The Dark Side

For every invention there are those that love it and those who are suspicious of it. So it has been since the very beginnings of innovation. The new brings both hope and fear. While it is difficult to advocate complete skepticism when it comes to shifts in the social paradigm, some reasonable caution is warranted.

When Social Media first arose on the scene, few thought much of it. Largely the bastion of university students and cute cat videos, early iterations were interesting but nothing to write hyperbole heavy, alarmist op-eds about. Unlike television which already boasted a polemic screed, demonizing it as potentially fatal (Amusing Ourselves to Death; Neil Postman, 1985).

As tends to happen Social Media has gotten a bit more sophisticated and not only has it gone mainstream but has come, in various forms, to dominate the modern cultural paradigm like none of the traditional media forms can. Traditional media certainly still exists and the truly ancient ones such as books will more than likely persist in some form but there is now no denying that Social Media is the future. At least until the next thing comes along, as it has at regular intervals for the last hundred years.

In the meantime it is prudent to acclimatize ourselves as well as we can to the systems and strictures in which we are trapped.

While Social Media can and has been used with great effectiveness in the fight for social change, there is another side to this dynamic that is less talked about. The fact that digital information is a two way street and while Twitter and Facebook and the like can be used for purposes of organization and dissemination of information, they can also be means by which the government can monitor dissident activities. There seems to be a conception that leaders, particularly dictators, are retrograde and would not know how to use technology to their advantage. 

While true in some cases in others to assume this can be a fatal mistake. The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence has been quite effective in the realm of cyber intelligence, digital surveillance being a major source of their intelligence.

In 2016 Lebanese authorities arrested university student Bassel al-Amin because he had been critical of Lebanon's leadership on Facebook. Though, it turns out that one does not even need to be openly critical or dissident to rouse suspicion. A university student in Belarus was arrested and questioned in connection with the burgeoning resistance movement in that country, simply because he had a few know dissidents on his friend-list. Perhaps not all that surprising considering the former Soviet state maintains a secret intelligence service which still referred to as the KGB. Not that the American government would do this. Not the land of the free and home of the brave. The First Amendment is sacred. Just ask Edward Snowden.

The internet can be a great and liberating place and net democratization has done more good than harm. Just keep in mind that anyone can see what you put online, so if you want to use it for something the powers that be might come down on, no matter how innocent it might be, be careful where you put it and protect yourself with encryption and proxy serves. Nothing is foolproof but it can't hurt.

Job Security

“Generation” is a term of convenience. A cheap and diabolically imprecise way of referring to complex age cohorts. A practice that really went off the proverbial rails with the “Baby Boomers”following WWII. While not having quite as an overtly offensive and belittling a moniker as one's own “Generation X”, the cohort dubbed “Millennials”, by the culture gods in charge of arbitrating such things, have really drawn the short straw in terms of the cultural attitude towards them, largely being seen as self-centred, tech-obsessed brats, who want everything handed to them.


Except they are not young. At least not as young as many assume. While there tends to be disagreements about the exact dates the general consensus is that “Millennial” refers to those born between 1983 and 1995. The youngest “Millennials” are,therefore, currently 23-years-old. The oldest group are turning 35. Mark Zuckerberg is a Millennial. As are Edward Snowden, Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro. Say what you will about them personally, no one can honestly describe any of them as being idle or entitled. They may be fobbed of haughtily as “exceptions” but that does not mean they do not exist nor does it really serve to lessen their impact, because they are dashed striking exceptions that directly contradict everything currently being assumed about “Millennials”.


One of the greatly underrated aspects of the “Millennial” group is their near preternatural tech. savvy. The reason that it seems like second nature to them being that this is exactly what it is. What can look like “obsession” usually just being engagement with dominant cultural paradigm. Something that can help solve the problem of underemployment. Even in the contract work so prevalent in the “gig” economy, one can have a long and healthy career simply by becoming indispensable (you will notice I used the word “simply” and not “easily”). The most direct way of becoming an essential asset is to suss out a skill that you either have or can develop that is both required and not everyone has and then either promoting the fact that you have it or acquiring it if it is not a skill your currently have.

A criminally under utilized area just primed for growth is Cyber Securities. Why this is not a bigger industry with a more aggressive recruiting program is something of a mystery as well as a missed opportunity. Basically a legalized form of hacking, the job is to break into a computer network to expose weaknesses and make the system stronger to prevent actual attacks by less well- intentioned folks. It is the main employment taken by reformed “Black Hat” hackers, using their powers for good, or at least in a way that unlikely to get them arrested and has roots going back to the use of Privateers. Officially mariners of the Realm, who looked and acted an awful lot like outlawed Pirates, working under the in the employ of Her Majesty Elizabeth I. The ability to test security systems to expose weaknesses is an essential skill in the world of online commerce. No matter how cutting-edge the company, innovative the idea or tech-savvy the executives (Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg were both hackers in their younger days), if a Worm, or related malicious virus, gets through and crashes the mainframe there is no longer a company to run. So take a page from the geniuses behind anti-virus software and make it your business to keep other businesses running smoothly. You may not get a lot of glory, or even thanks, but you may well have a job for life. Or however long you might want it.





To the Roots

The term “going digital” can have some odd associations. Though it really only Refers to content stored on a computerized device, there can be some peculiar assumptions made about what digital content is and should be. While there have been new genres and formats created, or at least inspired by the new, digital infrastructure (blogs, vlogs, podcasting etc.), there is also a good deal of content in traditional styles that are available mostly, if not exclusively, online. In such cases, the web is mostly being used as a promotional tool as opposed to the platform itself. Much like when music videos were broadcast on traditional television to promote artists, web streaming being traditional television's logical successor, while live performances and records were the primary commodity. Now it tends to be the individual songs. There are many of the same marketing tactics used but rather than physical CDs, according to recording industry insiders such as Music Engineer Glenn Fricker, the primary mode of selling music is online in the form of MP3 downloads.



An element that stands out in the music currently available online, is how staunchly traditional some of it is. At times to the point of the anachronistic. There is the jocular, such as the “Pirate Metal” stylings of the Scottish band Alestorm, which are basically high-powered sea-shanties, and the partially a Capella, Celtic Folk pieces of Ye Banished Privateers, many of which are literal sea-shanties.



On the darker end there is Russian Folk Metal band, Arkona famous for seamlessly blending Russian Folk music of the sort that got Stravinsky in trouble at the premier of Rite of Spring and Death Metal in tracks such as “Yarilo”. A counter-intuitive combination on par with peanut butter and chocolate.


Even deeper into the roots is Patty Gurdy. Primarily the hurdy-gurdy player and second vocalist for the 6-piece German Folk Metal band Storm Seeker (which also includes a keyboardist and cellist), Ms. Gurdy also has an active successful online presence on YouTube. No one-trick pony, her online content is a buffet of cool, combining several instruction videos on the hurdy-gurdy as well as solo performances and collaborations with other YouTube musicians and members of her band, such as the acoustic version of the band’s song “The Longing” she did with the band's aforementioned cellist.
There are also acts such as Faun. With a name referring to a mythical creature and using instruments that pre-date electricity by hundreds of years, all manner of descriptors can, and have, been used for their music, some of them more accurate than others. Though the fact is, the style of music they tend to do is so old that it pre-date the concept of genre itself. There is also a strong element of pre-Christian European paganism in the band's themes, instrumentation and visuals which point to a firmly Medievalist orientation.


Speaking of Medieval, if sheer numbers are anything to go by, one of the most popular songs to cover on YouTube is “Herr Mannelig”. First published in 1877, Herr Mannelig is a generally a Cappella Swedish Folk Ballad so old no one knows who originally wrote it. Yet type “Herr Mannelig” into the search bar and witness the seven pages (20 videos per page) of people doing variations on it. “Variation” really being the right word, the artist involved ranging from the solo Folk Singer Alsuna to a Symphonic Heavy Metal band called Ranthiel.



Despite the propaganda from the self-interested and misinformed, the move to digital is not completely destroying traditional art forms. In fact, in some ways they are helping them survive. 

Dark Phoenix

It is a sad fact of history that many ideas, both good and bad, simply run out their due time and are resigned to obscurity. Though it also a fact of history, if one looks hard and squints, that it does not run in a strictly linear course and ideas thought to have long ago had their day can see that day dawn once more. The 'Internet Age' (to the shock of many) is no great exception.


At the time of initial publication the Internet, or at least the 'world-wide-web' iteration designed by Tim Berners-Lee, was known to harbour some less than credible information. Mercifully, at this point in time there were rather few people on the 'web' and even fewer 'websites', the lion's share of the content stored there consisting of corporate web-pages for well-known companies and, true to the system's roots as a closed academic network, recognized and peer-reviewed journals and papers. As well as a few, select individuals, of the distinctly computer-savvy sort, airing their grievances on online diaries. A precursor to modern-day 'blogs' that dates back to the late-1980s (no one read them then either).


What a difference two decades can make! In the present Epoch, only a single generation removed form the, rather humble, beginnings of the 'web', the fledging communications network has come to be the dominant communication mode of the new millennium. A situation simply primed form from the resurgence of uninformed, dubious and just plain daft notions into the the public discourse. To paraphrase Silicon Valley instigator and 'virtual reality' impresario Jaron Lanier, everything looks real when it is online.


This phenomena is to do with medium uniformity. All online sources now dram from a fairly limited pool of styalisitc and design templates. A situation making it so that a web-site for a peer-reviewed scientific journal and a conspiracy theory web-site (Alexander Jones, I am looking in your general direction), are next to indistinguishable. A similar situation to the late 18th to early 20th centuries in Europe, when every Thomas, Richard or Harriet with a room and a second-hand printing-press was regarded as a legitimate news source. So, rather than the medium being the message, as some well-meaning folk would have it, the medium is come to obscure the message. Causing it to appear a good deal more credible that it may actually be.




Enter Flat-Earthers, Racial Purity proponents, Ant-Vaxers and Indigo Children. The Victorians also believed in many such notions. Though they lacked the scientific basis and methodological rigour to adequately test them. What, pray tell, is our excuse?