Send me some mail
I've done a couple white papers about AOL, and today I got a rather insulting piece of mail (which I won't quote) accusing me of all manner of idiocy because I don't think AOL sucks.
The real horror of it is that we're starting to do the same thing online that we championed the internet's ability to get rid of. We're discriminating. We've become a community of self-righteous, superior jerks who feel like we deserve to be treated better just because we're on the internet. And we're better than you are, see? Look at our e-mail addresses.
It started, I think, with AOL. Once AOL users could get online, we decided that the @aol.com in an e-mail address meant 'I am an idiot'. Why? Because they didn't know their way around the internet. Never mind that none of us were born knowing any of the stuff we take for granted, like the default port of an HTTP server or the fact that an FTP connection actually takes two socket connections or what exactly ports and sockets and HTTP are to begin with. And we came to this conclusion because we saw this in a newsgroup:
From: al54210@aol.com To: alt.music.industrial.fans Subject: Re: I like Nine Inch Nails Me too
What a waste of bandwidth! We cried out in protest! Look! The idiot actually thought we CARED that he agreed with this post!
Did anyone care that the original poster liked NIN? No. Was it accepted? Yes. Was it on topic? Yes. Why exactly is it off topic for this guy to agree? What did he do wrong? People do this all the time. "I like Chinese food." "Me too." What's wrong with that?
Well, there's a lot wrong with it. But did anyone explain? No. They did this:
From: superior@dipstick.net To: al54210@aol.com Subject: YOU SUCK > Me too You dork! Quit wasting bandwidth! You have no life! You need to get a clue! You suck! AOL is full of losers like you! We hate you! We hate your whole family! If you lived in my neighborhood I would poison your dog and slash your tires and give you a wedgie! Get off my newsgroup!
Can anyone tell me what's wrong with that message? I can. It doesn't tell the poor guy on the other end what he did! He's sitting in front of his computer thinking, "Why do you hate me so much? What exactly is bandwidth, and how did I waste it? Isn't the newsgroup there for people to post messages on? What was wrong with that one? Why are you being so mean? What did I do? I'm sorry, I won't do it again, I promise, but can you please just tell me what I did wrong?"
This is a community that is fully prepared to accept bondage, bestiality, fetishes, S&M, and various forms of perversion that can't be mentioned in polite company. Yet somehow, they can't abide innocence. Ever been in an internet chat room? It's nothing at all like real life. If a woman walked up to you on the street and told you she liked to have sex with dogs, you'd try to get away from her. In a chat room, however, this is perfectly okay! "Really? How long have you been doing this? What type of dog do you have? How hard was it to teach the dog what to do? Do you prefer specific breeds? Are purebreds better than mutts?"
Yes, you can be the world's biggest deviant, and the internet loves you anyway. But God forbid you ever make a mistake.
Then we started discriminating against URLs. First it was a general distaste for the infamous '~user' URL. Then for anything that was on GeoCities or Tripod. Now you're almost considered a second class citizen if you don't have your own domain -- or at the very least, your own machine name. There are whole companies that do this; ml.org gives out custom machine names. For those that are willing to accept a non-user directory, come.to provides you with a simple URL: come.to/whatever for easy and simple recognition.
And we look down on these people, because they don't know enough or have enough money or understand the community well enough to say "Gee, I'll just go pay the InterNIC $100 and some web provider $50 a month, and have my own web server." Easy, isn't it? All you have to do is know how to find a web provider and what the InterNIC is and how to get a domain name. But who's going to tell al54210@aol.com all of this? No one. He's from AOL. He's obviously an idiot.
Now we have HoTMaiL. And Juno. And all sorts of e-mail providers. Free. Advertiser-supported. And second-class. Why? Because they're too easy to sign up for. Too easy to use. Too easy to have.
We don't appreciate the easy to get, in any part of our lives. We tend to shrug and say 'oh, that was a simple thing'. But why do we actively disdain it on the internet? Weren't we all supposed to be equal here? No skin color, no nationality, no disabilities, nothing but minds, all coming together, all equal? We hold these truths to be self-evident?
The internet has always been something of an elite group. Not anymore, though; now anyone can get onto a service provider and get set up easily and quickly. No more cryptic calls to NOCs about IP addressing and flow control and protocol negotiation. Do we appreciate how much easier it is? No. We lament the loss of our elite status. We look for people we can spit on. We look for ways we can distinguish the real internet from the crap internet. We make rules, arbitrary rules, unfair rules, about who is in the real net users and who is just a wannabe.
Ten years ago, we were all saying that the world would be a better place if everyone was on the internet. Somehow, I don't see it. I always said that the world would be a better place if we treated people in the real world the way we treated each other on the internet.
I'm retracting that statement now. I'm reversing myself. Literally.
The world would be a better place if we treated people on the internet like we treat people in the real world.