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Good Faith, Stupidity, And The Internet: Essays On The Early 21st Century Internet Culture
1) The Failure Of Dialectic Recently I posted an article in which I ripped the poor professional ethics of Cambridge University Press, for having violated a promise made to me in excerpting a review of mine, and in deliberately slanting their quotation against my piece by quoting out of context and deliberately berating my opinion vis-à-vis a counter-opinion; all under the guise of an impartial textbook. The piece was titled On Critical Fair Play And Ethics: Cambridge University Press’s Contemporary Fiction: The Novel Since 1990, edited by Pamela Bickley. I write these pieces, including this one (the first in a new series of essays on the Internet) for one simple reason; so that later generations will know and understand the tremendous odds that great artists such as myself, my wife, and a handful of others I have known, had in getting their work out to a receptive audience. The battles to find a book agent, an editor, and a publisher who will ‘like’ your work, irrespective of its manifest quality, is bad enough. But there is a tendency to forget history if not scrupulously documented. Thus, I will herein detail some of the online nonsense I, and Cosmoetica, have been subjected to over the last couple of years....
2) Dean Esmay, Sociopathy, And The Wasted Blogosphere In the first installment of this series of essays, I demolished the poor dialectic that two not too bright poets were having over things that neither had any real grasp of, and posited that, unfortunately, this sickly inability to even be able to argue correctly, was a mere symptom of a larger ill- not only of the Internet, but of the larger society; online or off. I detailed how diehard Communist poet Lyle Daggett still had no fundamental understanding of the fact that art, especially great art, needs no overt didactical tones, for that is redundant, as great art enlightens by the sheer quality of its structure and the ability to leave something memorable and potent in one’s mind. Whether or not its position (or that of its artist) is pro or con any given point is irrelevant. Any true lover of art would rather experience a piece of great art written by someone they find personally or ethically repugnant than a piece of artistic tripe composed by a person they care much of. If they do not, simply put, they are not true art lovers....
3) The Persistence Of Idiocy As I begin this third exploration of Internet stupidity, in a continuing series, I reflect on some of the emails I’ve gotten in the many months since I posted the first two; one on the failure of dialectic online and the other on sociopathy online. The first piece saw me dissect general online failings, while the second piece had me revisit right wing blogger Dean Esmay, whose idiocy I have tackled, like that of Wikipedia, several times before in essays. Why? Well, I do it for a simple reason, and one that will manifest itself as this essay unfolds. The Internet is in many ways, an ephemeral place. There are websites that simply fold up and go away, as well as those which alter information posted on them, and sometimes websites that do both; as I will demonstrate. Thus, I do these essays for future generations of online readers, on the Internet, or whatever medium eventually subsumes and displaces it. This is because too many online denizens try to hide their identities and mask the real vulgarity and baseness of their opinions....
4) Cults Of Personality (Part 1) In my ongoing series of explorations of the insanity of these still early Internet years, I have touched upon a number of topics, but never one as this: the rise of cults of personality online. In the first part I will examine a cult following one of the biggest names online, at least in terms of hits and Internet traffic, and in the second part I will examine the inverse, cults of personality wherein the devotees and cult figures are unknown, and often form a cult of a singular person- i.e.- one where cult leader and cultist reside in one delusive person, or one with few followers outside themselves. Now, some may wonder if I, or Cosmoetica, fit into that mold. After all, there are only a few websites in the arts with more readers....
5) The Folly Of The Modern Books Editor Of all the essays, in and out of this series, that I have written, about the problems surrounding the Internet, this one may be the most important, because it goes beyond the Internet, and details why the publishing industry is suffering so greatly, financially. In it I will show details from a correspondence I had with a small press publisher that contacted me. I had sent a manuscript of a novel I’d written several years ago, and after a few months I received a rejection that included an email detailing the rejection, the annotated manuscript with editorial suggestions that, at their best, were inane, and at their worst, showed the publisher really had no idea what even constitutes good, much less great, writing and literature, despite his website’s claims to the contrary. In this essay, I will demonstrate, even through just a few pages worth of excerpts, that no reader of any real intellect would not be intrigued by the writing they contain, and not want to read more of the narrative and the characters. In short, the flaw is not with the good writers nor readers but with the bad editors, agents, and publishers....
6) Cults Of Personality (Part 2) As has been the case with all the rest of these prior essays in the GFSI series, this one will deal with much of the accumulated stupidity since the last essay, almost two years ago. In that essay I promised that this next installment would deal with mainly the cult of personality known as the cult of the self, and, indeed, the vast majority of the folks exposed in this essay will be shown to be guilty of the narcissism at the center of a cult of the self that dominates online culture in 2012, and since the rise of the internet in the mid-1990s. Of course, not much has changed over the two years, save that there are even more and more idiots online and their delusions and stupidity get more and more blatant....