Segue Into Absurdity

So unlike many of these compulsive logorrheac bloggers who crave personal validation, I don’t check this religiously. It’s more of a diary thing. “Random serialised mentatory excreta” is exactly what you get. Mostly this server exists to stream my MP3s to me and a place where I can store stuff that I like. Everything else is gravy.

I was therefore quite surprised and quite amused when Lisa told me that there seems to be a legion of Segway Weenies wailing on my website. As the leader of the pack Mr Torrone is extremely adamant:

your site with the errors is still not updated, it would seem my next option
is to send a certified letter asking you update your site, and then a lawyer
is the next step after that– which isn’t something i’ve never needed to do
and i really have no desire to spend money on that- i’d much rather give it
a local charity or pay some bills. so i’m hoping you and i can just chat
about this and correct the site and ideally remove the post, i don’t want an
apology, i don’t care about stuff like that.

Nobody’s threatened to sue me because of the Internet since the late 1980s so I find this quite retro and amusing. Mr Torrone is adamant that he does not “work” for Segway. I think he means that he receives no remuneration directly from them or any affiliated Kamen company in the shape of financial recompense. I am satisfied that this is the case based on his testimony and I endorse this fact. In fact, a careful reading of what I originally wrote will reveal that I never stated this.

The Internet is a regulated environment, and one of the regulations is that you furnish a WHOIS record in order to register a DNS domain. Now, when people first encounter the Internet the lack of privacy is often startling. It was so in the initial days, when a simple finger command could reveal more than you wanted to know about certain people. I recommend that the interested reader do a “finger -l mike@maths.tcd.ie” for a glimpse of my 1980s-1990s Internet persona. Again I repeat, one of the facts of choosing voluntarily to register an Internet domain is that your WHOIS record becomes public, regulated information. Get used to it. We live in a post-privacy world, a surveillance society. Foucault was right — Western societies tend towards maximum scrutiny.

There are certain restrictions on the use of this WHOIS information that have been elucidated by case law over the past decade or so: you may not use it to “slam” domain registrations and the database *can* be used by all companies for spamming purposes unless the registrant exercised the “no-spam” option. Since I derived no commercial gain from the use or Mr Torrone’s WHOIS record, I believe there is no case law that would restrict my recent usage of Mr Torrone’s WHOIS record.

However, what I find most amusing, and an interesting and commercially valuable by-product of commodity fetishism, is how gadget evangelists will often sublimate many, many drives in order to pimp a company’s gadgets. Steve Jobs has made a career out of leveraging deranged Macolytes into displays of humiliating public affection and adoration, and it seems like Kamen has taken a leaf out of his book. Cleverly recruiting helpless technophiles as cannon fodder and sending them into the trenches of public ridicule under the artillery of contempt and the labouring of many, many metaphors is undoubtedly one of the countless reasons why Mr Kamen is a zillionaire and I am not.

So, to sum up. It matters not to me whether you are paid cash to pimp a company, or whether you received some preferential treatment or schwag or advance purchase contract from them, or whether some sublimated drives compel you to pimp for them completely gratis. You are still pimping, and in my humble opinion I find that sad. Journalists do that sort of thing for a living, and since they pimp to eat I find that slightly more understandable. But when you devote so much of your time and energy to pimping someone else’s gadget, and hounding those who would cast aspersions on your motives and rationale then, well, that’s just very, very sad. Perhaps Mr Torrone will have time to reflect on this as he Segways his 3.5 miles to work, frightening pedestrians as he goes. I wish him well and urge him to keep up the exercise regimen that he says the Segway has made possible.

And for those various Segway Weenies who have demanded a personal letter, or email, or phone call from me. I am not here to be your friend, and I am not interested in establishing a relationship with you (I have enough of those already). I am not here to reify your fetish, to assuage your cognitive dissonance over paying $5000 for an oddly shaped scooter, or to validate your sense of self through agreement or concordance. Neither am I here to soothe your anxiety by climbing on board your cluetrain, buying into your Umwelt, or taking up a defensive position in your discursive formation. I owe you nothing, I expect nothing from you. To borrow from dear old Bill Burroughs:
I am not paid to listen to this drivel. You are a terminal boob.

Earlier here.