Do Not Read This

This image of Putin and Tillerson toasting a deal between Exxon-Mobil and Rosneft to collaborate on their engagement to develop oil drilling in arctic regions is a still from the movie “Merchants of Doubt” (2014).

You have probably never seen it before — I don’t imagine it was a blockbuster at any local cinema. The movie is still less than 10 years old (and the crappy quality of the image is due to the poor quality of a copy available on the Internet’s most popular piracy platform [YouTube]).

I often joke to my friends that the Corona virus achieved something Greta Thunberg has so far not been able to do: it slowed down global warming.

There are many things most people never hear about. Never read. Never see. Never understand. Never even imagine could ever be possible.

Is that because most people are just quite generally dumb, or could there perhaps be a more nefarious explanation of this weird phenomenon?

Let’s consider the following WARNING symbol:

This particular image comes from OIT.edu, but there are probably thousands if not millions of similar images online. You can even find images of warning messages from any specific browser software — I actually found a warning image @microsoft.com describing how the Edge browser reacts upon entering a URL @google.com. It is all really quite funny, except that a lot of people are worried something bad might happen to them, like maybe they could catch the Corona virus?

As a result, people generally do not visit sites if presented with such a warning message. It’s quite similar to the Catholic church’s index, which (let’s not forget) warned against reading Galileo (and many others, too). The logic is as follows: Reading this stuff is dangerous.

At least that is the way the message is usually interpreted — by “normal” people (i.e., people with limited literacy skills). Yet apparently this misunderstanding is useful to companies who hope to make maximum profits from most people’s limited literacy skills … because this way they can essentially blacklist their competitors — much like the Pope blacklisted Galileo or the way Adolf Hitler executed people who were concerned about what he was doing. People with limited literacy skills are usually afraid of a warning message like this, and so they will avoid even just looking at any site labelled this way.

For more background about why this might be of interest to you, see also “Wants.Blog is now a (founding) member of the PHLAT.net online catalog network” [ https://wants.blog/2023/08/17/wants-blog-is-now-a-founding-member-of-the-phlat-net-online-catalog-network ]