the impact that took place at the Pentagon on the morn­ing of September 11^th 2001, thanks to a Freedom of Information request by Judicial Watch. In 2002 stills from another Pentagon secur­ity cam­era claimed to show the same, but were of low qual­ity and failed to really clear up any­thing. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was quoted as say­ing, “finally, we hope that this video will put to rest the con­spir­acy the­or­ies involving American Airlines Flight 77.” Regrettably, it fails to do so.

The still below linked here is taken from the BBC stream of the video — the source cam­era, like the pre­vi­ously released stills, is of low fram­er­ate; this is the only frame con­tain­ing whatever it was that impacted with the Pentagon.

What annoyed me as much as the treat­ment of this release as some­thing con­clus­ive was the tone of the art­icle, which reminded me of every offi­cial response to crit­ical art­icles writ­ten about the incid­ent. Theories have long cir­cu­lated about what happened at the Pentagon, and regard­less of what the offi­cial line is and what is branded as “con­spir­acy the­ory” are the facts — that the dam­age at the Pentagon was not con­sist­ent with an impact by a 757, illus­trated (among other things) by the com­plete lack of vis­ible debris. Okay, so per­haps this can be explained away; why then, if this is so, has the US gov­ern­ment not released the other video and pho­to­graphic mater­ial record­ing the incid­ent, namely the private sur­veil­lance cam­eras at the hotel near the Pentagon (con­fis­cated by the FBI after the attack) and at the pet­rol sta­tion across from the Pentagon. National Geographic News repor­ted in December 2001 that “Velasquez [the owner] says the gas station’s secur­ity cam­eras are close enough to the Pentagon to have recor­ded the moment of impact. “I’ve never seen what the pic­tures looked like,” he said. “The FBI was here within minutes and took the film.”” The author­it­ies have never released these images which, logic argues, should surely show the true events of that morning.

This is no won­der, how­ever, when blinkered atti­tudes like those pre­val­ent in the United States still exist. In 2002 French author Theirry Meyssan released two books attempt­ing to give an object­ive explan­a­tion of what he believed were the real events at the Pentagon, namely that what impacted there could not have been a 757 but was instead a smal­ler plane or mis­sile, or the dam­age was caused by a truck bomb at the site. Leaping aboard the American insti­tu­tion of anti-French sen­ti­ment, Pentagon spokes­man Glen Flood described the book as “a slap in the face and real offence to the American people”. To me it seems that this men­tal­ity has become the norm when deal­ing with issues like this — com­plete rejec­tion of the pos­sible altern­at­ive story sug­ges­ted by the “con­spir­acy the­or­ists” because the rami­fic­a­tions of it being true are so mind-meltingly huge that civil­isa­tion as we know it would implode. The aver­age American, des­pite being faced with over­whelm­ing evid­ence to the con­trary, simply refuses to even enter­tain the pos­sib­il­ity that what happened could be any dif­fer­ent from the offi­cial ver­sion of events.

The release of this video does not help to shore up the defence of the offi­cial story. It should not be treated as such. The other evid­ence of the events at the Pentagon that is still being sup­pressed needs to be released. I don’t like the offi­cial story; I don’t like the implic­a­tions if one of the other the­or­ies turns out to be true. I don’t claim to know either way, but I and mil­lions of oth­ers want to see that other footage.

Yes, what happened at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11^th was an atro­city in every way. Yes, the loss of human life was hor­rific and ter­rible, and should never be for­got­ten. But that is not a reason to refuse to ques­tion what went on. Those who sug­gest altern­at­ive the­or­ies are not try­ing to insult the dead. They are only try­ing to find the truth.

US releases 9/11 Pentagon video, BBC News, 16÷5÷2006
Why Pentagon released 9/11 tape, BBC News, 16÷5÷2006
The Suppression of Video Footage of the Pentagon Attack, 911research.com
Three Months On, Tension Lingers Near the Pentagon, National Geographic News, 11/12/2001

Better Late Than Never

As the WTC towers fell four and a half years ago, most of Manhattan was engulfed by dust clouds from the massive amounts of debris pro­duced by the col­lapse. Wall Street was closed on September 11^th and re-opened on September 17^th, as author­it­ies were des­per­ate to limit the eco­nomic dam­age of the attacks. The Environmental Protection Agency, with its his­tory of admin­is­trat­ive sucking-up (cov­er­ing up global warm­ing evid­ence, sup­press­ing reports on car fuel effi­ciency, etc), declared the air in Lower Manhattan, which was loaded with asbes­tos, lead, americum and other tox­ins, “safe to breathe” on September 18^th, and thou­sands returned to work.

Now, nearly five years on, reports of the effects to health of those liv­ing and work­ing in the area are begin­ning to reach the main­stream media. BBC News repor­ted yes­ter­day that the count of those with med­ical prob­lems linked dir­ectly to the 9/11 attacks has reached 15,000, many of whom say they were offered “false reas­sur­ances” by the gov­ern­ment. 5,000 are now seek­ing a class-action law­suit. January saw the first death ruled to be due to 9/11 dust — James Zadroga, who worked at Ground Zero.

A foot­note on the report on the BBC News web­site states that “a spe­cial report on the dust fal­lout from the 9/11 attacks will be fea­tured on BBC World start­ing on Wednesday 3 May at 1930 GMT. The doc­u­ment­ary will also be car­ried on BBC News 24.” I first heard about the dust effects in the “Confronting the Evidence: A Call to Reopen the 911 Investigation” doc­u­ment­ary — and that was nearly two years ago.

Problems mount from 9/11 fal­lout, BBC News, 12÷4÷2006
EPA’s 9/11 Air Ratings Distorted, Report Says, LA Times, 23÷8÷2003
“Confronting the Evidence: A Call to Reopen the 911 Investigation”, Reopen911.org
EPA Controversies, Wikipedia