It has occurred to me that as the years go by I start to sound more and more like an anti-BBC, anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist nutcase; the sort who skulks around on forums extolling the virtues of indy media, ranting about the police surveillance state and how fair trade is a scam and we should all be growing our own organic food.
However, I think my distinguishing feature is that I’m not convinced it’s all some deliberate conspiracy. Almost all of my rants about the failings of any particular organisation stem from a belief that I think they’re just not very good at what they do. Examples:
- I regularly find myself talking about how bad BBC News is, but not because I think they’re left-wing or controlled by the government; I just think they’re bad journalists. Especially Rory Cellan-Jones.
- I’m quick to point and laugh whenever Google fall foul of violations of privacy law, not because I think they’re evil and exploiting users, but because I think they rush into things without really thinking them through more often than they should for people who are are supposedly very clever.
- I’m opposed to national ID cards, but not because of a fear of the government knowing too much about me; I just know they’ll bugger it up and all our records will be sent to the Russian Mafia one day by some useless prat who thought that email attachment he opened was going to be naked photos of Maria Sharapova.
In short, I think it’s all too easy to ascribe to malice what can more easily be explained as incompetence. Conspiracy theorists, take note.
