Wisdom of the Crowds.
Two Things.
(1) Crowds are only wise in the sense of generating a statistical bell-curve around an absolute point. Crowds have no ‘wisdom’ about subjective things, like whether or not high-collars will be fashionable in 2012, or whether or not the world will end in a mayantechosingularityclusterfuck.
Crowds are not wise, nor are they even tolerable most of the time. Picture it, Rose: two nights ago, packed into Austin’s still-newest gaybar, so close to so many other people there was barely room to lift my glass and drown my sorrows, trying to finagle my way off the dance floor spill-over and out into the open-air smoking corale (aka patio), one can’t help but eavesdrop in situations like this. And there I am, listening to throngs of inane blatherskite (did I mean ‘blather’s kite’? Who the hell is blather and why does shle have a kite?), feeling like a creep.
It served my solipsistic Saturday night needs.
Tonight the pendulum has swung back around and I’m alone at the laundry mat, washing dog piss from my bed-clothes, the only other soul on the entire block a sad-faced guy in some faux-russian tee-shirt and a NAVY hat. I’m betting his name is Darren… or John.
Tonight there will be (ass shot, hello! …Darren John bends over to collect his fallen socks; his face may be pocked and tearful, but his ass is not). Tonight there will be no sourcing of the dirty-clothes crowd, just the quiet hum of my overworked laptop and Darren John’s inevitable eventual finger-drumming to the 2010 male-equivalent Shania Twain song stuck in his head.
But back to the point; crowds are not wise. Crowds can tell us a lot of things– who’s going to win an election, who’s the more attractive potential mate, whose ox weighs closer to a metric tonne, who’s the most likely scape-goat in the next does of media-hysteria– but crowds can’t predict the future. And that’s what grinds my gears, business people/trend analysts thinking that crowd-sourcing will do a single lick of good in the mobile-global economy of the future. Use your head, man. If crowd-sourcing could predict the future then we’d all have our jetpacks by now.
I dunno, it’s just an idyl rant.
Oh, and the second thing?
Misogyny rankles me more than anything else, even homophobia (and of course you can’t have one without the other). The only thing worse than misogyny is misogyny masked as something else:
Katha Pollitt, in The Nation:
“I’m still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny.”
And female misogynists… wow. They might just be worse than homophobic queers.
So yeah, that’s what I got for this update. Sorry for the negative vibe. I’m in kind of a mood. I’ll be better next time.
♥doug
