Name that curmudgeon

Thor

Thor Iverson
The date: summer 2000.

The place: a winery newsletter.

The reason: because I'm cleaning out the basement, and throwing zillions of trees' worth of PR effluvia out. And because this was (briefly) saved from the outflow.

I quote:



I don't care how many individual billionaires the internet has floated, I still think it's just a fad.

People no longer punctuate, they don't capitalize, they don't use complete sentences, they don't form complete thoughts, they don't make cogent or well-reasoned points, and they don't proof-read before hitting the send button. I blame the internet for all that. [...] I blame the internet, with its exclusive emphasis on lightning speed over quality, and its aversion to capital letters and to spaces between words, for the bastardization of English that we're presently witnessing. [...] In my opinion, people might just as well send actual garbage to their friends, like fish bones and potato peels and oily rags, as electronic garbage such as that.

But I just feel in my bones that most people who buy things on the internet are insomniac zombies who have nothing going on in their lives, no friends, no social skills, so they sit awake at 3 in the morning playing with their keyboards and ordering books from you-know-who, and wines from obscure wineries they know nothing about.



Any takers? Long-timers should actually find this pretty easy.
 
On my wall at work I have a 1997 NY Post article talking about how internet stock trading will never become a big thing since some sites have experienced outages and no one will ever go back to a site that experiences an outage.
 
Cole got it. Not too hard, really, if you remember the rants.

And yes, there's some fun in that essay being online. But kudos to him for allowing it to go up anyway. (I guess I'm assuming he knows. Has he ever relented and acquired an email address? I suppose I probably won't find him on Twitter...)

Jay, if I spent all my time reading some of the stuff I'm throwing out I'd probably find some doozies along those lines. I did used to write quite a bit about matters digital for one publication or another, and paging through it recently I was (back-patting here) pretty darned impressed with my predictive abilities regarding the net and its emergent trends. The part that has me laughing, though, is that I repeatedly insist what we'd now call social media would never catch on, because online folk are just too individualistic. Nice call, Thor. *sigh*
 
Funny: I still have the missive he issued to explain why he needed to raise his pinot prices to match the up-and-comers who were charging what the market could bear (and then some). He said it was a matter of matching perception to quality, or some other such bullshit.
 
Wasn't he right, though? Someone on one of the fora -- this is obviously going back a while -- tracked his scores before and after the price increase, and they went up, just as he predicted.
 
originally posted by Thor:
Wasn't he right, though? Someone on one of the fora -- this is obviously going back a while -- tracked his scores before and after the price increase, and they went up, just as he predicted.

That's the pathetic part, he was right.
 
Back
Top