Published: Wednesday, 21st July, 2010 9:30am

WE'RE WITH STUPID

by David Walker

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People are thick.

We know this for a fact – it’s science - yet quite often we can still be left surprised, occasionally even fall-to-your-knees-and-beg-forgiveness-to-the-heavens staggered, at the sheer depth of stupidity that faces us on a daily basis.

A decisive case in point was the recent Facebook page set up in tribute to gun-toting meathead Raoul Moat. Thanks to the kind of frogspawn that breed in stagnant online ponds, this real-life Action Man gone wrong became a ‘legend’ on the social networking site. It didn’t help that Gazza turned up during his final moments with a bag of chicken and some beers for his so-called pal ‘Moaty’. Idiots attract idiots, you see.

In the alternate dumb reality that is the internet, it seems shooting innocent people becomes heroism while rolling about the countryside like you’re back in ‘Nam, even sleeping in a drain next to last week’s toilet paper, turns into the courageous act of a justice-imparting, truth-seeking, lone revolutionary, up there with Che Guevara and Ghandi.

The creator of this so-called ‘tribute’ to Moat was revealed to be benefits sponge Siobhan O’Dowd, who evidently matched her hero for foresight and all-round Nobel Prize potential. You could attempt to blame her for not considering her actions – but then it’s difficult to make the truly daft accountable. It’s like trying to blame a rock for being thrown through a window.

Some call the internet a forum for all viewpoints – democracy in action no less. I would call it too often a hiding place for cowards who lack the courage of their convictions to declare war anywhere but from behind a monitor.

Idiots attempting insults; stupid people with too much time on their stupid hands; we see them all on our own ‘News’ website everyday, often pretending to be others, and they’re on every newspaper comments section going.

It’s as if a clarion call to the anonymous hecklers of the world was sounded the very minute the internet was switched on - like a massive stampede of mouse-wielding Orcs, but with worse personal hygiene.

With anonymity on their side, small people with big keyboards become extremely tall; and featherweight scrappers pick fights with heavyweight champions. Suddenly emboldened, they start spewing the kind of narrow-minded, xenophobic, bigoted bile that you wouldn’t even dare to dream of aiming at a Nazi war criminal if they were in the same room.

Prior to the internet, these people were the ignored, the spurned, the social lepers of the world; now they have a platform and a lectern from which their little brains can almost be seen.

So we’re agreed then. These people are thick.

Yet, even when people get a little smarter than thick, they can still come up wanting of actual common sense when technology gets thrown into the mix. The truly Godforsaken global monolith that is Apple provides a handy case in point; they are purveyors of gadgets you simply don’t need.

The iPod was fine; a tiny jukebox allowing you to carry around thousands of songs – in effect, your entire music collection on the move. Great idea; well done.

But the iPhone is the ultimate in useless – in fact, if you’ve been to London recently, you’ll know that there’s literally herds upon herds of cross-eyed people roaming the streets and making a vague gurgling noise as they prod their shiny little screens with their sweaty person thumbs. There they are – the ones with their heads bowed, dribbling into infinity on the escalators.

Not content with allowing you to make calls AND have the ability to send text messages too, the iPhone appeals to the novelty-loving ADHD dullard in all of us with its endless catalogue of forgettable add-ons. Give these people a balloon instead; they’ll still run around giggling, but at least they will get some exercise.

The iPhone’s applications are not just ridiculous and redundant; they’re utterly boring and would send any right-thinking stranger running away screaming, fearing for their sanity.

In the food ‘apps’ section alone (even the widely accepted abbreviation sticks in my throat), there’s a ‘Wine PhD’, ‘VeganYumYumMobile’, whatever that is, and a ‘Sushipedia’. Oh, the humanity. Worse, in the health and fitness section, there’s a ‘Zen Timer’, and a ‘Food Additives Checker’. The sheer post-modern horror continues, even deepens, in the ‘Productivity’ section - surely for the ultimate office loser - where you can find a ‘Meetingzone’, a ‘ToDo Map’ and a ‘Figures Multi-Purpose Calendar’.

‘Split The Atom On Your Lunchbreak’? Why not. ‘Brain Surgery for Dummies’? Oh go on then. ‘Fly A Plane In A Day’? Sure, but let me check my ‘Air Control Tracker’ app first.

My God, in the latest sinister development, now you can even see each other on the screen while you talk. Surely that’s the brilliance of the basic phone? That you can give the illusion of empathetic communication, while masking the fact that you’re actually not in the place where you’re meant to be and that you really don’t care.

Soon you won’t be able to leave the country without showing your iPhone to customs. If you don’t have one you’ll get searched and interrogated, intimately, before being deported – to space.

It’s all just a massive waste of time, money and electricity, masquerading as life-enhancement, as some vague belief that you’ve suddenly become a much more useful person with so much more to offer the human race. Face it; you’re useless, just like your nonsense-filled phone.

The iPad doesn’t fare much better. It’s an iPhone that you can’t fit in your pocket; an unwieldy chopping board-cum-frisbee that instantly makes you a mugger’s friend. Filled to bursting with junk, the clutter of infinite oblivion, it’s designed purely to stave off the impending sense of inevitable death.

Thanks to its big stupid prod screen, in double quick time you can play a video, open a photo album, simultaneously charter a rocket to the moon and pop a microwave meal in the back. Three and a half minutes on high and you’ve probably got a cure for cancer. Ding!

If there’s a massive technological meltdown at Apple or Facebook HQ tomorrow, then frankly, it won’t have come soon enough for the nation’s iBerks.

 

What more is there to say about the Largs traffic management scheme? Nothing. And why is that? Because everyone knows how bad it is, everyone has complained about it till the cows have come home and gone away again – and because Amey and Transport Scotland know exactly what is wrong with it. Now the time has come for them to do something about it.

Sadly, this will involve them having to spend money – and probably more than they’d even budgeted for before swingeing cuts came in - but then that’s what you get when you try to fob off an entire town with a poor man’s idea of a traffic scheme and find yourself having to deal with the repercussions.