Empire of their own
All FcNext wants for Christmas is an empire of its own, or at least a name for one, as a balloon pumped with hot air to send up in delusional hope that the world (and Yahoo!) will notice, or care.
In the aftermath of Yahoo!’s recent investment in promoting TFN-affiliated groups as an Earth Day stunt for racking up more Yahoo! Groups membership activity to boost their sagging bottom line, the usually vocal tiny cadre of core FcNexters are rallying around the idea of some kind of centralized global directory of all non-TFN freecycling group links. We say group LINKS, not real, functioning , legitimate freecycling GROUPS, because that’s the majority of what they have in their existing junk directories.
Besides the fact that a form of it has been done already at http://finder.overcycle.com/ (but not the form they want that will generate search engine hits on their link parades, under their own empire name identity, though Overcycle may be on its way to that, too), for at least three reasons their global central directory idea will not work and cannot work any better than senselessly junk-padded directories like freesharing.org (Freecycling for Dollars), sharingisgiving.org (SIG Links R Us) and recycle4free.com (Lame is the Name of the Game), among so many other delusional “alternatives” to The Freecycle Network, Inc. (TFN).
1. They have no reason or motivation to do it except the silly dream of taking over dominance of the freecycling world from TFN. (At least Overcycle had the ambition to provide a mapping service, a real and unique alternative to anything done by TFN, and it includes links to TFN groups, unlike FcNext’s empty hope of erasing TFN from the map.) With that impossibility as a reason, they might as well try to impose American-style hypercapitalistic, market-driven “democracy” on the Middle East, Iraq-style. (Odd that SIG hasn’t “created” a Baghdad SIG zombie group yet, run from Schroon Lake, NY.) It is a lost cause from its inception, pursued the wrong way for the wrong reasons.
2. They have no organizational structure and cannot form one, because they don’t have what it takes to do something like that. Without that, the best they can do is create just another clickable empire of junk links. In doing that, they will make the difference between themselves and TFN or RIN (ReuseItNetwork.org) even more obvious. Then Nexteritis can retire, after FcNexters finally shoot themselves in both feet, both kneecaps, both hands and both elbows all at once on one central website. (Besides, the other goofy website directories won’t shut down anyway, because none of them will join this lost cause and give up their own delusional empires in the process.)
3. They cannot agree on the principles for operating such a thing, or standards for how to do it, and they never will, except for some anarchistic kind of unprincipled web link soup, in the kind of wanton disregard for quality and integrity already represented by so many of the existing directory services they so love now.
All they can do in this kind of quest is amplify their current and past failures. They will not attain their goal of overwhelming or undoing TFN by building a foundationless, unprincipled, undisciplined house of cards. But we’ll have fun watching them try, like watching the Keystone Cops, Three Stooges, or Wiley Coyote’s cartoon antics.
When you have no reason for being as a group except to fight against something you can never overcome, against something you have nothing better on offer to supercede or replace it, in a quest where you have no support except from an undisciplined, unprincipled, tiny ragtag rabble that has become worse than the thing it hates, the best you can hope to accomplish is to build a bigger illusion, this time in a new website to deify, dance and chant around in delusional rapture.
The only way FcNext can compete effectively with TFN (the sole purpose behind this “umbrella directory” idea) is to create another TFN. Eventually they may try that, but their complete lack of wherewithal for such an undertaking makes that impossible, too.
Six months from now, we’ll post a link back to this post and say, “See?” After all, they’ve been at this for about four years now, groping in the dark for “the future of freecycling” in the vain name of nothing more than toothless TFN watchdog, having nothing to offer as anything like a true “next generation of freecycling” that is any improvement over the current one. There are some things that some people can never learn. FcNext is the Lost Generation of Freecycling.
FcNext should change its name to “School of Hypocritical Opportunistic Directories and Dopey Yammering” (SHODDY). That’s the empire they own now.
We are amused to see that they are taking increasing amounts of their cult deliberations underground, knowing that they now have a watchdog reviewing their public antics, and populating the web every day with increasing numbers of search engine hits on criticisms of them. Underground is where they belong, since they can’t function in the open for any significantly meaningful purpose in the public interest.
Here’s a name for their new empire of junk links: FcNext Umbrella Directory (FUD).
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Copyright 2008 by Nexteritis. All rights reserved. For permissions write to: nexteritis-owner@yahoogroups.com
