We are ruining the internet.
It started out nobly enough, the bombastic notion of connecting people and ideas from the world over through a universal medium. Free exchange of knowledge and collective experience from the privacy of one's own ... whatever. Who needs a card catalog? No Dewey Decimal System is required to type a few words into a search bar. Better yet, why read the revolutionary book about animal platelet mapping by Dr. Luther Von Udderstein when you can instant message the good doctor directly?
In the past decade, I have visited foreign lands without once boarding a plane or getting painful vaccinations to ward against African Weeping Sickness. I have talked smack to semi-literate Muay Thai boxers in Bangkok and pledged my undying love to USER546798 on a Mickey Rourke For President message board forum. If life is a carnival, the Web is a 24/7 pie-eating contest featuring FATLADYXXL, SADCLOWN68, TINYDANCER and, of course, you.
As with any freakshow, there are freaks. Urchins, dungeon masters, trolls ... all have crashed the virtual masquerade ball. Emboldened by the anonymity they have always craved IRL (in real life), they refuse to be sequestered any longer. Though the troll's IP Address may, in actuality, be assigned as "Under The Bridge," he/she is free to mingle with the invited guests when online. The ankle bracelet doesn't register trespasses of the ethereal variety.
Therein lies the beauty of the online world. All are not inherently equal, but are afforded equal voice. Crazy Uncle Carl who shows up drunk to family reunions when he shows up at all. The otolaryngologist currently doing missionary work in South America for indigent children with cleft palates. The high school kid with a 2.7 GPA and high score on World of Warcraft. The prince. The pauper.
All are given the same mask at the door. It is humanity at its very essence. Crazy reveals itself just as quickly as beauty. Stunning intellect and brutal stupidity can only remain hidden for so long. A natural sort of selection theoretically imposes itself upon these binary Galapagos Islands. The crazies eventually slink away to snipe from their water towers, leaving those more deserving of attention alone in its phosphorescent glow. It's not Utopia, but it's real.
All went along imperfectly perfect. And then the spammers came. Those entrepreneurial types who learned that faceless and nameless was the perfect level of identification for peddling their snake oil to the masses. Much like the meat product by the same name was designed to fill bellies at a budget price, servers have become clogged with artery choking transsaturated, mental fats. Sure, we push away from the table full, but what have we really given our bodies to grow? What nourishment is derived from the E.D. banner ads that clutter our sidebars? What building blocks are found within the email come-ons to collect our winnings from the Nigerian lotto by simply supplying a social security number and the pancreas of our first-born?
We all hate fluff. We hate clutter. We hate reading 500 pages to find the 500 words that we want. We hate being informed that we might already be winners when all we really want is to find real contact from a real human.
Enter the Realtor.
Much as we loathe the garbage that is heaped upon us, we stuff forums and social media sites with enough of our own to choke a standard poodle (something there is undoubtedly 2478 sites already devoted to). Know the quickest way to kill a revolutionary new network for connecting family and friends? Tell a Realtor. We'll hit you upside the avatar with link after groan inducing link to our "Brand New Listing," or "Joke of the Day!" We'll blast you with proclamations that we are the greatest practitioners in all the land, and then we'll blast you with the hyperbolic data to semi-prove it. Ignored it the first time? No worries, we'll re-Tweet it. Foolish enough to list your place of residence in your profile? We'll find you via reverse searches and other such Jedi mind tricks. We'll friend you. We'll follow you. We'll subscribe to you. We are the Borg, and we want to sell you a house. Truth be told, we'll settle for your fawning attention.
And we'll waste your time with damn fool content like this here.
Somewhere, there is that article you were searching for about "Scottsdale otolaryngologists," but the groundbreaking doctor with more alphabet soup designations next to his name than consonants in the Polish dictionary doesn't have the Google juice that I do.
I'll gladly refer you and your jacked up cranium to a reputable specialist for a minimal finder's fee, however.
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