A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

big brother

Is is still cool to believe in Big Brother? Or did he get deconstructed along with the Easter Bunny, the Virgin Mary and Santa Claus?

Ezra is a true believer; he sees Big Brother's size 50 footprints all the time like the tracks of some kind of invisible Yeti that haunts cyberspace. Yesterday Ezra noticed the advertising banner over his blogspot. Some one was actually advertising things to do and places to stay in Ithaca, New York and the Finger Lakes region. Does that banner float over everyone's blogspot, whether they live in Anchorage or San Jose, or does it just fly over Ezra's meager piece of virtual real estate? Ezra is tempted ot pay to have it removed even that might cost more than he makes in a year. He'd advertise the great sale they're having on Budweiser twelve-packs over at A-Plus. Who should he contact?

Big Brother is the Genie in the Pentium who fools around with Ezra's internet settings when Ezra wants to post flame-mail to the IndyMedia site. Why can't this page be displayed? How the fuck do you adjust your browser settings? Ezra probably keeps getting bounced off because Arc, the Webmaster at Ithaca Indymedia, complained loud and long enough to Big Brother. In fact, just the other day, Arc called Ezra and his fellow flame-mailers 'trolls.' Arc was thoughtful enough to include the definition of troll. Ezra guesses that Arc probably took a lot of flak from his lady friends when someone took a potshot at upper middle class feminists. Was that you, Ezra? Ezra won't tell. Folks at Indymedia, however, have started talking about a crackdown on trolls, possibly even to the point of issuing cyber-identity cards, you know, bar codes on the forehead for internet users.

George Bush, like Arc, would like to be Big Brother. But his dad nicknamed him Sprout. So he'll have to settle for being Little Brother due an innate inferiority complex that forces him to invade smaller countries. Little Joe. Not Hoss. That's a throw-in for those in the blogging audience who used to watch Ponderosa Sunday nights.

Another George, this time Mr. Orwell, had a lot of interesting ideas about Big Brother. You know, he never imagined smart machines like the ones we have today that can keep track of the goings-on of millions of people around the world. The Age of Big Brother was really born amid the glow of transistor tubes and Babbage boards 60 years ago. Thanks to people like Thomas Watson and Johnny von Neumann. Big Blue. Big Brother wore suits and ties for a long time until he switched over to sweaters and jeans when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs came along.

Ezra is uncomfortable in the age of computers. He's a cyber wimp. Has software loaded in his home computer that's 20 years old. Doesn't know how a cookie works. But he does know that it has something to do with how Big Brother peeps into his hard drive. Ezra hears those fig newtons loading, clickyclickclick, whenever he visits a website. Somebody keeps track, and it's not Mrs. Ezra, of those naughty sites he visits. Like Counterpunch. In the not so distant future, techno-misfits like Ezra will be weeded out early in high school, deported to computer boot camps where drill sergeants dressed like MSN butterflies will kick them out of bed at 5 am in the morning, herd them into big sterile rooms where they'll be forced to strip down a Macintosh in 3 minutes. At night, the unhappy campers will all sit around under a huge portrait of Bill Gates, singing the Microsoft anthem while they toast marshmallows.

It would be nice if Ezra had an interactive, live journal type of site so people could write in about their experiences with Big Brother. Probably a lot more interesting than Ezra's because Ezra doesn't half the shit that goes on with his computer. He just knows that he has to take out the junkmail twice a week.

The thing is that no one ever visits Ezra's site except Big Brother and he's not talking.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 5:29 AM