Microstory 991: Wikipedia

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In 2005, shortly after reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I decided to go online and find out whether someone had tried to make an actual version of the all-encompassing tome. I discovered that a website inspired by it did indeed exist, and I even read a few articles on it, but it has ultimately failed to gain traction. By then, Wikipedia had already been created, and I had heard of it, but it wasn’t nearly as comprehensive as it is today. One thing that seems universally true in all of science fiction is that we’re the only ones who invented an internet. Sure, aliens communicate with each other long-distance all the time, but the breadth of the web has apparently never been replicated. Our internet is potentially accessible to all. Anyone can use it for practically anything they want, as long as it doesn’t break any regional laws, and sometimes even then. It’s full of lies, jokes, and totally conflicting information. It’s been used to bring people together, and tear them apart. For the aliens, they only need a network to share relevant information, and there’s no need to have any fun with it. There are very few things that the internet truly needs to remain sustainable, and good or not, a network like this is probably in our distant future. I wrote about this once as a joke in a tweet, but I’m about fifty percent certain that almost every webpage in the future will be completely wiped out within the next thousand years.

Wikipedia, or some similar service, will serve as the keystone for this new internet. It will be a repository of all human knowledge; our history, our identities, our discoveries, and our mistakes. And there will only be one of these, because in a post-capitalism society, there will be no need for competition. There will also be only one YouTube-like site, and one news source. The latter will be composed by artificial intelligence, and contain exclusively factual content. You may be asking, who would want to live in a world without The Onion, or Twitter, or blogs like this one? We won’t even need Google, because Google operates, not as a search engine—though that is its surface function—but as a web page indexer. The purpose of Google is to find you the best results, but in the future, we’ll only need one result: the answer. This future may sound depressing and unfulfilling, but it will not be without its joy and entertainment. There’s a lot of garbage on the internet, and in fact, I would go so far as to say it’s predominantly garbage. Currently, we live in a three-dimensional world, but unless we interact with each other in real life, we spend most of our time in a two-dimensional setting. The best parts of today’s internet will take one or both of two forms. It will either remain two-dimensional, or become three-dimensional, as virtual reality that’s indistinguishable for base reality is made possible. All the fun things you do on the internet right now; the broadcasting, and chatting, and image sharing, will all be pushed to these virtual realities. You’ll talk with another individual in person, just like you would in the real world. The difference is you’ll be able to teleport to them, and it won’t matter where they are physically. Again, I’m not sure that this is something we should do, but the deeper I go down the rabbit hole of future studies, often while researching on Wikipedia, the more obvious it seems that this is all inevitable. I just hope humanity lasts long enough to see what I am tentatively calling Web 5.0.

Microstory 974: Weird Twitter

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A few years ago, I was trying to publish my book. Well honestly, I’ve been trying to publish my book since forever, but constantly fail, and frequently give up. During this particular attempt, an agent actually responded to my submission for representation with advice. They said that I basically already had to be famous before agents would even bother considering me. In the olden days, this meant getting published in little-read magazines, and slowly gathering a base, until you’re (inter)nationally recognized. It’s kind of like how a band has to start out playing in small town bars, because Madison Square Garden isn’t going to call them out of the blue. While the internet has changed how we access content, the dynamic has remained roughly the same. I can’t make any money at what I do until I prove I can do it without making any money. Before I had a website, I  only had two avenues for releasing my work. I started posting my microstories on Facebook, and I set up an entirely new Twitter account for fiction. The plan was to tweet extremely short stories, which sounded good on paper, but every time I attempted to write one, it just came off as humorous. Or at least it was in the comedy genre. As far as whether any of my tweets are funny, you’re going to have to decide for yourself. It took more than two years before I made any true nanofiction, and it lasted that entire year. I’m doing something similar for 2019, and then reshaping my whole schedule for 2020. Yes, I’m that far ahead with my plans. Anyway, as I was saying, what I later learned is that these “jokes” had their own special name. They’re apparently called Weird Twitter. Understand that these aren’t just one-liners like you would hear Mitch Hedberg say. His jokes were just as absurd, and often didn’t come with context, but what makes Weird Twitter so different is that they’re usually unrelatable. I have a few running gags that you would only notice if you were really paying attention. I often joke about the present condition of the hit series Breaking Bad, as if the number of seasons it had, or when it premiered, was ever in question, which it isn’t. The joke is that there is no joke, because I chose it at random, and could have chosen any other show to express the same absurdity. I also post fake conversations with my parole officer, which would make sense if he existed, or if say, there was a rumor I was an ex-con. The fact that I’m so far removed from that life is what makes it less of a joke, and more just, well...weird. I love that Weird Twitter, and other humors accounts are out there, like this one I just discovered called Tess as Goats. Look it up, it’s hilarious, and Tess-approved. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t follow any other Weird Twitter accounts personally. My nanofiction account does, but I don’t check that feed, unless I have notifications. I only hope that other people aren’t doing the same thing, and are actually reading my stuff, because that’s why I create it. I certainly don’t do it for my health. That would be weird.

Microstory 938: Social Media

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Way back in the day, people were using social media before they were calling it that. I had an AOL Instant Messenger account when I was eleven years old, and several more over the course of the next nine or ten years, until it started falling out of favor. I spoke primarily to strangers by searching “common interests” that I realize now no one was taking seriously. Back then, we didn’t have internet safety discussions in the elementary school library. We had to figure out for ourselves that, just because someone claimed they could be trusted online, didn’t mean it was true. Most of us intuited that we were not to give out personal information, aided by the fact that AOL asked us to create usernames, rather than use our real names. These were not even the early days of internet communication. People before by time were using newsgroups, and…I wanna say, usenets? I’m not sure what they were exactly, but I can guess they were fairly unsophisticated. Come high school, people were still using instant messengers, but it was becoming hip to have a permanent web presence. Sites like MySpace, Xanga, and even Classmates.com were vying to give you their free accounts. I built a few stupid websites on my own before then, and never thought it would be something almost everyone had. But I guess it just had to become easier, and require no coding skills (I taught myself HTML, but for some reason, didn’t become the next Bill Gates, which is weird). Soon, one social media engine was seen to be moving faster than all the others. Facebook was edging out all competition to be the dominant force. You had to have a legitimate college email address, had to request your institution be added if it wasn’t already there, and it was generally expected that you use your real name. Instead of pointless blog posts, or innocuous conversations, this was designed to maintain contact with people to which you were no longer necessarily geographically linked. It was also helpful for school itself. I used it extensively to ask for help from my classmates; a fact that ultimately led me to deleting my account once I graduated from college. Facebook was only getting better, adding more features by the month, and eventually letting anyone over the age of thirteen in, whether they were attached to a school, or not. But a pattern emerged from this as well.

There are four main types of Facebook posts. One: personal tidbits/irrelevant aglets of conversation. Two: memes. Three: news. Four: fake news. I don’t care about most of it, and always found myself using Twitter mostly. Why? Not in spite of, but because of, the character limit. It was nearly impossible to go on a rant in Twitter’s early days. If you wanted to say something, you had to think about how to shorten it, thereby only expressing the most vital information. It allows me to keep up on the news, and the fact that you can’t post the text of an entire article means it’s much harder to spread misinformation. While I’m meant to connect with everyone I know on Facebook, I don’t feel bad about only following people I want to hear from on Twitter. After nearly eleven years of this, my Twitter game remains strong. I have three accounts, which are accompanied by an Instagram account I don’t use as much as I would like. I have since created a new Facebook account too, but I don’t scroll through the feed, and am only interested in sharing my original content. I don’t understand the appeal of Snapchat and Instagram stories, because if I tell you something, I want you to remember it, not limit it to your short-term memory, after which you move on to something else. I do appreciate that others are getting something out of it, though, along with Facebook. I just hope you don’t pay too much attention to that fake news. That’s exactly what the Russians want. Come on over to Twitter, where it’s fairly clear who you should follow, and who you shouldn’t.