Monday, December 31, 2007

Civilisation of Snitches

The larger, more successful websites on the internet have many things disturbing in common. One of these is the ability to flag 'inappropriate' material.

This is actually snitching, and this snitching is anonymous. At least to the person who posted the flagged material (the websites themselves know who you are, that you're a snitch, that they can't sell certain ('inappropriate') material to you). But the rest of us lose out. The rest of us are snitched upon. The rest of us get censored, with very little effort on the corporation's part, and very little evidence that it ever occurred. And there's nothing we can do about it, except re-post the 'inappropriate' material.

For example, the video "Censoring Cunt" is a piece of art that shows some of the art that has been censored over the years. It was originally posted on youtube, but ironically it was censored and removed. It is now hosted on google video (owned by the same company), and hasn't yet been censored.

So stop snitching, stop censoring, stop flagging.