Critiques, as opposed to mere descriptions, of internet culture emphasize the informality or (more judgmentally) the vulgarity of our promiscuous messages. These communications, in their ease, inexpensiveness, and abundance, suffer less pressure than before to be or seem important, meaningful, or definitive—in other words, to last in our minds. In their clamorous competition with one another, they more often strive to be the first noticed…. TV [has nothing] on porn sites or the comments sections of blogs when it comes to the solicitation of lust or anger….

I have noticed that it’s of no great use telling myself, when I go online, that I should muster my willpower against the sirens of amusement, distraction, and curiosity. I do better at not spending too much time at my computer if I remind myself how comparatively shallow and irregular my enjoyment of the internet is. The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online.

From a review by Benjamin Kunkel in n+1 magazine of three new books on our uneasy relationship with the internet [via Arts and Letters Daily].

I resisted getting a computer until 2002. I say “resisted” because there were so many cheerleaders singing the praises of the internet. It’s my ornery nature, to resist embracing something that is supposedly great — I don’t like having something shoved at me, great or not — but that, it seemed to me at the time, was focused on interests that were not my own. Like, for example, at least in its earliest days, a near-universal fascination with technological innovation for its own sake. Technology is just a tool, it should be used in the interest of creating something more thought-provoking or more beautiful than what was available before, with older technology. Like, uh, pen and paper. (What would Shakespeare have done if he had had access to the internet? Would he have written even better plays, sparked by the wealth of available inspiration, or would he have frittered away his time posting updates on Twitter and videotaping his cat’s antics for YouTube?)

The truth is there’s plenty of thought-provoking substance on the internet. It’s just that it’s so easy and alluring to be tempted away by the flashy and silly. When I was less aware that this was somewhat of a given, a couple of years ago, I got sucked in but felt guilty about it. I found that given the choice of slogging through another depressing and upsetting article on economic inequality, or chiming in on a ridiculous and hilarious discussion, going on in real time and right at my fingertips, about which hair color best suits Billie Joe, I chose… guess?

I can’t count how many online videos and photos of Green Day I’ve looked at. Probably hundreds. I’m glad they’re posted here, on the ole interwebs, but looking at them quickly becomes a compulsion, only because it’s hard not to sate my curiosity when I know something is out there and I haven’t seen it yet. When I was a fan of Green Day in 1994, and no less obsessed than I am now, which I should be — but am not (okay, maybe a little) — embarrassed to admit, I had their music and nothing else, except for the occasional magazine article. I didn’t (and don’t) have cable so I didn’t even see their videos on MTV. But I never felt that I was missing out. My enjoyment of the band was much more personal and therefore more satisfying. Now, (no) thanks to the internet, enjoying Green Day has become an emotional minefield.

Which brings me to the second and central issue about the internet: it’s crowded with people that I wouldn’t normally have ever come in contact with. That seems like a good thing in theory, but so many seem to be brimming with anger and self-righteous stupidity. Or at least that’s the side of themselves that they choose to bring out when they come online. That’s nothing new of course, but steering clear of it has been harder than I would have expected.

My own experience with the online world is similar to what Kunkel describes, but its most defining feature has not been boredom or distraction, nor annoyance at the shameless bids for my attention, though I have certainly contended with plenty of that. It’s been getting sucked in by the emotional vortex: making connections with people I would never have known in real life and naively thought I could connect with in spite of our fairly large differences, which now strikes me as a mistake begging to happen.

In the early days of the internet, probably because it was a new medium and people were more wary of it, there was an understanding that relationships formed online were unreliable. It might have been unfounded paranoia about internet stalkers, or a vague fear of unseen weirdos who could hide behind their computer screens and pretend to be something they were not. But as the internet became more familiar, the people populating it began to seem less sinister, or not at all sinister, since they were the same people you might see every day at the store or dropping off their kids at school.

But getting to know someone online leaves out an essential element of actually getting to know a person, the part where you can see how they carry themselves when they’re around you, or when they interact with others. In real life, I doubt I would have befriended housewives who refer to Billie Joe Armstrong as “fucktacular”, especially if they also have disturbing right-wing points of view. But on the internet it seemed like harmless fun. And, here’s the rub: I didn’t want to be judgmental. Is there a phenomenon like white-liberal guilt that could be called “liberal-intellectual guilt”? I don’t want to be a snob. I don’t want to look down on someone because they are not terribly smart or open-minded (that alone seems like a terrible thing to say). But the truth is I don’t know what to do with someone who is intransigent in their ignorance and holds onto it like a badge of honor. I am a snob. Maybe I just need to accept that, and suffer much less heartache.

Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much is sold every day, every week, every year. It doesn’t matter that the sales include vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, or that many commodities cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil as sewers for the disposal of industrial waste…. In short, pollution is not an accident, and it is not a “market failure.” It is the way the system works…. The devastation is caused by the global capitalist system, and by the tiny class of exploiters that profits from capitalism’s continued growth. The great majority of people are victims, not perpetrators.

Yet the people who say these basic and obvious things seem like tiny voices in the wilderness. Even left leaning news and opinion blogs tend to expend all their energy battling minutia. Of course the mainstream press is reprehensible. Of course the openly right-wing press is even more so. Why bother to give them any importance by discussing them at all? The reason why billions of people are struggling and the earth is becoming despoiled is not because of something Rush Limbaugh, or someone else of his ilk, said or did. He’s monstrous, but if he and his blowhard cronies were somehow eliminated, the system would continue its path of destruction utterly unfazed. Those chattering people and the manufactured issues they bring up are just a distraction.

I don’t entirely agree with the premise of even this article, but I won’t go into a critique that would be in any case out of my depth. I don’t entirely think that socialism is the solution, though it’s far and away preferable to what we have now. But its indictment of capitalism is, it seems to me, right on the money. The environmental destruction it brings is only its most tangible and quantifiable manifestation. The exploitation of not just nature but also of humans is perhaps harder to quantify. In wealthy nations, in particular, people are not only the exploited but also the exploiters. Globally, the vast majority of people are undoubtedly victims of the capitalist system. In rich countries, it seems to me, it’s not as cut-and-dried. The relatively, moderately well-off are in the paradoxical position of being both victims and perpetrators. The planet is reeling from our own collective consumption. And while it’s true that we are all, except for the ruling class, living within a system not of our own making, the only people who can overturn that system are us. And as maligned as the idea of creating different, less consuming, lifestyles, individually and collectively, is, I still see it as a viable road. And I suppose I’ll keep on talking about it, as the tiniest of voices, even if I’m only talking to myself.

Because I’ve largely lost track of my old circle, I feel more at a loss than ever. The internet changes so quickly, and it seems harder now than before to find the things I want to share in. Is it just my own perception or is there a much greater emphasis on the web on for-profit commercial sites that are short on content and big on flashy soundbites?

I’m not an expert in the subjects that interest me, like inequality, poverty, and economic injustice, and their various related subcategories (consumer culture, anarchism, radical frugality, the do-it-yourself ethos, and whatever else), so I kind of need frames of reference to write about these things. I need to be able to point to an article and say, yeah, that’s interesting, that’s something that sounds right to me and that contains some valuable insights. And then maybe I can add my two cents as well. But if I can’t find any source material, it leaves me with nothing to say. It seems foolish to write something like, “Well, I don’t really know enough about these things, but this is my impression of what’s wrong with [fill in the blank].”

But rather than feel stymied, I think I will try to just write what I can, to feel my way around and eventually maybe get some sort of momentum, find some kind of groove that makes sense to me.

Until I do, I’m thinking that I what I will post will be a combination of dreary explanations of issues I’m trying to sort out, interspersed with purely self-indulgent navel gazing. And then I tend to also just post about about random things, like commenting on the articles I find on Arts & Letters Daily, which has not ceased to be a treasure trove. Since no one is reading, it doesn’t really matter, so I think I can feel free to bore or amuse myself.

But it’s certainly dismaying and worrisome. In my own little head, it doesn’t seem to be all that complicated of an issue. I’m not even thinking of a possible solution that is politically radical, as in doing away with capitalism and replacing it with — gasp! — the fair exchange of goods and services at the local level. I’m thinking of a much milder form of radical change, like creating wealth through the actual production of goods and the provision of needed services (and sharing that wealth with some slight degree of fairness with the workers whose labor created it and with those unable to work), instead of by financial shenanigans and selling fake “products” — as the various ways of speculating in the stock market are now bizarrely called — that are merely parasitic.

Economy 101 teaches that wealth is created by adding value. You start out with a raw material, then manufacture it into something more useful. Or you start out with seeds and plant them and grow them so they turn into edible crops. It’s not exactly an unknown process. On the other hand, personal wealth that is generated by sleight of hand, or outright theft, through speculation or usurious interest rates that amount to thievery, does not add anything of value to the collective wealth, and is therefore unsustainable. Forgive me for stating the obvious, as I am wont to do. Perhaps I’m missing something?

I’m not qualified to posit my own economic theories, so I’m always looking for someone who can explain things to me in a way that makes sense. I came across an excellent article in the April 2009 issue of Harper’s: “Infinite debt: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy,” by Thomas Geoghegan. It’s not available online except to subscribers, so I’ll try to summarize.

Geoghegan looks at three core issues, all of them having to do with laws that were passed in recent decades to enrich the wealthy and disempower workers and the middle class: 1) the virtual elimination of usury laws, which allowed interest rates on credit cards to run amok and therefore created the potential for enormous profits by banks, which in turn made manufacturing far less profitable by comparison, and therefore eroded America’s manufacturing base by siphoning capital into banking; 2) the loss of enforceable labor contracts, which allowed companies to simply ditch any gains acquired by workers through collective bargaining; and 3) the loss of workers’ ability to organize in the first place, since laws against union busting have become weak and largely unenforceable.

We dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter’s term…. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that the banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing…. Think of GM, which, like GE, really makes its money by running a bank on the side. “After a while,” said a friend from Detroit, “the only reason they were making cars was so that they could make loans….”

With loans generating such high rates of return, banks had no incentive to keep money in reserve, since any money they loaned out instead was so profitable. They also had no incentive to seek out borrowers who would be able to repay the loans: at such high interest rates, banks make more money by keeping the interest payments coming than by getting back the principal. But when borrowers who had been extended unrealistic credit began defaulting, the banks went broke, “victims” of their own boundless greed.

None of this addresses the global crisis per se, or the issue of what will happen to the poorest people in the poorest countries, but reforming credit and bringing back usury laws, along with restoring some basic labor rights, seem like basic steps to put the US economy in order. (Incidentally, the mild changes in credit card laws recently proposed by Obama don’t come close to real reform, though I suppose they will be better than nothing, if implemented. It’s dismaying, once again, what we have to content ourselves with.)

I’m posting this wondering if there’s some obvious fallacy that I’ve failed to understand. If anyone is reading this, perhaps you can offer some insight?

For most people who weren’t counting on a paycheck from Lehman Brothers, the central drama of the 2008 collapse has been the more personal matter of their retirement savings and their property value. And with it, the prospect of a non-penurious old age, the basic reward for a life of hard work suddenly seems embattled. So much for all those ideas of affluent freedom, all those TV ads featuring Harley-riding healthy seniors, after leaving the 9-to-5 behind. That rug has been yanked away. But how to say farewell?

And it’s not just one article. The mainstream news media has only one story to tell: people who had been living relatively comfortable lives now are threatened with losing their good-paying jobs, their stock portfolios, and their homes (or much of their home’s previous value). But what about the poor, who had none of those to begin with? They weren’t in the news before the current economic downturn, when they were struggling, and they’re not often in the news now, still struggling and the hardest hit: the loss of a job or a home is much greater catastrophe for someone who has no cushion to fall back on. The relatively wealthy are not the majority, yet the story of the poor and even of the median earner, who takes home about $25,000 a year, is not being told, at least not very widely.

According to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the poor in the US are worse off now that they were in past recessions, because the aid available to poor families and individuals at both the State and Federal levels has been reduced or eliminated over the last several decades. Not only are only 40% of eligible families receiving assistance through TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is half the percentage that received help from its predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, (which was eliminated during the Clinton administration), but unless they qualify for unemployment, adults who are not raising children don’t qualify for any type of cash assistance at all. Many are not even eligible for food stamps.

More people will fall into poverty and deep poverty as the recession grows. Yet government is focused on giving money to Wall Street firms and banks, which, even if one were to buy the argument that those institutions will then extend loans which will keep businesses going so they can continue to employ people, it’s an awfully indirect way to help the people who need help the most. And it will be of no benefit to those who already don’t have a job or were only partially or occasionally employed to begin with.

If the loss of a previous sense of security and prosperity creates, for relatively-affluent baby boomers “a kind of vertiginous feeling, like stepping out a window in your childhood home only to realize that the balcony that’s been there all your life is gone,” what feeling does the loss of the basic means of survival create for those who have been perennially on the edge of that open window with no balcony in sight?

Sure, the price of a stock does reflect to some extent how well that company is actually doing, since that’s part of what shapes the perception of speculators, but unless a company is obviously tanking, it’s only a sideline in the way the stock market functions.

We hear so much about the need to boost “investor confidence.” Gee, is that because Wall Street analysts are so worried about our collective feelings of contentment? Of course, not, it’s because “confidence” will lead people to buy stocks, thus raising stock prices and increasing the wealth of the largest stockholders.

The notion that a healthy stock market is good for everyone is presented as a given. It’s even conflated to mean that if the stock market is up then the economy is doing well, and that should benefit everyone since most people need a job to survive, and if companies are doing well they are able to hire workers. But one thing has very little to do with the other. When companies announce layoffs their stocks usually go up, at least in the short term, which is the only term speculators are interested in..

This is from an article about hedge funds, which are especially pernicious (from what little I understand of them), but what the author says applies broadly to “short-selling,” the widespread practice engaged in by speculators of buying stocks to keep them only for a short time in order to turn a quick profit by taking advantage of the market’s constant up-and-down shifting:

Too much speculation turns the markets from an investment vehicle into a casino. Most commentators about the market ignore this. When the market suffers big losses on a single day, they find some small piece of bad economic news and attribute it to that. When the market gains a lot on a day, they look at the overall upward direction of the economy and attribute it to that. When the market stalls and seems to move aimlessly, they say the American economy is stagnating. The point is that even though the market is behaving in unfamiliar ways, it is explained as if it were behaving in traditional ways. Nowhere is the change in the players in the market recognized. The change in the means by which large players seek to profit and the greater role of the hedge funds and of speculation via short-selling is ignored.

And what about the notion that most average people have investments in the stock market and therefore bad performance hurts even the little guy? According to the Economic Policy Institute [pdf]:

Less than half of American households are invested in the stock market in any form –either directly or indirectly through mutual funds or 401(k)s. The percentage of households that own stock was 48.6% in 2004. The percentage of households with more than $5,000 in stock was 34.9% in 2004. The wealthiest 20% of households own over 90% of all stock value. For the top 1%, the average value of stock holdings was $3.3 million in 2004. The average value of stock holdings for the middle 20% was $7,500 in 2004.

No doubt it’s frightening for those who have 401(k)s invested in the stock market to see their retirement shrivel up. Yet the majority of Americans have very little or no investment in the stock market at all. So why is there so much emphasis placed on the stock market in the public discourse? Because it benefits the wealthy, of course. As long as people keep on buying stocks — and at the very least refrain from selling the ones they have — the wealth of the rich will continue to increase. At the same time, the little guy who has no insider information and is not savvy about stock market dynamics is the one who will get screwed by the shenanigans of speculators and large investors if he dips his toe in those shark-infested waters.

Every day when we listen to the news, we’re just being treated to more of the proven fallacy of trickle-down economics. When the rich get richer — surprise! — the poor and middle class don’t benefit at all.