Cool New Idea for New Ideas

Almost everyday while in the shower I come up with an array of insane, inane and disturbingly awful ideas for some form of narrative story. I have habitually and systematically come to the self-agreement that the idea is too ungrounded, sociopathic or even boring to take anywhere further that a mind fart, all by the time I step out the bathroom. As such, up to this point I have turned precisely zero ideas into real, cohesive, tangible novels (other media forms are available). I will occasionally stumble across one that I particularly like, scribble down a hundred ideas all at once into a .txt file and then spend hours deliberating the details of the story, and exactly how this master plan of mine will make me rich. By the time the morning hits, I have realised that my story is barely even worth my own thought time, never mind anyone else's. Of course, the real reason is that I just can't be bothered to actual see a large scale project all the way to the end, because by far the most exciting stage is coming up with zany ideas and being carried away with the sensation that you obtain, as you have always known, an intellect that rivals even Aristophles* or other smart sounding people. So forever these ideas stay perpetually as a few kilobytes of txt file rotting in my hard drive, to be occasionally read and either promptly deleted or laughed at by the oh-so smart me of 6 months time. *Not a guy.

Well this shit don't sit right with me. I don't like having these ideas for cool stories; which, at least for a few delirious hours, I had thought were destined to be the next Macbeth, just to watch them slowly die in a closed-system cyber-hell of ideas without hope of escape. However, I also know that I am in fact a lazy shit who ain't writing no real novel any time soon, I have more important stuff to do like [insert thing I do here]. So I have devised a plan to appease my morality while not actually having to do any hard graft. As soon as I have these ideas I will leap out of the shower and onto the internet where I'll type that shit into a semi-prose, semi-blog style post where I can at least put these ideas somewhere that it is possible for someone to read, I'm talking to you, that one guy who consistently views every post I make and lives in the UK. I know you, Blogger has a cool stalking feature where I can view the viewing activity for specific IPs. Hide your fucking cat, I'mma coming for it. Anyhows, this series of posts will be as regular as anything else, but I'll at least try to keep it going for a while. And don't worry, it'll still be written in a completely esoteric (I actually looked up the definition of that word finally) and incomprehensible format beloved by all my doting fan. That way nobody will ever dare steal my amazing intellectual property and I don't even need to sell my soul to the Illuminati for a patent or however that works.

Post Scriptum:

I originally came up with this idea on the final carriage of a train of thought that originally started in itself as a stupid story idea, evolving into a autopsychoanalysis and eventual inevitable post-existential paradigm flip were I realised that if I do a small amount of work, I can avoid feeling guilty about not having done a large amount of work. Perfect. But writing this right now I've already gone over the tipping point and my original story idea is incarcerated in a cringe containment cell somewhere near my mid-frontal hippocampus. Oh well. I'll be sure to catch the next idea before I realise its potential for mass crimes against the collective human conscience and apprehend it for what it really is, a form of incidental psychological warfare that was rightly banned by the UN constitution decades ago. (Lol kidding the UN is a piece of bureaucratic dung that deserves a good flinging.)

Post Post Scriptum:

I wrote the entire of that post scriptum without even looking at a thesaurus, I think I am becoming the pretentious post-philosophic twat that I parody and laugh at so much but not-so-secretly admire.

Post³ Scriptum:

That previous paragraph was actually a lie, I had to look up a different way to say “epilogue” for the subtitle. I never knew that PS stood for Post Scriptum before, huh.

The Centralisation of the Internet

The corporatisation and centralisation of the internet is by far the greatest threat to current internet culture and content. Forget malware propagation or government legislation, there is no greater threat than this. With the recent explosion of internet usage over the last decade, the internet has become a tool and platform that everyone uses. Not just for a niche for nerds, geeks and teens; but an everyday surfing ground for anyone and everyone. There is no entry barrier, no idiot nets no nothing. This huge influx of users has brought one major asset. Money. Or at least a platform from which to make money. The precursor to this was the .com bubble of the late 90s. Businesses, mostly small, jumped on to the new biggest thing and jumped straight back of when that burst. But nowadays we have something much more sinister, corporations based around the internet. These are companies that built the current web we use everyday, pioneered innovations that we take for granted. Such as Google and the only successful search engine, or Facebook with there super-profit machine MySpace rip-off. Companies such as these make a lot of money. And with this money they can do two things. They can invest into their own projects to make them the best around; or they can buy other people's projects that are already the best around. Great, right? Now these companies will build a service that everyone can use (probably for free) and it'll be the best in the world! There's no need for alternatives when there is one, objectively best option! Hmm. Once one company, or website, has a monopoly on a market; there is virtually no incentive for smaller competition to attempt to rival them. And once nobody rivals them, there is no point for the large company to invest any further into that product, from a business perspective.

Take Youtube for example. When Youtube was a baby, it had a multitude of rival sites that had either the same, or slightly nuanced, functionality. For example, if you wanted to post animations to the net, Youtube was not the place to do it. Newgrounds maybe? And nobody in their right mind would post music there. There's SoundCloud or BandCamp for that. But over the years Youtube became the place for internet video hosting; and once it was purchased by Google, there was no turning back. Youtube is currently the second most visited site on the internet, beaten only by Google's own Google, so any competition would have to be in the multi-millions-of-dollars range to present to much as a scratch to the site's base. As for users, Youtube is really the only viable option to find an audience at any amount that will rake money. Even content that Youtube was never built for, such as music or even product selling has migrated over, just because of the huge potential audience crowded in one spot. And the more people migrate to Youtube, the less reason there will be to ever leave, thus forming a vicious circle where Google always wins. Damn even this fucking blog is built on a Google-owned framework. There is no escape from giants.

This is a pattern that can be seen throughout the internet. Whatever the type of site, there will almost invariably be a huge, conglomerate site that dwarfs and squashes any rivals out of importance. Micro-blogging with Twitter, video-games with Steam, streaming with Twitch; even the more traditional base of text-forums are being funneled into Reddit. We've seen it all before. In the real world globalisation has made starting and maintaining a small business something that relies mostly on luck and is incredibly rare to occur. Try and set up successful grocery store that can compete with any supermarket, good luck. In a sense the internet represents a totally interconnected 100% globalised market. Any site is as easy to access than any other, so why would you use for anything other than the best? And once the internet base is completely controlled by a few huge, corporate, faceless monstrosities your precious “culture” and "innovative content" will be squashed with whatever they need in order to maximise their profits. Innovation will die without its incentive; why strive to be better when there's no rival to beat? The internet will stagnate, just as globalisation has stagnated so much before.

Enforce the stupidity police! Keep out the normies! Boycott the fat cats! Nothing will work, we need to innovate fast. Make something cleverer than the huge sites, attack their weak points. Return the internet to a bastion of expression and innovation. Keep the wild west free.