

A Declaration of Cyber-War - boh
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-201104

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NY_USA_Hacker
"They faced a crisis which did not yet have a name, but which seemed, at
first, to have the potential to bring industrial society to a halt."

Hmm .... Did it now? And, did that happen?

And from where do we read this? 'Vanity Fair' you say?

That magazine is for what? For some especially emotional women, and a few
similar men, worrying about their feelings about fashion?

Do the readers or the writers there actually know anything about computing?
Or, instead, is all the content just yet another old media application of
formula fiction as in "The sky is falling" or

"Oh, we got trouble. Right here in River City. Trouble starts with a 'T', And
that rhymes with a 'V', And that stands for 'virus'."

to grab people by the heart, the gut, or below the belt to get eyeballs for
the ads?

More generally, the content is from old media 'writers' who, in old media, as
in McLuhan's "the medium is the message", tried to write for the 'least common
denominator' (LCD) of an audience of millions.

And what is that LCD? Technical? No. Emotional? Yes. Only a small fraction of
the population is very technical, but a huge fraction is quite emotional. So,
the "message" was all emotionalism and not rationalism and certainly not
rationalism about technology.

Generally, then for any person A who works in field X, actually to get paid in
field X the person A has to know something about field X, know more than the
LCD of some audience of millions independent of X. Then when person A reads
some old media LCD content about X, they conclude that the writer didn't know
anything about X and once again tosses aside old media.

Here on HN we see the pattern clearly: It's super tough to find anyone writing
for old media who can write as much as a single, significantly meaningful
paragraph on computing without looking uninformed on computing.

So we are seeing "the medium is the message" again: Now the "medium" is the
Internet which permits focused content from experts in that content, and the
role of 'generalist writers' using formula fiction to grab people emotionally
with LCD content is fading away.

With irony, Dear Vanity Fair: This time the sky actually is falling, on old
media.

'Vanity Fair' RIP.

