Information Irony
Today has been a morning of irony. Thursdays are in many ways the best day of the week: the gym is as empty as it gets when I am there as those of decaying resolution roll over for a few minutes more sleep, or something; it is my last exercise day of the week, Fridays and Saturdays are overcrowded with those frantic that another week not get by without them doing something ‘good’, and Sunday the gym is closed in persecution of those who are not observers of the local religious mysticism customs; and I get to listen to the best – usually – podcasts of the week.
This morning the podcasts were the BBC’s “In Our Time” and a Canadian podcast named “Search Engine”. The latter used to be a CBC podcast but since it has the subject of IT and society and this obviously appeals to a rather specialized demographic of geeks and nerds, its price to listener ratio evidently got too high and CBC canned it. Its announcer/protagonist, in the best tradition of modern journalist as Greek hero, did not take firing as an end to his adventures and found another paymaster whose identity is a bit unclear to me, evidently a regional television organization or some such.
The irony enters in the subjects of the two episodes. In the IOT episode, the subject was the trial of Charles One of England; in the SE episode the podcaster was continuing on his crusade about copyright oppression in “the land of frogs and dogs”. [1] I could make some conspiracy comment about the latter’s cancellation being a matter of the IP oligarchs suppressing him, but I shan’t.
Anyway, the irony comes about in the subjects. Here, on the one hand facilitated by a life peer, Melvyn, Lord Bragg, is a tale of a monarch who has royally micturated the populace of his organization domain and they have placed him on trial for demanding they adere to certain practice they find unreasonable. On the other hand, there is an on-going story of organizational oligarchs demanding that the citizens of their domains refrain from certain practices the citizens consider unreasonable. Both are, in a sense, about information; the one over the form of religious services and the other over the form of publication usage. [2]
Neither the tyrant nor the information oligarchs were/are interested in the desires of the general populace, only their own desires. In the historical case, the tyrant denied the court’s power to try him and as a result he was discorporated rather than just set down. In the current case, an civil war is now ensueing where the general populace find ways of subverting the protective, suppressive means of the oligarchs, a situation ominously similar to the civil wars that preceeded the trial.
I shall defer any further comparisons. Selah.
[1] That’s a quote and while it does satsify the Kingston Trio’s criterion of “offending almost everyone”, it is rather too good not to use.
[2] I use publication rather loosely here as any form of information – text, sound, audio – that is sold and/or broadcast in some means.
