The Bad Idea Bears
Have you ever had a really, really bad idea that somehow appealed to all that's worst in you, and kept on tickling your imagination in the watches of the night?
I mean, really bad. Worse than Aliens vs. Pooh Bear. I mean: actually evil.
Switch scenes to the agreeable surroundings of The Antelope, wherein dwell the Ancient Ones of the BSFA: our conversation has turned to non-fiction and to blogs maintained by passable authors with abominable politics. Fruit-loops, wingnuts, libertarian fundamentalists, climate change denialists: you name it, they drivel it, and the loopier the better. But here's a thing: they don't write terribly well - surprising, given their profession; or unsurprising, given the disjointed and incoherent nature of their delusions. It's worse than moronic, it's robotic, and nowhere more so than in the 'comments' pages: rarely do they engage with any criticism - the preferred response is a proforma restatement of the clichés or ad-hominem attacks with a helping of schoolyard name-calling.
Much of it would surely fail the Turing Test.
...And so was born the notion of iFascism, a convenient aggregator for your mobile device that serves you up a steaming helping every morning, tailor made for the most important individual in the Universe: You.
I passed a snide remark that I could write the whole thing in VBA - trawl the blogosphere, clip out a paragraph here and there, do a bit of textual analysis to group together snipppets with a common set of buzzwords, and paste them together as a nice, repetitive rant.
As I said: a really bad idea - I 'd get buried alive and bankrupted by the breach-of-copyright lawsuits! (Notwithstanding the fact that the milieu is so incestuous that it is difficult to tell if any of it isn't cut-and-pasted into place).
But I digress. How hard would it be to adapt a spammers' text-generator into a repetitive right-wing rant-o-mat?
And how might I monetise this contribution to the liberation of humanity?