• Mood: bitchy

We're all going to hell in a handbasket.

WARNING: This article is deliberately one-sided, in an exploration of extrapolation of current events in a 'worst-case' scenario. However, reassuring comments to the contrary are welcome :)

Is it my imagination, or are world events just getting more stupid as time goes on? Perhaps it's because the events are happening to things that affect me more, ie. the internet and so forth.

The Evidence

• Software Patent law going mad in Europe
• RIAA overzealous in persuing copyright infringements
• Verisign dangerously big for its boots with the non-existant domain redirection fiasco

And of course Micro$oft. I think that's all I need to say on that. Still, so much public attention is on them nowadays that any suspicious or false moves are blown out of proportion - the end result of which is that most of what actually happens is fairly trivial.

Before, of course, the DMCA inspired people like M$ to look into sponsoring hardware vendors to build in licensing tools for media files, effectively taking ownership of the end user's media away from the end user. Oh, and making them unplayable on non-supported OSes too. As far as I know these plans could still be active.

I haven't even begun to mention the huge number of different projects all slowly eroding away our privacy, from RFIDs to ID cards to DNA databases to censorship to dragnet internet usage analysis to the nanny state. Some of it is quite nicely summed up in this article.

And in world politics, of course there is the second Vietnam waiting to happen in Iraq. Our country's getting very paranoid^[1] about the threat of terrorist attacts for being America sympathisers.

I'm beginning to think that our lives are so easy compared to people in third-world countries or in our own pasts that we contintually turn to more and bigger global issues to occupy our attention. Too many people in the world in general. Governments sticking their noses into others' businesses because they might now have the power to launch a devastating remote attack. All because we've got too much time on our hands, and human nature dictates that they're going to get upset at some point and lash out. It's happened recently. It could only be a matter of time before the pressure builds so the safety valves can't cope any more..

In my cynical and conspiratorial mode Blair knows this and is just siding with the most likely winner in all this. We're all going to hell in a handbasket.

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^[1] Thankswechlser for the link.