Dumb Shit is Our Birthright

Roy Edroso is feeling moroso:

That the grand hopes for we-dia and all the crap that came with it would prove a catastrophic bust is no surprise to students of history, who know what became of the Journals-Affiches of the French Revolution, and all the proletarian outlets thereafter.

But it is important to note not only what, but who failed in this case. It is tempting but too easy to lay the blame at the doorstep of one political faction or other. The real force behind blogs, Twitter, and all other social media is its users, which is to say, practically everyone of the internet. And this is the saddest part of the demise of the internet as anything other than a microwave for the mind: we are the ones who killed it. And no matter how feverishly we click and scroll and friend and block, nothing we do can bring it back to life. --"Why This Decade Sucked, Reason #10: Social Media Ruined the Internet" Village Voice

Every time human beings communicate, there is a drag toward the lowest common denominator. We have seen in in the evolution of every one of our communication and social networking tools: schools, books, newspapers, music, movies, plays, philosophies and ideologies.

The whole history of humanity is the history of seining out the accumulating crap of an endeavor to search for the one worthwhile thing. If we can find a few on the internet, we can call it a draw.