I’ve recently reached an age where I catch myself starting to say things like, “When I was a kid, nobody did stuff like that. Kids these days! Idiots, the lot of them! Hey, get away from my Stutz Bearcat you fecal-faced gong farmers!” And, fortunately, I don’t. Because not only do I not own a Stutz Bearcat, but things aren’t any different today than when I was a kid. In fact, they aren’t any different than they were fifty years ago. At least in America. Only the styles have changed. And rap music appeared. And then, of course, like everything cool, it was appropriated to the point of banality by white people. But little kids still fight each other, call each other names, use slang, build hierarchical social structures at school, play games to torture one another and in the process gain that sense of superiority (or at least gratitude) that they aren’t the ones being tortured, hate their parents, flick their beans, punch their clowns and so forth and so on.
Except for one thing: the Internet.
We had video games, but no Internet. Before that was broadcast TV, before that was radio, before that was genuine social interaction: labor meetings, bar fights, gang rumbles, sewing circles, magnate orgies, public hangings. But none of that stuff was quite like the Internet.
The Internet not only gives a voice to the otherwise-voiceless among the vast, anonymous, chatterboxy throngs within the expanding universe that is cyberspace, but infuses them, in the process, with the sense that they’re likely one of the smartest people in the chat room, as long as they can hurl the final sling before rage quitting out of it.
Plus, it’s an encyclopedia of Stupid waiting to be opened and perused any hour of the day, any time of year. It was another lurch in the downward spiral of nose-food-tube-accessible popular media that began with radio, and had twenty tons of even more Stupid fastened to it as soon as social media was invented.
I’m guessing the end of modern society will finally be achieved with humankind experiencing every previously-catalogued emotion over the course of an unstressful day, punctuated by a bit of exercise and satisfying resolution to the end of it while, in actuality, being hooked up to a life-support machine and harvested as energy by the very machines they built to bring them this type of goal-oriented, virtual nirvana in the first place.
Funny how so much of life goes back to The Matrix.
You think that’s unfair? Just type ‘wtf’ into the Internet right now. Or the word ‘funny.’ I guarantee you the results will come back: Bear falls on chainsaw, cuts itself in half lengthwise. Pregnant woman slips in the gore. People on YouTube write: ‘this should be another book in the bible.’
But that’s not to say there aren’t advantages. And it’s not to say people don’t learn things from being online, more so than they ever did with popular radio or television. There’s just too much out there. And while being able to click on a video and in five minutes know how to use a stud finder is one thing, spending half your day shopping for over-sized dildos on donkeydongs.com is something else entirely. And, for adults, there’s no discrete barrier to allowing one and regulating the other. Except their own frontal lobes. Which seem to be slowly liquefying the longer they sit, eyeballs crossed, inches from a computer screen, day in and day out.
Humans weren’t meant to remain still for any given length of time, T, counted from whenever a person chooses to go to sleep, zzzzz, minus the summation of the number of minutes, n, where n = 1, that they spent not being in front of a computer screen from the point at which they wake up, a, averaged over an adult lifetime.
They started out as hunters, not whatever it is they’ve become today. Well, technically, they started out as chimps, but after they made that transition, they developed the necessary habit of packing up and following their easily-killable, four-legged food wherever it went. Until they very likely accidentally invented agriculture, most likely due to the actions of primitive women, who used to stay at home and do all the important domestic work and who, therefore, wound up as the 10,000 BCE equivalent of a 1950s suburban housewife.
Without the Quaaludes and Tempranillo.
Because there wasn’t any of that back then.
I guess you could argue that watching crops grow is kind of like being on the Internet. You do a little search. For land. Use a search…engine, there’s a fucking mouse someplace. Mice. FarmVille. Facebook. Fuck, I don’t know.
But that doesn’t matter. Because I wanted to talk about the downfall of civilization that’s now been accelerated due to the onset and rise of the Internet. But I got a little sidetracked. And now I ran out of space.
I blame the Internet.
Because that will, in essence, be both the eventual acme and zenith of the World Wide Web’s contribution to mankind: A destruction of the human attention span, the neutralization of frontal lobe function, the reduction of human interaction, a loss of a sense of agency, the complete atomization of humankind and the resulting translation of the expression of emotions into ‘likes’ and ‘follows’. But right now, no one can see that far ahead. All it is right now is just…getting a little sidetracked.
You start out searching for one thing online and the next thing you know you’re watching an orangutan peeing into its own mouth. And you’re like, ‘How did I get here? I was looking up the history of the space program.’
But then you’re like, ‘Oh, right: Space Program, Cold War, Arms Race, Russian Military, Russian Professional Wrestlers, Nikolai Volkov, Nikolai Gogol, Nikolai Gogol’s favorite writer was Edgar Allen Poe, short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, bloodthirsty orangutans, pee-thirsty orangutans.’ And there you have it.
I mean, it’s pretty intuitive, if you think about it.
