Welcome to the digital age. It’s full of Crumb Brulee and other weird dustbunny hoarding. The internet strings that you put into the wall go into the computer, which turns mushy signals into music and pornography. Science hasn’t discovered how it does that, but we are getting closer to an answer using the latest technology and advances in terror management theory. Society encroaches and finds us here right in our ass-sweat-stained chairs.
In the digital age, you must be fast, because all your friends are turning into space putty that’s also magnetic, and if you’re not willing to accept it they’ll leave you for cat photos. I would leave you for cat photos, and I’m not even your friend.
Facebook is a place to put a photo of yourself and then post political commentary that no one cares about unless they agree or disagree.
If they agree, you get a smooch in the form of a little smiley face or dismembered blue hand sticking its thumb up in solidarity.
If they disagree, get ready for a discussion in the form of virtue signaling and pseudo-intellectual debate pockmarked by day-long stretches of no communication as everyone researches their topic. Facebook: your world, turned into a snake made of words and photos of everyone smiling even though the entire world has crippling depression — it’s never just you!
Twitter is a blue bird that takes meager fractions of concepts and throws them up so everyone can get angry. Many “interneters” use “tweets” to screech ideas that are so brief as to not be indicative of how they arrived at the concept. Things like “Kill all White Men” are cool to say. But be careful saying anything else about any other kind of person, because race-fluid androgenoids will find you and rub their period blood-soaked underooskies all over you car or rental power scooter. Don’t have a car or that other thing? You’ve got a body.
Google is a toilet paper mine of information, and a great place to find quizzes about your mental health. Don’t know if you want to subscribe to an idea you have? Look up something like “What if god doesn’t exist?” The conspiracy of the universe will cripple you into an oxygen-deprived scramble for information, which doesn’t say much of anything at all.
Google is also known as a repository for all kinds of lists, which you can use to order the disorganized world of information we’ve buried ourselves in.
Top tens!
Top zeros!
Celebrities all grown up and also deconstructed bodies!
Flippin’ frog carnival game hacks (the answers may surprise you)!
Which car is the best(s)!
Grammar rules!
Graham Cracker rules!
A pathetic bile-pond of unverifiable and subjective information is just a few drunken keystrokes away.
Buddhism is a big Google thing, because everyone is tired of thinking and it hurts to realize that this is really as good as it gets.
Want to learn to meditate but don’t like the idea of a skinny / fat guy with chunky earlobes telling you about the nature of reality? Use “mindfulness” to sink ever-deeper into the brain that’s making you think all these thoughts and compulsively search for meaning in a world that is as absurd as it is objectively cruel to its inhabitants.
I hope this gives you an idea of how sneakily the digital era will encroach on your values and knowledge. Thermometers, clocks, plates — everything’s going digital. And the sooner we get there, the better our chances of completely losing ourselves and finally finding the peace that we long for in annihilation.