So, what is actually different today? We know, in much larger numbers than ever before, of the level and complexity of the debt we face, we know of deals done in the name of the Club; we all know someone who knows someone who says that we will be in administration by next summer; we all know how much Bain earns and how bad he is at his job; we all know that Murray is an asset-stripper, only in football to earn as much off the name Rangers as he can before retiring to his villa in France.
But, if we are honest, the Internet has given us no real answers, all it has done is increase an appetite for knowledge that is simply not sated by what is available. The Internet is now where people meet to discuss the club, not in groups of five or ten, but in groups running into the thousands. Everyone has one little piece of information, one piece of the jigsaw that makes full picture. The only problem is, everybody's picture is different, it is not one big jigsaw but thousands of smaller ones, each different in some way, large or small, and the picture we eventually see is a mixture of fact, fiction, agenda and wish.
How much of the level and complexity of debt do we actually fully understand? We hear figures that vary from person to person until eventually a figure is agreed upon and accepted as 'the debt'. We don't know which banks are owed what and when beyond the most basic of terms, we don't know how much cross company financing has been done, we don't know if we can afford or otherwise the current levels or whether there are facilities for extending credit further. What we have is a vacuum created by tens of thousands of people looking for answers that don't exist, and some remarkably intelligent people using all the available information to give the best approximation they can. It is forgotten that it is simply an approximation by the wider audience, and it is accepted as fact.
We hear about Martin Bain whenever a player is bought or sold, or as was common under certain previous managers, paid to leave. If the deal does not meet with universal approval, if we do not manage to squeeze an extra few hundred thousand out of the buyer - or if we seemingly pay over the odds for a substandard journeyman - we point at the accounts and the half a million hole created by his pay and cry that he is obviously not up to the job he is so fortunate to hold. We don't know what he does day to day, whether he is good at it or not and whether he is earning that fat cheque he receives. The expansion of the Internet has created not only a platform for the sharing of information, it has created a need for information, so now rather than wondering at Bain's position and salary, we find the Internet filling in the blanks, using hearsay and conjecture in place of fact.
We hear of Murray's asset-stripping, how he has taken the revenue generating aspects of the club and sourced them out to his own firms, or sold off swathes of land from the Club's portfolio for less than they were worth simply to line his own pocket. The facts as we know them are simple. Murray has put more into the club than he could ever have taken out by these methods. We don't know what market value was for the Albion, or Edmiston house, we don't know if the catering was making us a fortune and we don't know if the outsourcing deals have been of a benefit to Rangers or not. The Internet does not allow for unknowns though, it demands answers, so the answers have been created by those with the loudest voices, not those with the most salient information. Time after time the people who make the asset-stripper claims have been asked to provide some slight shred of evidence in support, and time after time they have failed to do so, not because they are wrong, they could well be bang on the money, but because the illusion of knowledge the Internet creates is just that: an illusion.
I can now, sat here in front of my computer, bring up information on any player in the world; I can watch videos of young up and coming players; I can bet using the latest form from any sport in any country and I can sit and chat with people on the other side of the planet about our Rangers today. What I cannot do is find out with any certainty is the inside scoop on day to day workings at Ibrox, or at the banks which hold our debt, or find out what is on Martin Bain's calendar for the week, or find out just how many bids we turned down for Hutton. All I can find on those subjects is unrelated individual best guesses, their wishes or agendas, the information the Internet has created in order to fill the vacuum it lives off.