go, read

Ha! In shame­less acknow­ledg­ment of the irony here, let me point you at this rant in which predat0r shreds LJ while using it. He also blames me for intro­du­cing him to it. Guilty as charged: he expli­citly notes that I want kudos for know­ing him. Yup. It’s not just that though: I also think you’re a highly intel­li­gent, inter­est­ing dude whose stuff deserves a wider audi­ence. With that in mind…

High­lights include:

“We are judged by the com­pany we keep;
being invited onto LJ is not entirely an altru­istic act – someone,
some­where, wants to show off what an inter­est­ing dude they think they’ve
lured into their (and prob­ably your!) poly­gon of asso­ci­ates, and I smell a
weak tang of reci­pro­city – they want you to look at their stuff, too.”

I also *love* his self-descrip­tion here:

“LJ exhib­its an instant map of your social asso­ci­ations. Hey there,
friend-of-a-friend, do you really *want* to be asso­ci­ated with me? Let me
intro­duce myself, my name’s pred­ator, god­less mis­be­got­ten of a plundering
race, erstwhile blower-open of safes, bank­roller of hits on unborn babies,
quon­dam mess-abouter with the gen­omes of patho­genic organ­isms, picker of
locks, pur­loiner of free obtain­ium, dodger of tax, bach­elor of science
(twice), ana­gram of teardrop, deluded wanker, eco­nomic roadkill, and
blight on soci­ety in gen­eral. I’m the sort of person your par­ents warned
you about, if you’d believe that from someone who’s still under their
roof. We know noth­ing about each other except what each of us has chosen
to present. Hmmm… let’s talk about you.

Iden­tity map­pings aside, even I, ego­ma­niac of galactic pro­por­tions (I
mean, I’d have to be, writ­ing what amounts to a blog diss­ing blogs and
then post­ing a link to it on a blog site, would­n’t I?), am not by default
espe­cially con­vinced of the news­wor­thi­ness of my daze-to-daze excuse for a
life, even if I filter out the really tedi­ous unin­ter­est­ing scheduled
events such as chan­ging my socks, or repla­cing the oil in my motorcycle
engine, or even chan­ging my place of res­id­ence, and even if I am aware of
a small audi­ence which might want to know about it.”

Yes, pred, but it’s pre­cisely the sort of rant you’ve just pro­duced that’s why I thought this would be inter­est­ing coming from you. That and I was hoping to get the oppor­tun­ity to eaves­drop on con­ver­sa­tions between you and nuwishas_tail about chem­istry and micro­bi­o­logy and drains some day.

And I find your con­clu­sion fascinating:

“Our entries, mere pebbles in an ava­lanche of words barely
worth the effort of read­ing, yell “I exist’ only to reinforce
pre­cisely that chorus which drowns it in anonym­ity and
insig­ni­fic­ance. We delude ourselves think­ing that someone
some­where in the room full of rack-mount serv­ers which
host this stuff is going to think for more than two seconds
before even­tu­ally con­sign­ing the accu­mu­lated bil­lions of
archived streams of con­scious­ness to /dev/oblivion, if, say,
the own­er­ship of the LJ oper­a­tion changes hands. It’s the
hard­disk imple­ment­a­tion of the tragedy of the commons.”