CYBERSPACE – Attorney Greg Picionelli, never shy about speaking his mind, has a message for over-zealous prosecutors, conservative TV pundits, and anti-porn politicians alike: Get your priorities straight.Picionelli has launched a revamped version of his site www.doomsdaycurve.com, which utilizes an animated visual sequence and music of Picionelli’s own devising to drive home the Doomsday Curve concept, an idea which Picionelli has been developing for some time now.
The Doomsday Curve theory itself is fairly basic, as is the presentation on Picionelli’s site. The “curve” represents what Picionelli sees as an alarming trend driven by the ever-advancing technology of warfare; a rapid decrease in the number of human beings it would require to eliminate the entire human population of the earth through violent means.
An animated sequence on the site begins with a message directed squarely at the so-called “Campaign for Decency” or “War Against Obscenity” currently being waged at all levels of government.
“Here’s a good reason why our Government should not waste a single dollar or one minute of time prosecuting the legitimate adult entertainment industry,” reads the initial frame of the site’s animation, framing the animated depiction of Picionelli’s Doomsday Curve that follows.
The Doomsday Curve itself refers to line traversing a graph which has “% of humanity it takes to kill all of humanity” on its Y (vertical) axis and “Time” on its X axis.
As the site’s animation proceeds, points on the line are defined, labeled with a technological innovation that serves to reduce the percentage of humanity required to exact cataclysmic violence on the rest of humanity.
The advent of the bow and arrow in 8000 BC, for example, leads to a minor dip in the curve, while the development of atomic weaponry in 1945 is reflected by nose dive along the Doomsday Curve.
As the Doomsday Curve animation progresses, music and words composed and performed by Picionelli provide a soundtrack accompanying the graph.
According to Picionelli, DoomsdayCurve.com was created with two goals in mind, the first goal simply being to raise the political awareness of adult webmasters and adult business owners, with the hope that the adult industry will pass the message along to their customers and surfers.
“We have a possibility of changing the political status quo in Washington, and hopefully my site can do some small part in encouraging people to make that change,” Picionelli told YNOT in a phone interview this week.
While Picionelli conceded that “Democrats may not be any better in a lot of ways,” Picionelli believes that, at least with respect to the adult industry, the Democrats represent the lesser of two evils, to employ the old political cliché.
“We are likely to get less regressive legislation from the Democrats,” Picionelli said, noting that the Clinton years were relatively scrutiny-free for the adult industry and a time when the adult internet flourished under a federal government focused on issues aside from online porn.
“This is an incompetent administration,” Picionelli asserted with regards to George W. Bush’s White House. “It is the height of incompetence, especially in these dangerous times, to waste time and resources on fighting the legitimate adult industry.”
Another function of the Doomsday Curve is to add “serious value” to websites that incorporate the concept and animation into their existing adult sites, said Picionelli.
In determining whether material is legally “obscene,” the US federal obscenity statute states that “Serious artistic, political, or scientific value, using a national standard, is required for a finding that something is not obscene.”
The word “serious” is crucial in the language of the obscenity statute; the standard employed by the Supreme Court also states that “a finding of some artistic, political or scientific value does not preclude a finding that a work is obscene.” (Emphasis added).
“I’m giving this to people to use for free, without restriction,” says Picionelli. “In my opinion, it has serious scientific, artistic, political and literary value.” In Picionelli’s view, incorporating the Doomsday Curve will imbue webmasters’ existing adult sites with the same measure of “serious” value.
Picionelli’s primary purpose, however, simply is to point out how skewed the government’s perspective on porn truly is.
“The stigma attached to adult is ludicrous,” Piccionelli says. “The scary part is, in the midst of this war against what we all think of as a regressive, backwards view of the world, the Taliban’s position, for example, with regards to pornography is actually very similar to that of the Religious Right in this country – ‘do away with it all’ is what both have to say about porn.”
If Picionelli’s Doomsday Curve is indeed prescient, the US government has limited time left in which to realign their priorities.
According to the Curve, the percentage of humanity required to kill all of humanity will fall below 1-percent in the year 2025, when Picionelli predicts that we will reach a point where “Biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons are so advanced, so widespread and so inexpensive that a small group of people, or even a single person, can threaten the survival of humanity.”
And you thought the idea of children accessing porn via P2P was scary…
