Dublin Opinion

We’re all familiar with the myth of Sisyphus and if you’re not you’re clearly too stupid to appreciate the rest of this post. This may seem harsh but there’s a purpose to my rudeness.

Intelligent, curious and responsible users of the internet are long aware of the huge amount of blatant stupidity and ignorance that appears on web pages on an almost nano-second basis. Even when you try to be judicious in your searching you still manage to come across server loads of such flagrant ignorance that you’re almost tempted to develop a conspiracy theory to explain its absolute immensity.

Here’s one I came up with earlier while following a thread that descended into a Hades of absolute unreconstructed nuttiness (disclaimer: the thread was on Harry’s Place).

When computers were first developed during the Second World War they were large, cumbersome objects, which had to be stored in large vault sized rooms the size of a newly build townhouse in Cavan. Computer users wore lab coats and horned rimmed glasses and would examine the various dials, reels and paper print outs with a super-cerebral air of extreme boffin-ness. Lay people were told to keep their distance for fear that they’d somehow contaminate the delicate instrumentation and weeks of programming would go up in a mini fireworks display of sparks and blown fuses.

As technology developed these machine got smaller and easier to use. With the invention of magnetic tape, databases entered the frame and soon it was an essential tool for research programs in universities all over the world. But still the main users were brainy types, using the machines to answer complicated mathematical questions which had been entered using some sort of fancy code.

Then some of these propeller-heads (mainly Californians) decided that it would be a ‘neat’ idea to connect up some of the machines on different campuses so that they could communicate with each other using a newly developed killer-app called ‘e-mail’ – for research purposes only, of course. Now, as any one who has worked in or more especially, studied at university would know, university work involves a lot of downtime. So what happened was that these brainiacs used their new killer app to talk to each other about things that weren’t research related. Stuff that interested their nerdy arses, like folklore and renaissance musical instruments, the flora and fauna of Easter Island – how to cook a cordon-blu meal using a hub-cap and a zippo-lighter, stuff like that. And so USENET was born.

At around the same time Military types were worried about the dangers of nuclear war. They knew how close to the brink The Cuban Missile Crisis got them, so they had to think up contingencies. In the case of a nuclear war all communication, which at the time was largely reliant on over head wires, would be destroyed. They needed some sort of asymmetrical system which would ensure that if one avenue of communication failed the message would still get to where it was intended using some other avenue. What if, these bright young military consultants thought, the info was broken up into packets of data with the final address and the position of that piece of data within the whole written on it? Then, the data packet would be fired out using a networking protocol so that they could follow whatever route was available at the time within the network of interconnected computers and once it reached its final address would be reassembled with all the other packets.

And so APRANET was born.

The rest, of course, is history and although it has been pointed out about how the original internet is the product of the US military industrial complex it is also generally seen as a triumph of freedom of expression. Stuff about open access and open source, citizenship journalism etc etc suggests that it is the antithesis of tyranny (as long as no one mentioned Google and Yahoo and China). However, what if this very openness and freedom is provided so that the ‘man’ can have even more control over you?

Perhaps sinister corporations are using the addictive nature of the internet as a way of, like, controlling you? Previously I had a post on early personal computers and how I liked playing around with some of the early crappy ones to write basic computer programs. It was clear that when the market in Personal Computers was really starting to take off in the 80s that these machines were getting easier and easier to use. You no longer had to be a brainy sod to use them and as the PC has developed further in to the present day this is even more apparent.

The Internet itself has also come along way from being based on USENET email newsgroups with their dedicated threads on how to play Green Sleeves on the Rauschpfeife. Apparently, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of hypertext got into a right huff when someone started using images in Web pages. Images on the Internet?? As if.

So there we have it: computers and the internet are now so uncomplicated that any idiot can use them. And so they do, on a massive scale. It’s like a global dump of mindless frivolous nonsense and bellicose bastardly baseness. Not all of it, but a lot.

But where is the conspiracy? Well, who made these PCs and this internet so easy to use, and, with the development of web servers and browsers, so easy to access?

That’s right, big multinational corporations. They want us to get stuck in ridiculous never-ending arguments about Israel and Palestine. They want us to squabble about whether Radiohead were right to let the user choose the price of their latest album as a download. It means that when we’re stuck behind our PCs having it out with political idiots who think that Rudy Giuliani would make a fine President we’re not out there stoking up a revolution.

That’s it. It’s not a good conspiracy theory – or I should say hypothesis – but it is one.

The reason I mention all this (and I didn’t mean for there to be so much of it) is because someone is fighting back. There is a group of people who are working away on a thing called Stupid Filter, which according to their website, was:

“…originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

It’s time to fight back.”

Damn straight, but how?

“[with]…an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we’re collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.”

To which I say, good luck to them. But considering the scale of stupidity out there, and rate at which its produced it’s a bit like Sisyphus rolling the rock up hill isn’t it?

“Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a Wordpress plugin.”

So, we’ll have to wait for a while then. But in the meantime they have an option on their site which lets you look at a random bit of stupidity on the Internet (a lot of it is gleaned from YouTube comments unsurprisingly) and a link to where you can do your bit to help.

If you still not sure what defines online stupidity they’ve provided some random samples.

Here’s one I found earlier:

How come the mountains have snow on them when they emerge from the ocean? Or is that just giant fish shit?

God’s speed, Stupid Filter.