SUNDAY BREAKFAST

This is the second Sunday Doc40 breakfast partaken behind the iron curtain of a Blogger Content Warning. For those of you who are not involved, the topic is probably getting boring, but what-the-fuck? It’s pissing me right off. A couple of times this week I was about ready to quit the whole thing and find some other means to waste my free time. It wasn’t the simple matter of the actual content warning. As some well-wishers on Facebook suggested, it was something of a badge on honour. The real problem is that it royally screwed up search engines and consigned the accumulated Doc40 random data-fest to inaccessible oblivion – and there is some vitally arcane stuff in the Doc40 archive. Traffic dropped by 40% and I was at a loss. I had dug into the non-human circular labyrinth of Blogger and achieved nothing. No explanation or appeal was offered. I had considered restarting the whole thing on Wordpress or some other platform, but I had to ask myself just how much time could I really devote to what is, after all, a piece of unpaid internet performance art. But then I realised something. The traffic might be dwindling, but the readers who have stayed with me are the hardcore regulars and I value our mutually created virtual funhouse too much to simply dump it. Also I began to suspect that the content warning was somehow screwing up my tracker. I was seeing no referrals even from my own Facebook links and blogs in the same philosophical neighbourhood, when I knew that they existed. Thus I wasn’t even certain of the figures. I also became recalcitrant, because I strongly suspected that my troubles were the handiwork of trolls with a new weapon. They can flag as offensive anything they don’t like or with which they disagree, and create the kind of damage that has just caused me almost to quit the business. Then I saw a story on Dangerous Minds about how the mega-blog Ars Techina had been royally screwed on Facebook by what seemed to be malicious copyright complaints. The culture wars continue being fought in cyberspace and the trolls have found a new weapon. Unfortunately my moral scruples will not allow me to use it against anything I might find offensive. This whole business requires thought, discussion, and definite pressure on Facebook, Blogger and other providers to check more thoroughly that complainants are legitimate. In the meantime, I carry on while wondering what the fuck will happen next.

The secret word is Struggle