Thursday, April 21, 2016

Life In Cyberspace

I am now forever spoiled for any type of mass communication that doesn’t involve zero latency.  I’ve crossed the Event Horizon in terms of fact and news gathering, and there really isn’t any coming back from that, that is, unless you burn out and decide, “fuck this, I’m out” and take up gardening, or tennis or golf or whatever.  Internet crack is perhaps the most addictive thing known to man, though - and all it takes to break a sabbatical or a “I’m really quitting this time!  No, seriously!” Is a taste, a peek, a glimpse of a news crawl in an unlikely place.  Then you start jonesing, sweating, your heart races; your abdominal muscles and jaw clench, and you know all too well that you’re not getting out of this without a hit.  Without a check of that phone or a “quick stint” at your computer.  You’re hooked.  Welcome to the club.

I think Reddit was probably my gateway drug, in hindsight.  All of that sweet, uncut, fresh, instant information at my fingertips!  So many millions of people commenting, commenting, endlessly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!!  Intermitted insomnia was an unlocked door for the insidiousness of Reddit.  Awake at 2am, don’t have to be up at a particular hour, nor have any particular place to be “tomorrow” or later or whatever?  Pop open that iPad and read for a bit!  Fall back to sleep around 5am, sleep til 9am or so, and you still have the whole day in front of you!  Strangely awake and perhaps a bit wired (read: vodak)? Stay up for a while!  After all, you’re reading, and who could possibly find fault in that?? I’m enriching myself, right?  Educating myself by reading up on current events, or wet shaving with a straight edge, or fountain pens, makeup, circle-jerkery, nudie pics, replying to sad, lonely, depressed or TBI people in an effort to give them a binary code hug of sorts; I found all of that and much, much more on Reddit.

Spend any appreciable time on Reddit, and you start to notice certain recurring references (aside from the obvious, a particular favorite of reddit, memes) to “the chans” or “/pol/” or “top kek” or any of the other innumerable words, phrases, memes and colloquialism that people who perhaps spent even more time online than I did typically used.  Naturally, I’d be curious, especially at times where I’d spent so much time on reddit that I’d run out of new things to read.  The “Ellen Pao” event from last summer was one of those times.

The Ellen Pao thing.  Oh my god, the mother of all cluster-fucks.  But really, that’s ancient history, so I’ll tell you about it some other time.

Back to [current year].  I’m noticing a trend that surprises me, frankly.  I’m beginning to be followed by people with tens of thousands of followers.  I am pretty sure some number of them are bots, triggered by some combination of keywords (though I read today that Twatter had put the kibosh on auto-follower scripts or whatever the IT gurus call that function); not all of them are bots, however.  It’s pretty odd, but ngl, definitely a little bit thrilling.  This bizarro Twit universe is one that seems both so complex, so multi-layered, so nuanced, and yet so familiar, so navigable, so...do-able.  Since I really don’t have anything else at all going on at the moment aside from laundry, blah blah housewife shit, and find it necessary to take my brain to trot (like a racehorse) lest it succumb to the repetitive vodka-boarding I subject it to, it’s pretty fcuking fortuitous that I’ve potentially found something that combines everything in life I love the most - digging up information, learning systems (organically - grab a machete, head into the wild and either live or die), posting witty bon mots, having people pay attention to me - all of it!  I found it necessary to kick my habit up a notch from reddit’s upvote / downvote system to the more pure, uncut, pharmaceutical grade shit -- the immediacy of Twitter and everything that comes along with it.

One of the benefits to living on the internet, conversing with journalists, both hack and legit, is the “make sure you understand the words you’re using” imperative.  I will be trying to express a relatively nuanced thought or concept in 140 fucking characters, and it will occur to me that there is a word, a word I’ve either used or read before, that says exactly what I’m trying to say, but before posting it, willy nilly, I’ll look it up so as not to come off as...one of those people - people who use a fancy word just because they can, but who parse it in such a way as to belie their fundamental lack of understanding of the word or its use.

I love the internet so much, I can’t even stand it.  If mankind ever finds a way to transmogrify crunchy-boned meat-suit wearers into binary code, I am going to literally marry the internet and have like 100, no, a GOOGOL babies with it.  Thank God I had my tubes tied when I did.  Hypergamy and whatnot.  (Hypergamy is a cool new word I keep coming across in Red Pill literature - still not 100% sure what it means, but...brb, looking up “hypergamy”).

Well, hypergamy doesn’t mean anything close to what I thought it meant.  Huh.  Weird.  Thought it was pretty my Red Pill for “big giant hoe!!”, but it’s not!!  It’s defined as the action of marrying a person of a superior caste or class.  Makes more sense now, contextually.  Guess I was born a deficient affront to my gender, because hypergamy never appealed to me.  I pretty much didn’t want to marry a medium-height, angry, hairy Mediterranean guy; always had a proclivity for blone haired, blue eyed tall guys.

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