Thirteen Years of People Annoying Me

By Jonathan Timar
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Today I received a comment on my blog.

I used to receive a lot more comments. It’s a thing people used to do when they came across something on the internet that was interesting to them. Usually, though not always, such comments were polite and well thought out, often even interesting.

This blog has been in existence for thirteen years. The article in question was written nearly thirteen years ago. A lot has changed in thirteen years. The world has changed in unimaginable ways, though we barely noticed it happening. We didn’t notice when the pace of change was slow, or when it started accelerating, and few seem to be noticing even now when the pace of change is at light-speed and, I think, mostly not for the better.

The internet has changed. Our wide open, decentralized digital paradise has become a severely censored, severely restricted collection of walled gardens controlled by a small handful of super-rich corporations, which are in turn controlled by a small handful of super-rich individuals. Just like the real world. But then, the internet is the real world now. Freedom, online and off, has been traded away, eagerly, for convenience, absolution from responsibility, and everyone’s new favourite word; “safety”. And now you get a non-stop propaganda stream on every “app” you open and you think it makes you “informed”. By the way, I refuse to waste energy looking it up, but I heard we are banning Dr. Seuss now?

I’ve changed. I’ve been through so very, very much. Some of it very bad, like car accidents and surgery and chemotherapy. But then I have also been very blessed. I’ve been with my wife, the love of my life for over a decade now, and we’ve travelled the world together.

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    But enough of that. Let me get to the point:

    Today I received a comment on my blog. And like most of the comments that trickle in on this internet of thirteen years later, it was made in bad faith, by an unhappy soul who wanted to make themselves feel better about life. But worse, it was painfully boring! It sucked away my energy just to read such utter banality; the incoherent ramblings of a dull tool so very ironically convinced of his own sharpness of wit. It felt like a tragic waste of sarcasm to even reply to someone so incapable of even forming a proper sentence, let alone punctuating it, but I admit, I couldn’t resist.

    But I started to think; why on earth am I still allowing boring, unimaginative, and generally unpleasant people to interrupt my life to share with me their completely uninteresting opinions on things I wrote thirteen years ago?

    So comments are now closed on that post.