The Critics Respond, Part Twenty-One

The revival of my old Boxsters and watches post over the course of the past few days has proven to be remarkably robust. It's had more than a basketball arena's worth of new readers this week and it's been discussed around the world on a variety of automotive and watch forums. Some people agree with the style of it, some people agree with the content, some people agree with neither, and then we have the drooling moron above, whose hatred of the piece has caused him to inadvertently embody one of the biggest problems with modern online discussions.

RAJEN says that the article is

* poorly written * hyperbolic * totally inaccurate

He also states that at some point I was probably "fisted" by a Russian wearing a Big Bang watch. Allow me to address the last point first. I live in Ohio. We don't really have Russians with expensive watches here. While it's true that I was in Las Vegas lately, and enjoyed a "panorama suite" at Vdara about which I cannot say enough positive things, I didn't pull a Denzel-in-Training-Day with any Russians, watch-wearers or not. Furthermore, while I am aware that many sex-positive people of both genders enjoy a solid hand up the ol' batty, I am not that adventurous. My idea of "getting kinky" is leaving a nightlight on in the next room.

With that settled, perhaps to no one's satisfaction, let's take a look at RAJEN's other assertions. Is my article poorly written? You know, it might be. It was a first draft done in a hurry, not an Updike book in its final revision. I make no claims for the excellence of the article. How about hyperbolic? I think the paragraph which is most susceptible to that criticism would be this:

Modern Porsches, just like the Hublot Big Bangs and their ilk, are ephemeral. Fleeting. Fake. Faux. Luxury. Junk. The pleasure of purchase is all you get. After that it’s a full-tilt rush to buy the next thing. Their Eloi owners won’t think about the Morlocks who own, maintain, race, and enjoy old Porsches. We don’t exist to them. They are simply chasing the next brightest thing. An unfixable watch, worn to a meaningless meeting and left in a disposable “luxury” car. We know it’s luxury because they tell us so, with every press release, with every five-star hotel used for the first drive, with every Chinese-sewn-junk branded polo shirt left on the hotel bed.

I'm willing to take half a point on that, you know, but I feel compelled to point out that by modern blogging standards it's a masterpiece of understatement. Over at TTAC, we just published a piece by Doug DeMuro entitled "This Is the Most Annoying Button in the History of Time". The button in question, the most annoying button in the history of time:

* controls fresh air venting * is actually a knurled wheel

Yet this article was just as popular over the course of a single day as my labored investigation into the meaning of disposable luxury. If you use Mr. DeMuro's article as a standard for popular hyperbole, you have to admit that what I wrote doesn't register on the scale. Yet I'd suggest that "hyperbolic" is not something you can measure directly; it has no precise meaning. I cannot prove a lack of hyperbole in anything besides a straight technical or mathematical document. So, as previously noted, half a point. If RAJEN had stopped there, I think he'd be on relatively solid ground.

However, he did not stop there. What about his third claim: that what I wrote was totally inaccurate? There are two central assertions of the article:

* the procedure for adding power steering fluid to a Boxster * the assertion that the Hublot Big Bang uses the same mechanical innards as a $500 Hamilton Jazzmaster

So here's a video of the Boxster procedure. Note that the Boxster in the video does not have the Bose subwoofer system and thus skips five of my listed steps. However, you cannot argue that what I wrote was not accurate and factually correct. My procedure, as described, precisely matches what you see in the video.

How about my assertion about the Hublot and the Jazzmaster? Here's one of many Jazzmaster models with the ETA 2892, at a retail price of $553, more than two years after the publication of my article. Now here's an interview with Jean-Claude Biver, CEO of Hublot, where he states that

Hublot will continue to use both the ETA 2892 and 7750 movements for a long time to come (whether made by ETA themselves or by Hublot remains to be seen) as they provide an affordable and efficient base for the company.

There's no wiggle room there. The Hamilton Jazzmaster has the ETA 2892. It can be had for $500 (in 2012 dollars). The Hublot Big Bang has the ETA 2892. It will continue to have it.

As you can tell from the fact that I've devoted eight hundred words' worth of my own unpaid time to this subject, I'm pissed off by RAJEN's comment. Not so much because it's targeted at me --- there are far worse things said about me on the Internet every day of the week --- but because it was sloppy and stupid. He was on solid ground when he said the article was poorly written; that's a matter of opinion. He was on solid ground when he said it was hyperbolic, because that's also a matter of opinion. The problem was that he wasn't satisfied in saying those two things. He had to go ahead and libel me. I mean that in the literal sense that I could bring a suit again him for libel. He alleged that what I wrote was factually inaccurate, an allegation that I have just demonstrated is false and defamatory.

This is usually where the Lawyers Of The Internet come into play --- I will sue you for saying that my band sucked balls at its coffeehouse show last week! --- but let's stay in reality here. I'm not going to sue RAJEN for libel because that would be ridiculous. His assertion was refuted within the thread by other posters and he ended up walking it back, for the most part, in a follow-up comment. His statement is roughly equal to me stating on this blog that Lewis Hamilton spends his weekends orally servicing goats in the Hebrides. I have little to no ability to harm Mr. Hamilton's business prospects or public reputation so therefore such a post would be entirely harmless. As is RAJEN's assertion.

The problem, such as it is, has to do with the the way unintelligent people communicate on the Internet. As previously discussed, it's extremely binary. Things are 0 (bad) or 1 (good), period, point blank. It's Sucks And Rocks writ large. And if you think something sucks, you're allowed to say anything and everything that means "sucks". So while our friend may have appeared to write that my article was

* poorly written * hyperbolic * totally inaccurate

what was going on his mind was that the article:

* sucks * sucks * sucks

and he just chose three different ways of saying it. Sure, it's equivalent to calling Kim Kardashian

* ugly * trashy * a white man from Indiana born in 1913

but that's the future of criticism. We will aggressively compress the signal, lower the resolution, simplify the meaning, until we reach the level of Idiocracy. Which, if you haven't been told yet, is a terrible, racist film. Not that there's any proof that Idiocracy is racist --- but racist just means "bad" nowadays, you know,