Extinction Internet

 What a marvellous thing the Internet is. Now we can throw out the set of encyclopaedias, talk to all our friends for free, save a fortune on subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, download (pirated) films, check our bank account and order a smashing looking shirt advertised on Facebook for just nine ninety five.

Or two for fifteen, if we are quick.

And then, when you unwrap the package – if it ever gets to you – you find that the shirt is made of polyester. See, the Internet is service, information, and increasingly, opportunity.

Opportunity for scammers, hackers, fraudsters and crooks. Many of whom don’t even exist: that’s right, the woman with the large chest who wants to be your friend either on Facebook (‘I love your posts, you seem such an interesting person’) or in your Messenger (here’s one I just got from Busty Emma: ‘Hi Dear!’). They are both bots, like the empty phone calls or the get-rich-quick adverts.

I’m reading on Facebook this morning, in a paid-for advert, the following (in Spanish): ‘Donation of 544,000 euros. Please contact me to benefit’. I’m also getting tarot-reading and offers by Pedro Sánchez, Amancio Ortega and other Spanish household names to invest in a get-rich-quick scheme. Ya think?

Even in my private paid-for email account, I get scam adverts like, f’rinstance, ‘Get your free Oraal B Series 9 from Uniited Heallthcare’ – what’s with the misspellings, is it to fool the spam-guard?

Then, beware of anything that starts with ‘Congratulations…’ Indeed, I was offered a free Trump tee-shirt only yesterday, just pay for the postage and send us your details.

Besides emptying your bank account, or taking your ID or your online-presence, or pushing extremist views down your throat (with a nod to the anything-goes policies of Elon Musk and The Zuck), the Internet can provide misleading information (The old joke of – ‘All climate scientists agree on global warming, but on the other hand and to be fair, Sandra on Facebook says that it’s all bollocks’).

The Guardian notes, ‘…it is possible to conclude that Zuckerberg has always cared more about his company’s proximity to power than to its proximity to truth’. Indeed, his reversal of the fact-checkers has prompted the joke site El Mundo Today to announce that it, too, has removed its ‘protocols of verification’.

Revealingly, the word “enshittification” has just been crowned as Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows. ‘The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking’.

Luckily, there are several fact-checkers out there, Snopes, Maldita, Wikipedia (currently under threat from Musk), and of course Russia’s bogus Global Fact-Checking Network…

By the way, Invermectin, which reputedly cures both cancer and Covid if you believe the Internet, is in reality a horse laxative.

Besides misinformation, or rather disinformation (used a lot in the recent American elections, and indeed, with anything to do with Trump); there’s the danger of cyber-warfare, hijacking, bluesnarfing (you should switch your Bluetooth connector off to avoid piracy); malware – (viruses, spyware, worms and so on); denial-of-service attacks which can break down a network; phishing and password attacks.

And note that, these days, only amateur hackers bother to break into your account – the professionals are busy hacking the hospital, or the bank, or the electricity company.

Twitter has meanwhile become notoriously toxic, and some people are moving to an imitator called Blue Sky. The main advantage of this platform is that it doesn’t carry far-right posts along the lines of Elon Musk and his support for the AfD, the German fascist party (‘Jawohl, Hitler was a communist’), or his suggested invasion of the UK.

These days, it must be acutely embarrassing for anyone who owns and drives a Tesla.

We have rather taken to no longer following the news – neither buying newspapers any more (El País now prints around 52,000 copies daily – as against 470,000 just twenty years ago), or even watching the Telediario (75% of Spaniards now have a streaming service – Netflix, Disney and so on). Instead, we get our news from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where it has little or no editorial control. Don’t believe me? Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Uber have all given Trump a million dollars for his inauguration fund (sic!) and Elon Musk pumped 277 million dollars into the Donald Trump candidacy. The incoming president’s goals will become clear enough in the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be too sure of investing in Bitcoin: like fairies’ promises and happy endings, it ain’t necessarily so.

Our phones – if we are important enough – run the risk of being spied on by the Israeli Pegasus – or for that matter, being blown up by the Mossad.

The Dutch professor Geert Lovink in an essay called ‘Extinction Internet’ explains that there will come a time when everyone will get tired of being connected to the Internet, because the disadvantages of sharing opinions online will be so great – the negative aspects far outweighing the good – that people will simply turn away. The Spanish news-site Infobae ‘consults experts on the implications of a web increasingly dominated by bots and artificial content’. They find that ‘the Golden Age has passed and now most traffic is either bots (no relation) or synthetic AI-generated content’. One advantage to this is that it’s a cheap alternative to paying journalists. As Forbes notes, ‘Beyond news generation and consumption, AI is improving the business and operation of journalism, which is important given the high cost and low revenue usually associated with the news media industry. Journalism can be a resource-intensive business…’

As for the Spanish Government’s plan to punish the media who publish bulos (fake news), we can only await events (as the Partido Popular and its allies criticise the proposals).

In short, corporate greed and Internet fraud between them will one day outweigh the social advantages, certainly for the ordinary consumer. Could it be happening right now?

Are we seeing the Internet die? Not for Industry as a whole, but rather as we – humble users and customers – might understand it? Maybe soon we will have to return to Telefónica and writing postcards?

It might not be such a bad thing.

So, where am I going with all this? Oh Hell, let’s see what’s on Facebook.    

What Are We Going to Call Ourselves?

Ángel Medina and I used to produce and edit a monthly newspaper a decade ago called El Indalico which ran for around 108 editions. 

Ángel has now begun to record some of his essays on a blog here.

Here's one I translated.

...

Among the stories that I am going to publish on this blog there will be some related to Mojácar, the town where I have lived for more than thirty years. And they will be part of what I will call “Stories of Mojácar”. 

They are unusual and fantastic because the pueblo and its inhabitants are quite strange.

In every sense. 

Little by little, I will reveal what this place is like, which was on the verge of disappearing as a municipality after the Spanish Civil War due to the abandonment it suffered from its inhabitants thanks to hunger, a lack of resources, a fierce lack of communications with the surroundings, plus the aridity of its lands, always yearning for those drops of rain that never seemed to fall.

The town was lucky to have Jacinto Alarcón, a providential mayor who in the 60s managed to cause a National Parador hotel to be built and also, by giving away ruins or plots of land to diplomats and others, attracted personalities and investors who started the take-off of the town as an international tourist attraction. 

Many people later following his line consolidated this projection by building apartments, housing estates and hotels.

One of the many who believed in that future was Pedro García, who built and ran the Hotel Continental for many years, which is still there today.

Pedro, a restless and hard-working man, wanted to contribute in some way to that local development and thought of forming an association of hotel entrepreneurs who would join their efforts to achieve that definitive take-off of the town. And with his best spirit he met the businessmen of the area for that purpose one afternoon on the terraces of his hotel.

'The first thing is to find a name for the association. I propose ASEMMOJ (Association of Businessmen of Mojácar)', he proposed.

'No', replied one attendee, 'ASEMHOMOJ would be a better bet (Association of Hotel Entrepreneurs of Mojácar)'.

'Why only hoteliers? What about those of us who have bars?', another participant jumped in, 'it should be called ASEMHOYBARMOJ (Association of Hotel and Bar Entrepreneurs of Mojácar)'.

'You forget that we must limit the association to those of us who are forming it, who are neighbours of La Rumina and El Palmeral', said Pedro. 'I propose we go with ASEMHOYBARRUMPALMOJ (Association of Hotel and Bar Entrepreneurs of La Rumina and El Palmeral de Mojácar)'.

Then said another: 'And you haven't counted on the merchants who are here? Let's call our association ASEMHOYBARYCOMRUMPALMOJ'.

And so the initials were added until the session became a brawl and those present, shouting, did not stop arguing and demanding more and more absurd and complicated names until one of them, the since deceased Manolo Picardo, manager and owner of the Hotel Río Abajo, gave his verdict.

'That's enough! Silence!' And he continued with the greatest expectation: 'the Association will be called ATEM, which is META ('ambition') backwards and means that we will never get anywhere.

Which, give it its due, it didn't. 

2025, To Start As We Mean To Continue

No doubt like they do everywhere else, Spain hauls out its special gala TV shows on New Year’s Eve to help bring in the celebration. We must eat our twelve grapes and let off a firework.

This time around, the fierce competition between the national television and the commercial Antena3 channel (no one watched any of the others) came to a head.

La Una had David Broncano (host of the leading comedy chat show La Revuelta) and Lalachus (a jolly and overweight comedienne) to host the countdown from the roof of a building in Madrid overlooking La Puerta del Sol, while across the way, on another rooftop with another premium view of the square and its clock, were the Antena3 stalwarts Cristina Pedroche and Alberto Chicote. Cristina, for some reason, wearing a skimpy dress made from synthetic crystals containing real mother’s milk (no kidding).

And, it’s cold out there, on a Madrid rooftop, half naked, at half-past eleven at night.

At one point, as sensible folk stay home with the heater on high to watch the telly, Broncano is seen to break the unwritten rule as he shouts though a megaphone over to the rival team to ask ‘Say fellas, when do we get to eat the grapes?’ (Spaniards eat twelve grapes during the New Year chimes).

Well, I don’t know, but Antena3 promptly put up a screen so that their presenters could no longer be seen from the roof of their cheeky TVE rivals. Heh!

All good fun. Then Lalachus pulls out una estampita (a small card) from her copious bosom and waves it at the camera. It’s a representation of a popular TV show called Grand Prix – a version of It’s a Knockout: an affable looking cartoon-bull logo wearing a gold medal, only instead, this card has a bleeding heart around the bull’s neck – a joke that’s sure to offend the easily offendable: that’s to say, a small and extreme section of the Catholics.

Not that New Year’s Eve has anything to do with Christian tradition.

Duly offended, Hazte Oir and the Abogados Cristianos people were at the door of the juzgados bright and early the next morning to denounce the fat lady and her smarmy companion, along with the head of the Spanish television, and anyone else who may have laughed or sniggered. Blasphemy!

Cue the Monty Python joke (reworked): ‘Nobody laughs at the Spanish Inquisition!’

The Archbishop of Seville asks ‘How long will they take advantage of our patience?’ The senior Spanish prelate Monseñor Luis Argüello calls the joke ‘an intolerable offence’.

The opportunist Vox party calls for the presence of the president of the RTVE José Pablo López (a socialist appointee) to give an explanation of the affront in Congress.

Turn the other cheek, girls.

La blasfemia (or rather, its modern version known as el escarnio) is an offense that’s still on the books, although it will likely be removed this year says Félix Bolaños the justice minister. But first, presumably, we will have to suffer some lawfare from m’learned friends.

Some of those offended, says one editorial following the hateful affront to Catholics worldwide, are the very same people who regularly criticise Lalachus for being a fatty and complained about her appearing on the New Year’s Eve show (where the national TV beat out Antena3 in viewer numbers for the first time in fifteen years).

In the end, it’s not about religion, it’s about politics: where, of course, anything goes.   

How Time Flies

 

I remember enjoying the children’s comic called Century 21, and how I would wriggle with pleasure at the thought of that far-off future that awaited me (aliens, teleportation, Life in Spain, and the USA run by an orange lunatic).

Now here we are, all those years later, a quarter of the way towards Century 22.

I’m not sure how to write this, but things aren’t looking too good: global warming, food shortages, Artificial Intelligence and end-time politics.

Even though none of us will make it that far, our grand-children will, poor blighters.

I used to go up to the square outside the church in Mojácar on New Year’s Eve, where the town hall had prepared fireworks, cava, pots of grapes and silly hats.

Someone had underwritten a new system for the church bells, which used to be tugged with a dull clank (when the urge took him) by the resident campanologist, a dim-witted fellow in a dirty smock known as Lumphead. The new system, connected by satellite to some place in Germany, allowed us the dubious treat of a regular carillon on the hour, and a paroxysm of jubilation on certain events, of which la misa del gallo on Christmas Eve, a hundred different occasions during Easter and the village fiestas and of course New Year’s Eve were the foremost.

Thus we find me, with a thousand others, outside the church (few people ever go inside while things are going on there), watching the clock as it winds its way to midnight, on New Year’s Eve 1999 and the turnover from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.

That publication from my childhood was wrong about some stuff, but spot-on about others. Wasn’t it where the notion of the Millennium Bug would first be brought forward, where all the computers in the world would go clunk as the simple programming failed?

Ours did.

The church clock shuddered to a confused halt at precisely 11.59pm. We stared upwards, holding our breath, as absolutely nothing happened.

Cartoon from the incomparable Gahan Wilson

Around about four minutes into the new century, somebody blew a squib, releasing our doubt.

Huzzahs, champagne corks and fireworks rent the air.

We kissed, embraced and hugged our neighbours, as Mojácar, the only town in Spain to do so, apparently decided by Divine Will to remain firmly in the Twentieth Century (much to the noisy relief of many of the celebrants).

Anyhow, and sorry to relate, Mojácar eventually caught up and even overtook its peers.

But enough of that. Welcome to the Year 2025!

Who’d a thought it?   

Doubling Down for Christmas

 Last summer, I developed an ambitious plan for 2025. I would buy a house near the beach. I’d get a fancy new SUV, maybe that new American one which does seven miles to the gallon. I thought long and hard about acquiring a kangaroo from my Australian cousin as a house-pet, but after consideration, I was worried that it might lose its cool and punch the butler.

One has to make small sacrifices when planning one’s life following a windfall.

Of course, I’d continue writing my weekly Business over Tapas, with all those useful items about Spain, even if I spent half the year staying in a vacation-home in Hawaii with last-year’s Miss Milwaukee.

However, and inexplicably, my Christmas lottery number didn’t come first past the post; in fact – as usual – the damn thing was something of an also-ran.

So, OK, the Sunday celebrations were tearfully cancelled and I stayed in bed gloomily reading a book about home-economics.

I think it’s a pretty-good investment, though. For anything up to six months, one can enjoy a flutter of hope in winning a massive prize which, even after paying back 20% to the Government in tax – the self-same folk who print up and call the lottery in the first place – is going to see you back on top.

Now, that’s not a bad bet for just twenty euros.

The mathematical probability of winning the jackpot is precisely zero. But, who cares about that? The chances of me finding five euros down the back of the sofa yesterday were about the same, but here I am today, enjoying café and una tostada up at the High Table.

If you want to double your investment, by buying two decimos and thus having twice as big a chance of winning el Gordo, well sad to say… the same odds apply: zero again.

The only prize that does come along – sometimes – is to get un reintegro: your money back if the winning number ends in the same as your ticket. One chance in ten.

And yes, I was lucky enough to win such a prize (it probably comes from me diligently not walking under any ladders since last August, from tossing a cupful of salt over my left shoulder every now and again and saying ‘white rabbits’ in a commanding voice at the onset of each calendar month).

So, back I go to the expendería and with the money won, I buy a new ticket for Los Reyes, the Three Kings. But perhaps I’ve been setting my sights too high and should be more reasonably aiming for a second prize.

Let me see: a second-hand car, a subscription to Netflix, maybe a weekend in Marbella…