I ran into an engaging piece in the New yorker, “”Second Career Dept” by Antonia Hichens that was entitled, “What do you do after you’ve been fired by the Trump Administration?” I was hooked. She goes on to explain about how a new Internet Service at cameo.com where, for a fee, you can send a video message from a menagerie of semi-famous people like George Papadopoulpos (whose very name stretches your spelling ability) who, if you can still recall, was one of Trump’s early advisors. As an example, for a Father’s Day gift you can send Dad a video featuring Papadopoulpos (or even a Trump impersonator) wishing him well.
Intrigued, I visited cameo.com to see for myself their list of semi-famous celebs and how much they charge for the honor of receiving a video containing their best wishes. Obviously, no one Really famous (like Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen) needs to stoop to this level to make a living but there are a surprising number of second-rate celebs who enjoy or need to do this.
Upon entering the site one is met with a header page that is essentially a table of contents indicating various categories such as “Popular” “Sports” “Comedy” etc where you can pick a pseudo celebrity and the type of message you want them to send to your chosen loved one.. Before you commit to purchase, you may view sample videos that the celeb has already delivered so you can have a better idea of what you’re buying into.
I sampled Isiaih Thomas, Basketball Hall of Famer (Cost $245) and got a short but inspiring pep talk; (Brett Favre was $300) On the other hand, I found Gilbert Godfried’s schtick costing $150 disappointing but was quite amused by John Di Domenico’s impersonation of Trump for $180.
Not to mention, there are over 250 Drag Queens from which to choose. Just browsing the site was an eye-opening and nice mindless distraction from our “New Normal”.
Cameo’s COO, Arthur Leopold is quoted in the article, “We’ve democratized access to talent and celebrity. You don’t have to go to a fund-raiser at the Beverly Hills hotel anymore”. At first blush this may sound like pretty high-falutin sentiments for a purveyor of bubble gum for the mind, but think about this: isn’t one of the great things about the Internet that it is a leveler of opportunity --- resulting in greater social justice? Isn’t that a sweet addition to a democratic republic? Or not.
Anyone with a cell phone can access the Internet for entertainment, to shop, and even to access information to help make decisions to a degree greater than all the kings and queens of past centuries. Granted, it sure does feel like drinking from a fire hose and it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff but after a while one learns which sources to trust and which to go to for their needs. My favorite medical site for health issues is The Mayo Clinic and I trust the New York Times, The Economist, and the Christian Science Monitor for general news reporting. My favorite comic strips are --- wait, let’s not go there. But you get the general idea.
I worked on the IILIAC IV project at the University of Illinois back in the late sixties. It was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects agency) of the DOD( Department of Defense) but we perhaps over-optimistically believed the purpose of the project was to make the world a better place to live in. Using the ILLIAC IV, a massively parallel computer (it had 256 CPUs working in parallel), we could, for example, write useful algorithms that could predict the weather faster and more accurately. Of course, this was also of great interest to the Department of Defense. DOD had another important goal: they wanted a computer system that could withstand a nuclear attack. The obvious solution was to decentralize the location of our computing power by physically separating individual computers but linking them together via a Network so that they could cooperate and share information and in a safe, secure manner. In this way if one computer on the network went down for any reason, information could be routed around to another active computer on the multiply-connected network. Later, when free internet speech became an issue, this feature led to the aphorism coined by John Gilmore, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Gilmore (born 1955) is an American computer science innovator, Libertarian, Internet activist, and one of the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Wikipedia)
As the ARPAnet morphed into the Internet and civilian control, it was used first primarily by scientists worldwide to share papers. Personally, I found it very useful to be sitting in Champaign-Urbana Illinois running my programs on the computers at Stanford Research Institute (S.R.I.) in Menlo Park, Calif., U.C. because it was two hours earlier there and turn-around times for jobs submitted was way better.
Once the Internet was completely opened to individuals and businesses, the advantages of information sharing blossomed and today we reap those benefits as well as the problems. Many sites offer abundant services but at the price of giving up our personal privacy. There is also a real danger of addiction especially to webtsites that offer pornograpy, games, auction sites, social networking and just plain old surfing the net. There is a fair and balanced discussion of the Internet Addiction Disorder on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder
In the meanwhile, stay safe and, just like you adhere to the social contract by not running Stop signs, wear your mask.
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