There’s a black hole way down at the center of the internet and while the combined digital knowledge of humanity races outwards, incrementally larger each day like an interactive sim of the big bang, if you go back down into the basement where it all gets creaky and there’s like, one bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling you have to reach way above your head to find the broken string that turns it on, you can see where the stairs end and look down into the abyss. That pit, that theoretical dark matter, that spot on the internet where you get search results saying ‘here there be monsters’ is the point in our history when everything worth knowing was disseminated in hardcopy.
Huurk. Gah. I just barfed a bit in my mouth.
For example I wanted to reference an article that I read in Adbusters from, say, 1992, and couldn’t even find it in their back issues section online which goes back to 2003. People look at that and they think, hey man, good on Adbusters for keeping a decade of digital print online, but what the fuck, what about all the other years’ worth of self-righteous guilt I want to feel prior to 2003? You telling me that if I want to have my self-loathing for being coopted by the corporate machine validated prior to 2003 I’m going to have to go digging through a box of hardcopy magazines I’ve carted around through two marriages on the off-chance my autism-induced Otaku completism forced me to keep that particular magazine?
I might as well be chiseling words into a slab of rock like the bird that lives inside the Flintstone’s television set.
Yeah I know shit-tons of old media is getting digitized every day by the mindless hands of the beast that is the internet’s nostalgia for old crap, but for every CAPTCHA project to digitize handwritten text word by secure-authentication-word and for every Scorsese who makes saving disintegrating film archives a pet project, there are ten thousand out of print books or entire sections of the national archives getting pushed into a dumpster because they don’t have room anymore. If I want to get my dick wet in a BBC paperback novelization of Tom Baker era Doctor Who I still have to hope I find a big cardboard box of them at a garage sale somewhere or have some tit-fisted cockwagon jam me in the ass for the privilege of buying it on Ebay.
Case and point. I know this local film buff guy who has all the charm of the stillborn ‘Hills-have-Eyes’ mutant offspring of Kevin Smith and the Simpson’s comic book guy going on. When thousands of films from the national archives were about to be chucked in the landfill because they don’t have the resources to either a) keep them in a climate controlled vault until the end of time or b) be bothered to make a digital copies of them first, this Kevin Smith talking motherfucker personally backed up a van and transported as many as he could across the country to a bunch of guys who had the facilities to do both. This is the same guy who somehow got ahold of a bootleg VHS copy of the Star Wars Family Christmas special someone taped with early VCR technology (it used a pair of birds to chisel things into stone instead of one) back in 1978 and starting around 94-95 he would trot it out once a year to delight and horrify fans of both Star Wars and circus freak shows. Then after that single screening he would lock it up again until next year.
And that’s my point. Possessing that red-headed stepchild of the Star Wars trilogy gave the neckbeard wearing, Cheetos-dust smeared dickfinch authority and power. I never went to any of these special Life-day screenings; in part because I would rather cut off my own arm 127-hours stylz and fuck myself in the ass with it than spend a night in this guy’s company but also because in 1978 my anticipation for seeing the Star Wars Holiday Special was such that I elected to skip my grandfather’s funeral because travelling there overnight would mean missing the show. Further trauma arrived in the form of being so reluctant to miss a moment of the excitement that I pissed my pants in front of the entire family of neighbors I was staying with.
Once upon a time *that’s* the kindof persona scarring lengths a nerd would have to go through in order to accumulate an encyclopaedic fandom knowledge. If you didn’t piss yourself in front of your peers while skipping your grandfather’s funeral when it actually aired in 1978, you’d have to suckle the shrivelled teat-like cock of a Jabba the Hutt subhuman film nerd to ever get a glimpse of it. Now all it takes is a fucking Youtube search. Here there be monsters, all right. And the monsters are us.
SPOILER ALERT: False Positive 