xtcian

luddism

1/20/04

Salon's top story is about Dean's "fatal system crash" and how his own internet boom (young Dean-ites blogging away and planning meet-ups) went bust in the prairie pragmatism in Iowa. I'm sorry, but people are taking entirely too much delight in Dean's failure, a sort of political shadenfreude that used to be reserved for people who were already President. They seem especially elated that the whole "internet" thing didn't work out for him, which should be called out for what it is – just more plain ol' anti-intellectualism and the ego-stroking of the Inner Luddite that shines through us all.

Why are we so fucking happy when technology stops working? You'd think that a populace that lives on pacemakers, Lexapro, CDMA phones and up-to-the-millisecond stock quotes would be rooting for technology to get more and more flawless, but there's something about a massive failure that makes everyone smile warmly and wax romantic about "analog" and "bricks and mortar." And when Salon's writer Farhad Manjoo compares Dean to Pets.com, it comes off as oddly self-loathing (an internet-based company proffering that the internet failed us) even though I'm sure that wasn't the point.

I think there's a bit of nerd-hatred going on as well. I've actually written about it in Salon myself – part of the article is about the glee with which the Internet New Economy was abandoned in late 2001, as if the whole thing was the trumped-up horseshit of a gaggle of dorks. The football captains, "real" blue chip companies and George W. Bush came in to kick sand in the faces of all the 28-year-old upstart CEO's and bring us back to some sort of post-9/11 pragmatism. The epitaph for this decade is shaping up to be "Don't Get Too Excited."

I'm not about to give up that fight, however. The entire world basks in the sunny beneficence of the Internet and everything it has to offer, wired by geeks, and used by passionate young people to glom around the candidate they love most. When you tell revved-up young internet users that their whole campaign has been a disaster due to the wind-chill-hardened farm families of Iowa, all you're doing is demoralizing another generation away from the polls.

Quit it!

And stop being so smarmy about technology. That shit is keeping us alive, my unctuous friends!