KEY POINTS:
It was almost inspirational. They hated me, and I was hooked.
When one of my Bush-queasy columns turned up on a website as a "major barf alert", I learned I was a "snivelling brain-dead apologist coward", a "libhole who couldn't handle America", and, my personal favourite, I had
become a multiple-choice question.
Tracey Barnett is a "a) carbuncle, b) ingrown toenail, c) haemorrhoid, d) boring nobody." That one earned a pride of place near my tin of breath mints bearing George Bush's smiling face and the label "national embarrassmints".
I was smitten. There were pages of entries. I'd never been anybody's carbuncle before.
With all due respect to Sue Bradford, the only difference between her internet profile and mine is that no one on this site could spell a word as long as assassination, so I got off easily.
The internet's Harry Potter-esque invisibility cloak was working its magic. I can't remember the last time someone looked me in the eye and told me I was a haemorrhoid. Who needs the societal minefields of face-to-face interaction when you can hear the real poop on e-street without stepping out your door?
Strangely, the internet is almost functioning in a way that is more real than reality.
I felt as if I had stuck microphones on the beer bottles of the enemy to eavesdrop as I never could in a real bar.
Life doesn't give you the gift of buck-naked truth often, but the audacious and addicting reality of the internet does.
My gushing anti-fans weren't particularly poetic but they were an expression of opinion you'd be hard-pressed to find in any other cultural forum. Hearing that unedited voice was valuable and interesting.
MySpace, YouTube, and countless blogs are proof that the internet is the ultimate celebration of the individual citizen, right? Our golden e-ticket democracy has finally hatched.
Not so fast, according to Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and virtual-reality pioneer. He argues the individual is starting to lose out to an algorithm, and it's not pretty.
Almost everything we do on the web is controlled by collective voting with our eyeballs.
Every time you click on to aggregator sites like Google or Digg, you and millions of others are registering your vote for that site's popularity at the top of the page. Together, you form a collective voice that decides who will make it into the pile-up for greatest-hits status.
But what is that collective vote doing to the losers? If your views are not sexy, strange or attention-grabbing enough to garner mouse clicks, you may show up - but not for long.
Lanier calls this snowballing pursuit of collective-think Digital Maoism, according to The Edge website. He fears the individual voice is getting lost.
The collective chorus is so loud; soloists are getting biffed into the orchestra pit.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that can be edited by anyone, is both a celebrated and derided expression of what some call this hive mind.
Many academics in particular are derisive of its mistakes and centrist perspective.
Users can go in to change information at will as they did just minutes after Anna Nicole Smith's death when someone added, "On February 8, 2007, the b ... bought the farm."
Recently, a 24-year-old, posing as a professor of religious studies, was caught making more than 20,000 alterations.
That's more like: join the Wiki Nation and see the whirled.
The collective voice usually corrects itself (as Anna Nicole's site did quickly), but with all this mass harmony of a monolithic perspective, aren't we really just subsuming richer individual solos?
Jaron Lanier fears we are. He argues it is dangerous to see this collective voice as all-wise.
Not only is mass consciousness fallible (Y2K mania), but often guilty of something far worse, blandly siphoning out the value of singular expression.
What's more, it's spreading.
People are voted off the island in a giant popularity poll. We create pop idols by mass national vote.
Lanier writes on The Edge, "John Lennon wouldn't have won. He wouldn't have made it to the finals. Or, if he had, he would have ended up a different sort of person and artist.
"The same could be said about Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Bob Dylan (please!)."
As is it now, I'd wager Janet Frame is getting whooped by Lonelygirl15 big-time. Maybe that's okay, as long as Frame's entry doesn't fall off the bottom of the page.
What makes our culture rich is not design by committee, consensus art, or an aggregator site's greatest hits of history.
It is the expression of a singularly stunning pen. And, even occasionally, a dust-up with the haemorrhoid-carbuncle boys who have now been sadly aggregated into near e-oblivion.
If they are our future, I hope they write again soon. I already miss them.
