Should I Secede

... from the internet? I am certain that I will miss nothing, and I will be missed even less.

I knew an old German professor of Philosophy who refused to have an email account. His imagery of having to respond to alarm bells and whistles going off when he was trying to complete serious research is appropriate. The internet creates a huge amount of psychological noise dictating where we need to be, how to order videos and pizza, and displacing the physical act of Christmas shopping with its point-and-click counterpart.

I expect any day to find an advertisement for a web-based enema service -- to open up blocked electronic passage ways. (Do not search. I did and the results are not pretty.)

There are broken links. Links to smut, advertisements and phishing holes always work. Broken links are a phenomenon strictly limited to the tiny fraction of useful or interesting content on the Web. Broken links are always and only to something I actually need or want.

I am really tired of the spam. I used to believe that spam only came in email. I've come to understand that the most of the internet is spam. Email only alerts me to its exact location.

Most of the internet is comprised of disorganized web sites devoid of any useful content at all - four percent lean bits wrapped in an ethereal sausage casing, 96 percent ground up organ parts, ears, snouts and feet.

The robot brain so feared by human ethicists of the 1950s and '70s is already their primary mode of cognition. Do they see the worst-fear-realized state of an electronic community mind that lives independently of its contributors and consumers? It is here.

I do not mean to disparage the entertainment value of the internet. We are definitely entertained. Yet we are now privately entertained by content that we do not and cannot share with our mothers.

I love the internet. They can have my Web when the pry my cold dead fingers from my keyboard.

My fear is that we might all secede from the internet, but no one would notice.

            Raise
                 your
                      laptop lid
                           if
                                you
                                     are
                 NOT
            here.

The Great Intellectual Levelers...

of our day exploit the diversifying potential of our new electronic democracy and other macro-level social trends. Moonglamper Services might have been summonsed to divine the most effective ways to squash intellect, flatten culture, and dishevel diversity. They would have selected exactly the methods to which we have migrated on our own lemmish accord. Society is stewed by these levelers into an oddly atomized, primordial intellectual goo.

Television - there are over six billion people on earth [i] and only 7 television shows worth watching. We are all watching the same ones. Some people watch TV all of the time. They have seen them all. Some people tell you they never watch TV. They lie. They, too, have seen all episodes of all seven shows. There are obviously a few other shows to watch. There are fifty-seven channels, and you are still stuck watching NBC, the Weather Channel, Judge Nobody, or The Extreme-Wheels Half-Pipe Championships -- or a rerun of an early episode of one of the seven shows. All other programs are really only commercials that broadcasters use to fill the air-waves and wire-waves while they rewind the tape containing the seven shows.

Sports - Class is completely leveled by professional sports. The neurologist and the homeless man excitedly discuss the Great Play in last night's game as if they are neighbors whose other common interests include first class upgrades, hotels in Heidelberg and the shrimp cocktail. They really only share brain death. "Oh, you live the 7,500 square foot mansion at 1215 Oak? Yes, I live under a tarp in the dishwasher box in the empty wood next block over. That play was awesome!"

Video Games - while there appear to be somewhere in excess of 178 billion different video games available, everybody I know bought the new Halo release and the new console to go with it: A very diverse panopoly of options, indeed. Our family owns a Wii console, and I am periodically obliged to play it for hours without respite. Otherwise, I only play Jello Car on the PC, though I have played Pac Man, Mine Sweep, solitaire and Wolfenstein at various times in my life. Mostly, find such games to be even more anti-social than I am. They train eye-thumb coordination, but completely stifle the diversity of our collective brain.

The NYT Best Seller List for books - This Moonglampers Service is made to order and defines culture as we live and read. Some people do not read at all. Some people read about a book, and claim to have read it. They nod slightly over-excitedly, and say, "Wasn't that great?" Some people read at the speed of a fiber optic webcast, and have no idea what they just read. All of these people have the NYT Best Seller List in common. The NYT Best Seller List doesn't just report on popular books any more than Dick Clark just played popular songs. It is a great leveling force that provides its followers with a socially safe orthodoxy and an acceptable list from which to choose their next topic of cooptation.

The Pottery Pier Crate Barn and Apple Barrel Store - Retail mass-uniqueness is an interesting oxymoron foist upon the oxy-deprived-moron. Old and wicker do not function well together. Distressed and refurbished are not the same thing. You can expect to see Apple zealots turn against their sacred boutique gospel like dragons in a thunderstorm should Mac sales increase to corner more than a quarter of the laptop market, i.e., when regular dumb people have them. (Except the Apple Deacons who own a lot of stock.) The advertisements for these retail outlets are more priceless than anything on a credit card commercial: Be Unique. Buy From Us Like Everyone Else!

These levelers are the glue of culture. They bind us together, provide a common basis for understanding the world around us, give us comfortable, familiar places to meet in a world of strange and uninterpretable events.

Do you ever feel
          like you are stuck
               to a giant
                    strip
          of flypaper --
               a huge,
                              common,
                                             comfortable,
                              familiar
                              strip
               of flypaper?