Variety columnist says writers' strike was your fault

In today's column (somewhat histrionically subtitled "Mob mentality rules on talkbacks, boards"), Variety's Brian Lowry posits a new explanation for why the recently resolved writers' strike dragged on the way it did: The Internet is full of assholes. According to Lowry, "Squabbling over Internet revenues was at the heart of the writers' strike, but it was squabbling on the Internet that contributed to the vitriolic tone and rhetoric flung about during the dispute that will leave a bitter aftertaste." Because this strike was the "first conducted in the Facebook/Gen-Web era," it apparently helped deepen wounds and perpetuate angry backbiting that made finding diplomatic relations between striking writers and executives all the more difficult. But what it further illustrates, Lowry says, is that "the Web has inadvertently helped pollute society, coarsening the level of discourse and incubating online communities prone to wildly lash out at enemies real and imagined." Man, glad that stuff doesn't happen here!