Thought That Came Unbidden

Well, I suppose it had to happen some time. I’ve been online 20+ years (yes, that means I started with CompuServe, kiddies) and I’ve finally been caught by a sort-of phishing scam.

Or, to put it another way: Quechup.com is a bunch of e-mail harvesting, fraud promoting scumbags.

After responding to an invite, which seemed legitimately to be an invite from someone I know and trust, I stupidly (dumb! dumb! dumb! dumb!) gave them access to my Google address book. Once I found out that this invite wasn’t actually from the person it proported to be from, I immediately closed my Quechup account and requested they delete all of my information from their database.

That done, I moved along only to find out that after my account was closed Quechup chose to send invites in my name to everyone in my address book.

Now, if my account were still open I could see this as a legitimate social network building tactic. But my account is closed and despite their Terms of Usage this still stinks to me of fraud.

So, I call bullshit and caution you not to respond to any of these invites. Get an overview on the Quechup debacle, and please accept my apologies in advance.

So the media and the Republican party are in an uproar over the fact that Sen. Larry Craig pled guilty to a lesser charge rather than face a trial for what actually happened in the men’s room at the Minneapolis airport. But what, exactly, is causing all the fuss?

That he pled guilty?

That he was accused by a newspaper in Idaho of having engaged in anonymous, gay sex acts in public bathrooms prior to his arrest in Minneapolis?

Because he has is married to a woman and has children?

Or is it because Craig has vocally opposed civil rights for lgbt people while secretly engaging in one of the more outre behaviors available in the community he so loudly condemns?

Despite the fact that in their slavering over the details of Craig’s arrest and his woefully inept spin control – “I am not gay” come on, Larry! You couldn’t think of anything better than that? It’s like the kid with the chocolate on his face denying he’s the one who marked up the sofa with chocolate stains. – the mainstream media have largely ignored or chosen not to report Craig’s previous positions on legislation like the Defense of Marriage Act and the debate over a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely heterosexual they’ve managed to make this the story of political Washington at the end of the summer.

So are we just in it for the gossip factor? I have to say so because if it’s really a surprise that a “family values” Republican turns out to be a hypocrite I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

There is a handful of topics about which I will always read. Flop a story about time travel down in front of me and you’ll easily get my attention. Same with anything that involves chicks kicking butt; this affection has, sadly, lead to me seeing Ultraviolet, Aeon Flux, and both the Resident Evil movies.

In the non-fiction world I will always read a story about depression. The way the medical establishment simultaneously vilifies and pities people with chronic mental illness says way more, I think, about what’s wrong with the medical establishment than it does about people seeking treatment.

Too, I am endlessly fascinated by the mainstream media’s fascination with defining generations: what characterizes each generation; why they will never agree on the best way to live; how each will have to adjust to the presence and influence of the other. Part of what fascinates me is the revision of history – does anyone really think that the baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s would have given a shit about the war in Vietnam if there hadn’t been a draft on? Yet, the mainstream press seems to have forgotten that small but salient point when they lament the lack of active resistance to America’s current land war in Asia debacle.

The other part of what fascinates me is our seemingly undying need to pigeon hole. People born within this bracket year and that bracket year are this generation; folks born between this bracket year and this other bracket year are this other generation. And because you were born within those years you must think this way. It seems to me that these generational definitions are characterized by a random series of conclusions drawn from little or no data (someone, please, show me a comprehensive study that says that my “generation” is cynical, withdrawn, and interested only in what is “in it for us” because as far as I can tell we bought the whole middle class, two kids, a house, a job, and an SUV line of bullshit just the same as everyone before us did). Part of the problem, at least for people my age, is that all the things that happened to characterize our generation were what I call “soft events.”

It’s fairly easy to look at the events of the late 1940s and define the beginning of the Baby Boom generation in America: pick a WWII demobilization date and count forward 10 to 15 months. The demobilization of troops, the return of men from the front, this is a hard event; it can be tied to something in history for which the date can be fixed.

Events that had an effect on people in my age cohort can sometimes be traced to specific dates – the fall of the Berlin wall, the riots in Tiananmen Square, the stock market crash in 1987, both of Reagan’s elections – but more often than not our cultural landscape is marked by a sort of slippery, shifting change. Just when did disco give way to punk? When did metal give way to rap? How did we start the 1980s with Michael Jackson’s Rock With You and end them with Bobby Brown’s My Prerogative? Is Wall Street and the “greed is good” ethic really part of our cultural landscape or is it more a reflection of the little brothers and sisters of the boomers who birthed us?

Depending upon whom you ask I either come very late to Gen X or very early to Gen Y. If you take Wikipedia’s classifications (yes, I know; Wikipedia often isn’t worth the paper upon which it is printed), my generation (after 1965 but before 1976) doesn’t really exist at all. But being situated as we are we seem to be in a position to take advantage of the best of both the new and the old worlds. One of the ways in which those old and new worlds are being defined centers around technology: who uses it and how.

I must confess at this point that I am an introvert. I fully realize the irony of saying this in what is essentially a public diary but do not be fooled for a minute by this blog. The full sum of my thoughts, fears, desires, or even rants, is not contained herein. Indeed, a lot of what appears in this blog is the result of many hours of synthesis, lots of shifting and sifting and thinking. Some of it is random babble, it’s true. But mostly it’s the face I feel comfortable presenting to the world.

Why is this relevant you ask? One of the ways the mainstream press has chosen to differentiate the “old world” from the “new world” is to write myriad stories on the “death of privacy.” From scare stories about how easy it is to steal someone’s identity to why 20 somethings should be careful what they put on Facebook, MySpace, or in their blogs as it can have an affect on their job prospects, the “privacy gap” is something amateur sociologists will continue to ponder in the media for years to come.

A fairly recent article in New York Magazine talks extensively about the so-called generation gap specifically referring to the fact that people say, oh, over 30 wonder why anyone would want to put their entire lives, including party photos, details about what they ate for lunch and with whom, and other minutiae online. Author Emily Nussbaum writes:

It’s been a long time since there was a true generation gap, perhaps 50 years—you have to go back to the early years of rock and roll, when old people still talked about “jungle rhythms.” Everything associated with that music and its greasy, shaggy culture felt baffling and divisive, from the crude slang to the dirty thoughts it was rumored to trigger in little girls. That musical divide has all but disappeared. But in the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. It goes something like this:
Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.
“When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight,” sneers Lakshmi Chaudhry in the current issue of The Nation. “Without any meaningful standard by which to measure our worth, we turn to the public eye for affirmation.”

Nussbaum goes on to argue:

Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

But I think she’s missing something. While technology is fine, and yes I do love me some 43things.com – the randomness of having someone you don’t know give you a pat on the back; realizing that there are people out there, people you’ve never met and probably never will, who feel just like you and that you’re not alone in the world – what I see when I look at all of this self-exposure isn’t so much the flitting from one virtual stage to another, or even the whoring for fame (though that’s a part of it), what I see is a culture becoming totally and completely dominated by extroverts.

Those loud talkers you can’t get away from at the cocktail party; the hostess who wants to introduce you to simply everyone; the fact that you seem to have conversations about the same surface level stuff with just about everyone you meet. All of this concentration on the other, all of the party photos and the “look at me, look at me” jumping up and down that is the essence of MySpace, the idea that we are on stage all the damn time, is the antithesis of what it means to be an introvert.

This is not to say that popular culture hasn’t long been dominated by the extroverted. Have you ever watched a talk show where one of the guests was an author? Most writers make really boring interviews because we need to take in our world, process it, and then spit it back out. The extroverted, those comfortable at the small, intimate gathering of a hundred of their closest “friends” (and we’ll get to that at a later date), seem to function much better on the surface forming their opinions with a lot of input from the outside.

So in a society that rewards the documentation of every single minute and detail of our lives, what place is there for those of us who prefer to consult deeply with a small, trusted group of people? When will we reach the point when it will become odd not to have your entire life online and exposed to the judgements of others?

And for the record, yes, I have a MySpace page. There isn’t much there, but like a settler moving West I have staked my claim.

Even if it’s a rainy, too-cold-for-the-season, gross kinda day, and on your birthday too.

Today’s horoscope:

Reality has an obstacle or two to place in your way now, as Saturn is in its final week of visiting your sign. Consider the extraordinary pressures you have faced since August, 2005, to see what you can learn from the past two years. Remember, awareness is crucial; if you can understand your role in what’s happening, then you can push through to the other side.

And it’s times like these when I consider the idea that maybe astrology isn’t bullshit.

Despite the fact that it’s patently illegal for most organizations that demand your Social Security Number to do so, many have standardized to your SSN as your id number. Some, like the DC Department of Motor Vehicles, have copped to the fact that “hey, we have computers! we can generate an account number for you!”

So with the prevalence of SSN use and the ability to just generate a random account number my dealings with the phone company still beg the question: why aren’t they using my phone number as my account number?