As he was flicking through the channels a documentary on Chaos Theory caught George’s attention.
Unfortunately he didn’t quite get all of it.

All characters and situations mentioned in this blog are completely fictional. Anyresemblance to actual people or places is purely coincidental. The publisher cannot be held responsible. For anything. Ever.

Sometimes you’d think that ‘we the people’ are in control since everything is rapidly becoming a popularity contest. Voters get to choose their political leader, consumers get to choose what products are on the shelves, fans get to choose their next idols. There are polls on everything and this also means that serious discussions can get cluttered and important decisions get made on the basis of uninformed opinions, fed back to us in incomplete and misleading questionnaire reports (”53% of population opposed to roundabout” usually means, 53% of online voters are not completely satisfied with the current plan of a roundabout for various reason and 47% of online voters don’t care one bit, which is a completely different result than the headline in your local weekly.)

Dutch artist and webdesigner Jacco van de Post has made a cool online application that let’s everybody vote
on the news. It would simply be the next democratic step to take; news we like can make it to the final and news we don’t like, gets voted out. If news is injected in us with this big hypodermic needle, than at least let it inject us with a big dose of ‘happy’ (or perhaps, ‘denial’).

Besides it being a clever comment on our voting addiction his work also comments on the media-age we live in. bringing news is one thing, but what if you only bring news that (potential) viewers don’t like? That would cost you loads of money from advertisers wouldn’t it? So clicking and voting would bring CNN (which is where the app gets its headlines from) valuable information which, I am sure, Jacco would be willing to sell to them for loads of money.

Start the application by clicking here.

Please read this post, you might win an i-pod. Upon reading this post, we will save your ip-number and store that data on our servers. We will combine that data with the information we will obtain from your internet access provider, which they are required to store for several months by our governments. Obviously, with all that data, on all those servers, it is easy to find a backdoor somewhere and get access to your websurfing information.

By snooping around your personal surfing data we will find out what your personal interests are and start sending you some tailored spam. So far, so good. Chances are also good, that we find out where you do your online banking. From your myspace page we will find out some essential data, like your date of birth et cetera, but do not worry. We are not thieves so we won’t actually get into your accounts. Not unless we have also found out that the way you actually made that money say… you are a an international money trader or something, is by stealing it yourself. In which case we will invest it in saving rainforests and educating children on your behalf. No need to thank us. With you accounts, date of birth, and address we are set up for obtaining your social security number. Luckily for us, your government will doubtlessly have all information we need to… erm… ‘own your arse’… linked to that one number.

This will save us a lot of needless hassle. Your credit-card details, your health insurance, the amount of super-saver points from the supermarket and the products you bought to earn those, if you have any debts, if you were ever active in politics, where you work(ed), who you called on your mobile phone, when and how long, when your drove your car past what toll-booth, who you talked to at the mall (unless that person is an unknown terrorist, obviously)… this information might all prove to be useful. We don’t know for what exactly, but rest assured. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

The great thing about all that personal data that is so conveniently linked to each other is that it provides jobs for government officials, nothing else. And it helps fight terrorism. And should you ever recover from a coma and suffer memory loss, isn’t it easy that your government can tell you all about your old life? From your favorite restaurant to your usual brand of undies. Storing and combining data is great!

But we lied about the i-pod. Sorry.

There are people that feel that a free society means that we should be able to say and do everything we want, anytime we want and anywhere we want. We should, for example, be allowed to have sex in the streets. I have actually read some columns by respected authors that were defending that view. Nonetheless, I can only disagree and not because of all that ‘great freedom comes with great responsibility’ blahblah.

I do agree that what you do in your own home is your business. As long as you don’t hurt anyone; I don’t care, sculpt midgets out of carrots, dip them in chocolate pudding and shove them wherever you like. But the streets are, if you’ll excuse the very contemporary phrase, public domain. No matter how ‘free’ a society is, in a public domain you need rules. And one of those rules should be that you don’t have sex in the streets. And no: I don’t think that’s a very conservative view on my part. Fact remains that there are people that find the idea of being confronted with people having sex very offensive. I must admit that there have been an occasion or two where I would not have cared for that sight myself. So, if we were to allow people to have sex in the streets, that would mean that freedom was stolen from them, those innocent passersby. There is no way for people to be able to avoid having to see others having sex if all that sex was going on in the streets. You need to get out and do some shopping once in a while don’t you? Therefor I agree that it should remain illegal to do so

Away from sex, on to mobile phone conversations in the public domain. This week alone I have heard someone break up with her boyfriend, I heard about someones grandmother that wet her bed and how her granddaughter is really tired of having to go see her and I overheard someone complain about the receptionist at work (apparently she is a complete bitch). I can imagine people taking offense to being confronted with all that personal information as well. And if your travelling in a crowded train like I do everyday, a lot of times it is quite impossible to simply ‘go away’ and avoid it. Luckily I enjoy a bit of sleazy gossip, so I don’t mind terribly, but that’s beside the point. Should ’speaking out loud into a mobile phone in public’ be banned as well? Don’t the same rules apply as when it comes to having sex at the bus-stop, or at the grocers?

I guess not. People speak. And some people have no shame whatsoever. And even though I don’t consider the three people in the examples above as very civilised human beings, they’re merely having a conversation they could have been having with a person sitting across them. Perhaps they would be speaking a little less loud then, but still. I wouldn’t want to ban any subjects from being discussed, ever. And there are already rules about the amount of noise you’re allowed to make. And -more or less- normal speech is well within those boundaries.

As far as I am concerned, you can’t have sex in the streets, but at least you talk about it on your mobile phone. Isn’t freedom wonderful?