Why the Internet is Important: A NSFW Exploration of Us and our Times

For nearly two decades we've all been told that the Internet is one of the most important advances in human history, but nobody has ever really come out and said why. Usually, you'll get some insipid trope about how instant, world-wide communication has the potential to broaden our intelligence more than anything before it.

Well, look around. Do people look any smarter to you than they did in a bygone era when books and newspapers were popular? Indeed, I would argue that most people are immeasurably dumber than they were just twenty years ago, despite having instant access to virtual encyclopedias of knowledge and endless other intellectual resources. The lowliest janitor can now converse with the greatest professors of our age, but those professors are actually more anonymous than they were thirty years ago.

As a means of bettering ourselves and our intellects, the Internet has failed spectacularly and indisputably.

No, there are reasons to love Al Gore's greatest invention above and beyond its wildly overrated ability to enhance the mind. And I'm not just talking about the unlimited porn out there, either, although I can't stress the importance of that enough. Nothing has broadened the horizons of  lovemaking quite like the Internet.

In the end, the single greatest function of of the World Wibe Web is that it serves as a permanent living monument of our time. Remember that cell phone video you took of yourself getting your clit pierced in college? There's every reason to believe that people will be able to see it hundreds of years from now, allowing them to get a glimpse of how we lived as a species.

Imagine if you could see and hear, for example, Genghis Khan or Jesus Christ at work. Imagine if we could see Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation without relying on Spielberg to re-create it for us.  Imagine the insight we'd have into our own civilization today!

Well, we're creating a record of ourselves for future historians to study for all time. Sure, most of it consists of us drunkenly drawing cocks on each other's unconscious faces, but that's better than nothing, right? There will be no doubt about the way we lived.

Hundreds - maybe thousands of years from now - our descendants will be able to see this ....



(NSFW warning: Extreme language and disturbing content alert! If you fucking daredevils choose to watch this without headphones from the office, don't come crying to me when you get shitcanned directly into Hell. I couldn't be more serious about this.)

Could anything be more important than that? I would suggest not, and I'm an internationally famous student of history. Those three minutes and seven seconds will tell future scholars everything they need to know about life at the dawn of the 21st century. They'll learn about economic disparity, health care and contemporary human sexuality, but that's not all. They'll learn the exact moment that we understood as a species  that public hair is evil and better done away with. They'll learn that white-trash women fucked themselves with home pregnancy tests, which is a fact that somehow eluded even me!

But there's still more. This might be the single most compelling dissertation on love and loss that I've ever seen. If history books are delinquent in anything, it's that you never get a proper understanding of the personal passions of a particular age. How common people were truly feeling, the heartbreak they suffered and the hope they held on to. Well, no longer is that left to the imagination.

Those that survive us in the great experiment of life will have immediate access to the documentation of our lives that we leave behind. All of it will be at their fingertips. And I can't help but believe that this video will be the most prized find of all.

So much of what we put out there is little more than a cultural Potemkin village of our highest aspirations rather than a true reflection of what we are. We pretend that we're symphonies, the Bolshoi and the Guggenheim. But we're not. Not really. We're not even Kim Kardashian.

No, this video is the most accurate representation of who we really are at this moment in time. Culturally, politically and spiritually; we're crab-infested grandmas, mourning the loss of our pestilent little friends to the point of our own ultimate self-destruction. We love the discomfort and shame our condition causes us, but we miss it with all of our despondent little hearts when it's gone.

All that we are, all that we can ever hope to be, is written in that video file, just as the word "crab" was written in the sand.

It is the Yad Vashem is American life. And it will never be forgotten!


Editor's Note: I couldn't be more grateful to my personal hero, Drunken Stepfather (also deeply NSFW) for this great and most excellent gift to the ages. I couldn't be more confident that Drunken Stepfather will someday be seen as the unsung hero of our age. For this and everything else he's contributed, I thank him.