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Alex I don't want to shoot the messenger. I only paid attention to these couple of cyberherpies featured in this article because I followed your links to the metafilter wiki, otherwise I wouldn't give these turgidstans a blink in a moments worth of daily eyelid movement. I support what your comments say because I believe that the real juice of interaction exists below the line in interactive dance with what appears above the line. In this comment itself I've sprayed out enough of my own negative labels to win a "latrine of the year" contest, and so while I also value a toothgrit watchdog or well-intended fierce activism, and the creation of community labels such as "astroturfing and sock puppeting", I also want to value standing behind the journalist, the teacher and the public servant. Yet I don't think the path to higher quality media is going to come from how we label negative people or how we segment diseased social behaviour. If we focus too much on life as a disease, even more of life begins to look like a disease. We cease to focus on anything remotely healthy, we don't even bother tabulating all the healthy things we do, the ones that are really worth labelling, because IMHO we can learn far more from a labels like that. We end up like the medical practice today, watching a "Patch Adams" movie and wondering where the medical world lost the plot while they were prescribing their social medication. No one on our planet has ever achieved anything by focusing on the removal of hypocrisy and that is because hypocrisy is invariably impossible to remove. In that regard the intelligence of daily house-cleaning is always way more powerful than any social agenda or improvement program this world can invent or conjure; and that's what made me realize that I cannot make my life about cleaning other people's houses. People generally focus on how much they have bled rather than how much they have read including the writer of this piece. We all do that in lockstep stereotypical fashion and label generation is proof IMHO that we are being hormonally active in our honourable impulse to protect the world from other hormones. It is honourable to stand up and fight for something we strongly value, that is why IMHO mankind has invented its extreme child prodigy, culminating often in a social collective called "war". Ultimately when all of this compounded result ends in this big bang because thats what the collective habit of trying to clean other people's houses becomes in its final expression. Our well intended focuses therefore often leads us to the biggest hypocrisy of all where we all become friends again, (call it norming, storming, norming if you want) where at a national level we become a league or a united nations and as a human family we engage in reparations, the ultimate hypocrisy of global atomic institutionalism and activism - to repair that which we united together to inadvertently "improve", defend or destroy. Yet we don't just do that on the national scale, we do it on the playground as well, and my best friends were often the ones where our value arguments became full blooded fist fights, or at least at my school where I had plenty of spectators to urge me and my opponent on. We are therefore tribal as our environment allows us to be, but we also live in an increasingly digital age of mechanical computers, where technology doesn't fight, it simply processes and so I realized from this that process trumps tribalism. So why do I write this, because I don't want to rag, even remotely, on the shortcomings of this writer, I want this writer to be on our side, I want to move out of our vertical identity siloes and acknowledge smart people on the horizontal, and then we can start looking at the kind of scum that media think that we need to be aware of (and allow pondscum to live in harmony with the intelligence floating in the rest of the horizontal). An undue attraction and attention towards scumbags, does not really uplift the quality of my own life in any significant way, as does watching the profile of the next nutcase on the next voyeuristic media special. So today I realize that I cannot prevent a world that is continuously daily conditioned to view life as a disease or as a product to buy, but I sure can start exploring what a healthy world looks like by looking at my own self, and for me to do that Alex, I need to read metafilter wiki that describes to me what healthy human behaviour also looks like, and that is because my friend, I am tired of labels that just add to my internalized memory that there is something extremely problematic with the world. I want to find a way to stop the label machine manufacturing away in my own head, so that I can ultimately be free to look at my developing world from a far healthier perspective; where I acknowledge Alex as Alex and Anya as Anya without pretending that I have anything remotely in common with both or that we are friends or blood-brothers or oxygen-sisters of a common cause. I simply want to remove the unnecessary boundary above the line and below the line that I have continuously created in my own head, where I improve the quality of my own listening by noticing the quality in other people's voice, as well learning to silence my own voice in the accompanied learning. I know that when I can walk through this world in a silent manner, I will have witnessed the first sign of my own intelligence, and to do that I have to learn to think differently and I guess here came the real positive coming from all of this spiel today. I talk too much, and from now on I will leave it to all you guys to do the talking and maybe, just maybe your collective voices might figure it out, for maybe at last, today I have discovered the only label that should have mattered all along, what it means to "be" than to "have" freedom......M.