The Ravens Nest

To Escape What We Hated Being

I just caught wind of Elon Musk firing shots on CNBC.

I wasn’t appalled. I wasn’t bowled over. I did, however, smile.

Before you hop into my comments whether for or against Elon, let me explain something to you all.

Some of you have forgotten the powerful tool called The Internet that, to me and many others in the 1990s held a mystique and a magic to it altogether.

The ability to sit here and chat with people all over the world was amazing to me. The ability to find people of like-mind with like-interests was akin to going to school in those days to find your bullies replaced with people who might go, “Dude, you like metal? Check this out!” and then handing you a mixtape or compliation CD or people who saw you and asked, “You play D&D? I think you’ll dig our Cyberpunk game. Why not come over this weekend and we’ll show ya how to play!”

There were people online manipulating source code, HTML code and knew how to get things if you didn’t. Yeah you found the snobs there, you know the ones. Those were the people that would post “Fuck Off, N00b” and expected you to know things without ever having been told them but reality was always a little stranger than fiction. I did find fellow metalheads, industrialites, goths and generally cool people.

The content that we see online today isn’t what we had back then either. We didn’t really have the tech available to us to properly deliver it but we always imagined that, when we did, we’d have something better than cable access channels could offer.

We began to reject a lot of what we saw on TV. Most of us would turn up our noses at an edited-for-TV version of The Crow because that’s not why we’re paying for cable, right?

…right?

Why was it like that on TV? Why was it, everywhere we turned, TV was just getting to be more and more cookie-cutter? There were no good shows on, save for WWF: Monday Night Raw and WCW: Monday Nitro (did I mention I met wrestling fans in that time too? I did!)

Little did we all know until one night, Shawn Michaels, Triple H and Chyna were on TV doing this pseudo-presidential address where they tore the lid off of it. Many of us didn’t realize it at the time but those three exposed something that none of us really knew anything about; Standards & Practices.

Standards & Practices were there because of, I hope you’re sitting down, younger folks, …advertisers.

See, the way channels work is this. Advertisers buy time to advertise their products. For example, in those days, the then World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling held the highest ratings on TV. That airtime was sold at a premium and that money coming in basically sponsored the show and helped to keep it on the air. It helped with production which means that the money helped pay for the show to run on the air and the reason people watched these shows at the time is because they were full of intrigue. I won’t go into the totality of The Monday Night War but, if you get the chance, go check out those old episodes of Monday Night Raw and Monday Nitro, respectively. So camera crews, those putting up sets, etc could all be paid and this was money earned on top of the attendance in the arena. Monday Night Football, Major League Baseball, National Basketball League, all of these types of events shown on TV drew large amounts of people tuning in to those channels and syndicated channels every night and this was what advertisers were paying for. In return, the channel thanks to Federal Communication Commissions rules (not laws) would then have to show an advertisement for the product, for example, Snickers and Slim Jim ads were all over Monday Night Raw and Monday Nitro, respectively.

If something were to offend someone, then the person could communicate this to the network and the network would have to respond. Typically, this was a complaint lodged to the FCC and then the network responded to the FCC, pointing out that either they did nothing wrong according to Standards & Practices or perhaps they did wrong and would then incorporate their “offense” into an ever-changing set of rules.

Married With Children was a TV sitcom that bucked that trend quite a bit and Fox did battle quite a bit back then with people who were some of the earliest forms of what we know today as Karens.

Now let’s say you lodged a complaint. The investigation turned out that, according to Standards & Practices, everything was fine and you were told your options were to change the channel or turn the TV off, your next avenue would be to then contact the advertiser and threaten a boycott of their product. The advertiser, if they see things your way, pulls sponsorship from the show but another one would step in to buy up that time on sweet ratings and now you have a new problem, the show goes on. Alternately, the show would begin to suffer because they don’t have that advertiser and, ideally, you’d want to spook all the advertisers to the point where they pull out too, the show is cancelled and you’re happy…but everyone else is telling you what Elon just said “Yeah, go fuck yourself.”

I’m giving you the origins of what we call Cancel Culture but it’s really a cult, as I’ve pointed out.

What does this have to do with the Internet, Raven?

Thanks for asking, Strawman, we’re getting right to that.

Over time, corporations also saw the possibilities. To them, the internet would serve as a great, big Ubermall and now they could get more advertising on more eyes, namely yours. There were no limits to the amount of advertising that could take place.

Starting to see where this is taking shape yet?

Over time, creator-owned content creation was one of those things that was done on low-end equipment and a lot of DIY initiative. Now that there are advertisements, you could be paid for that content…but now you’d be subjected to the whims of the advertisers.

There were a lot of high-tech advancements to be had here and now targeted advertising was something these companies were going after, custom-tailoring the advertising you would get because, let’s face it, my broke ass isn’t interested in the new Audi, whatever Rolex is doing and I could give a damn about DeBeers. Traditional advertising wasn’t really working but the targeting, that would. That meant data and site tracking and, generally, eventually, a full-blown surveillance apparatus to the point where even talking around your phone, those things can and will be collected and sent and there will be an ad for something on Amazon that you merely talked about.

Your buying interests interested them. The things you thought about interested them and now, at a moment’s notice, advertisers could pull the plug on your entire livelihood without warning or recourse. They have all the money and all the power and if a platform wants that next multiple million or so, they must make sure that there are…Standards & Practices.

Slowly, but surely, every single thing about the internet you and I see every day became almost indistiguishable from network cable TV, which has also become obsolete as of late. I can stream much the same thing on my TV as I can the internet but now I can also interact with the creators to a point. Everything is algorithms. Everything is fake. Everything is just mass-produced turds with a metric fuckton of spit, polish and shine, brought to you by Pfizer or GSK.

Now, after thirty years, here we are. What’s our alternative now? Some still have that DIY spirit but we know it won’t have the reach.

Enter Elon Musk. He bought Twitter. He exposed all of the dirt that many of us have been telling you existed for years. By the way, how are we on “conspiracy theories” these days? Just checkin’.

Then he appears on CNBC and he said something that did bring a smile to my face and it was, “If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money. Go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself! Is that clear? I hope it is.”

He went on to say, ““What I care about is the reality of goodness and not the perception of it. What I’m seeing all over the place is people trying to look good while doing evil. Fuck them!”

What this showed me was that he, personally, is not going to bow or bend the knee to a mob mentality as others have done. People like Bob Iger from Disney have made claims to wanting to “quiet the noise” in the culture war but Disney’s efforts and products have shown the exact opposite. If he’s threatening to pull the plug on advertising on Twitter then Elon is telling him the equivalent of “Fuck you, go right ahead, bitch!”

Your move, Bob.

The blue checkmark of Twitter was initially supposed to mean that the account of someone had been verified to be them, rather than some celebrity impersonator. Eventually, it came to mean that, as long as you were on their side of that culture war, you could have a verified account and then it just became a symbol of self-important people who both they and Twitter thought were better than you.

Elon isn’t perfect but even he knows for certain why we’re currently in the state in which we find ourselves and, like myself, he’s not at all happy with it. Elon Musk is showing that he’s not a man who can be bullied.

I know there are people monetizing their work on the internet and I’m happy for them. Until this advertiser stranglehold is finally something reliable, I won’t be. I enjoy doing what I do whether it’s video content, these articles or even just talking with some of you. I am of the opinion that if you’re reliant on advertising, I shouldn’t have to pay for a subscription. The entire point of a subscription to cable TV, initially was to watch what local network TV couldn’t offer without advertisements. Same was said for XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. Now, everything has had the door to the advertisers open for them and many of you still don’t know where the problem lies?

Sure, the internet might not be as sleek, polished or refined as it is today without advertisers, however, I counter it could be much better. It’s high time that advertisers understood that this is a much different world than that of TV and Radio and the reason this became the go-to alternative was because it offered what TV and Radio could or would not. It’s why there are so many devices capable of reaching out and getting the information but we need to get back to that point in time where we have an internet that is truly open and full of possibility, rather than one that soulless megacorporations can and do, control.

So, when Elon Musk calls out the virtue-signaling hypocrites, I, for one, back him fully. I’m not a fan at all of the Neurolink implants he wants to market. I would like to remain one-hundred percent home-grown and corn-fed…okay, well, cheeseburger-fed at times but an open internet where corporate control was broken? It’s time for corporations to be held to account, called out and for people to realize that these entities are not infallible and maybe we’ll get our worlds of possibility back where real, self-produced content can travel the world unimpeded for people to check out and, organically, the best and most interesting content can be more commonplace, rather than the banal and stupid.