About
So I’m phillyharper, I’ve been binging on information for as long as the internet has been digestible to normal human beings. I’ve been fascinated by the internet from the day my Dad came home one day in 1997 with a 56k modem and showed me yukyuk.com.
By around 2003 I was starting to frequent marginally political websites, I think I was first suckered in at the prospect of using the internet to find out what UFO’s were after a mind boggling documentary on the History Channel; needless to say I never did get to the bottom of it. The Disclosure Project was as close as I got to finding out the answer but unfortunately it left me in such a state of bemusement that after an impassioned three months tinkering over the prospect of it being real and attempting (pathetically) to shepard people towards watching it, I was 20% closer to the devastating reality that people don’t care about things if the scale of their meaning threatens to puncture their own personal reality. I had 80% enthusiasm left for fighting the information war.
I was now staring at sites that, at the time, were doing a great service to the world. They were full of both crap and stuff that inspired the mind to think “could this be real?”. An interesting intellectual exercise.
Filtering through the crap on abovetopsecret.com (remember it’s 2003…I was born in 1985) was an interesting, if a little geeky, pastime. After diluting as much “holy-shit-what-is-that-footage” as one brain can take, I was compelled more towards “gosh-I-didn’t-know-that-content” that had slightly more footing in reality down here on earth. 9/11 had happened, and some people were really annoyed about it. Having never been a political thinker before, 9/11 was my first taste of political thought and abovetopsecret, as bad as I now know it is, led this horse to the water.
Around a year later I discovered digg. “It’s so much BRIGHTER” I thought. Through the prism of digg, the world seemed a much friendlier place, there was art work, pictures, and funny videos, and Bush wasn’t coming for me in my sleep, flouride most certainly did not warp my fragile little mind, and there was only a marginal possibility of a base on the moon. 9/11 however remained a hot topic, why did people keep going on about it so much?
Eventually, having skipped over much of the 9/11 content that was being banded about I finally became curious enough to put the concept to bed once and for all. Apparently there was a Professor of physics who knew all about it, so rather than listen to people scream at each other on message boards I decided to listen to someone who was at least clever enough to become a Professor of Physics. Professor Steven Jones was his name, and with the emerging trend of on demand streaming video, his controversial lecture was broadcast full screen, on demand and directly into my study, I felt like part of the digital revolution!
For two hours I sat totally baffled. This guy was at the top of his game and he was certainly onto something, more over, now that this study had entered the public arena (so it seemed to me) there must soon follow some sort of debate in the media about what it all meant. In my naïvety I said to my friends, “something strange happened on 9/11, they’ll start talking about it in the news tonight or tomorrow”. But nothing happened. Nothing was mentioned, and I was utterly baffled as to why. “Because it’s all bullshit” was the common reasoning for why it wasn’t mentioned, but I wasn’t convinced that was the case. Prof. Jones had put forward some pretty compelling research on why a new investigation was needed, and not one news outlet had covered it.
Enter Noam Chomsky and BitTorrent. His name had been mentioned time and time again on the message boards I was reading, as ever I was curious as to why people thought he was so important. I learned that a film had been made about him called Manufacturing Consent and the Media and from somewhere I found a .torrent of it. Through a haze of smoke in my student house in Rusholme (I was now studying Media at Manchester Metropolitan) my flatmate and I sat through the whole three hours of it. Well hot diggedy damn; I’d solved the puzzle of how no one was ever going to learn what Steven Jones had said, and it was in that smoke filled room in Manchester that I came to the overtly paranoid conclusion that the media lies through omission on a frighteningly regular basis. I became hooked on things that the media doesn’t discuss.
Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe it was fate, but it couldn’t have been more than 6 months later that my sisters boyfriend, an IT technician, introduced me to StumbleUpon. I woke up two weeks later from a caffeine binge having sat clicking stumble a disgraceful number of times. StumbleUpon removed all the effort from learning, all I had to do was click “stumble” and something amazing would hit my screen, if it wasn’t that interesting then I just click stumble again and off I go. One memory that sticks out was seeing a flash animation about permaculture, I’d never even heard of permaculture, nor would I ever have heard of it had it not been for StumbleUpon, but now I know that somewhere on the planet there is a bloke who thinks he can re-green the Middle East, if only we’d have the time to all listen to what he has to say. I learned about low impact housing, interesing hotels, Stanley Meyer, the Downing Street memo, amazing pieces of animation, Buddism, French body poppers and how to make smooth corners in CSS. There’s not much point in me listing everything I’ve ever found that’s interesting on StumbleUpon, because it’s all archived in a nicely laid out page here.
The curious thing with StumbleUpon is it’s ability to heal the intellectual torture you suffer at the hands of reddit and digg. If it bleeds it leads is the same logic that runs through the editorial of both of these sites; if left to be edited entirely by the popular vote the news reflects much of the negativity we see in the mainstream media, albeit in a much more accurate and factual way. StumbleUpon stimulates niche communities and ideas, and you can wonder through a world of ideas that don’t always bestow such a world burden on your shoulders. Where reddit and digg demonstrate the worlds problems, StumbleUpon seems to offer solutions.
By the time I had binged myself to the brink of brain overload on StumbleUpon I was already an avid user of reddit. I’d grown weary of the “PWNED!” and “OMFG THAT RULEZ!” comments that had become so prominent on digg. Over a transitional period of about 6 months I totally shifted over to the elegant minimalism of the reddit front page where intelligent debate could breathe a breath of fresh air. It did not have anything to do with the HD encryption key saga, since I didn’t really understand what was going on, HD encryption keys don’t massively interest me.
The comment system was, and still is by far the best on the internet and the community always dig out content that I relate to. I feel that reddit, as a whole community of people, went through a similar online experience to myself, feeling that something wasn’t right with mainstream media reporting and that the world needed to catch up with its own progress. I check it religiously every day but I’m starting to grow tired of checking it. I guess it’s down to how exciting and juicy reddit used to be during the Bush era – that guy was eight years of political hate fodder and my resentment towards him developed into a love to hate paradox. Then there was an election that seemed to last forever, everything got really heated and reddit really thought there was going to be an October surprise, Martial Law, election/suspension rigging, and the invasion of Iran before Bush left office, the fear was real, and reddit lapped it up. Well guess what? It didn’t happen. But I never throw the baby out with the bathwater and treat reddit like a newsroom, some leads end up going nowhere while others run all the way to the top. The idea that the US might invade Iran before the elections was actually Seymour Hersh’s – arguably one of the best journalists in the world.
During my journey to this very blog, I’ve been a serial project starter. In the early days I started a project called wired music which I hoped would revolutionise music, needless to say I was 6 months behind the curve since MySpace was just around the corner. I tried to set up a website called evolvecast.com to aggregate podcasts but I quickly realised I was never going to have it in me to build the application. I then set up my own blog chomskyswar.com which received relative success, I was pleased with my 600-700 hits a day along with the occasional front page hit for reddit or digg. Eventually I neglected the blog and learned how fast they die when you leave them be for more than a week. I’ve since set up many other blogs to various degrees of success, I’ve worked as a viral marketer for a flash games company, and went on to work in Online Editorial over at current.com before they made me redundant (only marginal hard feelings).
Now I’m 23, full to the brim of ideas and information, unemployed, and about to take the plunge from living in Manchester to living in London. In fact as I write this I am sat on the train tooting along somewhere between Crewe and London Euston with my precious few belongings dangling above my head. This is the first blog I’ve made solely about me, what I think, what I like, and what I hate. I shall be blogging in small chunks as often as my internet connection will allow me to, I’ll share everything I can. The media is ours now, we have only ourselves to answer to.