The Internet: Here's what I think

A long time ago, in China, a mountain became pregnant by a ray of sunshine, and thus the Monkey King was born.

Much in the same way, western science, that whore, was knocked up by the military-industrial complex in some dark back alley during the cold war, and the biproduct of this paranoid union was the Internet. The infant was breast-fed by the proud mother, off course, all the information it could eat, true or false, and it grew fat. When it reached puberty it rebelled against its father and ran away to join the circus.

Now the Internet is fully grown, and it has a mind of its own. It is the collective mind of the huddled masses, excuse me, the middle classes all over the world. And you know who that is, right? That’s you and some over-privileged asshole in Dubai you may think you have nothing in common with, but you do. You’re conjoined. You share a mind.

As in any healthy mind, the subconscious part is by far the largest. Yeah, you guessed it; it’s the all the porn. Remember how hard it was to get your fingers on some of that? Now you can’t seem to get rid of it. Only, it’s mostly pay sites. When the Internet dreams, it dreams about a pussy with a dollar sign on it. Your own dreams may be free and secret, but when you log on, it’s the other way around.

It’s a boring metaphor, I know, but it works. It works because the Internet can be used as a metaphor for anything, which is in itself tiresome. The Internet is Democracy, for example, a cacophony of voices speaking only filth and nonsense when they could be speaking the truth. The Internet is Freedom. The Internet is Language. The Internet is the Tower of Babel.

But my generation (excuse my language) has already seen the Towers tumble and burn in that beautiful cloud of airplane fuel and stockbrokers. It didn’t seem to affect the Internet much, that’s why they built the damn thing in the first place. If you fly an airplane into the web, the spider will just spin a cocoon around it. And you know who the spider is, don’t you? It’s you and that guy in Dubai, again, spinning that silk, thought by thought, word by word, letter by letter.

It’s one of the grand projects of western civilization, and for that alone it deserves some credit. You look at a pyramid and you go, wow, that’s big. It’s so big, in fact, that it doesn’t matter if it’s utterly pointless. It has no windows. It houses the dead. It was built by wretched slaves.

But look at the size of that thing.