Flickr now allows users to post short videos. This is the worst thing that could happen in this world or any possible alternate timeline, at least if you ask the members of the "We Say NO to Videos on Flickr" group.

These people are devastated by this option. They feel betrayed and violated by the thought that, if they want to upload a video to their account, they will be allowed to do so. How can Flickr stab them in the back like this? Or more specifically, how can Flickr allow them to own cutlery and go around without body armor?



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There are petitions going around over this. That's not a surprise — online petitions are the favorite tool of passive activists, in spite of the fact that the only thing they ever accomplish is taking up a few kilobytes on a hard drive somewhere. There are also threats of a lawsuit. That cracks me up. The legal argument appears to be: "I paid for a service with fewer options, and I want a judge to step in and prevent Flickr from giving me more than I asked for."

If this lawsuit goes through, and is successful, I look forward to extracting bulky cash wads from local Chinese restaurants. Decades of free fortune cookies, none of which I asked for, have sullied my dining experience, and I demand retribution.

The lawsuit isn't the point, of course. A lawsuit threat on a message board makes an internet petition look like the March on Washington by comparison. It's just a conversational gambit, just a way of saying, "Gosh, I'm really cheesed off here. Seriously, I could just spit nails. I want you to understand this, so I'm going to start making up laws like an 8-year-old inventing imaginary bunny people."

So what is the point? I've been trying to figure that out. One argument is that if videos are allowed, people will put up videos of shallow and pointless things like cute kitties and teenagers in stupid outfits. Seriously, I'm trying really hard not to throw together straw men here, that's an actual argument: People will put up videos of their cats.

A photo-only search on "cute kitty" at Flickr currently provides 70,759 results. Hell, a search on "litter box" gives you 3,155 hits. You could look at a Flickr photo of a litter box every single day, and you wouldn't run out of litter boxes before the sentient alpacas take over the government in 2016. The odd video of a snoring Manx isn't going to seriously compromise the quality control over at Flickr central.

Trying my damnedest to give people the benefit of the doubt, I think I know what their problem is. Their problem is YouTube. They look down from Flickr Hills into YouTube Chasm and see wailing, gnashing of teeth, and endless versions of "Caramelldansen" and they are sore afraid.

This borders on understandable. After all, YouTube is widely acknowledged as an oily river of open sewage, devoid of aesthetic, intellectual or spiritual value. (Except of course, for the engaging and edifying videos uploaded by the fine people at Wired.com, who rise above the limitations of the format and create items of such quality that God himself subscribes to them and watches them, well, religiously.)

While technically and technologically impossible, it's not hard to imagine rampaging hooligans from YouTube, attracted by the musky scent of streaming video, pouring over the site and actually setting fire to the Historic Buildings Flickr group. Photos of azaleas will be stomped and pictures of classic cars will be overturned in the riots, and the Flickr community will wake to find that the entire site is nothing but a smoldering pile of dangerously sharp pixels and misspelled swear words.

I'm torn between supporting the blue-nosed, lawsuit-happy elitists, and the semiliterate, poorly compressed marauders. I can only take solace in the knowledge that, if we were to give them clubs and chains and throw them into a giant cage, the resulting fracas wouldn't lack for visual documentation.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a documentarian, a dockworker and a doctrinaire.

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