A Selfish Post About Iran

The Iranian election is disturbing for reasons almost anyone mentioning it at all will cover. But to me, almost the worst part of it is the idea that a leader could just shut down the information network. No cellphones. No internet. Nothing. Can't reach out and touch the world in just a moment's thought. To me, that is terrifying. The power of the Internet is used for good and evil all the time, but to have its massive power simply missing is horrible.

It's something I associate with the worst of disasters: hurricanes, earthquakes, things where you don't know if someone isn't online because they are dead or because they simply lost power. And it's exactly the same thing -- we don't know what is going on because they've lost power. But it could also be something worse.

I know it is selfish to think about it like this, but it's so scary that a leader can just throw citizens into darkness like that.

--Lu

2009 Officially Declared Shittiest Year

I have, for numerous personal and non-personal reasons, officially declared 2009 the shittiest year ever. However, I think as long as we get stories like this one on the news, we'll be okay. I regularly mock CNN for posting less-than-vital things in their breaking news videos. But given the way the economy is, my job is (or I guess, isn't as the case will soon be), and everything else, I'm glad to see it. It almost brought a tear to my eye and I am not a weepy girl. I think the humans are gonna make it.

Eli reminded me yesterday that I haven't written anything in a while (BLAWG! she said). Of course, I had the best comeback ever to that (so, my job's gone). Still, she was right. To some extent I gotta just write it out. Love the way she's really stepped up lately though.

So I think today is a post about how you can think you know who people are, but you really don't until you need them. I mean, most of the people I know are going through bad times right now (sister going back to Iraq, messy breakup with fiance, grandmother with cancer and grandfather with heart attack, unemployed, etc.) but no one has been like, "You think you got it bad??" when I tell them of my looming unemployment. Everyone has been very sympathetic, very nice. Like a community. Because that's what the Internet allows for. Even though I'm hear and hurting, my friends all around the country -- and world -- can be sympathetic and caring from wherever we are. It's one of the best parts of the Internet.

I mention it in part, because I also encountered one of the fouler parts this morning as someone trolled through a website I spend far too much time at. It was weird (it always is) to see someone troll through the site. Many of the people there care for the community greatly and trolls never last long, nor are they very effective. Everyone knows what is happening the moment it starts. They don't put up with it.

It's so amazing that we have this tool that we use for good and evil evenly, I think, that our parents didn't have and our grandparents certainly didn't have. And it makes this generation the first of its kind, in a way, we have far greater power to help or hurt anonymous, and it is going to be weird but cool to see how it changes the world.