Joel Stein at Time.com wrote:
Skwerl, 27, is in a punk band and used to work for Universal Music. Now he works for a Web marketing company. “Among my friends, I’m the guy known for getting things no one can get,” he says. “I’m just that rabid for information.” Skwerls are the people who make the Internet useful. To everyone but record companies.
The article is about stealing an album by Axl Rose, about whom I have no warm feelings but that’s not the point. Stein downloads music from an album that has taken 14 years of drunken indecision to make. He makes much of how it only took ten minutes to download. People like Stein make a lot of numbers like years and minutes – they always get excited about storage size and bandwidth, because that’s how they measure things – I have 30,000 songs on my iPod, I have 3 cars, they cost me this much, my wife is D cup. A consumer, basically. That’s it, nothing more.We are being written at by a consumer.
But the figure I am most interested in is the mythical Skwerl, who is in a punk band and used to work for Universal. The funny thing is how, as you add details to this character, they become increasingly shallow. They have have a funny name, they think they are ‘punk’ some 30 years too late, they used to clean the kitchen at a record label, so they are ‘in the industry’ and now they send out spam about a club night, so they’re into web marketing. Perhaps this myth is Joel Stein’s idea of ‘cool’ and that’s very possible seeing as these are the kinds of things that consumers list as being ‘cool’. But I think Skwerl exists, because I have met his innumerable clones. These are the cliches that have slowly but surely dragged everything beautiful, exotic and artistic down into an animated flash banner with a hip hop loop. They are the people that ‘share’ other people’s work and think they are adding something to the world. They are the people that use words like ‘punk’ with no fucking idea of what it once meant and why. They are people that never take a dump – they ‘blog about toilet culture’.
I just want to make sure that both of these people know the utter depths of my contempt for them, their ideas, and what they stand for.