Always A Crisis On Planet Earth

I can’t even remember the context. All I remember was turning to Dan and saying something about the internet going airborne. Lying in bed that night, one thought led to another and next thing I knew I was making notes for an entry into the Rock, Paper, Shotgun Crysis competition. And whaddya know, I was picked as one of the three winners! A nice surprise for me, since I’m rather self-critical about my own work.

As an aside, the last time I won a competition was some time in Year 2. It was ran by MB Games, and the prize was £100 worth of their stuff. As a child of 7, this was incredibly shiny. Except for the part where it got mentioned in Assembly and I had to stand up. That wasn’t fun.

Right, enough pre-amble, below the cut is the winning entry. Initially I was going to present in a more humorous light, but after doing some work on my FYP Report I decided to go for a journalistic slant. I was half tempted to LaTeX it up, but decided against it.

The Internet Goes Airborne

It started somewhere in the dank depths of the internet. Best guess is that it originated on 4chan, some time in early May, 2009. No one is really sure, but it doesn’t matter any more. Such details are trivial in the face of what was to come.

Plenty of research has already been undertaken into memes; so called ‘Thought Virii’ (Memes and the Internet, Atwell et al, 2004), funny little jokes borne in the subculture of the internet, often just flashes in the pan like most real world fads. No one dared imagine what happened that fateful May, however. To this day, scientists have been unable to come up with a rational explanation: Somehow, the internet became airborne. No longer constrained by ones and zeroes, its nature seeped into the real world, and it was infectious.

What follows is a rough account of what occurred in that first, terrible month.

It started off subtly at first; Rick Astley made a sudden, unexpected comeback, Internet slang was being used in real world media, people inexplicably spinning leeks whilst at the green grocers. These events barely registered in the radar of the general population, being as harmless as they were. It was the cats, however, made people take note that something very serious and very wrong had occurred.

During late May, certain members of the icanhascheezeburger (ICHC) community were claiming that their cats had actually begun to speak, in the kind of disjointed sentence structure known as Cat Pidgin (Cat Pidgin, Johnson et al, 2007). The ICHC archives show that the first of such comments was made at 1:37 PM (UTC), 20/5/2009 (see Appendix C). Respondents were sceptical at first; the denizens of ICHC were an odd sort, so claims of this nature were taken with a liberal helping of salt. However, within 3 hours the thread had reached 50 pages, with numerous users citing similar phenomena to that of the opening poster.

At 10:15 AM (UTC) on Thursday, 21/5/2009, that the first video was posted on YouTube (see Appendix D). Ignorant commenters, unaware of the ICHC thread, were quick to respond, claiming the video was a fake and insulting the poster. Regardless, by midday the video had been watched by 50,000 viewers, and many similar videos were rapidly appearing.

Global news outlets were quick to respond. CNN secured an interview with both the enigmatic Eric Nakagawa (creator of ICHC) and leading feline expert Roger Tabor. Neither was able to provide any explanation for what was being described by some camps as ‘a miracle for the youtube generation’.

This media coverage continued for several days, backed by extensive scientific research. In all cases, preliminary test results were showing the presence of viral infection the type of which had never before been seen.

Concurrent to this research, many more ’symptoms’ were appearing around the world. Numerous police reports of domestic disputes that ended with the spontaneous combustion of one of more participants were leaked to the press (Flame Wars!, The Guardian, 27/5/2009). Not that it mattered, as written media longer than one or two paragraphs was disregarded by the general populous (The TL;DR Phenomenon, Sanger et al, 2009).

The real threat, however, was still to come. Initially seen by many as a welcome relief in comparison to what had already happened; what once was confined to behind the counter or in black bags in the forest was soon on every book stand, in every video store and on every street corner. Porn was everywhere.

What happened next was the worst crisis to ever hit mankind, and potentially the world. Over the period of the week 1/6/09 to 7/6/09, approximately 80% of the worlds female population passed away. The cause was indeterminable; the only link between victims was their physical appearance. Whatever this affliction was, it spared the overweight and the ugly. The world was left in a state of total shock. Governments tried to maintain order, but in the widespread riots that followed, another 20% of the remaining population were killed.

At this point, the more (at the time) radical thinkers were starting to glimpse the truth. All the events that had happened could be directly mapped to internet phenomena. Lolcats, flame wars, female population on internet communities (and the nature of such females), and of course the sheer amount of free pornographic material available online.

However, this realisation came too late. In a world already beset by apathy and obsessed with the ‘ideal’, what chance did the human race stand? Men simply lost interest in sex, happy to simply masturbate our species into oblivion. Some have tried; in the past 28 years, there have been 4294,504 recorded births. Still, year on year, the annual birth rate declines, the male to female ratio still sits at around 5:1, and most females born with genetic defects.

Humanity is in on the brink of extinction. If the current rate continues, we as a species will be gone by the turn of the next century. I write this for the only reason such things are written; hope. Hope that someone else reads this. Hope that some alien race one day discovers this planet, and will have some record of what happened.

Simon Wharton, 1/3/2037

~ by Seniath on March 25, 2008.