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.