Uncrunched

Howard Kurtz, among others, are being very vocal in their defense of Meet The Press host David Gregory. I understand his arguments that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a violent crime while showing a 30 round AR-15 magazine on television. But he (or the show) did apparently ask for permission to show it and that request was denied by Washington D.C. police.

The facts are pretty straightforward. Gregory (or the show) knew that it was a crime in Washington D.C. to be in possession of a high capacity magazine, they ignored the law and they showed the crime being committed on television.

Is the particular law ridiculous? I don’t know. But it was enough to put this wounded veteran in jail earlier this year. And Lieutenant Kim wasn’t aware, like Gregory was, that he was committing a crime.

Whatever the gun laws are, they need to apply to everyone. If a wounded vet can be jailed for inadvertently violating them, so should Mr. Gregory. For journalists to hold themselves to a different standard than everyone else is absurd and hypocritical.

Many of the existing and proposed gun laws do little to deter crime. A few years ago I received death threats from a man who was clearly deranged and had previously been convicted of a felony. Yet he still possessed multiple guns and other weapons.

He was never charged with a crime.

If Gregory walks away from this without being charged, this can easily become a rallying cry for gun rights advocates. Many of these people are already on the edge of paranoia, convinced the government wants to strip them of their weapons as a prelude to tyranny. Giving special treatment to those who are in favor of gun control and allowing them to flout laws will only increase that paranoia.

If people (like me) really want tighter gun control they need to show that even their own are not exempt from prosecution. That’s the only way for them to logically defend their arguments.

If I was Gregory I would proudly turn myself in to the police and plead guilty to violating the law. It would be a powerful message that he truly believes in the laws he’s supporting and is willing to make a personal sacrifice to make this country safer. The fact that he isn’t doing that shows little more than hypocrisy.

Over a year ago I tried to get Google Voice working natively on the iPhone via Sprint. The whole system has been plagued with problems and I finally gave up today. See my post on TechCrunch for details.

We just got screwed. More on this below.

Nobody says “Web 2.0” anymore. The term just didn’t stand the test of time, long ago it became cliched.

But a handful of years ago it had real meaning to a lot of us. It encompassed a lot of ideas, but chief among them was the notion of mashed up web services, all collaborating via APIs.

Whether a service had robust APIs to allow it to collide in unexpected ways with other services was very important. Services that left out APIs, for whatever reason, were flawed.

And, importantly, services at least paid lip service to the idea that data was “ours,” not “theirs,” and would be treated accordingly.

So that was a really nice fantasy that lasted for a long while. But what happens in the real world is companies grow up, hire grown ups and they sit in board meetings and they fret about barriers to entry in their respective markets.

And they forget about users.

They all do it. Facebook screwed us (disclosure, CrunchFund owns Facebook stock). Twitter screwed us repeatedly, and comes back regularly for more (see Dave Winer’s wild ramblings over the years that all seem to come true) (disclosure, CrunchFund owns Twitter stock).

And now Instagram (owned by Facebook, so see disclosure above) is screwing us.

Case in point, this piece of art that I created, called Poohead, will no longer display properly on Twitter. I have to live with a flawed reproduction of the original artwork, cropped incompetently and the magic is just lost.

Mostly people are saying it’s ok that Instagram is screwing us by removing our ability to properly share our pictures on Twitter. Because Twitter screwed Instagram multiple times in the recent past.

Twitter, of course, only screwed Instagram because Instagram screwed Twitter right before Twitter screwed them. Because Instagram decided that they’d rather be acquired by Facebook instead of Twitter.

Screw that, thought Twitter. We used to love Instagram, particularly during the time while we were trying to buy Instagram. But then we didn’t buy them and so, obviously, we now hate Instagram. We’re gonna screw them and bad.

So that’s all clear now.

But there are lots of civilian casualties in all this screwing. Those civilians being us users, the dopes that keep feeding these companies content in the vain hope that this time we won’t get screwed.

Because these companies we love do treat our data as sacred, right? They don’t sit around the office calling our data their data and occasionally slip up in public, too, right? Except,

“This is an evolution of just where we are and where we want links from our content to go.”

That was Instagram founder Kevin Systrom earlier today at the Le Web conference talking to my CrunchFund partner MG Siegler (disclosure, MG is my partner, at CrunchFund).

Yep, Instagram is now officially in the “it’s our data” club. Pretty much everyone joins that club as soon as they can. One day they love users and talk about how much they owe their users. The next day it’s “users who? This is our data.”

And of course it goes without saying that the best way to run a business is to treat users with respect and make sure that your product does everything it can to delight and amaze. Except,

“This [screwing users, because Twitter screwed them before right after they screwed Twitter] is a consequence of us doing the best thing for our business at this time.”

Systrom again. Taking care of business by doing the opposite of delighting and amazing them.

Someday one of these companies is going to grow up from a fledgling, user-loving baby startup and get lots of traction and then…and then…wait…think hard…No! We will not screw over the users. Even though we totally have the morale high ground here because somebody else screwed somebody before and now it’s all just a blood feud that nobody can figure out who started and QUICK grab all that money over there before those other guys do.

See that? They thought about doing the right thing, which may have even gathered so much long term user loyalty that they could be sitting on a hundred year brand. And in the middle of thinking all those noble thoughts about doing right by users they just slapped themselves back down to earth and did what they always do.

Seize all assets within reach, and tell the sheeple users that they were sadly forced to do this to protect the data, which is their data now, and PS thank you very much for transferring all that data you made to us. High five! Then go home and pour yourself a double Macallan, neat, and tell yourself again how much you are helping the world become a better place.

Disclosure – I just broke a rule where I said I wouldn’t be talking much here on TechCrunch about companies we’ve invested in at CrunchFund. In this post I have a financial interest in every single company mentioned, who are all acting like children all hopped up on sugar and playing with too many legos.

Legos made of solid gold, lovingly crafted by us. The screwed sheeples. We sheeples get no legos. None at all.

This post was originally published on TechCrunch.