The Desktop Fishbowl
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Tuesday, 25 June 2002

jenett.radio read Floodbots and asks what makes Joe Loser tick? Like the Force, the Internet has a light and dark side. The Dark Side of the Internet lies in its capacity to bestow power without responsibility. It's very easy to assault someone on the net, either through words or through network attacks, and remain anonymous and unaffected. I hate to fall into stereotypes, but that sort of thing is really attractive to people who have lacked power in real life, who see themselves as victims, and thus (unconsciously) approach the Internet as a way to turn that around. From a mature perspective, the power to destroy is the poor cousin of the power to create. And you'll find far more people trying to create things on the Internet than trying to destroy them. Barely a day goes by when I don't write something in my blog, livejournal or wiki. Sometimes, people even pay attention to something I say. It doesn't really matter, because it's knowing I'm building something that's important. But it's far easier to get noticed, far easier to have people pay attention to you if you're tearing something down. 9:41:57 AM

From Jamie Zawinski; nightclub owner, webcaster and hacker. Burn, Hollywood, Burn. Wow, check this out, from RAIN (Radio and Internet Newsletter): the author of the Yahoo deal on which the new RIAA webcasting royalty rate was based has come forward to say that the deal was specifically designed to make it impossible for small webcasters to compete! Mark Cuban says: Now, no one asked me any of these things prior, during, or after the first or second pricing. I'm not sure that this matters. But if it does, here it is: The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a "percentage-of-revenue" to survive, couldn't. Please don't drop dead of non-shock. 9:22:49 AM