Don’t Need a Weatherman

…to tell you which way the shitstorm’s blowing.

Over the weekend, the accelerating decline of online culture experienced a fleeting reversal with the return of Mister Metokur. If you’re not familiar with the digital gadfly also known as the Internet Aristocrat, the Weatherman, Daddy, or simply Jim, he started as a puckish prankster in the danker corners of the web. He first stepped into the limelight by breaking the Five Guys story that proved to be the opening shot of #GamerGate. Over the next five years–and almost as many Twitter accounts–Jim proved the case behind the 1980s Satanic Panic and sounded the alarm on Corona-chan.

Jim’s own battle with even more serious illnesses, and rising internet censorship, greatly reduced his online presence. That was, until Saturday, when he hosted a playfully titled Ice Cream Social that turned out to be more of an Irish wake for the internet.

Watch to pay your respects for the Worldwide Web:

It’s hard not to sympathize with Jim’s classic Gen Y nostalgia for the net. If you were a kid in the early 90s, you heard the ascendant internet’s praises sung from every rooftop. The Information Superhighway would connect us all together and pave the way to solving all our problems. Instant global communication would usher in a new golden age.

What the grand experiment in worldwide connectedness ended up doing was proving the great pre-Modern thinkers right after all. It turns out that most people really are idiots, and none of us is as dumb as all of us. The internet just gave morons a platform to collectively shout down the right end of the bell curve.

That brain drain is an often-overlooked cause of the rampant censorship that’s reducing the global information freeway to cable TV. A version of the Corporate IP Death Cycle has befallen the major online players, leaving midwit bugmen to man the levers in the original creators’ absence. The third-generation captains of digital industry love to portray themselves as maverick geniuses, but they’re really conformist dullards who’ve hung their hopes on machine learning cargo cultism.

The wholesale importation of linear thinking wage slaves who don’t understand the malfunctioning algorithms onto which they push more and more of their work is the smoking gun at the internet’s murder scene. The transitional period will be rough, especially for Zoomers, but the post-internet world may be the end of Clown World.

For an increasingly prescient vision of a post-Collapse future, read my hit mecha thriller Combat Frame XSeed.