Many inventions shape our day-to-day life, including electric fans, pop top beer cans and proton accelerators. But could any one of them possibly touch the magical, butt-kicking World Wide Wooziness that is the Internet? Do you hear? Man, I repeat, The I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T, it is there, finally it has arrived, so wake up!! Billions of years of idly waiting for the sluggish evolution of geosphere and biosphere and all that filthy nature stuff are over. Here we are, retrogradely and ultimately propelled into the one and only nöosphere, the fairy realm of consciousness united, where the milk and honey of free information, pure ideas, and thoughts untainted by matter flow, and the phishing grounds are ever so plentiful!!! I say, that French chap Teilhard de Chardin had it all figured out. For, after all, what are we here for except shuffling off that mortal coil, collectively unite our minds and jerk off to the bumpy streams of sperm-drippers’ 30 second clips? Ever since Tantalus invented television and forced humans to squat in front of incandescent plastic squares, I have been praying for this vision to come true. Now it has. What can I say? The Omega Point is within easy reach of humanity, and all we have to do is further immerge ourselves in cyberworld and steel our souls a little longer in the purgatory of back aches. Don’t you see the masterplan? The body is but an animal of burden, a once useful but now retired donkey that has dumped its precious freight right into the El Dorado of Universal and Emphatic Sameness!

Now how does the preterphysical nöosphere affect my daily life you may wonder? The effects are myriad.

Formerly, in the crude world of Non-Internet, I used to spend the greater part of my days in a variety of body postures, heavily taxing my corticospinal tract and relentlessly firing my every motor neuron. And they were not too happy with it! Now that my limbs are safely rested on an uncomfortable office chair, my legs crossed, I can quietly and abstractedly pick my nose all day long. Or develop any other form of hospitalism I choose. For is not the still life superior to the hustle and bustle of a battle scene? Is God not best perceived in the grazing bovine and the dozing lioness? But let us not speak of the physical world and its drabness! For the internet is there!

In pre-internet days, when I wanted to hear music, I went to the record store and bought those nasty analogous vinyl records. You had to put them on the record-player and they got all scratchy and authentic after a while. But a record did not consist of music only, mind you! It came in one of those cardboard sleeves, with pictures and a bio of the artist and some artwork and all that crap. What for? Do you really want to treasure a piece of stuff? And connect to the artist through cardboard? It had that smell too. I mean come on, who wants smelly things? The earth smells, humans smell, poo smells. Did you know, that when talking to another human being you even communicate through odours? Yup, a wholly different talk is in progress, different from the content of the words you say, the most smell information coming out of the hair. Now have you ever seen a kick-ass avatar or cybercop with a filamentous, reeking outgrowth of protein on their potato? And one that got contradicted by his own hair at that? I bet you haven’t. And you wouldn’t want to interact and even smell-talk to a dusty old record would you.

Now yesterday a friend came to my place and dumped 12 GB of the freshest music on my Ipod. It is music - full stop. No cardboard. Now, I can listen for three consecutive life spans. They are all there, a panacoustikon of tunes, at the tip of my arthritic index finger!

Or take films. Formerly, if you wanted to see a movie in the comfort zone of home, you had to rent bulky VHS tapes and rewind them or pay a fee. Now, you just enter what you want at Youtube.com, and there you go, watching the world’s motion-picture heritage at a quality insulting to pre-WWI viewers of nickelodeon cinema! But then again, who are we to demand broadcasting excellence in the emerging superhuman superbrain!

Or think of knowledge. Does the term Wikipedia mean anything to you? It sure should supposing you ever struck out in quest of an item of knowledge on the bustling avenues of Informatia! Just look it up on the Web, that is, and there you have it all, peer-reviewed facts that are the same the world over. For between us, who could seriously suppose water has different meanings for an Ethiopian family and a North American hydrologist? It just hasn’t. That is why we can all go Wiki. The most anyone can know is exactly 1W. Full stop. It doesnt get any more confusing than that. So why tap diverse sources of knowledge when you can have information value meals? Scrap the Encyclopedia Britannica, rid your souls of the smell of paper, shake off the yoke of research!

Buy stuff? It’s the web, the supermarket of supermarkets! Just enter what you want and find a hundred thousand things! So I guess in terms of shopping, the web is pretty much the opposite of Wikipedia. It is a cornucopia of the unwanted, I admit. But still, it is a cornucopia. Gives you a sense of comfort and plenty and quenches your deepest fears about digital cameras ever running out. I must say I have ordered my share of books and cds online, most of the time because someone raved about them in a review and told me I needed to buy it. Now I have tons of media I cannot form any kind of personal attachment to since they just fell out of the sky in the shape of a UPS delivery van. This sure feels spacy.

Meet people? Go online buddy! Buddysearch, Stayfriends, Friendster, Facebook, or MySpace have all the friends you need. Just pay a fee, and meet your soul mate. Fee, soul mate. It is as easy as that. Saves you the trouble of meeting people that happen to grow in your physical enviroment like so much weed. And remember, you never have to smell them anymore, they’re just online. And since they don’t move from the screen their smell is bound to be a bit on the foul side! By the way, profile matching works so well because the internet tends to make people more honest and upright, too. After all, who would lie to a stranger they will never meet!

The internet is a great place for humour too! Just imagine all the best punchlines and dirty jokes collected in one place, stripped off their situational context and laid bare as a corpse amid flickering, obtrusive beer ads! It is hilarious. Also, there is much more creative freedom, and even businesses don’t take themselves all that seriously any more. Just think of all the quaint, infant-speak names out there like
Google, Napster, Flickr, Boingboing, Yahoo, Woot or Zoomerang. What more could drooling half-literate nitwits ask for! Sounds a lot better than Domestic and General Services Limited too, if you ask me.

Boy, the internet makes me hungry. Wait, can’t I order online? Sure I can! Just hit Dominos, fill out the registration form, enter your password twice (remember to put a capital letter and two non-consecutive numbers in there), tick the terms and conditions box and choose a pizza (how about Philly Cheese Steak with the Astro Crunch Gar-a-delic Crust!). Two hours later, your hunger will cowtow. Plus, you get sorely needed mouth-watering updates of Pizza News right into your inbox – every month!

It is this plus of serendipity that makes the internet worth our while. And though they won’t admit to it, I have known adult people open their browser without any kind of intention or plan of click-action. They’re just lucky drifters, adventurously setting forth to reach the internet’s far coasts in miliseconds, or just silently holding communion with millions of their soul-mates, lucky drifters like themselves.

So when television had put a stop to the sensory insult that is three-dimensional space, this was not the end of the story. For our beloved Internet has given us back the golden age, long ago, when we had but one eye. Just one! Enough for One-Line-Land! Remember Abbott? That British chap who wrote the tale of the Flatland? In it, a square from two dimensions travels to Lineland, and behold the king of lineland rules over his subjects who are just tiny dots, or users. And behold, he is the king of the internet!

So when I start my computers in the morning, in the dawn of the office cubicle, I feel the gentle touch of the internet’s arms reaching out to hold me, cradle me, rock me ever so gently. Now where would I be without this loving touch? Staring at opposite walls for hours, waiting for the wallpaper to load? Ah the glory of it all, the glory of the world wide wobbely web lubricating our souls for the pleasantest mindfuck that ever was. God bless the internet!

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