Blogged Down?

Max's Post: 

Yes, hello, thanks for coming. Ya, ya, that's all very nice, now just sit the hell down and let's get this over with...

Now, let's get one thing perfectly clear from the beginning: I'm a crotchety old bastard when it comes to the Internet. Perhaps this blog will be good medicine for me. We'll see. 

I've fought against it long enough, but I suppose it's time I start taking in the 21st century, one teaspoon at a time.  Facebook... I've embraced that, but what the hell does that prove? Even 8 year old lesbian nuns in Greenland have facebook pages, and they probably have more friends than I do. But the buck has pretty much stopped there for me. From my cluttered living room I've pulled back the stained curtains just enough to see and shake my fist at those pesky neighborhood kids playing with their Twitter accounts, their blogspots, their livejournals, their... See? I don't even know what else is out there. The cyber-obsessed generation of which I'm a part has left me in its wake, but this has been an ongoing theme in my life, I suppose. I was one of those schmucks who amassed a treasure trove of VHS tapes because I thought this DVD thing would never take off, I was one of those schmucks who actually bought a Sega Dreamcast (best console ever, I maintain), I was, well... AM one of those schmucks who still has a flip phone and squirms with unpronounced envy and penal inadequacy when someone says "you can still look up driving directions on that phone, though, right?"


Anyway, I digress. The ultimate point here is that I haven't just fallen through the gaps in the World Wide Web but, like all shriveled codgers, I've managed to convince myself that I've done it on purpose, I was right to do so, of course I am, and all those hairy-palmed, self-obsessed, cyber-savvy social retards are... well, hairy-palmed, self-obsessed, cyber-savvy social retards.


Ask around. Anyone who's spoken to me for 2 seconds knows that I have an extraordinary talent for alienating myself from the rest of the world and subsequently convincing myself of my intellectual self-righteousness. 


And yet... here I am. Get your cameras kids, here we see a hypocrite in his natural habitat. Once a moral activist of throw-red-paint-on-movie-stars'-fur-coats proportions, I'm now posting webcam shots of myself in a thong made of live chinchillas.

If I'm going to take this blog (somewhat) seriously, I feel it's a vital imperative to answer or, at least, attempt to answer for myself the inevitable question: Why should anyone give a shit about blogs?  I trust my twin of lesser intelligence and greater baldness will provide some valuable insight from a more, hmm, rational point of view. But where does that leave me? Reveling, as I tend to do, in my own irrational and self-gratifying justifications.


How do I look myself in the mirror now that I've been assimilated?  Well... it seems obvious that one of two things has happened, and they're quite archetypal things at that. Either a) I have been converted to the cyber hysteria and must, therefore, find some way to weasel myself out of admitting that I've sold out or b) I have picked up some banner to wave in the faces of my accusers and substantiate my actions.

And, Lord knows, I love waving a good banner. 

Why should people give a shit about blogs? Why should I give a shit about writing one (with my brother)? And why should anyone give a shit about reading it?....

…....

…... Tough questions.

The main reason I agreed to write this blog with Zak is my sister, and my girlfriend, and my mom, and anyone, really, who's told me at one point or another to stop whining in my ivory tower, to stop tearing down other people and to put my money where my mouth is. Or, in this case, put my money where my fingers are quickly moving to act as my mouth. Does anyone else find this a bit odd by the way? A whole cyber world of information and opinion and bull shit exists and no one has made a virtual peep – with the exception of youtube posters... they get my wave of approval for now. It's all been done with the clacking of fingers on keyboards. The value of voice has been depreciated and usurped by something else. Something that I Hate.

A quick side-note, over the course of this blog you will see me use the word “hate” very frivolously. This isn't because I lack the due respect for the word or the action of hating. I lack respect for all the things to which I apply it.

Anyway, I hate the voiceless cyber-world for its annoyingly cliché Matrix-esque transformation of our social nature. At least give me a problem that's original! Now I'm going to sound cliché talking about it. I hate that mediums like facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. have forcibly wrenched a clear divide in our personae – like a log splitter, wedged in a trunk of birch, whacked with a sledgehammer. The internet is the dreamland through which our personalities can be represented in chopped up, airbrushed, and even fabricated pieces. Scrawny nerds can become giants with their booming-voiced blog-based avatars, ugly people can post pictures only taken from their “good side” and cyber-flirt with people they'd never have the guts to talk to in person, weirdos can lure you into their creepy Vans without you ever seeing the Van.

“So what?” You might reply. “It's all part of the cyber world anyway. It's like a video game. Once we log off, we're back to normal.”

Spare me.

We're becoming more socially retarded by the day. This isn't even the worst part. The worst part is how goddamn narcissistic the whole thing is. Only in a time of supreme, sci-fi self obsession could we honestly believe anyone gives a shit about our twitter updates We're the same ol' restless generation of the 90's but with a penchant for social schizophrenia; an increasingly quiet crowd of losers who can't look each other in the eye but will bash out pages of messages to each other with all the unrestrained familiarity of lovers. Clack, clack, clack, clack... 

Or maybe we're just really lonely.

Again, we've become subject to an unoriginal problem in an original form. David Foster Wallace took a golden dump on the intellectual world when he talked about Television and the self-assured, self-replaced drones it's made of us. And now the problems of the internet are the bigger muscles of TV's younger brother growing into maturity. If only David were here now.

So, what's my banner? Well, until I find a better one, I'm going for the restoration-of-social-honesty banner. I'm not going to try to be more clever than I am nor assume a cyber-identity (a cydentity?) for the purpose of this blog. Don't get me wrong, the things I write may be totally pointless and vapid, but at least they'll be my opinions and not my witty, articulate, Tucker Max Doppleganger. Is that good enough?

Why should you give a shit about blogs? You shouldn't, anymore than you should give a shit about listening to someone yack on in person. If you want to hear me yack on, this is the place to be. Mostly I fear that this is not what the www.cybercrowd.com wants. They WANT false, voiceless, entertaining personalities. I only hope that my actual personality is enough of those things on its own. We'll see.

Clack, clack, clack....