The Unpainted Corner

The internet is getting smaller and smaller. It started out small, sure. I was on board with local-area dial-up bulletin board systems, even though for the life of me I can't tell you where I ever got a direct phone number to call one of those. How do you, in the first instance, get a hold of an information distribution service when you don't have access to the the information services to distribute it to you? Like most of the early/mid-nineties, the details are fuzzy. I just get flashes anymore really, of modem noise, feedback and flannel, something painted salmon and teal... It's an indistinct ball of emotive synesthesia and it all tastes like Mountain Dew. I don't know how I dialed in to my first connection, but  I remember it was a revelation in 256 colors, usually arranged to make a blocky-looking dragon's head or Starship Enterprise. There was no Buzzfeed or Amazon to distract you, just a few lines of text dancing along the cutting edge, completely revolutionizing the way we as humans could reach out and anonymously call other humans assholes.

The internet got big fast, though, ridden along on the un-tameable backs of the twin horses of credit card numbers and porn. It was the Wild West for a while, vast and wide open and uncharted, nothing but horizon and opportunity, but with way less likelihood to die from gunplay or cholera like the real Wild West. It was boundless. Unless bounds were something you were into, then you could find pictures of people bound every which-a-way. That was the irony, though, that it drew us, all of us, out into the open at the same time--the dirty perverts and the legitimate entrepreneurs figuring out how to make money from dirty perverts--by affixing us all to smaller and smaller spaces on a series of shockingly smaller and smaller devices.

At some point in the last 10 years, and I'm not sure exactly when this was, we began descending from Peak Internet. That is to say, the point at which the absolute freedom of growth and dissemination of ideas began to constrict with the consolidation of corners of the infotainment landscape by corporate interests or concerted group action. The things that seem like openness now are funneling more and more into pre-determined slots designed to channel your attention using the slow gravity of snack-thinking.

As an example, Twitter, which I have never really been able to flow with at any speed, is around somewhere like 500 million users. All those people, alone, unmonitored, allowed to communicate whenever and however and with whomever they like. Except: Justin Bieber has around 40 million people following him on Twitter. That's almost 10% of the people using it. Nearly 1 in 10 of the people operating what looks likely to become the fastest global disseminator of information in the history of human thought are the kind of people who do not have the good sense to disregard a person who doesn't know not to go out in public looking like an androgynous suburban mall mannequin with encephalitis. What are your social options there really? The crowd is selecting itself, sequestering itself, disqualifying itself from participation from the rest of us who just want you to know when the line is too long at that Starbucks in Corona.*

What isn't polluted by the shallowness opt-ins has been staked off by corporate interests. I don't even trust the honesty of my google searches anymore. They all try to steer me toward some kind of retail transaction, even if the exchange is only my precious time and my logo-branded heart. It used to be the internet was a willing, blue-skinned djinn waiting, arms crossed, to fly off in an instant to retrieve whatever desire one could conjure. But now, like everything else vaguely Arab-y, it's become sinister and suspect. For instance, now if I go to google and type in "biracial cheerios," I'm only getting one response. If I want to see videos of people of varying shades along the melanin spectrum saying goodbye to one another using outdated British colloquial speech, I guess I'm on my fucking own now.

Those are your choices, people. Shit Canadian pop stars with low-level brain damage or breakfast cereal. The only saving grace is knowing that, since this is the internet, somewhere there is porn that contains both those things at once. It's all we have left.


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*The one on Foothill near Main, that one is too close to the high school AND there's that ratty yoga "studio" a few doors down, so it's like impossible to get out of there in less than 10 minutes any weekday between 1 and 5. Plus I misread some of the signals from a barista one time. Turns out she was just being polite. Got awkward.