Guilty, says the collective
This kid, pictured above, tells ABC News today, “Right now pretty much the internet thinks it is me.” (Excerpt and link, below.)
He’s been receiving death threats and hate mail since the shooting at Virginia Tech yesterday. His passion for firearms, his personal circumstances and Web 2.0 chatter in blog services, chat rooms and Twitter, have conspired to link him to the mass shooting yesterday.
Meanwhile, marketers and tech journalists are busy parroting the Web 2.0 message–that groups, not individuals, will produce the internet’s “content” through their “collective intelligence”–at a convention this week in San Francisco.
Many more individuals (such as those with non-politically correct hobbies) will find themselves in opposition to what the Institute for the Future‘s Jane McGonigal calls this “collective life worth living.”
McGonigal this week is speaking on the subject of “hacking happiness.” She says her work is based on the positive psychology movement started by UPenn professor Marty Seligman.
McGonigal’s quest for human happiness has its roots in animal suffering.
In 1965, Seligman conducted sadistic animal experiments–including trapping and shocking dogs in cages–to show that animals learn helplessness, according to a recent audio blurb by Alan Watt, and an article in the Economist.
| He is Asian, he lived in the dorm where the first shooting occurred and he recently broke up with his girlfriend — he also happens to have a web blog packed with pictures in which he poses with firearms. On the Internet, Wayne Chiang is as good as convicted. |
| “Right now pretty much the Internet thinks it is me, Chiang told ABC News. “I am just interested in trying to clear my name. |
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Hopefully, as aboard Battlestar Galactica, there will be sufficient booze and tobacco in the European Space Agency’s planned Mars spacecraft simulation.
