The internet
is the worst thing to happen to humanity since the Hydrogen-bomb. You
might think this is an outlandish and wildly inaccurate statement and
you would almost definitely be right. But after spending almost three
days straight refreshing my Facebook page and posting pictures of
small animals with assorted danish pastries on their heads on Tumblr,
well heck, I'm burnt out. I'd just like to point out this isn't my
usual approach to the internet. Normally I ration myself to only 20
hours a day. But this week I've been avoiding doing all the work I
avoided doing over Christmas. And as we all know:
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| Honestly if it's not a bar graph I'm lost, but some boffins at Oxford made this (probably) so it's science. |
Sure, the
internet isn't all bad. It's saved an entire generation of young men
from the shame of having to buy top shelf pornography in a discreet
brown paper bag of shame that may as well have “FILTHY PERVERT”
scrawled all over it, because everyone knows that if your bag is opaque, you're probably a sex offender. I guess there's some other
reasons why we all dig the internet and if this was a rational,
balanced argument wherein I
carefully weighed up the pro's and the con's, then you would get to
hear them. As it stands, this is basically what you have come to
expect from my blog: the over-caffeinated ravings of a wildly
unstable personality. That's right, I'm going to get all Michael
Moore up in this shit.
As any good
polemicist knows, facts talk. So here's a fact: THE INTERNET KILLS
PEOPLE. Every time you fire up your laptop you have a 90% chance of
dying. You could end up being strangled by your spouse for using up
all the bandwith downloading every episode ever of Come Dine With Me:
Extra Portions. You could die
like that guy in the internet cafe when he sat infront of his
computer for twelve hours straight. You could become addicted to
pornography and furiously asphixi-wank yourself into an eternal
slumber. You could even get addicted to World of Warcraft and die of
shame.
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| Common side-effects of pretending to be a pixellated troll include adult acne and eternal virginity. |
And,
sure, you might say, these are all easily avoidable scenarios. Just
step back from they keyboard, take a ten minute break, make a cup of
tea, go outside for some fresh air. But you know what? People are dumb and they will stare at a screen for
seventy-eight hours straight even though their eyeballs are bleeding
and they can't stop dry-heaving from the everpresent stench of their soiled jeans.
Even
if you manage to use the internet without dying, don't think you're
safe. The internet makes it almost impossible to avoid people. You
are always just the click of a button away from someone you really
don't want to deal with. That guy you accidentally sat next to on the
bus once? Yeah, he's not going anywhere until you've heard all about
how difficult it is seeing his mother go through chemotherapy. That
girl who stole your boyfriend? She wants to Facebook chat about their sex life in exruciating detail so she can ask you 'how did you ever let that one go?!' while you sit there, your genitals nothing more than a blank neutral space because it's been so long since you've felt the touch of another human being your body automatically assumes that you are an amoeba and reproduce asexually now. Pulling a sick day? Your boss just read your Twitter feed where
you spent the last six hours LOLing about how much fun you had at Sea
World and how awesome shaking fins with Shamu was while the schmucks
at the office toiled away, wasting their miserable lives in the
mediocrity of middle management. Well guess what, you've got all the
time in the world to just get out there and live, because, hey, now
your unemployed and soon to be homeless. May as well buy a season
pass to Sea World and drown yourself in the conga eel tank.
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| I've never read Moby Dick, so if a whale busts you to your boss via G-mail, you should definitely get all Ahab on him hunt down some nautical revenge. |
Do
you even remember what it's like outside? I sure as heck don't.
Sometimes I twitch open my curtains to peek out into the world I've
half-forgotten, before scurrying back to my desk, eyes, unaccustomed
to natural light, bleeding ever so slightly. I've heard talk of a time before Tumblr, but honestly, I don't remember. My life has been
spent before a procession of LCD screens. If I'm not texting my
friends (that's hypothetical, because I don't have friends. Mostly I
text the Samaritans Suicide hotline and they send me motivational
messages like 'you can do it!' and 'be brave, soon the pain will
vanish'), I'm tweeting, or tumblring or watching Iplayer. Human
interaction that doesn't involve a protective barrier is pretty much
impossible at this point.
So,
what can be done about it? Well if, like me, you believe that Pixar
are actually purveyor's of chillingly accurate Nostradamus type
predictions, then humanity is in for a bumpy ride. In between the
lost fish and talking cars, it seems as though the human race is
heading for a lifetime of immobility, the loss of vowels from the
alphabet and an inability to blink. Turn on, log on and
let your brains dribble from your ears and out of your skull.
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| This guy ruined your life. |
Disclaimer:
I actually really like the internet, please don't make me live in a
yurt.
