<nettime> The Gilded(tm) Horse Apple: A Theory of the Internet

[Gerard Van der Leun <gerard.vanderleun {AT} generalmedia.com>]

boswell the unbeliver wrote:

> Pretend the Internet can be represented by a Gilded(tm) Horse Apple (1). The
> malordorous, steaming golden exterior represents the physical structure 
> of the internet: hosed and crashing overpriced computers, a dense tangle
> of thick overpriced wires gathering dust and frangments of mouse dung,
> mindless web pages with pathetic blinking little boxed ads making begging
> click me please offers to justify their useless existence (with audio/video 
> events that slow the page even more than previously thought possible
> before delivering yet more junk information and hopelessly hip
> graphics with no meaning and less interest!) etc. The moist, warm, vile
> center is the central endlessly repeated pseudo-idea that supports
> the whole industry: namely, the Internet as humankind's Great Dump.
> 
> Now, watch what happens when we put the Golden Horse Apple
> into a microwave oven and subject it to a dose of reality. 
> The pseudo-idea bakes down in a few years to a dried flake of dung
> a worm would not knowingly inhabit, and the foetid moisture evaporates 
> out the infinite  little holes in the bottom, leaving a black slime lining 
> the now empty concept.The Horse Apple now looks like what it is, a
> piece of shit, smells worse and is deeply  hollow with no bottom in
> sight. And Net boosters increasingly suspect that they
> are blathering along, as usual, about nothing at all and so turn to ever
> more intense displays of flaming flatulence in conferences and books
> which are increasingly attended to only by others of their ilk since
> having to get real jobs is beyond the talents of almost all of them.
> With longer exposure to reality  (especially under the more intense
> sacral, haptic and liminal rays produced by the  French blathermeisters.
> in the grand tradition of the Marquis de Sade and other fit media critics),
> the Internet  Horse Apple turns into a black puddle, and is served up
> ready for the kind of lunch only eaten by drooling Technorealists
> equiped with powerbooks and flexstraws at the next free lunch
> on the rubber tofu circuit . Clearly they should not be eating so many
> nuked Horse Apples since they will only tend to recycle them to
> others of their ilk. After all, it is only a junk medium. Eat a peach.
> 
> (1) An equine snack cake having great food value to travelling technoblathers
> and others humping for speaking fees, book advances and other spare change 
> from the tables of technocapitalists praying no one will really catch on 
> to the gigantic Ponzi scheme they've  been running for over half a decade. 
> Therefore a longtime  favorite of kids still in school who have to be
> hit by a large clueX4 to have a hope in hell of leading a productive life in
> a more rewarding field, such as heavy metal song lyrics or high-speed
> septum piercing, or advanced pedophilia.
---
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