The point being, whether you have read The Divine Comedy or not, it's still possible to find Brutus' ranking unjust. What Dante appears to have forgotten is Julius Caesar was gunning to usurp the Republic. He was trying to set himself up as dictator, as surely as Walt Disney or Al Haig. Heck, Julius Caesar wasn't even the first to get the point; that dubious honor goes to Tiberius Gracchus, who got got by his fellow senators back when Caesar's grandfather was still in short pants. And yet, you don't see Dante getting his pantaloons in a blossom over that, do you? (Answer: No, you do not.)
For his trouble, Brutus and coconspirators would eventually get an ass-kicking at Philippi, before Octavian and Antony turned on each other. The Republic fell anyway. Then, to add insult to injury, some cheap hack comes along and drags his family name through the lowest circle of hell.
Well, I dare say this Brutus bashing has gone on long enough. I say it's time we find a new occupant for the lowest circle of hell.
I know just the guy.
Internet respectability, insofar as such a thing exists, demands the purchase of a boss domain name for your website. A hoop to jump through, separating you from the rabble who refused to play minimal ball. Optimally, your domain name should be at once obvious and memorable, so that punters might more easily find your charming wiseassery in the pile of sound and fury on-line life has become. And although the Internet has been likened to Thunderdome vis-a-vis respect for the rule of law, domain naming is a highly-regulated affair. There is a master Internet namelist and an Internet namelist master, a sort of Master-Blaster cum Santa Claus who decides the good kids get the domain name they ask for and the bad kids get to go in the cage with Blaster.
Mostly it works first-come-first-served.
Convergent evolution is a bitch . I accept that. Perhaps your initials are "BK" and you live in Los Angeles and your diminutive size has earned you the precocious nickname "itty" (short for "itty-bitty"). It may well be that you snagged the domain name www.labkitty.com to blog about your exploits. Or perhaps to report on your retriever who thinks he's a cat (hi-larious!). Fair dinkum.
However, If typing a putative domain name into your browser brings up a page selling domain names, then you have been squatted. Someone has thunk up your domain name or perchance found it floating in their cereal one gospel morning and spent a couple bucks to register it in perpetuity with no intent of ever putting it to good use.
The PayDay loan store of the Internet, squatters are. Sleazier than a used car salesman selling Trabants with extended warranties to pedophiles who drown puppies in buckets . An inversion of natural order, Charlemagne's grandfather famously describing Merovingian rule to Pope Zachary as pretext to end it. And like most inversions of natural order, domain squatting did not come through happenstance but through nefarious efforts.
Look, I applaud naked entrepreneurship as much as the next cat. If some Fortune 500 company was slow to embrace the emerging technology of the 90s and you snagged their every obvious choice for a domain name hoping to extort them someday, then, sure, you have earned your daily bread. (Although there would be a certain adolescent joy in seeing stubborn domain names like www.unitedairlinesnotthepornsite.com . Then again, there would be a certain adolescent joy in seeing Fortune 500 companies deal with Internet squatters like United Fruit dealt with Jacobo Árbenz.)
But somewhere along the way, domain name registration became a shell game (cat /etc/dictionary.txt | mail register@squat.com). All-the-more insidious is when the people doing the squatting are the registrars themselves. Try this experiment: Go to one of the less-reputable DNS websites (I won't mention any names here but, as a rule, the integrity of any Internet service is inversely proportional to the cleavage of the company mascot ). Think up an available domain name (try: www.bitemyfur.com). Verify its availability with the site. Wait 48 hours. Return and try to register the domain name. You may find the name is now mysteriously unavailable, although re-available should you be willing to "grease the wheels" as the TSA agents say.
When naked entrepreneurship trumps the genuine kind, then it's time for all of us to pause and reflect (and by "pause and reflect' I of course mean "drink and rant on teh blog." Paw in the air in the land of hypocrisy).
This practice is a perversion of the American dream, no less than the patent mill . What could be more American than the garage inventor taking his or her million-dollar idea to the patent office, earning his or her slice of the American pie through the sweat of his or her brow? Innovation duly rewarded, consilio manuque, with recognition and legal protection.
And then you find out how patents really work , as I was recently schooled by a colleague who consults for one of the big microchip manufacturers. The reality is corporations have regular meetings wherein their tech people meet with their legal people for the purpose of pooping out a constant mountain of patents for things they are never going to make just so you or I can't. Back in Einstein's day, you had to bring a working model to the patent office for evaluation. Now just a lick and a promise, and an $900/hr attorney, will do.
It's a microcosm of What Has Gone Wrong with America . A system of getting ahead through innovation and hard work has been supplanted by an old-boy system of shady deals in smoky back rooms. In business. In government. In academics. On the Internet. There's winners and losers, and nothing short of wholesale murder will make the former share with the latter.
So, Internet domain name squatter, someday when we finally get the Comedia re-imagined for modern sensibilities, probably zombie themed because for reasons beyond understanding that's what the kids are still going for, and full-frontal if it's on HBO, there you will stand in the lowest circle of hell instead of noble Brutus. Frozen still, unable to speak, gnawing on the skull of Mark Zuckerberg . In the shadow of three-headed Lucifer, Dante's inversion of the Trinity and the sort of heavy-handed symbolism that wouldn't make it past the slushpile at Random House these days.
Footnote: Standing next to you is no longer Judas. Rather, it's whoever came up with the non-fast-forwardable DVD commentary track legal disclaimer . No, Sony, I'm really really not going to sue you or take my Carcano up a bell tower as a result of anything some 2nd AD had to say about Sharknado. What is wrong with you people?
But in the meantime know this: If I ever run into one of you domain name slumlords at some fancy dinner party, never in your life will you see someone stare at their shoes and not talk to you so hard.
Consider yourselves warned.
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