Normally, although the Internet is a mess of advertising and manipulation, much of my daily experience of it is relatively personal, or at least to my taste.
But in the last few days the trashy, controlling, greedy, incompetent, screaming corporate world has been moving in heavily on some of my familiar standards... the Mac shareware site is taken over by a corporation that has ruined it in just a few days, Bloglines is being discontinued by its growing corporation because it doesn't pay enough, and of course Pirate Bay flickers on and off.
The stupidest part of this is the sheer heavy-handed ineptitude of the bloated corporate management once they take over these sites – they broaden it, mess it up, make it unreadable, then when it stops paying off (because they ruined it so quickly and so utterly) they close it down after a few years. I know also that this is the invasion of my haughtily superior Mac sites by the cheap trash of the Windows world – because Apple is no longer considered to have such a small client base as to be useless for corporate drones.
Ridiculous. I know that my students, and other savvy youngsters, stay a hundred steps ahead of these changes, and that for them many of these sites were hopelessly vieux jeu long before they were taken over. But I'm not as good at keeping up with the new versions of things... oh well, another bit of proof that tiresome old Adorno was right.
It reminds me a bit of this lovely/hideous/comic/grotesque video, on io9 (which seems a nerdy enough site, though with energetically frequent daily updates, that no corporation would bother with it – I hope). They are cheerful despite all those little advertisements, aren't they?...
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