The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Something weird is going on down here on the techno-challenged South End. Something troubling and as yet unexplained. The weather, for one, but I don’t think this is causative. Although, since none of us believe in science anymore, the possibility is there that it could be. Make up something, anything, or better yet, imagine some conspiracy, then forward it to all your ‘friends’. Post it on your social medias. Hope the Russians amplify it on who knows how many websites. When it shows up on Fox and Friends, you know it’s probably true. Fair and balanced, at least. As good a test as any so far as the President is concerned.

We used to play a game in grade school called Telephone. At least I think it was called Telephone. Or maybe it was Gossip. Who cares, make up a name of your own. You start out with a sentence, something like: Tomorrow if it snows we’ll get out of school. The first person who gets this turns to the desk next door and whispers it in the ear of another student who then passes it on to the next and so on. By the time it gets back around after about 30 iterations, it was amazing what sausage emerged from the grinder. Nothing like the beginning and of course the whole point to us little munchkins in 4th grade was how distorted information got the more folks passed it on.

Course in our modern computerized times, the message is pretty much just copied and pasted or else forwarded whole. Not much room for message evolution. But what we got instead is all this phony baloney information being disseminated by … someone. For some unknown reason … For what nefarious purpose? The Russians pick it up, amplify it with all their phony websites that look semi-legit and voila, half the stuff you get on Facebook or Yahoo news or Twitter is really Fake News, just what the President keeps saying about anything which seems negative about him. You don’t know WHAT to believe anymore and so, in this miraculous Age of Information we live in, we have filled our brains with digital poop. Most of which makes us angry and polarized and ultimately Cynical. Which I suspect is the whole point. We don’t believe the media, we don’t believe the President, we don’t believe politicians, we don’t buy Science, we don’t believe in much of anything other than Facebook. We might as well drag our cellphones and laptops into a cave and go back to cooking with fire. If we still believe in fire.

But … and lest I’ve digressed too far from the original point, something weird is going on with this little blogsite. In less than two days its number of visitors (let’s call them Curious Minds) has spiked beyond anything reasonable. Ten times the usual and curving skyward. Hell if I know why. I suppose I should be pleased, but I’m mostly baffled. Oh sure, probably these posts are suddenly scintillating and incisive, no doubt the result of my … my … well, who knows? Maybe the Russians know.

Maybe you do.

Anyway, hopefully any day now the advertisers will be knocking on my door and I can quit my day job, just pound out this moonshine wisdom and wet powder wit until my retirement fund is full. For those of you who have made this possible: спасибо Comrade Putin!

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Tags: How To Succeed in Blogging Without Even Trying, Monetizing the Anger, Russian Bots

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2018 at 4:21 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.