The Ones Who Walk Away From Google

There have always been gatekeepers. And even if there weren't any to begin with, they quickly arose.

 Hip-hop, for example. If you could rhyme over your buddy's beatboxing, you were a rapper. Congrats. You can start a career on that.

Hey! Look! It's Biz Markie!

 (Man, YouTube integration with Blogger sucks. I guess AlphaGoogTube didn't think they could mine enough data from this.)

 As hip-hop became big business the gatekeepers kept out anyone who didn't talk about their guns. What if you wanted to rap about your delicious breakfast? Didn't matter. The white audience paying all the money wanted to hear about black people shooting each other. Can you rap about a drug deal gone wrong? No? Fuck off.

Gate closes. 

Comics had the publishers as the gatekeepers. Not just Marvel and DC. Fantagraphics and the artier publishers too. Heck, even the Japanese industry after Goku Spirit Bombed Shueisha into the biggest publisher on the planet.

Can you draw Spider-Man? No? Fuck off. Can you draw a punk rock cheese wedge? No? Fuck off. Can you draw a pointy-haired muscle man with a power scale? No? 消えろ.

Fuck off with this fun hobby shit, loser.

 Then the internet arrived. It was a weird place filled with passionate weird people and it was relatively small. Word of mouth worked like magic. You could hang out your shingle and there was a very good chance folks would come. You wanted to be seen for your ideas and creations and now you are seen.

YOU HAVE BEEN SEEN. FUCK YOU RIGHT BACK, GATEKEEPERS!

Then people started making money from it. They didn't have the name for their method of making money just yet. We'd later know it as The Parasocial Relationship. All they knew is that it worked. 

The cherry on the top was that, if you were petty and manipulative enough, you could use that relationship as a weapon against people who displease you. It's a gun so effective that it's still in use today. 

Moneyed classes saw this and realized they can make a shitonne of money by promising everyone their own parasocial relationships. They can make money from it and punish their enemies! Who can resist that? All they wanted in return was all of your personal information and that you watch this nice advertisement they made for you.

That parasocial relationship isn't just as addictive and mind-altering as the blue meth is. It's also mandatory if you want today's gates opened up for you. Can use your parasocial relationship to deliver people to have their lives invaded and turned into a sales pitch? No? Fuck off.

Sadly, most folks don't want to fuck off. They want the blue meth. Considering the world we live in, they're right to do so. You can't walk away from Omelas when everywhere is Omelas.

Here's a fun sketch of Fran to take your mind off of your neo-serfdom.

 I have been hearing whispers that there is a growing resentment from towards their only options being the gates or the blue meth. That a lot of folks are preferring to simply walk away from the online world like it was Omelas rather than make that choice. 

No idea if it's a real social change or just newsblogger horseshit, but I often have a similar urge and there are many days I wish I would just listen to it. There's no place for me to hang out my shingle anymore like there was in 2002 and no one will be reading this unless an algorithm tells them to do so.

Yeah.

But.

Is that right though? I'm blogging right now. Blogging is dead last I heard. Xitter killed it.

The gate is attached to a fence and fenced in spaces are finite by nature. Reasonably there should be more outside of it. That's something to consider. 

I have been. I just haven't figured out the best dirt road to tramp down yet.

(And that's why I'm so unreliable.)