Apr
4th
Sat
4th
Seriously, I need help.
Last night I had an incredibly bizarre dream about a new invention which was called The Remblr and harnessed the microscopic amount of energy created each time a post on the Internet was reblogged to power what essentially became a self-perpetuating power source mostly based on pictures of funny animals and Barack Obama looking cool. This wasn’t your run of the mill deep sleep drive-by: not only could I see exactly how the machine looked (like one of those solar-powered bulb toys you found in museum gift shops toward the middle part of the last century), the responses to its invention were also fairly well delineated. Jeff Jarvis, for example, claimed that it made blogging itself an unnecessary activity, since all people really needed to do now was reblog, and if bloggers didn’t understand that but quick, they’d find themselves out of a job. Ryan Catbird said it was pretty much a carbon copy of an idea which had already been tried during Web 1.0, and anyway there was no way to monetize it, so what was the point? Maura thought it was sexist. The kids at Young Manhattanite wrote 87 posts, all under the rubric “Something Jewy this way comes,” suggesting that its creator had a gigantic cock. And Doubleday spent two million dollars for the rights to a book inspired by it which was basically a series of user-submitted pictures of various Internet types clicking “reblog” on their Tumblrs. The fact that this fantasy was both so vivid and specific raises an incredibly important—and, to me, disturbing—question: Um, WHAT THE FUCK, SUBCONSCIOUS?
