Here's a short story about the internet. It is a draft!


Web

Carl Taylor is twenty-three years old and he maintains a profoundly unpopular political blog that until now averaged something like 6.33 unique users per day, one of whom he knows to be his mother. She has commented on every post he has ever written. Carl orients his blog towards the political commentary-op-ed-humor-analysis-rant side of things, with just a little celebrity gossip. He has a particular interest in and fondness for news stories about happy celebrity couples such as William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman. Mostly, though, Carl goes for political news. Makes some jokes, maybe. Maybe not the best ones. He uses a standard template from Wordpress, a blogging service, and the title written across the top of his blog is “POLITICAL INSIGHT AND HUMOR.” Carl’s opinions are pretty good; they are neither good enough nor bad enough attract attention to his writing. But it keeps him occupied.

Carl lives on the third floor of vinyl-sided apartment in Tallahassee, Florida. He is one of the managers of a local coffee shop, and he is competent and personable. He is between girlfriends right now, but he is not without prospects. Today is that day that Carl Taylor’s blog will receive fare more than 6.33 visitors, and it is also the day that Carl will fall straight out of all the world.

What has happened is that late this morning (the current time is 4:23 PM), Carl made a post discussing, well ahead of famous commentators such as Rachel Maddow, the unintentionally humorous use of the term teabagging by conservative individuals, politicians, and pundits, as part of their protests alluding to the Boston Tea Party wherein these persons send bags of tea to those whom they blame for excessive taxation, such as President Barack Obama and others. Immediately after publishing this post to his blog Carl put on his work clothes and drove to the coffee shop for a short managing shift. Later, he drove back, and it is now 4:23 PM and just after logging in to the administrative control panel of his blog Carl has found the start of the thing that will knock him out of the whole of it. On Carl’s Wordpress blog service there is an option called “comment moderation,” where an individual’s comment will not be posted until the administrator (Carl, in this case) has approved it. From then on the individual is able to post comments straight to public viewing, but until then only the administrator can know what the individual has said.

Which is why it is very peculiar that every comment on the post is a logical progression from those that preceded. This is very confusing to Carl, as each of the hundreds of comments is visible to no one but the administrator, which, as previously established, is Carl.

“What the hell,” said Carl. “This makes absolutely no kind of sense. God damn.

What. What.”



“first post!! lol that is to funny,” remarked crzysprintr2006. And without the

comment becoming visible, not one person tried to claim it in the hundreds more of the hidden, building remarks that followed. And more every second as Carl stares, sweating.



Xx~pixie~xX19 responded to RogueClancer’s angry claim that Carl is a faggot, with a tart, a flippant, “no u,” without one pixel of one letter of RogueClancer’s comment shining from her plasma monitor into her eyes and nerves and brain. At every perfect junction a LOLcat has been posted, in a spot of unrelentingly serious comments there is humble Turtleburger. In response to every claim that this event is proof of white supremacy (and there are several such claims) there is that new archetypical owl, eyes wide and beak agape, “O RLY?” emblazoned in a font that evokes heroism and the everlasting. Every hyperlink is a Rick-Roll or a legitimate link to a Youtube video of giraffes fighting. Graphic Photoshopped images of Ron Paul teabagging Obama are greeted with DO NOT WANT macros in perfect time. More racism, and there sexism, and there racist sexism.

Death threats to Carl, defenses of Carl, appreciations, hates, and fights between the two. Godwin’s law is invoked in the nanosecond after someone says “the NeoCons are Nazis people.” Pitch-perfect irrelevant comments at the time they were called for. Page after page of tall columns of un-moderated comments expand and multiply; the reference of one comment to another comment or to multiple other comments expands and builds in disturbing webs, in impossible, non-Euclidian Geometries of the inane and the profane. Stacking in electronic densities. The insult of one person to three others is a color that is not part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Every person has not needed to see what those who came before them have said to know what they have said.

With a jerk of his head Carl pushes himself back from his computer and throws up painfully and with force in the trashcan. It is 4:36 PM. It is 75 degrees Fahrenheit outside, 65 degrees in Carl’s apartment. A mimetic sweat starts on Carl’s forehead and spreads to his face, his neck and arms, predictable like epidemiology and fluid dynamics and the traffic of our cars, and he know the exact second when the first droplet will appear on his hand, just beyond the cuff of his shirt. The comments expand, the minds of more than a thousand now have known each other without evidence or hesitation. It takes Carl three and a half minutes to parse out the significance of what is the only thing he can think of, “Filliam H. Muffman.” At the end of the three minutes, he knows.

“Felicity Huffman. William H. Macy.”



Then he also knows something else, and as lines begin to extend from him in all directions, he formulates the following plan:



Go to balcony
Sit in chair
???
Profit!


As he moves unnaturally through his apartment, he no longer knows the significance any object he sees. The pictures on the wall of his family, the refrigerator in his kitchen, are the light reflected into the eyes of an unconscious man. He slides or floats, pulled, to the balcony, through his living room, his feet are on the ground but do not touch it. His eyes look at nothing, but he can see from true cubist angles every chanslut and camwhore to ever live, a thousand private gyrations just for him. His mouth moves silently and no noise comes out, but from the walls comes the sound of his own voice: “Peanut Butter Jelly Time, Peanut Butter Jelly Time.” His skin is becoming pale or translucent. The lines extending from his body have touched and passed the coffee shop, his mother’s house, a person’s hair in Los Angeles. His body starts to cling to the lines and follow along rapidly, he is dissipating. His body and what his mind has become shimmer like heat off asphalt. He is about to go, the world is falling out from under and above and beside him. He is moving across every angle as the beyond-mind forms of the blog comment structures slow, collapse, and are forgotten. The lines are far beyond the coffee shop and his mother’s house, behind the L.A. person’s hair, beyond the planet and all planets. Carl’s last thought that we would understand as part of consciousness is:



“This is relevant to my interests.”