The Inconvenient Truth…

It is an inconvenient and quintessentially modern Truth that while the Internet has empowered anyone to be able to say whatever they damn well please, it is also an instrument of unimaginable power, and unfortunately the cliché is true; with great power comes an equally tall measure of responsibility.

Anyone can say anything on the Internet. I can say, “The world is flat! I know it to be true!”. As long as I write my name you will all know who to blame for the rash of nutters saying in response, “It’s on the Internet. It must be true.”

Of course no one will care about the above, mostly because it’s patent nonsense, but also because it ceased to be interesting roughly 400 years ago.

The real problem, is that if you carelessly, and anonymously, bandy around juicy, scurrilous rumours about an emerging business and do so from the easily achieved hiding place of the Internet and all of its possibilities for anonymity then you are playing a very different game indeed.

I am sure that the shadowy individuals who were able to find my criticism of their activities on this meagre blog firmly believe that their grievances give them every right to pursue Christina Domecq and Daniel Doulton by any means necessary, but I fear that in their anger, and I daresay grief, they have forgotten a very important aspect to what they are doing…

Allow me to explain… Mud, nay even shit, sticks and sometimes when we least expect it can become a deadly and indelible stain. Whoever you are, tossing your mortars of insinuation and doubt into an already questionable milieu of media supposition, that only a fool would assume is less complex than any other media circus we have seen in the past, you are no longer messing solely with CD & DD. Oh no, you are playing with other people’s lives now.

I am not just speaking of my friends who work for SpinVox, or of their families, their children, but of the people who work for their business partners, their investors and even their customers. Are you really prepared to loftily assume that all of these people are complicit in whatever wrong you have experienced? Am I as guilty of the things that you alledge seeing as I worked for SpinVox for a goodly length of time? Are my other friends amongst the SpinVox Alumni also in your sights? Where does your anger end?

For all I know, everything that you say may be true, but we live in a world where truth is in fact only a consensus, where in order for your truth to be held in any esteem, you must prove it to the satisfaction of Society. I venture that if you could prove it, you would do so, and you would have done it already. To stand in the shadows, wearing the mask of a convenient righteousness, whilst doling out judgement and reproof, accusation and insinuation IS an act of cowardice and desperation.

If you have proof, bring it forth. Show the World the triumph of your certitude and in so doing nail your colours firmly to the mast of your endeavour; sign your name and prove your mettle.

If you have no proof, even though you may believe whatever you want, you have a duty of care to my friends, and their families and every single person that you have not considered in your fury, whose livelihoods you are gambling with, to hold your tongue.

Publish and be damned, or trouble not mine eyes with your empty rhetoric. If you can prove what you say then there is no reason for fear of lawyers or the courts; I am afraid to have to tell you that being right (not that I concede you are even close to being so) is simply not enough, and it is no excuse for fucking with people’s lives.

And as a side issue, to my most recent detractor, in comments upon my last post, it is spelt “credibility”. I am far less likely to believe the words of anyone who does not have the good sense and courtesy to check their spelling.

C. Oliver Godby – See it’s not hard to sign something that you have written.

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EOT