Yeah, Michael Kinsley, I'm Talking to You

As happens sometimes, I spent 20 minutes posting an angry rant on a message board, and then thought: Why the hell did I waste the time and energy on this post when I haven't blogged in weeks?

The backstory on the following rant: I used to do improv in Chicago, and god willing, I will do improv again, in some city, somewhere. In the meantime, I still read the Chicago Improv Network on a regular basis. For one thing, a lot of old friends hang out and post there, so I can keep up on what they're doing. For another, it's actually a tremendously funny community.

Maybe half a year ago, CIN put up an improvwiki, an online encyclopedia of improv terms and traditions. For an artform and a community that is continually changing and evolving, it was an awesome resource, and the people behind it did a fantastic job.

This is where it gets sad.

Nobody involved with CIN, myself included, understands how to lock the wiki so that only registered members can post or edit items. This makes it essentially an unmoderated message board. To put this in terms of the wild west badlands the internet has become, it's like stripping your virginal 16 year old daughter naked and leaving her on the front steps of a whorehouse and hoping to find her, virtue intact, still standing there when you stop by two weeks later.

At this point, the CINwiki is pretty much gone, the original posts destroyed by spam bots that roam the internet looking for places to shove pointless links to hot girlssssss and c*ck akshun.

And I have to say this, even though I recognize its total obviousness even before I type the words:

Where is the fucking logic in spamming the world with links for porn and cheap Samsung ringtones? Dude! If I even WANTED a Samsung ringtone, the LAST PLACE I would go is a link I found WEDGED into a website about SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY!

The Nigerian Treasury scams, okay, I see the crazy (yet criminal) logic of posting all over hell and gone with your sad, broken-English stories of coups gone wrong and wire transfers for $K. Poor, helpless son of the recently deposed Mboto Omejawe, how could you possibly know that CIN/Craiglist/CourtTV message board thread about "Intervention" and that one girl meth addict who thought she was god/AICN isn't the best place for you to go looking for a trustworthy new internet friend?

Economists often say things that make no sense and then they say "Well, that's the logic of the marketplace!" I want to know: Where is the marketplace's logic when some bot is cramming the CIN wiki with links to herbal male enhancement drugs?

I think these same self-satisfied economists should suit up, ninja style, and hunt down mfers who abuse the commons in this fashion. And they could call themselves the Econo-ninjas, and have a catchphrase like "Help yourself to a heap spoonful of econo-justice!"

Oh, who am I kidding? I know this will continue, unabated, until the collapse of the global economy in 2016 and the consequent reversion to salt as the one true currency. But it makes a nice change from thinking about wounded soldiers lying on a piss-soaked mattress.