The Million Dollar Poetry Project

I want to decry what I feel to be a wave of anti-industrious attitude that’s become increasingly more prevalent on the web. All these people who block ANY comment that has anything even slightly to do with self-promotion, the people who get angry when anyone tries to start something new and doesn’t already have a vast corporate marketing budget to work with. I understand you’ve seen plenty of these ideas fail and that it taxed your emotions, but spreading the bitterness, the cynicism - that’s not going to help any one.

At the same time these people are griping about "affiliate marketing" or porn site spam or Viagra pill spam or whatever the latest craze is, out of the other corner of their mouth they’re complaining about how unfair society is and how it offers limited opportunities. So you want more jobs, better lives, but fuck other people if they try to do that also? See, a good chunk of the world lives very close to the bottom of the food chain. Plenty of people go broke, lose their homes, have an unexpected baby coming, etc. Think about those possibilities. While I understand massive floods of automated spam or endless cheesy comments get old, it aggravates me to see people with these popular blogs suddenly become irritated about being "used" by other people seeking to promote their own online endeavors. Talk about hypocritical! I’m not even willing to consider that anyone who started blogging or any other kind of online phenomenon/celebrity blog/website became popular without SOME form of advertising. No one has that many friends, sorry. You either start with a budget and some pre-existing fame/notoriety or you go beat on doors and find an audience and piss a few people off in the process.

Here’s my bottom line: I hate when people get to the top and then try to kick the ladders they
climbed up on back down so no one can follow them up. Few things piss me off to that level and I suppose because it shows a basic lack of empathy, deep-seated personal insecurity and a grand dose of narcissistic arrogance. I write this post today so that I will have a reminder to myself when I reach the level of success that I’ve been aiming for. I want to be a person who not only gives back, but staunchly defends the rights of other people to try and compete with me. By trying to block others I’d be stunting my own growth, limiting my own enrichment.

This applies offline, too. All those telemarketers? People trying to make a living. The guy at the
drive through window who’s so damned slow with your order? Yeah, he’s got rent to pay, too.
The lady at Wal-Mart who argues with you over the store’s return policy? She’ll be a grandmother next month and may not be able to retire until she’s well past age 75 due to her limited savings. What I’m trying to convey is that everyone’s got struggles and everyone deserves some respect up front (until they prove otherwise). It’s the very basis of our society to learn to not only cope with each other but to co-exist in a fashion that ADVANCES each of us.

All the marketing that surrounds us all day long, that’s someone trying to put food on the table. Does it primarily benefit some small percentage of people at the top? Probably. But those people spend money, too. My objective is to stay as open-minded and open-hearted as I possibly can and try to understand those I encounter before I start boxing them in with judgments.

I do not want to see the internet drift towards this fascistic state of ‘if you don’t agree with US then go away’ to the point that many forums, blogs, chatrooms and online communities take things. Over and over again, since I first got online in 1993 or so, I’ve seen communities rise up, I’ve joined them and then the ‘powers that be’ come in and squash the ‘rebel element’. The channel ops get ban-happy, the profiles stop allowing comments, the blogs start ‘needing to approve’ comments. It’s always blamed on some ‘exploiter’, but every single time the rules end up excluding a lot more people than they were said to have been designed to exclude.

It’s as if the person who got the power gradually gets more tipsy until they’re drunk and picking fights. It’s almost as if the mere fact that people have freedom begins to get under the skin of some personality type and eventually those people get things shut down all while they point the fingers at some group they dislike. I mean the American Midwest used to be filled with buffalo (bison), too.

Maybe some of you remember how you used to be able to post ads on newsgroups way back when. The first website I ever set up, back in 1996 or so, I advertised a call for writers and
artists in the newsgroups. I got tons of excited replies and so much traffic to the page that my hitcounter went down and my free hosting account got closed (I was in my teens without a budget back then). I tried that same approach in 2001 and got my e-mail box absolutely inundated with hate mail. Same thing happened with forums. Anyone remember how Yahoo chat used to let you make your own chatrooms? Those are gone now, I believe.

Year after year places crop up and then they die off. I’m sure there are plenty of bastions of
unbridled craziness left on the web today, but I don’t know of many. Napster got strangled, YouTube gets censor-happy and god forbid you show the wrong pictures on MySpace or kiss your account goodbye. We won’t even get into trying to place ANY kind of ad that won’t get flagged on craigslist (even in the ADS sections, mind you).

That’ll end my little rant on the importance of allowing opportunity for EVERYONE (even if we
hate them) online in order to preserve our own freedom, integrity and honesty. Let the jerks
reveal themselves and we’ll simply ignore them instead of punishing anyone who looks like they
might possibly be a jerk.

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