I hate to say I told you so, but…
<off-the-meds rant warning>
For those of you who are still guessing, I’m an anti-corporate, anti-marketing, plain-speaking individualist. I despise the affects of advertising in our everyday lives. I think that given accurate information, people can make informed decisions about what products suit their needs the best. Advertising and marketing play on the emotions rather than support rational decision making. It is better to have a “cool” product than one that actually functions as advertised. The idea that all entertainment, all public facing media whatsoever must be run through the corporate marketing filter is un-American, un-democratic, and the most blatant form of rule of the corporations that we have yet seen.
Corporations run the government, the arts, the environment, our health, our education, our waking hours, they control all the ideas that get into our minds, and the ideas that come out of our minds.
So when people argue with me that advertising on your blog does not turn your head, well, people are welcome to an opinion, even if it is wrong. I don’t care who you are, if you advertise something on your site, you give up the right to speak freely about it. If you accept freebies from a company, its the same thing. The recent ridiculous flap about the 3D connexion spaceballs, and previous ones about freebies doled out by SW Corp to bloggers who fit the harness, and even people who have complained about me putting their blogs on the “Commercial Blogs” section of my blog roll instead of the main blog roll I reserve for places you can go and not get inundated with the relentless commercial crap that drives almost everything. (whoa! now if I were a real media mogul, I could never get away with a sentence like that, but as an amateur, the sky is the limit!)
Well, I hate to say I told you so (not really, but let’s just say that I do), but , “I told you so”. So there. This is a hot topic with the professional press, and why shouldn’t it be a hot topic with the amateur press? Other than grammar, qualifications, education, and money, the main differences are usually passion and expertise in the topic they write about.
No doubt all of this individualism puts me on the outs with SolidWorks, other SolidWorks bloggers, the CAD media, and just about all other corporatized means of extorting money from the public or commercial worlds. We are all corporate zombies, or if you like, you could use the Matrix catechism. Fiscal growth is powered by population growth, which is the 800 pound gorilla that no one mentions that is killing every way of life we know except stacked on top of one another in concrete menageries.
Here are a few references to read. Bloggers, start your 1099s.
FTC to go after blogger freebies
Microsoft and free laptops to bloggers