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Why A Website Called TellUsWhatSucks.com? Because things just plain suck, and no one is listening to us. Let’s face it: while technology is a great thing, it distances us farther and farther from the people who affect our lives. Businesses put voicemail and anonymous email between us and them, leaving us no one to complain to when things go wrong. You send them a letter to complain about something, and they send back a form letter expressing all the sympathy in the world without really solving the problem. And then there are the online surveys: we’re solicited all the time to do surveys, and sometimes we fill them out, but we never, ever see the results. Is there anyone out there listening? Do other people agree with us? And what are you going to do about it? And it’s not just companies. New York and Hollywood celebrities spend money to puff themselves up, to create inane reality shows, to start singing careers despite not being able to sing a lick, and end up profiled in newspapers and magazines while real artists struggle in the wilderness of cyberspace hoping to be found. Politicians across the spectrum listen to lobbyists and interest groups, and ignore their constituents. When they do allow citizen input, it’s a joke, as at city councils, where they limit citizen input to three-minute speeches tacked on at the end of hours-long council meetings, and then do what they want anyway. Why? Because they’re hearing from individuals, not the collective frustrations, anger, angst of all the people they’ve wronged. Technology is a lot of what has given them that power; we need to take it back. Well, no other word quite conveys the level of disgust that you hear when someone says, “Boy, that sucks.” When someone says that something sucks, it’s beyond a minor complaint (“my nose itches”), it’s beyond a mere dislike (“I don’t like vanilla ice cream”), it’s something important, something that needs to be expressed and needs to be heard. No other word in English has that precise power and can still be used openly without offending most people. A more eloquent (and, for us, exceedingly timely) defense of the use of the word “suck” can be found in Seth Stevenson’s “Suck It Up: A Defense of the Much-Maligned Word,” posted to Slate on August 2, 2006. We must note, however, that this site is in no way linked or otherwise affiliated with the legendary Suck.com, the granddaddy of all snarky websites. None of the founders, owners or operators of this website had or have the good fortune to have been in any way involved with that website or the incredibly creative team who developed and ran it. We should be so lucky. We do not know. We plan to aggregate the data you send us, and make that available to the people, places and things that you decide suck. (See our Privacy Policy for the ways that we will protect your privacy in aggregating it.) We would actually like to see things solved, or see things change. We want airlines to know what people think about their service; we want politicians to know what people (not political parties, but individuals) think about what they are doing, and what needs to be fixed. We want software companies to provide good products at reasonable prices. And so on, and so on. Maybe we’re just cockeyed optimists, but we think it’s worth a try. |
