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Anti-Dot-Com Slogans Pepper SF
marks writes "Wired is carrying a story about some folks in San Francisco that are going around and putting up anti-dot-com stickers such as 'blowthedotoutyourass.com' and 'ButIDon'tNeedMyToothPasteDelivered.com.' They even have a website (blowthedotoutyourass.com) where other people can download and print their slogans and paste them other places. Its funny, in that sick, twisted, 'If I hear one more website commercial I'm gonna kill someone' way."
read the comments in the html
What the government (state and local) needs to understand is that they must funnel these huge tax surpluses that the Internet economy is creating into capital improvements for school and transportation. If they do, we'll cruise through the recession with new schools and low taxes that just break even on the operating costs.
-jwb (-= 0.02)
(Whoa, I'm replying to a JDax post! ;-) )
Everybody gets sick of stuff they hear all the time, whether it's Brittney Spears or "Cha-ching!" However, you don't very often see people going around vandalizing property over it. The reaction that this article (and many others that you can find at the SF Weekly or SF Gate) is talking about is a different phenomenon.
Namely, it's all about jealousy and class warfare and the incredibly immature (although we've probably all done it at some point) "I got here first, so I'm better" attitude.
Jealousy and class warfare? This shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone anywhere, but San Francisco (no, I refuse to call it "The City") is particularly notorious for it. The bonus is that it takes no thought whatsoever to join this movement -- just go after anything that looks like a yuppie status symbol: in order, the pager, the cell phone, the SUV, and San Francisco real estate.
An aside: I never really understood why yuppie youth thought they were cool because they carried a pager on their belt. To me, it's saying, "Yeah, I lack so much independence that I have to be at the beck and call of other people 24 hours a day." But I digress.
As for the third attitude I mentioned, it's hardly unique to San Francisco, but they seem to do it better than just about anyone save possibly New York City dwellers. Recently, a decent number of gay folks thought it would be fun to start vandalizing people's cars, because too many straight people were moving into their neighborhoods. (How's that for discriminatory irony!) You see it among the Slackers of NYC, too, because the mayor actually had to gall to make run down areas like Times Square safe for families to visit at night. Gasp! This definitely isn't limited to real estate, either, if you've ever heard anyone whine "Man, BandX and TVshowX were so cool, but now they suck because a lot of people like them. Mainstream bastards!"
In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that we're one of the groups that has moved into a place that was vacated by an organization mentioned elsewhere in this thread at Slashdot because they could no longer afford the rent. It still wouldn't change my opinion on this, though, as I've never been harrassed over it, nor has any of my property been vandalized.
I will say, however, that the San Francisco land grab is pretty ironic. Technology, and more specifically, the Internet, are supposed to increase our abilities to work together remotely, yet we're all fighting to squeeze into San Francisco, and paying through the nose for the honor.
And to JDax, since I didn't get a chance to reply last night: Hell, I wasn't going to blame Linux for bad weather forecasting, I was going to blame it for the bad weather itself! Global warming, the recent spate of droughts, floods, and natural disasters: all can be traced back to Torvalds and Cox. It's true! :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Yes, the sticker idea is a really good one. It requires no central orginisation and it allows you to communicate with a lot of people. Slashdoters should take notice of this idea because these are exactly the qualities we require too.
.edu domain, Utah library tests show 1 of 20 blocks is a bad block, etc).
Example: Many companies are selling (so called) mp3 players which are SDMI compliant. We could run a stickering campaign to attach stickers to the devices (on store sheleves) warning about all the bad things SDMI dose. Stickers could also be attached to shrink wrapped censorware which would warn the consumer about all the good sites the software blocks (like blocked feminists sites, 70% bad blocks in the
Anywho, the sticker campaign could be really effective for "make people think issues" (like the SF thing) or "get the word out issues" (like my examplkes). The only question is "how do we distribute the stickers?"
The safest way to distribute the stickers would be to run a web site providing the materials necissary to order the stickers from the various custom sticker outfits online.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
There were campaigns like this in the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago in the 60's, too. But, those were to keep African-Americans and "foreigners" from moving in or staying. Isn't this a sort of distressing reaction to a shift in population demographic? Isn't SF supposed to be an almost mystical land of community tolerance and acceptation? If "artists" (you know, the voice of culture, those who spend every day slaving to prove that human beings are at least a notch above rabid dogs) are stooping (or, god forbid, gladly taking up) subtle (and not-so-subtle) terror tactics, isn't the art scene already dead?
As for BlowItOutYourMonkeysButt.com (or whatever the hell it's called,) some of the material is funny (in a sort of AIRTOONS kinda way), but it seems to me that the whole campaign is just howling-at-the-moon brand rage: futile not only in its tacit attempt (stickers will kill this dot-com bullshit about as quickly as a water hose will put out the sun) but also in its execution (by setting yourself up as not-A [we hate them dot-com coloninc services!], you basically guarantee that every time you impress your message on someone[look, honey: those artists really hate e-colonics], you're also passing on the much-loathed message you're trying to resist [honey, do you think we should get ourselves colonically irrigated online?]. )
Oh, crap; does any of this make sense?
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
I'm sick of this internet BS too...everyone is E-this/E-that. I just want to read a book or something. Even my boss at work seems to be into this whole internet thing...he's always asking me, "Did you restart those webservers?" or "Hey..is that E4500 back up and working yet"/"Damnit, why has our bandwidth dropped?"
Personally, i don't know what he's talking about. I just took this job as a...i think they call me a SysAd or something...because they have a foosball table. Besides - no one has told me why they call the company i work for "Sun" anyway. I mean...it's really not that well lit around here anyways.
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
With a significant segment of the population here taking in income that is an order of magnitude higher than that of the general, non-high-tech population, a local inflation has made it very difficult for the working poor and artists who had long considered this a home to survive. The service industry here has gotten outright hostile to people it percieves as part of that economy - especially the MBA types (less so the geeks, since we're less into conspicuous consumption, even though we are just as guilty of pushing up rent costs.) Jobs at restaurants and cafes that pay $10 an hour go begging.
Also good targets for abuse are people who buy and drive SUVs in a crowded city without parking - there was a campaign encouraging locals to vandalize SUVs and luxury cars, partially out of vengeance and partially to scare away the rich arrivers, who are pushing up the cost of living. (It was called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.) Another source of contention is the property-tax exemption for so-called live-work spaces. Originally designed to motivate artists to move into troubled neighborhoods and convert industrial space into studio and work space, the vast majority of so-called live-work lofts are new construction that simply is built in an industrial style, which is bought for $200,000 to $600,000 a unit by trendy nouveux riches. Then these people pay no tax into the local school system, while local residents in regular housing (including those of us who rent, since it is part of the cost of renting) pay property tax.
I see a lot of vaguely guilty sympathy for these anti-tech-yuppie efforts among the creatives of the web industry - after all, many of them had hoped to be artists themselves - as well as among the more thoughtful tech geeks. Most real artists, unless they are very rich or married to someone who is, are leaving the Bay Area; San Francisco is in danger of falling off the art map.