Blockquote

Who paid five degraded American dollars to reference blockquote.org from the word vegan on The Big Word Project? I don’t know. Site co-founder Paddy Donnelly skirted a request to identify my anonymous patron, answering, “Someone must have bought it for you, lucky you!” The clues don’t sift to helpful details—someone who knows Blockquote is my site, knows I’m vegan, and has the audacity to anonymously link these two on a public site I have no stake in and no control over. I’m kind of grateful. I’ll get to that later.

The Big Word Project’s founders claim to be “exploring what different words mean to different people” is something more than disingenuous. In the search engine optimization game, it’s called “black hat,” a grab for unfair advantage in search rankings by playing to search engines rather than to users. Built to exploit the blood lust for PageRank, the site’s pitch is cynical and the business model predatory. To the site’s founders, every word means money. That’s “viral marketing” in Web 2.0 parlance.

Viral marketing is a means of transmitting commercial messages horizontally or “peer-to-peer,” as a virus spreads through personal contact. You find something online, you email your friends, they email their friends, wallets open, the rich get richer. Once mined consumer data pares our shopping to predictable patterns of activity, relieving us of the need to make decisions, gradually but surely blotting from our minds all illusion of personal choice and convincing us to yield our final freedoms to corporations already bent on owning us (that’s why it’s called “branding”!), viral marketers will sink their shiny little razor teeth into our necks and bleed us dry. They will kill us and they will kill themselves. Welcome to the end times.

Thanks to the hundreds who bought their snake oil, Paddy and friend Lee Munroe make out all right. Nevermind that Google punishes black hat SEO with a few algorithmic tweaks, or that The Big Word Project will fade to obscurity before March, 2008, is a yellowing stack of newsprint. At this writing, with nearly 2000 words registered at a dollar a letter and an average 4.5 letters per English word, these two are $9000 richer than they were on Monday. Notwithstanding his hatred for “predictability,” Paddy’s future in business is bright.

This post is the first of likely many on blockquote.org to use the word vegan. Whoever bought me the word meant well, I’m sure. It’s a strange honor to know others regard me high enough to warrant exclusive rights to the word in this arbitrary lexicon. I also thank you for the sudden spike in traffic to my site, which in some respects is nice. But I ask, please, next time you feel like dropping $5 on me, bear in mind that that much covers beer and tip where I drink, and I’d be real happy about that.