Because legislators around the country haven’t caught up with the changing technology of the internet, pretty much every scorned ex who wants to degrade their ex-partner by posting intimate photos of them online is totally free to do so without any worry of legal ramifications.
Look outside of your window. If you see miles of farmland, chances are you have terrible internet service. That’s because major telecommunications companies don’t think it’s worth the investment to bring high-speed broadband to sparsely populated areas.
Internet access is an essential need on par with education access, but at what point do regulators recognize that? When will government officials acknowledge that widespread, guaranteed access is essential to fostering growth in the country?
Bad news, everyone. The greatest convenience the Internet has brought us, something our predecessors could never have imagined– 24/7 free porn at the click of a button–has been stained by science. Our collective porn habit was sure to bring upon our heads a day of reckoning, but until now we were all happy to avert our eyes from the blinding light of the truth of Internet smut and keep them locked on the screen instead. But now, my friends, the time has come to face the groovy porn music.
This week’s World Peace Update doesn’t veer too far from its default distress curve on the bruised and bloodied axes of planetary suffering: some Slovenians got really angry with their government, a group of Tunisian protesters got blinded and the Syrians got booted off the internet.
Twitter is a fucked up place where it’s completely normal, even encouraged, to blast statements about your dick being a Nazi (or whatever) to complete strangers. The other day, I set myself the challenge of finding the mostfucked up feeds I could. I searched nonsensical and half-sensical terms like “want be horse,” and found what I was looking for.
MySpace is a punchline now—just another failed social network, like Friendster, a cesspool of pedophiles and bullying and cluttered profile pages designed by emo teens with moodswings. But how would you feel about the site’s demise if you were one of those people who spent all of your free waking hours adding “friends” and tweaking your page to the point where you were legitimately, kinda internet-famous? What if, in other words, you were a Scene Queen?
The first photographic image ever uploaded to the web was a Photoshop disaster. It was created to sell something and featured attractive women in a come-hither pose.
In short, photo-uploading was born with some original sins that never quite washed away.
What would we do without the internet? We’d probably be in better shape and know how to interact with strangers in the supermarket. Of course without the web, we also would’ve never had the exquisite pleasures of seeing that monkey piss in its own mouth or the chance to cultivate crops on FarmVille…
“What do you think this is about?” was the question that Sruly, a bespectacled twenty-something Hasidic student and erstwhile packer and shipper from Williamsburg, bounced back at me while we rode on the G train together, en route to what may have been the largest so-called “anti-internet” rally in history. Most of the media coverage I had seen portrayed the asifa, which was organized by Ichud HaKehillos LeTohar HaMachane, or the Unification of the Communities for the Purification of the Camp, as a backwards rally against an unavoidable technology and a call to arms to put an end the greatest masturbation aid since lotion. But Sruly, aware of the way it may have looked from the outside, gave me his perspective.
