I have a rather controversial belief. I think the world is basically bad (evil even).
For most people, this viewpoint is unacceptable. Why it's outrageous!
Not everyone instinctively rejects the notion. A minority simply doesn't care. Others prefer to keep an ironic detachment at all times.
A handful of individuals may have an inkling of the depth of the horror. They are few and far between.
99% unquestionably accept the System, even if they are trapped in a cage of pure evil. In fact, they glorify the inefficiencies and deliberate hardships that ruin their lives, thereby perpetuating them.
The reason why things suck is simple: evolution.
Most conflicts are the result of shortages, which could be reduced by restraint, including birth control; but this goes against the fundamental biological urge to reproduce and acquire more resources.
Ecosystems are based on competition. They require a degree of deception and exclusion.
Competition can create immense wealth, but it often gets short-circuited. In practice, people prefer to make things more complicated than necessary. Rules and restrictions are used to harass and obscure.
The biggest economic problem is friction: the difficulties involved in acquiring a new job or a diploma, figuring out the relative benefits of groups and communities, endless social intrigues, power hierarchies and back-stabbing, and all the poorly defined yet complex rules.
It takes a lot of work just to live a bad life. The world would be better off if people were lazier.
One of our contributors has a random example of things deliberately being made more complex than they should be:
Review of Midwest Can spill-proof system.
When I say that the world is deeply, fundamentally evil, what I mean is that society doesn't work.
The following example involves explosive substances, the kind of thing that only happens about every other week:
I happened to buy a portable gasoline container at K-Mart, what I thought was called a 'Jerry can', but they have never heard that word at the gas station.
It's a 1-gallon, 'Model 1200 spill-proof system' (EPA#9MDC2P2AABM1) by 'Midwest Can'.
http://www.midwestcan.com/static.asp?path=2840,3459
Incredibly, it is not made in China but in the USA.
Many Chinese-made products I bought at K-mart failed during their first use, including tire pumps.
At the gas station, I filled the can with almost 1 gallon of regular gasoline. Then I put on the black cap
In the immortal words of Jack Slater, Big Mistake!
The black cap can be screwed on, but it can't be screwed off. It still was a bit loose. The fuel leaked out if the can was tilted even slightly!
Thinking that it wasn't tight enough, I tried to fiddle with the 'child proof' cap, and then there came a cracking sound as a hole appeared in the plastic cap from a breakaway component.
There was STILL no way to tighten or remove the black cap.
One other piece came with the can, a horrible kind of spring-loaded spout thingy.
There was no way to attach the spout to the can with the irremovable cap in place (and probably not otherwise either). It was physically impossible to seal this huge hole!
Of course K-Mart had already closed by then. That didn't prevent me from loitering in the parking lot outside their entrance carrying the defective can filled with flammable liquid like some would-be arsonist.
Fortunately I had duct tape to seal the can, but the gasoline immediately loosened the tape.
If the can had fallen over, at least half a gallon of gasoline would have spilled out. I had to drive home very slowly. A strong smell of gasoline still pervades the air as the fumes disperse.
Even if it were somehow possible to remove the black cap (it isn't), the sliding spout is a new mystery. There seems to be no way to use it to refuel a lawnmower, the original purpose of this bizarre exercise.
This kind of pointless odyssey recurs with the sad regularity of a stupid sitcom. Just last week I was trying and failing to get a Youtube account to post some masked rants without having to give Google my mobile number.
However, as we've already pointed out, the most obvious example of how reality sucks is software. There are many case studies of inscrutable interfaces, deliberate over-complexifications, infuriating failures, constant crashing, and digital insubordination. Some more horror stories:
I spent the last two days trying to sign up for an account at whitehouse.gov so I could start an online petition.
Needless to say, the government's vastly overpriced web servers won't allow me to do that, either crashing without warning or refusing to send the confirmation email despite dozens of attempts to get them to comply.
Surprisingly, this isn't part of a conspiracy to shut up one of the few remaining dissident voices on a hyper-conformist planet.
It's simply more proof of the strange phenomenon that COMPUTERS SUCK, or to put it another way: they don't work much or most of the time; especially when they should work. Once the government gets involved, the curse is multiplied seven-fold.
Computers could easily become useful and powerful tools, but are instead riddled with deliberate defects and bureaucratic inefficiencies.
This is by design, the choices of smug programmers and their corporate overseers everywhere.
Or to sum it up in one word: evil.
Twitter: white screen of death
Some claim it's a security issue.
Their screen just stays blank in an increasing number of browsers that refuse to run their script-spreading ad software. No solution appears to exist.
Conde Nast is evil
There is now ample proof that the world is kept evil by the unshakable will of the majority, but consider one specific example:
http://www.wired.com/ no longer allows posting replies on their comment threads if you have even a slightly out of date browser or computer. They clearly went out of their way to make that happen, spending a lot of time and effort on the computational crippling.
How hard could it be to make a website that just works, like in the slightly less evil 1990s? It would be easier than doing the opposite - just not evil enough.
It's not surprising that a hipster site like Wired would make things more complicated than necessary (they just loved Enron), but the trend has spread across media empires. Gawker is the worst offender. Now even Twitter refuses to load in millions of browsers.
The free Internet is decaying like a freshly made-up and embalmed corpse, fading like a lost dream.
Some formerly favorite sites that no longer allow comment posting from many browsers include realussr.com and North Korean Economy Watch.
Zonealarm is evil
The software won't block Internet Explorer from accessing the Internet, despite IE being listed as having to ask permission before going online in Zonealarm's program controls.
Zonealarm also tends to change other program access settings to make it easier for programs to go online without having to ask the user for permission.
Another LiveJournal crime
They have secretly been 'hiding' our blogs' comments with no clear way to change this setting. The only remedy is an obscure 'slashed eye' or 'unscreen' icon that requires the moderator to approve each comment individually in a multi-step process through at least four pages. It also makes it look like each approved comment has been banned. LiveJournal is literally infinitely worse than Satan.
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Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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