Column 7

Of late (and by "of late" I mean "since the Renaissance"), many individuals with a "blame society first" mentality have posited the assertion that we are becoming addicted to technology. Now, I've not had much experience with addiction. I'm just not wealthy enough to get hooked on love (damn sales tax), not demonic enough to get hooked on coffee (cafiends, begone!), and not patient enough to get hooked on cocaine (I just can't stand long lines). But I do have some experience with this “intraweb” thing, and, I must say, it’s catchier than tuberculosis at a CPR convention.

With that said, my first response to these cri-techs is “Whoa, whoa, whoa. If you’re trying to tell me there’s another way to get my news, sports, solid B+ essays for $9.95, and ‘creatively purchased’ hippity hop music all while curled in the fetal position next to a space heater in my parents’ basement, then I don’t want to hear about it!” But, of course, The Man just has to keep a brother down.

First tactic: green stuff. “Dylan!” they say. “Outside of your cold, bitter lair is a world of magnificent magnificence that, we think you’ll agree, has the potential to be totally super. Once there, you can run and frolic about like the days of yore, when-” That’s all I need to hear. What part of “sitting around time” don’t some people understand?

Thwarted once, they persist. “Dylan!” they say. “If you remain in front of your computer forever, you will never meet pretty ladies or experience the joys of friendship, camaraderie, and having that guy you kinda, sorta know from down the street borrow your toaster oven for just fifteen minutes and then not return it for, like, a year. What kind of standard of living can you have when you can’t make friends, find love, or have your material possessions permanently borrowed by jerks unless you get off the damn computer!”

I respond that jfkfcspan476, cpnnopants32, and ThePrpleFuzz19 are all the friends I’ll ever need, love is the mayonnaise to my peanut butter, and I only let people borrow things I’d already stolen myself.

In other words, I’m not budging. But I have a problem and, until I see it, they simply cannot stop. So they pull out the big guns: theory. “Dylan!” they say. “If we continue to get caught in internets of our own devices, soon enough we’ll create robots that will do everything for us, like thinking and taxes and water polo. Then, right when we turn our backs to go to the bathroom or comb our hair or something, the robots will strike! We’ll be enslaved and civilization will end and our organs will be used for bagpipes and everything. Do you want your organs to be bagpipes, Dylan? Do you?”

Contrary to popular opinion, I do not, in fact, want my organs to be bagpipes (how many times do I have to say it, good Lord!). My weakness exposed, I wrack my brain for a way out. I must save my precious intraweb! Then, as if from the Forums on High, an epiphany: If we develop robots to do everything for us, why not make a robot that gets subjugated by other robots? Hence, while one robot race mercilessly decimates the other robot race, all the human can be, like, partaying it up, organic-style.

So, with my foes defeated and every conceivable argument for reality overcome, I return to my computer, assured in my conviction that full-scale devotion to the virtual is the only path to fulfillment. Or, at the very least, muscle atrophy.