Insane Evil Radio

Andrew Grumet points to a very weird piece of internet errata. It
is the kind of brilliant sounding idea which in practice makes you sit
up
and think – don’t very smart people have anything better to do with their
time than to make other people crazy? The brilliant idea is brilliantly
summed up on the site, Radio Vox Populi, and if you still don’t get it
check out the accompanying diagram:

Radio Vox Populi is a realization of the people’s voice, taking the content of
the weblogs and broadcasting it back to the world. As weblog authors update their
sites their writing is collected, synthesized into speech, and streamed to listeners
as an Internet radio station. Live from the commons 24 hours a day, 365 days
a year.

Doesn’t
that make it sound exciting, hip and righteously refreshing? In
reality, the effect is, well, interesting at first.  Of course,
the computerized voices of text-to-speech applications inhabit a space
somewhere between comical and annoying in their ineptness and unnatural
inflections. But combined with the facts that the Robot Harvester only
harvests about two sentences of each blog, and that interspersed with
the barely comprehensible English prose are garbled and twisted
attempts by the computer to pronounce things like ##### and

It’s like the Burroughs-Kerouac cut-up
composition method, where they cut phrases and sentences from each others
work and mixed them up at random, were applied to a bunch of less-than-mediocre
prose and recited by a cast of hypnotized, lobotomized zombies on cough syrup.
If listened to closely over extended periods we are convinced this stuff
could drive
a person
mad,
at least
temporarily. We can only speculate what kind of chemicals the people
who can tolerate listening to this stuff have access to, but they are
way stronger than anything WE have seen in quite a while.

So check it out – its amusing at first.  But don’t get hooked,
because the Dowbrigade takes no responsibility for damage resulting from
use.

from radio vox populi