Flipping the bird at answers

So it turns out this Lee Siegel fella might be a total douchebag.

He got busted for sockpuppetry at his blog for The New Republic, was hounded out of there and proceeded to get angry about internet anonymity, among other things wrong with the internet, in his book, Against the Machine. That this book is subtitled, ‘Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob’ should have said enough. Siegel’s posts have been deleted from The New Republic.

I though I might have found a discerning, dissenting view of the internet, which I have been extolling the virtues of endlessly, lately. But the more I delved into this character, the more I realised I was dealing with the sort of person who rallies against baseball caps for affecting ‘a lazily defiant casualness’.

This reminded me of Andrew Bolt hating on tracksuit pants once, which unfortunately I couldn’t dig out of the archives.

I’m dismayed that there is another person out there like Bolt. Maybe I should still give Siegel a go – Socratic ignorance and all that. But it’s hard to respect a guy who began criticising the internet when he found himself challenged by the unwashed masses of ‘blogofascists’.