Posted by IN.DO.GU.TSU on 9/20/2009, 8:41 am
Once upon a time, there was a place where the socially inept could retreat from the critical, mocking world. There, they could meet kindred spirits, discuss common interests, and create simple works of art in a private, non-judgmental atmosphere. This place was known as the Internet.
All was well until the mid-2000s, with the phenomenal emergence of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The "Beautiful People" invaded the Internet en masse, relegating the social outcasts to the sidelines once again. With their annoyingly simple tastes and tendency to coerce and convert those different from them, the popular kids have succeeded in taking over what was once a nerds' stronghold.
It seems that more and more "griefers" surface on the Internet every day, forming close-knit societies and elaborate inside jokes as they join forces to destroy the lives of those less fortunate.
Search engines such as Google have become weapons, surveillance tools, used by an individual's potential enemies to dig up incriminating information about that individual. In today's struggling economy, business owners have been using the Internet to spy on their less desirable employees, desperately looking for reasons to fire these workers and cut company expenses. In addition, in recent years there has been an alarming rise in the number of elderly Internet users, who are only interested in violating the privacy of their younger relatives in a misguided attempt at love.
Even our culture has suffered. Look no further than YouTube for examples. This unspeakable video inexplicably has over twenty million views. (Harry Dacre, who wrote the original "Daisy Bell" song over a century ago, must be turning in his grave.) And this grotesque cartoon is an international sensation, its atonal song's repetitive lyrics having been translated into a multitude of languages and looping infinitely in the nightmares of children around the world.
The quality and integrity of our video games also grow more diluted as time goes on. For example, right now, there is a popular RPG out there. Its gameplay is lacking, its story is plagiarized wholesale from a bestselling fantasy novel, its graphics are simple recolors of the RPG Maker XP defaults, and its soundtrack consists of lifeless, sleep-inducing symphonies made by a young hotshot California music major. Moreover, the game's authors have the utter nerve to demand money for the downloads. Still, this game has an enviable following, with hundreds of regular members on the official site's message board. Odd how RPGs were once considered "video games for thinking people."
With each passing day, our world becomes progressively more like filmmaker Mike Judge's quasi-comedic dystopian vision of the distant future. And sadly, cyberspace is no longer a refuge for independent thought.
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