The internet is Epic (with a capital E)

Introduction!

Ooooooooooh shit! Here it is, the one and only me talking about the one and only internet. Thank you thank you you're all so kind.

Internet. This post is about the internet. You, yes you, reading using your eyes like you're using the word "you" a lot, you get to read about the internet in this blog post. That wacky endless deluge of overwhelming beauty that we've all come to know and love as a normal part of our lives.

Not gonna lie, I'm pretty excited. I feel like there's bees in my ass from how hard I'm sitting on the edge of my seat.

Fuck me (please), I've grown up on the internet. I got my first crap-tastic computer when I was like 8, and it was a match made in heaven, notarized by the devil, and co-signed by Shub-Niggurath black goat of the woods mother of a thousand young. I signed my life away to this intricate song and dancing series of tubes known as the internet and in the process sealed the fate of the world to endure the person it made me into. The prophesy is come true! Ha ha HA!

I began exposing my retinas to the ionizing radiation of internet content around the year 2006 or 2007. YouTube was my jam, Kongregate was my peanut butter, and the bread was crippling self esteem issues. You know, normal kid stuff.

Let's stop pretending like we all have the attention span for lengthy preamble and instead move onto the meat.

Stuff me! Stuff me like one of your french turkeys!

There's just so much stuff on the internet. There's tough stuff, rough stuff, and muffin stuff. But that's just me trying to act all gruff stuff. Enough!

As the great original OG gangster Einstein once said, "Dude, Tim, the internet is like really big man. You should talk about that lololo."

Once upon a time there was an idea. Twas' a good idea, one that was good. All the way back in the crusty ass age of 1822 this guy Charles Babbage got the bright idea of making the first mechanical computer, the "Difference engine".

After that failed spectacularly (not due to design flaws, but due to funding) another madman came along and said, "Wait what if we did it again, but with more war?" and thus Alan Turing will be remembered forever as that one guy who's name is on the Turing Machine.

Why am I shitting a history lesson out of my hexagonal ass like pushing Play-Doh through a mold? Because the idea of a computer is crazy non-obvious and it's good to get some perspective. What? You thought just because I'm being funny and wacky you weren't going to get cultured? How cynical.

Through a combination of number theory, logic, information theory, absurd engineering feats, baroque communication protocols, network effects, and sheer power of will, we can now copy information nearly for free. Yeah, italics. I went there. Because being able to copy information nearly for free is a big fuckin' deal.

Like throwing napalm onto a kitchen fire the economic price of communication drops to nearly zero, evolving the human race from Homo Erectus to Homo Connectus.

And so there were cat pictures. And dogs, too. And memes and jokes and social media and websites and online shopping and! But you already know that. You know all of it, because you're here right now in this website complaining about my design sensibilities wondering if I can maintain this manic tone while chomping at the bit for that sweet sweet ambrosia of another paragraph.

The implications of nigh-limitless copying and sharing is one thing, but combine it with a species of talking monkeys with nothing better to do than communicate and you've got the internet baby!

It's not like the internet is very old; we're still watching it in it's infancy, stumbling around on its stupid chubby baby legs blubbering incomprehensible gibberish that you think is adorable because the alternative is resenting your child. And just like that gross demon crotch spawn we must express our undying love to it or it'll get developmental issues that'll only be dealt with in its late 20s.

Or, wait, no. The better metaphor would be like us being the... grandma? And being like, "Wow internet you're so tall now." Yeah that's it. Grandma Tim reporting for duty. Not diaper duty though. Get it? Diaper duty.

Our name is Humanity, monkeys of monkeys; Look upon our works, ye grandma, and despair. For we have built vast monuments to our cultures, raised effigies in the name of content, and engraved unto the form of silicon our lives and passions. Behold thine memes, for it is deemed to be the internet, and it shall stretch into the endless far away.

The sheer scale of the things you can find on the internet is obscene. Not to mention all the obscene things you can find. The obscene obscenities of the scale of the obscene internet is obscene. I'm just having fun with words at this point, I'll get back on track.

So we know that there's a lot of stuff on the internet and we know that it can be shared at the speed of your shitty Comcast plan, but what does it mean? What are the implications of such scale, of such magnificent -- I dare say obscene -- girth?

The internet is a series of boobs!

Instead of trying to squeeze blood out of the stone of your empty fucking life you can instead squeeze one out to our vast selection of pornographic materials.

Yeah but seriously. There's a lot of porn on the internet. Like, a lot a lot. Like enough that alien invaders will be confused about why we use our porn machine for socialization.

Y'all a bunch of horny freaks. You might think that's pejorative; not so, it's endearing. In what other age of humanity would we ever have to come to a collective cultural understanding of Rule 34? Did Confucius have to think about Rule 34? I don't fucking think so.

Porn is a perfect example of the single greatest thing about the internet: specialization.

If you're the kind of person who values slapping your five dollar foot long to Confucius porn, and that beef jerking doesn't hurt other people, then you as a human being deserve the right to clean your clarinet to erotic depictions of a 530 BC Chinese philosopher.

(I'm serious by the way. I actually found Confucius porn. Your throbbing meat truncheon will thank me later.)

And since the internet specializes, since it creates these small bubble communities, you can almost always "find your people" so to speak. You can find your subculture.

Come with me and you will see a world of endless niche specialization!

Subculture? Subculture?? Do you know what that means? It means that I get to present a link! Yeah, a blog post with links on it, we're really turning into a mini representation of the internet now. Here it comes, it's a doozy...

Ahem. Please check out The Melancholy of Subculture Society by Gwern. This guy's writing is more dry than cornbread, but I promise you that it's well worth your time. Even though I know you're not going to read it anyways ;).

Hold my beer, I'ma summarize the shit out of this bitch:

/begin summary

One problem with society is that being in a global culture is really stressful; you've most likely got a built-in biological imperative to compete so that you can have status and sex and all that nasty shit, and since you ain't ever going to be a billionaire you're basically always going to be at the bottom of the heap, creating stress.

Chronic stress bad. Status feels good. People deserve to feel good. Enter subcultures, where you can be high status with a small group of people without having to compete on a global stage. You ain't ever going to be a billionaire, but you might just make a name for yourself writing blog posts and short stories.

Although subculture society causes a lot of issues it also allows a larger amount of people to co-exist in the same global world while still feeling at least a bit satisfied with their lives.

/end summary

See? I can't even summarize it without sounding like I'm lecturing an apathetic community college class on anthropology. I fucking love Gwern's writings, but I always write like a dog gamn academic after I read it.

Anyways, the internet might as well be a Subculture Machine. It takes niche interests as input and spits out little communities.

The implementation and consequences of this are more rough than a three year old's coloring book, but it still gets shockingly close to the utopian ideal of a world where everyone can live a life that is catered to their specific desires.

Imagine a version of you from 100 years ago. You would have a cripplingly hard time coming to terms with your canned beans obsession in that kind of world. Yes I know about the canned beans thing, but it's okay because there's probably some place on the internet that's accepting of that. In the world of internet subcultures, the worst you'll have to do is be the founder of yet another niche community about canned beans.

Ah yes. Modern canned bean subcultures. This is truly the dream time. What pizzas, what passion.

Passion out from excitement!

Pop quiz: What do you get when a lot of people make a lot of stuff?

Answer: outliers!

I'm going to let you in on a little secret, I'm a nerd. But not just a nerd, I'm Nerd King of Nerd Mountain. I sit on my nerd throne of broken computers as lesser nerds bend a nerd knee in nerd supplication to my flaming nerd boner.

Given that, even I'm impressed at the depth of passion that some people display on the internet. Not just passion for "nerd stuff", but passion for all the things. Dig deep enough into the catacombs of the internet and you'll resurface as a monk with 10 years of academy training in the deep lore of Courage The Cowardly Dog.

Seriously, it's beautiful. Awesome. Lovely. Give it to me. Bring me your passion. Yessssss

What do I mean by "passionate"? For me it's someone who's found their Thing and is bursting at the seams to share it with the world. Their Thing being whatever it is that tickles their brain in that special way that inspires someone to spend years deconstructing the entire construction pipeline of airplanes, or something.

"Hi my name is Tim and I have an addiction to passionate people."

"Hi Tim!"

This is such a difficult concept for me to convey with words. It runs through the very core of the hamster wheel of my soul, touching everything from how I write to the weird thoughts I have when I wake up in the middle of the night, delirious, in that strange space between dreams. Inside me, under the gunk and burning tires, there's a deep profound respect and admiration for passionate people.

Maybe I can give an example? In my newsletter I talked about building your own castle with software. There's some technical programming stuff in there, but the main point is this:

You could buy a castle, or rent someone else's, but if you've built your own castle, than[sic] you can look at every brick and crack and say, "This is mine". You know every corner of your castle front and back, and you've made it to your own exacting expectations.

-Me lol

You don't need to hold back like you're a grown ass man playing a little league baseball game. You can spit your sick-nasty things however which way you please, since the internet always provides you with your own platform.

Your own castle!

Making things is hard yo.

But you know what's harder? No. We're done with the porn section. Stop. The answer is: trying to conform to the expectations of a publisher.

I don't know about you, but I hate people controlling me. Working at a job sucks. Writing for other people sucks. Thinking of a third list item to complete the pattern of this paragraph sucks. It all sucks. Just let me do what I want.

On an artistic level the internet provides the ultimate benediction: Your own platform.

You might be restrained by your budget or your time or your ability to reach an audience, but god damn it the internet will provide you a voice anyways. The internet is so eager to provide you with a voice that it might as well be begging you like your puppy at 3 AM whining to be taken outside for the eighth octovigintillionth time today.

This website -- my pride and joy -- costs me about $20 a year to keep up. If I didn't want to have my own website there's innumerable other websites out there that would be willing to take my hard earned creative works. The barriers to entry are lower than a limbo bar and grill.

When writing for my website -- for myself -- I don't have to hold back. I can put a stupid joke in every fucking paragraph, making this post exhausting and confusing to read, and nobody can force me to stop. The horrible extended metaphors are inexorable because the internet let it happen; praise be the internet for this blessing.

It boils down to a nasty 3 day old chicken bone broth of expectations. The majority of people on our dear planet Earth and associated hell dimensions have a propensity to conform to a standard set of things they think are interesting; their're're expectations about what to consume fall into a narrow range, like a grammer nazi. For the rest of us, we have the internet's endless bounty.

Art that's actually good!

Just through sheer probability it's inevitable that the internet has good stuff.

For every 10,000 blog posts out there that are boring and stupid, there's one that can change your entire view on reality. For every 100,000 awful fanfictions, theres one that is shockingly good.

I could make a list of the best things, but then this post would become three times as long. And three times as long is just too much, even for me. Don't think about that sentence too hard.

Do you not realize how high your expectations are about things are? Have you seen older comedy? Only the very very best stands any chance of being remembered as anything decent. The rest falls on its face like a skit of some guy falling on his face slipping on a banana peel. I'm trying to think of some way to put in another "falling on face" sentence here, but I've got nothing; looks like I fell on my face with this joke.

When I say "art" that's actually good, I don't just mean the normal creative fields either. Sure writing and painting and music are deep-seeded human traditions iterated on since at least a few days ago, but what about the art of programming? What about the art of writing little snappy one-liner comments in a Reddit thread? The art of critiquing a 50 year old video game in a way that's both informative and funny? The total set of all things that humans can use to express themselves is enormous, and now with the internet you actually have a chance of finding it without having to sacrifice a goat.

This paragraph intentionally left blank.

Let's conclude this meandering mess. We're on the internet after all, who has the attention span for this kind of thing? Let's bring it to the end.

Conclusion!

Yo momma.

I love the internet because it's interesting. It's the single most interesting thing ever created by humanity, and it was made for humanity. It's so... self serving. It doesn't try to hide itself; it's the internet for fsck sake. I for one am glad to have watched and grown with this corner of our collective minds, and I hope to continue contributing to it into the long future.

Before I go I have to tell you about this post's companion piece: The internet is Evil (With a capital E). I should say flat outright that the "Evil" side of these two posts is the most hateful and vitriolic thing I've ever written, let alone published. I was also belligerently drunk when writing it.

Take it to heart, or not, I don't care. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

Thank you all for being awesome,

-Tim