That today filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki proposed the iPad ™ users appear to be doing strange “masturbation gestures” with their iPad was only made more timely by the number of people I know who are leaving the Internet, even if only to break their temporary addition to the chilling magical screen that brings, porn, animal pictures, and clips of celebrity rants set to music.   Oh, and news and infotainment.

“I realized that I jerk off less.  There isn’t this constant stream of weird porn where I’m sitting at my computer and wonder… what about this…” and then time passes in a most profoundly wasteful way – considering the sin of Onan was the spilling (waste) of seed rather than the stroking gestures he had (allegedly) to employ that angered G/g/_/od/s/dess/es.  Another friend gave up the intertubes and finds that concentration is better, life is simpler and that “my time was always spend every night looking up some dumb shit.”  Another personal friend, a long WOW player who works with media also has given up the tubes, also expressing an increase in quality time and mental health and lack of weird porn, cute cat videos, and rants by celebrities put to music.  What can this mean?

It can mean that the intertubes are re-wiring the brain, but not in a we’re all becoming the Six Million Dollar Man kind of way.  Many claim that this re-wiring is a jump in evolution while others say that it is creating a land of morons addicted to… what was that?  Huh… (click click click)….. My… I didn’t know that X could put Y in Z and AB!  Sort of grossed out but not too much to not be turned on… wait…

Done.

That the internet is being left may be a fad itself.  A fringe moment.  However, the shift in the usefulness of the internet as a tool for the average person is certainly in some flux.  More than ten years ago the intertubes was the wild wild west.  There were academic papers for free, great blogs, communities of practice and knowledge, and some really fantastic porn….. While the porn remains, the chat rooms are filled with kids, the craigslists with scams, the comments on blogs shit heads with axes to grind, and the academics…  Real research sites are pay-per-view and have very high costs so that only firms can afford entry – again making the “average person” having to make due with whatever yahoo puts online. Having to pay money to get access to knowledge and information returns us to a digital academy system where, like the Ivy Leagues, money buys access and if knowledge is power – then so too power.  On the consumer side of things, the controls are being tightened and the kill switch to this whole digital septic system in the hands of the government while the corporations are creating two internets – one for the rich, the other for the masses where my Smurf tribute film won’t load as fast as Universal’s Smurf Film.  Then there is the behavior of the “average person.”  The Masses are not, as the Industrial Workers of the World would have you believe, reading trade papers nor discussing philosophy but are looking at stuffinthepuss and sundry other sites that ask, if I had a body cavity made for something to be put in it… what would I put in it?

Is leaving the internet a fad?  A fringe behavior?  Is the Internets dying like email?  Or, is our new new economy seeing the limitations of our technology when our search for value ends in greatly diminishing returns?   More of us realizing that the same vines of corruption that strangle our old media are choking our information systems faster and faster allowing a Chinese chilling effect in process throughout our series of formerly unfettered tubes that is cutting many people out of the information loop – or pushing their sites out to the neither reaches of search results.  To turn off the tubes means an end to constant infotainment and what may now be a counter culture statement.  The return to older, slower moving systems, may keep out the lower orders of the human condition as well as get around the new blocks in the road as samizdats circumnavigated State Run Media in the SOVIET Union.  Books and such may move slower to publish than blogs and websites, but may allow for a vetting of knowledge as well as a period where the consumer or user (before the intertubes called readers) could digest this information, consider arguments and facts or enjoy thinking about a story rather than enticed to click away after the “elevator pitch” of some blipvert onto another blipvert.  Could we indeed move to jerk off less to strange internet porn….?  Or do we need this new tube system and have wired it into our brains and social interactions in a way that it can no more be ripped out of our lives than having oil removed from supporting modern human life on earth…?  After all:

Assaalamu Alaikkum,

I am Mr.Mohammed Abdulrahman Al, I am an accountant of a company in my country, there is a fund
amounted to 30.6 million USD which I want us to jointly invest.
Please try and reply me as soon as possible for more details.

Regards,
Mr Mohammed Abdulrahman Al.
My Tel.00226-7847-2160

How can we live without uncle Mohammed Abdulrahaman e-mailing us at 4 AM?  And with all that is going on in the world for citizen journalists to write about the top wordpress blogs are about:

Because we… perhaps we can masturbate to Lady Gaga getting covered in Hello Kitties…..