Notes From the Internet Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF Page A

resting in the control of fewer hands. It just got worse until it only took a small cabal to shut it down.
    “Fair enough,” I said, and wrote down “Corporate America” in my journal.
    Of course, there was only one problem with Sean’s theory: it was stupid. Capitalists like to play with their toys and there was no compelling reason I could see for them to take their ball and go home. Not this ball that was wanted by millions willing to pay for it. I explained this all to Sean, who continued to stare at his data while sipping coffee. After a moment, he wiped the foam from his goatee and said, “Well, fuck. I don’t know. Terrorists then, maybe?”
    DAY 23. OZ
    It was a beautiful day. The kind that makes most people happy, but ultimately depresses me when I realize something as superficial as the weather can affect my mood. Still, the sun was shining, and I wanted to look at pretty things, so we set our course for Central Park.
    I used to gawk at the sheer size of it on a subway map and be amazed that no developers had disturbed its pristine beauty. No industrialist had insisted upon access to the millions and millions of dollars of wasted prime real estate. But the truth behind the park is far more difficult to comprehend. Central Park is not a square of God’s beauty so majestic that it pushed back man’s skyscrapers by a sheer force of nature. Central Park is man-made.
    Before the Civil War, it was just overgrown, sporadically populated land, but those inhabitants were displaced by Government decree to make way for Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s creation. (They won a contest.) There was a belief that if you forced all races and social classes to live among and literally on top of each other, under constant metropolitan pressure, then there had to be a release valve in the center of that social experiment. So men built not only fountains and bridges, but lakes and foliage. And when it was done, New Yorkers stood back and stared at something unique and free which belonged equally to everyone. A place used by celebrities and vagrants alike to see and be seen. Central Park was the closest thing they had to the Internet.
    I hadn’t been to the park in a long time, but, at first, it seemed unchanged. The trees and landmarks were all there, as were the joggers and the stoners playing Hacky Sack. But a harder look at the circles revealed some were filled with Internet zombies, and a few of those joggers were just the terrified people fleeing them. I was a little surprised. Even I was getting used to zombies. In another week, they’ll be just like pop-up ads with the X hidden on the left side. You adjust. Learn a new way to delete.
    Harder to ignore, however, are the Twatters. Clever, huh? That’s what we’re calling Twitter addicts now. Losing the Internet has forced them to interact verbally instead of microblogging their lives, but a lot of them still talk in Tweets:
    “Ugh! I’m standing in line at the post office.”
    “I’m not eating the crusts on my sandwich because apparently I’m five.”
    “Oh, my god, the barista didn’t leave room for milk, like some sort of ax murderer.”
    But not all the changes are so ominous or annoying. As we sat and regrouped, I pointed out to Tobey that some of the park chess tables had been converted to Scrabble boards to meet the word addictions fueled by Facebook apps.
    “Hmm, I didn’t think folks would go for that in real life,” I said. “Keeping score’s a drag.”
    “I wonder if people will start farming again,” Tobey pondered.
    We sat there a little longer, but neither Tobey’s jokes nor sips from my flask could quell my rising anxiety. Keeping this journal causes tension as much as it calms it. The writing busies my hands and occupies my mind, but there’s something about the pen scratching against the thick textured paper that makes my words take on an uncomfortable weight. Online, words flow almost as quickly as thoughts without revision or