Call for a radical new PC connector

Remember those "hole-and-peg" sets you may have had when you were a kid? Still a tousle-haired toddler, new to the world, you struggled to insert a star-shaped peg into a triangular-shaped hole. This exercise was meant to teach you a lesson - the lesson that the world had rules: square pegs go into square holes, round pegs into round holes

If only this could have prepared you for owning a PC. Hair no less tousled, you grunt and strain on two knees and one hand, the other hand unnaturally bent around the back of your PC case, only your twitching feet indicating to the casual passer-by that there is anyone under the desk.

You know exactly where the connector is in the PC case (USB, keyboard, mouse, monitor, take your pick). You even know which way up it is. There should be no need to actually have to SEE it. It ought to be a simple matter to just insert the cable you had correctly orientated prior to plunging yourself into the dusty netherworld that is the space under your desk.

But... It is the old "square peg in the round hole" situation. No amount of fiddling or twiddling seems to produce any result. You blindly try the USB connector both ways up - neither way fits. You rotate the keyboard connector through 720 degrees, yet at no point does it slot in and end your misery.

The temperature is now at dangerous tropical levels under the desk. You have inhaled several kilograms of dust. The quiet weeping which has been filtering up from the depths of your being now threatens to turn into a primal howling born of helpless rage.

You give up and drag the entire PC case out from under your desk, whip it around with a little more force than was strictly necessary so you can access the rear panel and, now that you can actually see the socket... in goes the connector first time, slotting into place as though it were the simplest thing in the world.

This is a call for a radical new variety of connector - one that can be inserted, blind, in one simple move. This will take a new breed of inventor, one who can think out of the box. The rewards could be huge - Nobel fame, riches beyond your wildest dreams, a happier humanity that will be able to forget the connector-based frustrations of yesteryear and focus on making this world a better place. Are you that person?

Internet sweat-shops, coming soon to a slum near you

Surely it is only a matter of time before the Internet becomes as exploitative as the real world (if it already hasn't) and we are forced to deal with examples of forced/bonded labour and modern-day slavery even in the online world!

I will give you a couple of examples where things seem to be going that way already:

1) you may not be aware of this, though it is not an especially new story (see here for example). Did you know that there are companies who employ workers solely for the purpose of "farming" online "gold" in online games like World of Warcraft? A "day's work" in one of these places means playing an online video game all day every day, solely in order to collect the in-game "gold" (the inverted commas means it's not REAL gold, ok!?), which the company's owner sells for real money to players, usually those with cash, i.e. from Western countries.

Why is it exploitative? Perhaps because as usual, very low-cost (i.e. "low-paid") labour is being used to supply a need in the western markets, but more to the point, it creates a class system within the online world. Well-off, western players play games for fun, poor underprivileged 3rd-world workers slave away within the same game, collecting resources for the rich people so they can continue to have fun.

2) a market exists for extremely low-paid web services, particular blogging. Simply put, someone wants to start up a blog which they will make money from, usually by selling ad space. But they need content for that (content being the current reigning male monarch), and they ain't got none. What do they do? Employ someone to write the content for them, preferably for a pittance. See the Problogger Jobs board for examples of blog-writing jobs that are paid as little as a few dollars per blog post.

What's the problem here? Well, no high-quality blog writer is going to agree to write a blog post a day for $5 per post, unless of course they live in a less-developed country and there we are again... Problem there is, you pay for what you get - I get really cheap Chinese-made T-shirts on my local market, but the sleeves usually fall off after two washes. Likewise, if your blog is in English and you employ a non-native speaker to write it at below-the-breadline wages, you will get what you paid for... A sleeve-less blog. But there's a market for those, too...

So much for the internet being some kind of egalitarian Utopia...

With all this in mind, I would like to hereby declare that no cheap 3rd world labour was used to create any of the posts on Future-Phobia, and incidentally, no animals were harmed in the site's making either.

Dehumanising webmaster jargon! (Did you know you are a hit?)

Did you know that you are just a "hit", a mere statistic, a "click", an item of traffic? Well you would know this if you followed some of the webmaster chat that goes on, on forums such as Digital Point. The most important thing for most webmasters who are in it for business, is that they get as many people visiting their sites as possible, and as high a percentage of those people as possible clicking on advertisements, buying stuff or whatever other way it is they are earning money from their site.

Only thing is, they do not use words like "people" most of the time! In fact, to read some of the discussions, you might not realise they are talking about human beings at all! Here are some samples from a thread chosen completely at random from Digital Point:

"I checked my logs yesterday and I found that so far in June google has sent me as much traffic as they did in all of May...."

Say what? Traffic? What, like cars, buses, etc?

"The funny thing was that i also got a few from Yahoo also - and this is rare."

"A few"? A few what?! Lesser-spotted marsh-warblers?

"so most of the traffic there was only one or 2 hits per keyword phrase."

Now you've really lost me! Hits? Keyword phrase?

In fact, at the time of press, this thread did not mention human beings one single time!

Now, all business is dehumanising to an extent, but still, in the majority of businesses, their operators at least come into contact with the end consumer in some way. In this world of web business the only point of contact with the "customer" (aha, didn't know you were a customer!) is through looking at statistics in web-server logs (or bank account). So it is understandable to an extent that they can only refer to you by a logged IP address, or a "referral code", and that, in direct proportion to the popularity of a site, you simply become a statistic.

But this goes much further: for example, webmasters often make tiny tweaks to their sites - say by moving an advertisement to a slightly different part of the page, to see what the result will be on their "stats". This result usually translates to a different "CTR" - click-through rate - (the percentage of visitors that clicks on an ad), or "conversion rate" (the percentage of visitors that buys whatever they are selling) and these minute changes often yield slightly better "results" over a longer period. So you might not know it, but you are really just a tiny blip in a number-manipulation game.

The real-world equivalent might be something like a soft-drinks manufacturer making a minute change to the flavour of their beverage and seeing what that translates into in terms of sales over the coming year. But in the web-world, the results of these changes can sometimes be seen in minutes!

This kind of impersonal treatment of humans as statistics is the sort of thing that could boil over into revolution. The question is, are you and I, my precious hits, I mean, dear visitors, going to stand for this? And another question is, what can we really do about it? Perhaps in the long-term, web users will get wise to this, and companies will be forced to return to good old, personal customer service.

In the meantime, say with me, "I am not a hit, I am a free man...!"