God granted humans the facility for speech with one purpose in mind: transmitting truth. Defining truth is covered elsewhere, this is about sharing it. The point is, using your speech to deceive, confuse and manipulate as the end result is sin. Efforts to cover that sin add more sin.
Back in the early 1990s, I worked in the DARE Program, supposedly teaching kids in the US DoD Schools in Europe how to resist the cultural urges to get involved in drug abuse. The program remains as yet another example of government’s natural love for monumental boondoggles. I don’t doubt the people who wrote the program were sincere — I met some of them — but they were sincerely wrong. You could have predicted from the start government officials would always be a sucker for something which looks good but cannot possibly work. It was glitzy, cool, hip and sold well to the public. The program was also a miserable failure in its stated goals.
Ironically, one of the things in the program which worked well was the brief study of advertising manipulation. The program materials identified several approaches used by advertisers to get fools to buy their stuff. The kids were tasked with digging through magazines — even then over half of the paper content was taken up by advertising — and picking up on the subtle messages and false assumptions. We did the same with other media, but the point was, this was the one part of the program which worked relatively well, making the kids appropriately skeptical to the degree possible. It was the one part of the teaching on which I worked hardest. A couple of cynical young souls pointed out to me the DARE Program itself was loaded with hype; God bless `em, they were the only ones who got it.
The average human remains a herd animal on such issues. I don’t flatter myself pretending to be any better in the broad sense, given the number of things to which I spare little attention, accepting the default provided by whatever system is providing. But this one thing I do know: I’m very much on the fringe when it comes to mass information transmission. I despise TV, but watch it just a little to keep track of the medium itself. I seldom listen to radio, but when I do, usually tune in a classical music station. I glance at newspapers when they are in front of me. I flip through magazines only in waiting rooms. Still, I pay more attention to advertising only because I still study the manipulation of the herd.
When advertising seeks more control yet over my attention, then it has crossed that line which has already moved too far from sanity. Morally, advertising should restrict itself to, “Here’s what we have.” I don’t even admit them the privilege of telling me why their product is better than another. Tell me what you have, with a dry account of its features and price. Leave the rest to me. Anything more is illegitimate manipulation. As you might surmise, I bear a passionate hatred for most advertisers as children of Satan. When they seek to gain even greater leverage, I view them as demons.
Browser cookies can serve a useful purpose, but the vast majority do not. I tend to set my browser to accept a small handful of cookies from sites I really need, and for the rest I turn them off. It’s a privilege, not a right, for anyone to store their data on my computer. By no means do I easily permit them to gather data about me. There can be but a tiny few justifications for it. As you might expect, it’s only ever done by those with no justification for it. I always encourage people to be strict with cookies.
But we then discover Flashplayer has its own cookies. Worse, they aren’t actually “cookies” — small bits of data. They are more like huge cakes of data, very hard to delete. You have to know precisely where to find them, and delete whole directories to prevent the unique ID number being preserved and the cookies recreated, something Wired features as “zombie cookies.” When testing, I discovered sites I visited without any active Flash elements still manage to set Flash cookies. The Wired article links to instructions on setting Flash to be more protective, but warns Adobe has gone out of their way to make it as complicated as possible.
Flashplayer takes up way too much computer resources on Linux in general, indicating Adobe is only pretending to care about Linux customers. But it’s particularly painful on my old laptop. The only reason I ever installed it was because so many friends and acquaintances have drunk the koolaid and insist on sending me links, or embedding Flash videos in their pages. Often, the entire content I want is contained in the video itself, with no text version available. But having learned and investigated this cookie issue, I found it a last straw and deleted the Flashplayer. If I really need any videos, I’ll just use Clive and download them for direct viewing with MPlayer. I’ve never kept but one or two videos over the years I’ve been messing with them at all, so this method is just the manual equivalent of what browsers do anyway. Everything your browser draws off the Net is kept in a cache for some period of time, so you technically keep a copy of all the videos you see. I don’t need Flashplayer.
Further, I am find it increasingly tiresome to deal with all this advertising based portion of the Net. The primary argument in favor of forcing ads upon me is that’s how we pay for content. There are a few places where I find the content worthy. Wired is useful, for example. Most sites are simply ad-sponsored propaganda I could do without, which includes virtually every mainstream news site. The vast majority will never simply report the facts, but will always be seeking to misguide and misinform. This is not a reference to a political difference of opinion, but a reference to shaping the worldview of visitors by declaring this or that is soooooo important, but things not mentioned you should never care about. More Michael Jackson; almost nothing about the Bilderbergers. More about famous dead newsmen; no honest examination of dissenters from Global Warming or any other major issue. I visit such sites only to see the latest lies, and always keep the graphics turned off.
As a fringer, my choices have no real effect on what everyone else does in this regard. A rare few websites won’t let me see any content unless I accept their cookies. For them, if I’m really interested in something, I use Elinks and delete their cookies later. Track that, butthead! They don’t notice, and would hardly give it a thought if I bothered to write, even if ever so graciously composing a scholarly complaint. I don’t matter, because I use advertising as a perverse guide for what to avoid. If they gotta advertise, it must be crap in the first place. The best products I’ve found typically are not advertised that way, but by word of mouth or direct free samples. Meanwhile, the most important sources of information are mostly bloggers who do it for free, or as a hobby. In a very broad sense, I personally wouldn’t miss the ad-supported Web, because most of it is a lie.
