PINGBACK IN THE AFTERLIFE

Remember when the internet died? Remember that? The day it all went down and never got back up. You lot didn't know what to do with yourselves. You were all addicted to the internet. All of you. (I wasn't, I just liked it so much I used it all the time.) You lot didn't know what to do without your Facebook updates. You couldn't imagine how you'd get by with no one Twittering your hashtags or admiring your selfies.

Some of you started improvising, shouting out your Tweets to passersby. You opened the windows of your homes and roared out things like 'I watched the new Marvel comics movie last night and it sucked!' The nasty anonymous trolls amongst you improvised too, popping out from behind corners, wearing balaclavas and shouting things like 'I'm glad your family died in a fire'. The end of Chatroulette also meant the return of flashers to our public parks. Those guys didn't get many 'likes' I'll tell you that. Likes were now conveyed when somebody passed you on the street and roared something at you and you gave them a thumbs up before rapidly moving on without really engaging. When someone did force others to 'engage' they were usually met with the acronym TLDL (too long, didn't listen) but when someone was brief and to the point, saying something that didn't really have a point because what's the point in that, they got the post-internet version of a retweet - as in they'd roar something and cause a person who heard them to roar out exactly the same thing whilst pointing a finger at the person who roared it in the first place. A couple of long held Facebook traditions were also maintained with people saying they'd attend events they were invited to and then not attending them and people allowing others insight into their private lives in the post-Facebook way of leaving their keys out for others to gain access to their homes and have a look around - once the home had been specifically altered so all the right things were left lying about to make the home owner look tasteful, sophisticated, well-adjusted and all that kind of shit.

Oh, what a superficial bunch of sorry cun... Jesus, I almost typed that out loud?

Anyway, this continued for a while until everyone started to feel a bit silly and strangely empty. Remember that, when you started feeling a bit daft and redundant? Remember how it got to the stage where you lot didn't know what to say to each other or how to act around each other? Problem was that everyone eventually realised there was nothing to share or react to. You had to start instigating and you'd forgotten how to do that without the use of a modem. It was impossible to make things go viral. Al Qaeda and affiliates even stopped beheading infidels. There didn't seem to be a point if they couldn't upload it. People wandered the streets forlorn. It seemed a cold world without all the liking and sharing. The internet was gone and in its place was nothing. Nothing at all. There was just the sound of the wind and that's a scary distant sound that reminds you that the world keeps doing its own thing and you don't matter all that much. I find that notion comforting myself but I suppose that's just me.

So, that's it. Our over reliance on the web made culture tabula rasa. I suppose our generation will die out. We'll exit this life like socially awkward guests leaving a crap party. The future generations will have to create the cultural content of the future anew. I wonder what they'll come up with. I wonder will it just be the same kind of thing all over again. Is all the need for attention in our DNA? Anonymous internet trolling, is there a gene for that? We'll have to wait and see. Not that we'll be around to see it. I don't know though, maybe we'll get some kind of pingback in the afterlife.