The World That's Coming

May’s remarks alarmed privacy campaigners who fear a Conservative government will revive the controversial draft communications bill, which was beaten last year after the Lib Dems withdrew their support.

That law, labelled a snooper’s charter, would have required internet and mobile phone companies to keep records of customers’ browsing activity, social media use, emails, voice calls, online gaming and text messages for a year.

Data compiled by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) for the Observer showed Ukip had received 3.86m votes for the one MP it had elected to the Commons. This compared with an average of 26,000 votes for every SNP MP, 34,000 for every Conservative, 40,000 for every Labour MP and 299,000 for every Liberal Democrat.

The ERS said that 24.2% of seats in parliament were now held by MPs who would not be there if a proportional voting system were in place. The previous record highest figure was 23% in 1983, when the former SDP suffered from first-past-the-post.

Now, for many, Britain looks and feels like a different place, as if emerging from a night in hospital after being treated for concussion. The 11.3 million who voted Conservative may well be snuggling into the security blanket of a majority government tonight. But those voters who didn’t back the Tories are likely left feeling exposed, chilled by the uncertainty about what might unfold. Ripping up the Human Rights Act, bringing in the snoopers’ charter, risking an exit from the European Union.

What will these fundamental changes mean to the future of the country? And what fresh designs will be drawn up for Britain in the corridors of power, as the Conservatives embark on five years of near-unfettered reign?

But instead of sitting down at the table of the Internet and discussing these issues like calm, collected folk, the Internet responded as only the Internet knows how: with pile-ons and death threats.

The people who criticized Whedon publicly — which may or may not have spurred Whedon leaving the Internet — are, themselves, getting death threats. It’s a snake eating its own tail.

People have been writing about the many ways that the treatment of Black Widow has sucked, but that’s all going to get lost now. Instead, everyone’s going to talk about the abuse. And about Whedon, personally, instead of the work. But that’s just playing into the Internet’s many ongoing culture wars, and it’s going to ruin everything.

Marvel Entertainment are not nice people. They like having an avuncular mascot to trot out and reassure people that these entertainment products are made by the same kind of people who hand-crafted the original comics, but that’s a lie. It’s not about people at all. It’s about a company with a seventy-five year track record of scorched-earth business tactics doing everything they can to maximize their leverage on largest scale possible, the kind of scale not even Lee himself could ever have imagined.

You can’t root for Marvel anymore. It’s like rooting for McDonalds. Once upon a time Stan Lee believed himself to be Ray Kroc, but for a while now he’s been Ronald McDonald.