the internet is for losers How much would you pay to spend your evenings and weekends in a room full of salesmen, misogynists, Greeks, librarians, racists, sports fans, neo-Nazis, hermits, anarchists, teenagers, housewives, bad poets, Trikes, Jesus freaks, professors, addicts, hippies, pornographers and FBI agents?
How much would you pay? Most online services charge about $10 a month. Welcome to CyberDumb.
Cyberspace has to be the most overblown recreational activity to hit America since cocaine. If you read the hot magazines such as Wired, you know that you're either online or one of the 230 million Americans who are hopelessly behind the times. Well, I've been to the information highway and back, and best I can tell the Internet is a collection of morons typing moronic messages back and forth about moronic topics that make you feel like a moron for participating. It's little more than cable television for the '90s — a "revolutionary" technology that has instead filled our lives with even more stupidity.
On the InterDumb, unlike cable, the entire gang descends on you at once: programmers who bore your eyebrows off while writing condescending notes because you obviously don't have the latest equipment; bureaucrats who have discovered technology gives them whole new ways to funk up your life; perverts typing with one hand; professors from places like the University of Saskatchewan who have failed at their chosen profession and are now writing how-to books; pimply drop-outs cracking their knuckles as they search for the second hidden door on the 15th level of Doom.
For those of you looking for intelligent life in cyberspace, here's an example of a recent Internet conversation: An anti-Semite joins a group of journalists to argue that the Holocaust never happened. The journalists respond by the dozens, arguing over the anti-Semites arcane "proofs" in excruciating detail, citing books and articles, telling him to go to hell. The anti-Semite shoots off another message; the journalists respond (the original group and those who have since joined the group), the anti-Semite responds; the journalists fire back; until finally your mailbox is jammed with 764 unread messages and responses ("Am not." "Are too." "Am not." "Are too."), at least one of which is labeled "In Response to ———— (I'm not even going to dignify him by using his name.)" Oooh....good one. When the anti-Semite (or the Nazi, or the religious fanatic, or the life insurance salesman, take your pick) tires of the journalists, he moves on to the feminists, or the farmers, or wherever the Infobahn leads him. It's like giving the village idiot a junk mail permit.
Ironically, when us regular folks log on — the ones who visit our grandmother so she won't die alone, who grow gardens so the birds have a place to rest, who visit the library to help a boy retrieve a book about Thomas Jefferson from a high shelf — we are pushed to the bottom of the Inter Caste. We don't know enough, we don't know what we're doing, we're asking dumb questions. There's a Netiquette, as it's called, that says you shouldn't ask dumb questions. Of course, a dumb question is anything that's been asked and answered.
The Net also allows users to hide behind asinine nicknames and, in some cases, anonymity. Let people wear masks and they become bigger assholes than even the Ku Klux Klan. For that reason, every third person you encounter turns out to be a potential ward of the state. Worse, much of the information on the "information highway" is outdated, arcane, unreliable or plain dull, and most of the people who supply it seem to think 1/ we give a shit about their opinions, and 2/ we care that they're alive. The only thing the Net has done well has been to organize and occupy the nation's idiots the rest of us can get some things done.

how to get offline

America Online
Go keyword CANCEL. You will be given two options: Return to AOL or Pricing Plans, which explains the many ways you can give AOL your money. There is no quick-and-easy "Cancel" button — you have to log off, dial an 800 number, wait on hold for a human and make a formal request (what happened to point-and-click convenience?). Don't pass up the chance to explain why you're fleeing cyberspace. Say something like, "They told me to. Please don't ask any more questions!" If a representative phones back to ask if you'll reconsider, scream, "WHO GAVE YOU THIS NUMBER? OH MY GOD....NOOOOOO!" and hang up.

CompuServe
Go keyword CANCEL. Select Cancel Your Membership. Like AOL, you have to phone or write Customer Service before they'll let you go. If you receive an unsolicited phone call, explain that your computer short-circuited while you were downloading and burned your house down. Begin to cry.

Prodigy Classic
Jump CANCEL. Read over whiny Please Don't Go screen; read the Reasons to Stay options. When it was still around, Prodigy Classic (now Prodigy Internet) used this screen to tell you how to change the fonts on your screen, AS IF THAT'S WHY YOU WERE LEAVING, BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE THE WAY THE WORDS LOOK. There was no way to explain to Prodigy that it had to be the UGLIEST and DUMBEST of the major online services, and what was up with all the ads popping up at the bottom of the screen? Plus, it was co-owned by Sears! SEARS! Gimme a break. Select Cancel Prodigy.

The Internet
If you're at a university or large research firm, scout out the Sysop (system operator, not person with one eye), who is likely to be a middle-aged, balding, paunchy white male with glasses who calls you "bud" or "guy" as in "Hi, guy." Ask him to close your account. If he gets nosy, say you're going back to your wife and kids.

visitor feedback

From Josh Hughes:
I'd have to say that Chip Rowe is the biggest fucking poseur on the Net. How could someone with so much knowledge flame the Net so hard-core? Oh, I see. He writes for the cutting-edge Playboy but mocks alt.sex.masturbation. He's either the biggest asshole or the biggest troll in print. Whatcha think? Oh yeah, Chip, where's your email address? Hide behind the media, you social wannabe.

From Zinya:
The Internet is for losers? Maybe you should have rephrased that. The Internet is for people who can't be bothered to pick up a book and learn what this vast network can be used for. Instead they use it for getting their mail, surfing the net for stupid sites, looking at porn, keeping in touch with others. The Net is a goldmine for those who know what they're doing. To them, they are not in the Net, but under it. They traverse tunnels under the Net and search for a challenge. They gain access to otherwise locked systems, and learn. They are not moronic, they know what they're doing. Salesmen, misogynists, Greeks, librarians, racists, sports fans, neon-Nazis, hermits, anarchists, teenagers, housewives, bad poets, Trikes, Jesus freaks, professors, addicts, hippies, pornographers and FBI agents all exist on the Internet because they exist in real life. You are just as likely to get into a moronic conversation with these people in a pub as you are in a chat room. That's why I never go out anymore, and at least on the Net I can prevent them from trying to annoy me.

From S. Clement:
First of all, if you choose to consort with "...salesmen, misogynists, Greeks, librarians, racists, sports fans, neon-Nazis, hermits, anarchists, teenagers, housewives, bad poets, Trikes, Jesus freaks, professors, addicts, hippies, pornographers and FBI agents..." that is your option. However remember that like attracts like. Is this kind of vermin out there? Yes. What happens on the rare occasions I encounter one of them? My browser has a <Back> button. Most of the time the site is abandoned as a waste of time, but on three occasions the site was reported, once to the service provider and twice to Phonebusters, a site jointly operated by the Ontario Provincial Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Obviously I'm in Canada. On the subject of "loser," seven weeks and one day ago I "lost" my wife to cancer. I thank all the fates for the Internet. Friends on the Internet whom I've never met helped me through some awful rough times. Via the Internet, I have met some relatives whom I have not seen for, in one case 44 years. The Internet is a tool. Like any other tool it can be used however you want to use it. How you decide to use it says a lot more about you than it does about the Internet.

From Wile E:
Are you actually a moron? Do you know what a neon-Nazi is? [He is referring to a typo, since corrected, that apparently went unnoticed by anyone else for five years.] A neo-Nazi I understand, but one that illuminates classrooms? And a Sysop? How is that in any way related to a cyclops? Oh, sorry, i didn't realize that fewer than half the letters are the same. I have to say that, without a doubt, yours is the WORST website i have ever visited..... I'm dyslexic and was drunk and still realized your mistakes. Guess that gives a pretty good impression of the average person who visits your site. P.S. The phonetics of sysop and cyclops in no way lend themselves to a joke.