Jussi's Blog - "the Accidental Buddhist"

Mappo is alive and well on the Internet

Today I am ranting about the state of the internet and how this marvellous tool has brought out the full ugliness of us all, the human beings.
What started out as a tool for Universities to exchange information has transformed in its relatively short existence into a kind of hyper mart of the human condition.
While it is still a useful tool for passing on information and for learning about the world we live in and reading the news etc etc etc….it has to be said that it is also a magnet for all the nutters, all the cheaters, all the “lowlifes” of the world.

Today I am ranting about the state of the internet and how this marvellous tool has brought out the full ugliness of us all, the human beings.
What started out as a tool for Universities to exchange information has transformed in its relatively short existence into a kind of hyper mart of the human condition.
While it is still a useful tool for passing on information and for learning about the world we live in and reading the news etc etc etc….it has to be said that it is also a magnet for all the nutters, all the cheaters, all the “lowlifes” of the world.
I suppose it is a reflection of the human condition. We tend to be driven by greed and insatiable desire for pleasure. For every site about kindness there are thousand of how to kill and maim. For every site on tending a garden there must be hundreds on how to destroy and poison. As if we did not know this before we can now buy happiness be it in the form of endless spam that floods our inboxes.
What I did not know was that there are people who get their kicks on trying to get into my computer and read the boring stuff I keep. I did not know I could get trillions of £££££’s for just giving a Nigerian person my bank account details and how many families of African dictators, now deceased, have money stashed away in Switzerland!….I was not aware of my interest in Asian lesbian sluts or strange things you can perform with animals but e-mails in my inbox seem to imply I do! Apparently I am in desperate need of Viagra and loans and credit from an ever expanding circle of “friends”.
I read on the news that spam is going to be made illegal by the European community powers that be yet there is not much evidence of that so far in my Inbox.
And that is just spam. How many websites are there that teach me how to make a bomb? How many places for cannibals to indulge in their strange deviations (ref. the recent events in Germany that were on the news)? How may locations on the net that teach us just to hate!
The companies we so innocently do business with on the net by ordering goods from their site and in the process reveal our e-mails to go on unabashedly and sell our e-mail addresses to others who then sell them to others and so on and in the end we receive yet again more of those totally unwanted miserable adverts and pleas for our cash.
I do not know how much the Nigerian fraudsters make or how much money the Asian lesbo-sluts rake in but I have to wonder how many people actually take the bait.
Now I have nothing personal against Nigerians or Asian lesbo-sluts but what do they want with me?
In Buddhism Mappo is sometimes described as an era when people have scattered minds. On the Internet this is proven time and time again.
All we seem to want is instant gratification, money and scandal. That is what makes the world go around it seems.
If that is what people want to read that is ok by me. It is not my business. But please do not e-mail me about it. Thankfully at least my ISP has begun to filter our e-mails for viruses which is a good step forward. If only they were able to devise a way to truly stop the scammers and others on the make from invading our privacy…that would be real progress.
In Mappo it is hard indeed to keep a mind that is upright and pure. The Internet while teaching us about Buddhism at the same time is doing its best to destroy all seeds of goodness from our minds.
Just an opinion of course….
Jussi.