defortunate wooshers

Awesome.

There's no irrelevant keywords here, no hidden text, no hidden links,

Uhmm... Here's an H1 tag that's hidden, exactly the sort of SEO trick that google warns against.

<h1 class="offscreen">Welcome to Target Products and Promotions</h1>

And more relevant, perhaps, here's one from the "Your Mom Is So Hot" Target search.

<h1 class="offscreen">your mom is hot Products and Promotions</h1>

In this case, there are no actual promotions available from Target about "Your Mom is So Hot," which means, I think, that it's expressly deceptive. And here are some hidden links on the page as well.

<a href="#mainBody">Skip to Main Content</a>
<a href="#leftNav">Skip to Left Navigation</a>
<a href="#scripted_tabs">Skip to Product Information Tabs</a>

These links cannot be seen in a regular browser. Dunno if this qualifies as nefarious or black-hat, but it's definitely, obviously hidden links. Of course, any site with a dropdown menu has hidden links on it, but these hidden links on the Target.com page don't even qualify for that. Perhaps they show up if you have javascript disabled, or browse from text-only browser. The point is, in a regular browser, they are hidden links. I suppose I'm responding to an AC troll. But I do find it interesting that Target.com can get away with clearly deceptive hidden H1 tags. That's like the definition of amateur black hat SEO.

Tom Stoppard used to tell an anecdote in his interviews about how, at an earlier point in his life, he used to feel guilty for getting away with being an Artiste. Which is to say, ditch diggers work hard, sysadmins work hard, but Stoppard lucked out and got to frit about with his imagination and a pencil, and thence be paid.

But Stoppard eventually assuaged his guilt by posing the following question: What if we lived in a world with plenty of material satisfaction (good food, jet-skis, cozy houses) but no art? His contemplation of this question led him to feel okay, generally, with the prospect of spending all his time & effort on the seemingly useless pursuit of making plays and movie scripts. And he felt okay being the lucky one who gets the leisure, indeed gets PAID to do it.

Stoppard is all famous and horribly clever and whatnot, but I think he missed the mark with his argument. There's no reason that being a creative genius means you ought to get PAID for it, or that you DESERVE the time and money to Make Your Precious Art. Because even if you stop paying all the artists, stuff will still get made. Some of it will get popular. We will still have fads and trends and cliques and identity groups and that-about-which-to-get-obsessed. In short, we will still have everything that Big Content presently commoditizes for us in tidy artificially expensive packages. There is a world out there, one that exists without the high-dollar-cashflow content machine, and it has plenty of Art in it.

There's an analogue already existing in the academic world. Scientists, some of them, are freaking Brilliant. And even in a landscape where scientists don't regularly reap fantastic cash awards, they still doggedly pursue their craft. The landscape has shifted in the last decades, with universities rushing to cash in on the patentable discoveries that percolate up from their laboratories. But this has not yet (totally) changed the culture of the academic scientists, who don't pursue their science just for the Huge Bucks lurking in the next Petri dish.

I sure would like to be a Super-Billionaire-Artiste, sucking up cash and bidding my minions prosecute the latest artificial-bottleneck-du-jour. But if I ever achieve such a thing, I won't kid myself and pretend I deserve it. It's like any other privelege inherent in living in the upper middle class of the Western world. Whenever I think about my comfortable cheap clothes made at the expense of near-slave-labor, I feel a twinge of guilt, and then return to cheerfully slurping my Diet Coke(tm), and I forget about it. Same with profiting from Copyright Persecution. Sure, it's a privelege and a pleasure to profit from fake scarcity. But it's a GUILTY pleasure. And it's going away.