Why ve I changed this blog's design to austere grey?
Because, over the past 48 hours, the world became a much grimmer place.
It had been doing so for a while
(witness things like the concentration of power in the hands of huge
corporations, the DMCA and
SSSCA bill and their ilk across the world, the appointment of
George W. Bush to the US presidency), but the horrific terrorist attack in the
US has taken things to a new level. The fact that we (both the US and Australia)
are likely to be enmeshed in a Vietnam-level war very soon (do you really think
Bush will let this slide once they hand over Bin Laden or whoever it was?)
hangs like a toxic black cloud over everything. And even if the war doesn't
come, or is over in days, this is likely to be used to centralise power and
strip away more of the freedoms people take for granted (the FBI will probably
get its mandatory key escrow laws after all; in fact, perhaps FBI-approved
keystroke loggers will be built into all new computers alongside the
copyright-enforcement chips). One way or another, we're all going to hell.
Yesterday I picked up the local street press (printed before news of the
attack) and Fringe Festival guide; reading them has been like looking at
artefacts from a parallel universe, a much more innocent, pleasant and less
scary one. A world in which people thought about seeing shows and listening
to music rather than whether they were to be the next casualties in an insane
war. It now seems that everything before those airliners full of terrified
people slammed into the World Trade Centre, all that frivolity, belongs to a
different world, one forever lost to us. The time for frivolity is over.