“The Facts of Life,” by Black Box Recorder

It’s Friday night and we’re among friends here. Anybody up for a nice game of Gender Cards?

I’ve been reading a lot of dense material lately for a piece I want to write on the social, technical, and historical origins of the Internet (if I ever have the time to write it). The Web has a theoretical foundation that stretches back at least to 1937, when H. G. Wells wrote a treatise called “World Encyclopedia.” Thousands of scientists, social thinkers, and visionaries labored to create our “Global Brain,” which some say will help humanity reach its next evolutionary stage.

So what does it think about? Mostly sex, baby-talk, and cute pictures of cats. Can I haz evolve?

That last sentence was in LOLCat, the language that was invented on a blog called LOLCats ‘n’ Funny Pictures. It probably outdraws every political blog on Earth – combined. But never fear: Now there’s a webpage that converts any site – even FDL – into LOLCat. They’ll hear our message now! (I converted my dull healthcare and futurism blogs, too, since nobody visits them anymore – even me.)

As for the sex part, there are allegedly 1.3 million porn websites, with a total of 260 million lust-drenched pages. GOOD Magazine says (in a pseudo-erotic video, of course) that 12 percent of all Web sites are porn, 25 percent of all search engine requests are for porn, 35 percent of all Internet downloads are pornographic,and $2.84 billion in revenue was generated from U.S. porn sites in 2006.

Ol’ H. G. Wells didn’t see that coming.

To be fair, not everybody buys those statistics. This study, cited by the ACLU when it fought the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, says that only 1% of the Net is pornographic. But even 1% of the Internet represents a massive computational engine working day and night to generate an orgiastic miasma of text, sound, and images. It’s a jungle out there.

Which leads me to all those “political rumors” that have been floating around. Be really careful about those, OK? Ron Rosenbaum wrote that the LA Times is sitting on a hot scandal, and that gave the wingnuts license to be … licentious. So the usual sleazy crowd is spreading the usual sleazy rumors (no links, please, we’re skittish). Rosenbaum’s a terrific journalist, but he’s impaled on an ethical dilemma now: By writing about the story, didn’t he already “run with the sex story”? Can you be half-pregnant with scandal?

We can disagree about certain Democratic politicians, and we can disagree about Tuesday’s debate – but here’s a Fact of Life we can agree on: When the rumor-mongering begins, it’s almost always about dirty tricks against Democrats.

Feel free to attack politicians, or for that matter any of us, on the merits. We can take it. “Pile on.” But please, please,lay off the sex scandals unless and until they’re confirmed. We’ll deal with ‘em then … if necessary.

H. G. Wells wrote in “World Encyclopedia” that “America, when all is said and done, is one of the most intelligently aware communities in the world.” He envisioned a World Brain, as he called it, nurtured by an intellectual and moral elite. Oops. Even the Great Prognosticator couldn’t have foreseen the phenomenon of right-wing bloggers, much less Internet porn and LOLCat.

So remember … your Global Brain isn’t necessarily in its right mind. Don’t believe everything it thinks.

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