Dante

At the gates of Hell, in Dante’s Inferno, there is an inscrip­tion which is typ­i­cally trans­lated as “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here” For some rea­son, I always recall that par­tic­u­lar cliché as “Abandon Hope, Ye Who Enter Here” instead. When acronymized, as one would do for short­hand tech-support slang — such as PEBKAC — to indi­cate the “fourth-hand …

Support Your Local Troll

When the Internet was first opened to the pub­lic in 1992, some per­sons con­cluded that this amaz­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work may actu­ally start the process of end­ing the rule of tech­nocrats. Some used to think that it would even sup­plant the Pyramids as humanity’s great­est Wonder of the World, by allow­ing any­one, any­where, access to a …