The Internet terrifies me. I've got a number of reasons for this.
For one thing, it's a media and news outlet controlled by you people. You have no idea how much you people bum me out. I'm not talking about you, obviously. You read printed word on real live paper. That shows a certain amount of disciplined effort to appear smart to sexy people.
No, I mean whoever as a collective got Betty White to appear on Saturday Night Live. That wasn't cool, guys. You had your chance with Bea Arthur, or failing that, Rue McClanahan. Betty White wasn't even the funny one.
My point here is, thanks to the Internet we've turned almost all of society into a living episode of Family Guy, just one disjointed non-sequitur after the next. Also, every time you laugh at somedumb thing a cat did, a dog gets side-swiped by a semi.
But my real reason for fearing the Internet began with a little band I started called Mary's Panties.
Like every band worth noting, this project started after a delicious birthday cake at my aunt's house. My cousin and I were talking about beats, and after a few beers we opened up Garageband on her computer and I whipped up a beat.
Long story short, it turned into a family phenomenon-my cousins and I making dance music with relatively offensive themes (things like menstrual cramps, post-thanksgiving dumps, abducting Justin Beiber and dressing him up like a baby) and cracking ourselves up with it. Eventually we made cheap videos of my cousin busting several moves to the tracks.
And inevitably, like all garbage, it found its way to YouTube.
Personally, I didn't see much of a problem with being seen in the background of a video with potentially gross lyrical content ("On the can, Lincoln Loggin'/ Stack 'em up like you're Poggin'") so it was no skin off my ass. But eventually, the protests from the older family members began to surface. "Anyone can see that." "What if you get hired for a job one day and your boss sees that? You'll lose your job, that's what."
I didn't buy it. Figure everyone's young and dumb at some point in their lives, how would anyone ever in the history of forever get a job if that kind of mentality held true?
Well, see, my folks never had the Internet. If I stumble on a picture of my dad with a shitty dirt 'stache or some daisy dukes and a tank top at the bottom of a shoebox, that's fine. A shoebox ain't public domain. He's safe from the public onslaught of mockery and ostracizing that would follow a picture like that.
Although now that I think on it, scummy facial hair, tiny denim shorts and tank tops seem to be the norm among Philly hipsters so maybe they'd elect him mayor.
Let's say I deleted my Facebook account right this second. Aside from the fact that you technically can't actually delete it, as it basically goes dormant, lying in wait like some kind of, I dunno, social network panther? Point is, that isn't gonna stop some numbnuts from snapping a picture of me in my girlfriend's sundress and putting it up without my express written consent.
And yeah, I know what you're thinking: "Why don't you just stop putting on sundresses and subjecting yourself to the ridicule of your cruel shutterbug friends?" To which I respond, "Thanks for your concern but I already have two moms, and I sure as sugar don't need a third." Point is, you'd be damn hard-pressed to keep yourself completely invisible to the rest of the world online.
My cousin recently deleted all the Mary's Panties videos off of YouTube in light of some legal hullaballoo (don't worry, Beebs didn't press charges,) and that gave me even more cause for paranoia. What if all those nagging aunts were right? What if all my youthful stupidity keeps me locked into a specific bracket of unemployment, a kind of glass ceiling brought on by my penchant to write and share absurd dance music and occasionally cross-dress?
My hope is that eventually, seeing that our entire generation has been warped into a kind of free-for-all exposé where everyone always knows and sees what everyone is doing and wearing and drinking, in the near future we will all be forced to turn a blind eye to what Internet results produce.
You got caught on camera making out with the neighbors' dog after a particularly brutal game of "Drink Whiskey" and your boss has the video to prove it? Big deal, you've got his Flickr account, documenting him cheating on his dog wife with his cat side-jawn. A stalemate is all we're gonna have to go on. Either that, or all of society shuts down due to our Internet joyriding incompetence.
Either way, thank god Betty White won't be around to see it.
