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| You are being manipulated | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The IdiotNet |  |
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| It must have been that I used to live in some tiny, insulated cocoon of my own. I’ve always known the world was a big place. Everybody knows that. You can’t be a child of the Television Age and not know that. But I never realized just how many people are crowding the world until I started going out onto the Internet. You think you’re unique? A single, wonderful soul as rich and unrepeatable as a snowflake or a fingerprint? Well, try signing onto a web service or portal using a screen name you’re sure no one has ever thought of before. That’ll scale down your ego just a bit. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Anything you’ve ever thought, done, or said, has been thought, done, or said before. By people nowhere near as clever as you. By some downright idiots. It’s estimated that by the year 2020 the world population will balloon up to some 8 billion people. Try getting good seats to a Sharks game then. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| But let’s try to narrow this down a bit. If you start thinking about all the imbeciles happily reproducing themselves like out-of-control Xerox machines, you’ll have a hard time keeping your hand out of the Prozac and wanting to end it all. Let’s not think about parking spaces, grocery store lines, gas stations, traffic lights, your-call-will-answered-by-our-next-available-representative, and all the other myriad ways we waste much of our lives just because there are too damn many people in the world. Let’s just talk about the Internet. |
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| Say you’re some yahoo (no offense to my web host) who’s just got himself (for the sake of brevity and grammar, I’ll use the masculine pronoun, although stupidity is by no means confined to only the hairier sex) a nice, shiny, brand-spanking new computer. Hot dog, you think, I’ll set this puppy up and then I’m off to every web site I can find! Porno heaven, here I come (any pun construed by my reader is unintentional). A fiery mouse with the speed of light, an ISP, and a hearty “Where’s the chat room?” The Lone Surfer! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Better by far, my son, that you should honorably commit suicide than clog up the bandwidth with the pointless crap you’re about to start self-righteously spreading. You find a free web host, so you immediately set up a site no one will care about but yourself. You set a hideous screaming red background and think the perfect complementary text color is electric blue. You upload and steal (you know who you are) every damned animated graphic that makes our eyes water and cram them all on one page. Then you think you want to make some money off this, so you link to every pay-by-the-click web banner you can find, the busier the better. Half your links are broken, some of your graphics either take ten years to load or won’t load at all, then you proudly state “This page last updated…” so we can tell you don’t give a fuck about your work since you haven’t even visited your own web site since the Stone Age. |
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| You think you’re an artist. A proponent of the First Amendment. A pioneer in the ever-changing world of the Web! You’re not. You are a moron. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tell me why you feel you have to post on your home page the date and time and details of every tiny change you’ve made to your site? You’re not writing Samuel Pepys’ diary, for Christ’s sake. Nobody gives a shit about the hours you’ve spent staring at your monitor and tweaking every little GIF and applet. We want to see the results of your work, not your work. Delete all that shit and put up something useful. Better yet, go to www.webpagesthatsuck.com and try to learn something. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| So the point here is not just that there are crappy web sites out there. The point is that the sheer number of people posting crappy web sites is absolutely staggering. Any kind of search for practically any subject at all will return more than a thousand results. Everybody has something to say, and by God, we’re going to say it, no matter what! This is America! I have the God-given right to be stupid and to broadcast just how stupid I am! I can be as tasteless and crude as I want, and I don’t need to show any artistic merit whatsoever! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| If you have any doubt at all that this is true, just watch an hour of television. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The Internet can be a very useful tool in the search for information. Not that you can actually find any real information, but you can search for it to your heart’s content. Getting useful information on the Web is like trying to sift Jell-O: It’s really interesting, colorful and diverting, but it leaves you feeling kind of sticky and dissatisfied, and you don’t really accomplish much. Kind of like "free" porno sites. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| So why aren’t most web sites useful? Because of all those nearly 8 billion people, perhaps two percent of whom use computers, and of the 50 percent of those who connect to the Web, they’re all talking, talking, talking. And no one’s listening. Are you? |
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| 2000 Truman Hooks | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Episode 2 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Episode 4 |  |
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