DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Many pundits and companies have tried to illustrate how the net neutrality repeal will affect internet users, but YouTuber Rob Bliss has made one of the best demonstrations yet. It’s good because it’s simple, it isn’t trying to sell you hamburgers, and it confused police officers.

The demonstration also took place at a very suitable location—the streets outside of the FCC headquarters in Washington, DC. That’s where Bliss set up traffic cones and rode his bike in the one available lane so that he could “throttle” traffic, unless drivers wanted to pay a $5 fee. This way, as Ajit Pai has put it, “consumers can pick the plan that’s best for them.”

The analogy is inapposite because he neither built nor does he own the road. That’s the problem with analogies: What seems obvious to you may seem absurd to others, and all you do is piss people off and make them think you’re an asshole. This doesn’t help your cause, however much it may ‘raise awareness’. (‘Raising awareness’ typically merely raises awareness that the protestors are assholes. But Virtue Signaling isn’t about effectiveness, it’s about that warm fuzzy feeling that the protesters get at other people’s expense.)

Protests such as this one are effective only to the extent that other people aren’t assholes too. Once somebody gets fed up with assholery and drives over his ass, the demonstration ends, typically with the injured asshole spending his future living as the victim. I had an ethnic German friend who said, when watching the movie Gandhi, that such shenanigans would only have worked with the British; if Gandhi had tried that sort of thing in, say, German East Africa, some leutnant would have shot him in the head and left his body by the side of the road to rot — end of protest.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2018 at 07:13 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.