With, not a Shout, but an Apocalyptic Screech

"Don't give a shit about the temperature in Guatemala
Don't really see what all the fuss is about
Ain't gonna worry about no future generations
And I'm sure somebody's gonna figure it out
...
Well I use to stand for something
But forgot what that could be
There's a lot of me inside you
Maybe your afraid to see "


Here's a little known fact about me...not too long ago I was one thousand-fold Internet opposed. I mean, in a crazy, apocalyptic, the end-is-near kind of way. Probably much the same as I imagine storytellers or the Catholic Church reacted when Gutenberg built his printing press...

What changed in 7 years? What brought me over to the dark side of cultural and social interaction? Well, first, let me back up and say that everything I feared would happen to our society as a result of the Internet has come true -- and it's not just a little ironic that Year Zero, which is arguably NIN's most apocalyptic record to date, surfaced through a barrage of the most ambitious and brilliant social media marketing I've yet to see. Not only that, but everything I feared I would become as a result of the Internet has also materialized. I am, in fact, now, in a way I never could have been before...asleep, drugged by media, lulled into quietude and passivity, technology-obsessed, completely unable to function without a computer, and completely unable to "speak", "type", and "interact" in non-email, non-text, non-im shorthand.

The brilliant girl who used to write long eloquent letters by hand -- 10 or 20 of them a week -- has been replaced by a total airhead who can barely master printing her letters in the correct order, because she's so used to typing followed by spell-check.

So, what changed? Same problem as the post-apocalyptic world of Year Zero...complacency. I could not beat the revolution, I could not convince anyone that we were headed in the wrong direction, AND I could not stop myself from being pulled into the mix. I gave in to the ease, the convenience, the laziness, the sloth. And, ultimately in a great twist of irony and fate, a very well-known fact about me (especially for those that read this blog and know the way of the beta -- who I've been spying on again, by the way, because social media makes it so easy to do so), social media as we know it in the mid-to-late 2000s, destroyed my life. Or the illusion of the life I had.

Apocalyptic whining? Yes.

Unfair characterization of social media, the Internet, and/or the power of this crap to totally reinvent even the strongest and most sincere among us? NO!

So, call me Chicken Little. I've heard it before. I won't reiterate the theories and opinions that were laughed at so many years ago... I won't try to explain what I know is true: That interconnectedness and democratization of information are an Illusion -- as the Web expands we, as a society, contract into lifeless, thoughtless, zombies.

In the immortal words of Bono:

"Where do we go?
Where do we go from here?
Where to go?
...
And staring at each other.
We were doing nothing.
Jerusalem, jerusalem.
Shout, shout.
With a shout, shout it out."

Or as The Killers like to say... "run for the hills before they burn".

Thanks to Trent for an amazing record and incredibly vivid picture of the present and the future. For what it's worth, I think he's right.