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Anyone who's spent time on the web will know that amidst the very smart and cool people and ideas is an avalanche of annoying, puerile rubbish. This cyber-waste often takes the form of obnoxious, typo-ridden posts and messages to people's personal pages and public discussion forums. You've seen them ... U r lk s0 h0t. Or... btch lol ur dum. We're not talking irony or wit here, just plain stupidity. You know it when you see it. This invasion of neuron-snatchers made Albuquerque's Gabriel Ortiz and Hawaii's Paul Starr mad as hell, so they decided not to take it anymore. The dynamic geek duo built themselves a StupidFilter to serve as 'prophylactic for memetically transmitted diseases.' Although in its early stages of development, the project has sparked a wealth of discussion online about how it can and should work, what constitutes stupid, and how quickly can it be made available. The boys even made news on the BBC, such was the nerve they hit. GI took a moment to get to know the lads, hoping we would make it through the filter... GI: Where did you grow up? GABE: Albuquerque, New Mexico. PAUL: Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA -- born and raised. To this day, anyplace with more than a couple of inches of rain per year seems downright unnatural. GI: What pushed your buttons as a kid? Favorite toy? Book? Game? GABE: I was a big fan of Construx building toys and Radio Shack electronics kits. I also read almost constantly. PAUL: Like many proto-geeks, I had vats of legos that I would build with for hours as a kid; ditto wooden building blocks. I read (and re- read) voraciously, particularly favoring Usborne science books -- Usborne's a British publisher that puts out these lavishly- illustrated books about an incredible variety of subjects. I also loved Heinlein, and wore several of his juvenile novels right out; The Rolling Stones was (and still is) my favorite of those. GI: What was your first touchpoint with technology? GABE: My family got a Commodore 64 when I was seven years old, I later built a "Pennywhistle" acoustic coupler modem for it out of plans in Popular Mechanics and used it to connect to bulletin board systems. I was really into electronics before the age of ten, building circuits and transistor logic units out of scavenged parts, but the concept of a computer network opened up a lot of possibilities and created something of a fundamental change in the way I viewed the world. It became a place to connect with other people who were like me rather than a series of problems to be solved. PAUL: I grew up around technology. My dad is a mechanical engineer who specializes in robotics, so some of my earliest memories are of going to his lab and getting rides on the PUMA robot arm he was using in his research. It was a big deal in '85 or so when the lab got its first Sun workstation with its GUI, but it was old news to my family because we already had the original 128k Macintosh at home, which we got in 1984, almost immediately after it came out. Right around 1990 or 1991, my family got our first videogame console, a Sega Genesis (My dad agreed to it because it used a Motorola 68000 processor, which was the same CPU the original Macintosh used; we were a Mac family, you understand.) There wasn't a web then, so the only place to get strategy guides and talk about games was the rec.games.sega newsgroup, so we'd dial into the university machine and read netnews over the modem. A few years later, dad came home raving about something called "Mosaic," and how it was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen on a computer, and it was all downhill from there... GI: What's the stupidest question you've been asked about the Filter thus far (excluding GI, of course)? GABE: The worst questions and assumptions about the filter come from people who don't understand the form vs. content distinction. PAUL: Read the FAQ people! GI: Why is the invasion of the moronic such an issue for the web? GABE: It's all about signal to noise ratio and our ability as people to communicate effectively with one another. Moronic, content-less speech hurts us all in the sense that the more poor-quality information there is, the harder it is to find useful information.
Also written by Annie Geek-o-vitz
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