Thinking About Resistance is a Crime

As part of my continuing efforts to document the decline of Western civilization, I would like to say that today I looked briefly at a Miami Herald story and saw several lust-based clickbait items.

When a major newspaper (a phrase soon to be an oxymoron) tries to make money by tempting readers to click on photos of women in their underwear, they can’t credibly say things like, “We are experiencing momentary difficulties finding equilibrium in the new Internet-based media paradigm.” It’s more accurate to say, “We are a bunch of desperate rats, looking for a dock line we can climb to safety.” Or maybe, “We will happily eat our own babies in order to save our jobs.”

I guess the English reached this point a long time ago, with topless women in popular newspapers. I should be surprised it took longer for it to spread to the Internet and the rest of the world.

In a few years, we will probably have to drive past billboards featuring full-frontal nudity on the way to work. After that, we’ll have animated porn billboards. Then we’ll get too jaded to see even that, and advertisers will have to resort to snuff films.

What happened to the world? I miss it.

I’ve learned to avoid The Daily Mail’s site. It’s virtually impossible to go there without seeing some inappropriate part of Kim Kardashian’s worn-out, boring anatomy.

I don’t know what’s going on with the Internet, but I assume the problem is that no relatively reputable media outlet has figured out how to make actual money with it. If the Internet worked economically, there would be no need to post clickbait offering peeks at upskirts and wardrobe malfunctions.

I remember making fun of Arianna Huffington, because I said her site would never make money. Oddly, I was correct, but she got rich anyway. I didn’t understand the way corporate accounting worked. She created an unsuccessful site, paid herself from money taken from investors, kept the salary, and then sold the project to a company with deep pockets. Now they pay her for her invaluable consulting services. That’s my understanding of it.

Your Internet project does not have to work to make you rich. It just has to attract investor money, which you then take in the form of nonrefundable payments. When the company craps out, you don’t have to pay back your salary or bonuses. You say, “Sorry about that, but my $50 million salary from a nonfunctional enterprise was justified. I did show up four hours a day.”

I wonder if St. Andrew Breitbart understood this when he helped start The Huffington Post. I don’t think saving the universe was his main priority. And yes, he worked for her AFTER she had her Road to Damascus moment and instantaneously became a Marxist. Don’t make excuses for him based on her earlier incarnation as a pretend conservative.

What worked for Arianna won’t work for everyone. Sooner or later, someone has to be the final owner of every website. Someone has to be the one who is holding the hot potato at the end of the game. The trick is to be the one who starts the game. The Miami Herald and The Daily Mail can’t sell their crappy sites to new people; the sites are inextricably unified with the Herald and the Mail. You can have The Huffington Post with Arianna as a paid consultant who isn’t exposed to financial risk. You can’t have The Miami Herald’s site with The Miami Herald insulated from debt.

Maybe what I’m saying sounds crazy, but think about this: Amazon didn’t make a profit until recently; it took about twenty years. Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men on earth, and for most of his company’s history, his corporation was losing money. People kept propping Amazon up because they thought it would turn a profit in the future. It’s starting to look like that’s true; unfortunately, people are also propping up a lot of sites that will never do well.

You don’t have to succeed to get rich. You can be a huge failure and be rich. You just have to find people stupid enough to invest in a project that will give you payments you don’t have to refund.

The Wilkerson family–the people who run Trinity Church here in Miami–are great examples of the art of failing successfully. The church always has money problems, but the head pastor has a very expensive house in Miami’s ritzy Golden Beach neighborhood, and his son managed to wangle a reality TV engagement. The people who attend the church stay poor, and the church is a mess with a huge mortgage, but the Wilkersons are doing fine, as far as anyone can tell.

Most–well, many–people would refuse to start a business they intended to bleed and abandon, and people like that don’t get to ride on the parasitic gravy train. Others don’t mind at all. They think anyone who believes success is an essential ingredient of success is a sucker.

Making money is always easier for people who have no conscience.

To get back to the irritating proliferation of filth on the web, it forces me to consider the high probability that I will have to disconnect myself entirely in a few years.

Will the government allow us to do that? No. Not when the statists finally crush our resistance. You’ll have to have a Facebook account, and you’ll have to have an electronic device with GPS with you all the time. If you cover the camera lens or disable the microphone, Mommy Uncle Sam will call in a trice to scold you and “offer” to help you fix it.

Wait and see.

You’ll have to be plugged in all the time, “for your own good,” and you’ll have to expose yourself to a certain amount of content, some of which will be other people exposing THEMselves.

Oh well.

I guess I better stop ranting. I just heard a text come in.