Global Financial Meltdown: My Role in it All October 14th, 2008
You can’t read anything these days without it relating to the global financial apocalypse. All in all it’s getting a bit dull now. The prospect of war with Iceland seems to have receded, which is fairly disappointing and all the news consists of flashing red numbers and doom laden graphs.
As everyone seems to be cheering up a bit it might be a good time to begin to apportion blame.
Many people believe that the root cause of the root cause of the collapse of the world economy has been the lack of liquidity in bank lending as a result sub prime mortgage lending in the US. The de-regulation of US financial services would be an easy target when looking for someone to blame but I believe this is too simplistic.
In truth much of the responsibility for the situation we now find ourselves in sits firmly on the shoulders of the Guardian. I know this because I saw it happen before my very eyes.
For the last couple of years I’ve been a fan of the Gamesblog run by the Guardian. The Guardian has really gone for the whole blogging thing but the one about video games in particular is the one that I look at everyday. Mainly because I like video games but also for the people that comment on there.
The main reason for its success is down to the fact that used to use pretty ancient blogging software. As a result quite a few people found that it was one of the only sites that they could look at whilst they were at work. Over the years a little community grew up of people that found they could avoid doing any work by using the comments section of the blog to have discussions about the types of drugs they used to take and biscuits.
As a result of the number of completely arbitrary comments the Guardian agreed to put a post up everyday just for comments. I haven’t really looked around the rest of the Guardian site but I’m pretty sure this was unusual. At its height this post could get over 500 comments in a day which just made up a very weird conversation.
It was quite obvious that of the 50 odd regular posters quite a few of them were from the banking sector. Particularly Lloyds TSB in all parts of the country. Over the last few years I’ve learnt quite a lot about Lloyds TSB.
This was all working fine until the Guardian decided it would be a really good idea to update its blogging software. Unfortunately this has meant that the comments now rely on java script and can’t be accessed in many work places.
It seems unlikely that it is any coincidence that the day after numerous Lloyds TSB employees were forced to go back to working for a living that our banking system collapsed. It also says quite a lot for their recruitment policy if when their employees do a full days work for a change the share price falls through the floor.
I hope this can serve as a warning to all those organisations out there that want to begin using draconian monitoring software. There can be unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences can be worldwide recession.
Posted in Games, Media | Comments (0)