Jumat, 18 Januari 2013

The Internet: Unlimited Opportunities for Being Terrible

By Ben Scott


Opportunity - the Chinese have over 8700 words for it, if I recollect my university Spanish class correctly.

The internet has proven to be a boon for all types of marketing and promotions - you can order everything from Vi8gra to Vigara to Vaigira with just a few clicks of your mouse, swipes from your finger, or even without your intervention because you have malware in your browser.

It's something about the mesmerizing allure of the raw potential of an unexplored market - the wide-open vistas of sheer promise, the waiting tsunami of money which draws in souls from all walks of life and every corner of the planet - as well as those posessed of every sort of moral failing.

Now a few entrepreneurial types have invented a devious new way to earn money. Just put people's mug shots online, SEO the living daylights out of them, and abolish a person's chances of ever getting a job again.

Then - and this is the genius bit - charge them hundreds or thousands of dollars to take the photos down when they come begging you.

You see, in most U.S. states, the activities of law enforcement are placed online for public review and scrutiny. This includes mugshots of citizens who are taken into custody, whether it's for manslaughter, or banking fraud resulting in global economic disaster (just joking, obviously), or even because they grabbed the wrong suspect and he got released an hour later.

Far from neglecting this valuable natural source of public humiliation, with just a few clicks of your mouse and some devious manipulation of search engine ranking cues, you can guarantee that anyone Googling a person's name will be presented with that mugshot displayed front-and-center atop the list of results. Forever. (just ask Rick Santorum....)

So the next time you walk into a job interview, you'd better have a pretty funny tale to tell about that time you got booked by the police because you look a bit like a mugger when you wear an old grey hoodie...

People like this are why I'm convinced we are doomed.




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