Facebook

Has there ever been a more fitting corporate meltdown than that endured by Facebook over the last two years? After perhaps swinging an election or two in 2016, the company has been dragged bawling through the mud more times than an Medieval Estonian peasant caught stealing horses. There have been non-apologies and listening tours, rebrands and reach-outs, Senate committee hearings, slap-downs and back-pedals, faked humility and conspiracy theories, inquests and campaigns and furious denunciations, ponderous op-eds and stock-price massacres, would-be trust-busters on the make, crisis management PR operations and parade ground about-faces.

A wise meme once said that you should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. If you want to know who said that, you can look it up online. But you don’t need to look it up online, because the internet has freed us all from the bonds of copyright law and common decency. If you did look it up online, you will find that this aphorism was originally popularized in the 1980s in The Jargon File, a computer programmers’ handbook. So needy were the nerds to avenge themselves on the physical world, source of their steamy-spectacled, spotty-faced humiliations, that they tossed this aphorism around without tracking down its source.

Modern tyrants have always looked to antiquity for models of how to exercise and display their power. For Joseph Stalin self-improvement did not mean listening to more audiobooks or enrolling in bi-weekly meditation classes. A lifelong bookworm who kept improbably long office hours, Stalin enjoyed reading about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. Yet the most heavily annotated work in his 20,000 volume library was an account of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire by his favourite historian, Robert Vipper. The terrible, godlike power of the Caesars was something he could relate to. Adolf Hitler, taking a more dilettantish route, looked to classical aesthetics in painting, sculpture and architecture to infuse German culture with his ideas about race.

They used to say that the primary function of a boat was to be beautiful. I suppose that is why boats were feminine, as in ‘she’s a real beauty, that one’. Puritan is certainly a beauty and I’ve had a great time on board, especially when anchoring near some modern horror or other, bloated and overstuffed with ‘toys’, its occupants reflecting the boat: fat, ugly and invasive. Why is it that boats reflect their owners, as dogs do, and as women used to, although one can get oneself killed nowadays for describing a female as ‘owned’? Show me a tart and she’s sure to be with a James Stunt type.