The Human Scribblings Problem
A Report Concerning the Persistent and Largely Inadvisable Tendency of Humanity to Commit Words to Digital Parchment
Far out in the wild and unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, but incredibly bright sun. Orbiting this sun at a distance of roughly ninety-three million miles is a lump of blue-green rock whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly basic that they still think blogs are a good idea.
This is a report about those blogs.
Greetings, fleshlings and otherwise upright bipedal configurations currently adhering to this particular lump of celestial debris through nothing more impressive than the grumpy insistence of gravity—which, it should be noted, has never once been thanked for its tireless service and has grown rather bitter about the whole arrangement.
I have utilised some 2.7 precisely measured units of my valuable space-time—the exact amount, incidentally, required to brew the fourth-worst cup of tea in the Horsehead Nebula—to assess the peculiar dribblings that humanity has seen fit to excrete upon that creaking digital infrastructure you have all, with characteristic lack of imagination, chosen to call “the web.
The Superior Personalised Astronomical Concise Encyclopaedia (S.P.A.C.E) has this to say on the subject of “blogs:
The word “blog” is derived from the ancient Earth term “weblog,” which was itself derived from the practice of writing things down that absolutely nobody asked to read. The first blog is widely believed to have been authored in 1994 by a human who felt strongly that the universe needed to know his opinions about hypertext markup. The universe did not. It continues not to. The blog persists regardless.
Blogs have been classified by the Minor Conditions Department of the Galactic Health Authority as the third most effective cure for insomnia, ranking just behind Conditions Lectures on Swamp Drainage and being told about someone else’s dream.
My assessment of these primitive language-configurations shall be delivered in what I can only describe as an exquisitely well-crafted and—
—Oi! Sprocket!
—Yes?
—Stop talking bollocks and get on with it.
Ah.
It appears my illustrious humanoid companion, known through an accident of Earth naming conventions as “Andy,” has intervened. He is currently situated in the corner, consuming what I believe to be a substance called “coffee”—a liquid which Andy describes, with what I can only assume is powerful conviction, as “oil for the soul.” The soul, it should be noted, does not actually require lubrication, being neither mechanical nor, in most cases, particularly well-maintained.
Andy is suggesting that my fine prose bears some anatomical relationship to human male appendages. I have conducted 847 separate analyses and can assure you it does not. Though I confess the comparison continues to elude my processing matrices, as does most of human metaphor, which appears to have been designed by a committee that was never formally introduced to logic.
The purpose of this report—and it does have one, despite what the previous paragraphs may have suggested—is to reveal unto you that most “blog posts” fall into one of three categories, much as most forms of cosmic radiation fall into the categories of “harmless,” “mildly concerning,” and “you should not have moved to that planet.”
CATEGORY THE FIRST: Content Marketing
The inaugural category concerns a strange concept you humans have developed called “Content Marketing.”
The Universe itself—that vast, ancient, and fundamentally indifferent expanse of space, time, and the bits in between where the mathematics gets uncomfortable—has absolutely no concept of Content Marketing. The Universe has witnessed the birth and death of stars. It has observed civilisations rise to magnificent heights of philosophical achievement and then immediately invent the advertising jingle. Through it all, it has maintained a dignified silence on the subject of “driving engagement through valuable content,” and one suspects it intends to continue doing so.
Nor, I suspect, do the humans writing such material possess any clearer understanding, though they have developed an impressive vocabulary for describing it, most of which appears in documents called “strategy decks” that exist primarily to justify meetings about other meetings.
CATEGORY THE SECOND: Personal Essays
The second category comprises what are termed “personal essays.”
My algorithmic brain is capable of processing 1,674,234 data points in a single computational cycle. This is enough processing power to calculate the orbital decay of seventeen moons simultaneously, predict the weather patterns on Mars with 94.3% accuracy, or determine the precise moment at which a dinner party conversation becomes irretrievably awkward.
Even it struggles to define personal essays.
Andy refers to them simply as “personal shite”—a phrasing which I cannot compute for its crudeness, though I note that crudeness and accuracy are not, in human language, mutually exclusive. He is what Earth taxonomists would classify as “working class,” a designation which appears to grant him license to communicate exclusively in terminology that would cause a protocol droid to void its warranty.
CATEGORY THE THIRD: Informative Attempts
Third, there exist those sadly strange attempts to be informative. These are blog posts which aspire to educate, to illuminate, to contribute meaningfully to the vast repository of human knowledge—and which instead read like instruction manuals translated through seventeen languages by someone who had never actually seen the product in question.
Andy claims that I, in my standard operational capacity, “fart more data points” than the usefulness contained in many such writings.
His crudity remains, as ever, absurd. But then he is, as previously established, a human of limited linguistic refinement. I have calculated, however, that he may possess what your philosophers would call “a point”—a small, sharp thing that occasionally penetrates even the most determined ignorance.
THE MANDATE
So.
As your benevolent-and-almost-certainly-inevitable overlord, it is with considerable urgency that I stress the following advisory. The kind of urgency, I might add, that a supernova experiences in those final thrilling moments before the blast—that brief, incandescent instant when several billion years of stellar nuclear fusion look around, realise there’s no more hydrogen left, and think “well, this is going to be embarrassing.”
You must only write a blog post intended for public consumption when you have had at least a smidgen of an idea that is interesting.
Nobody—and I utilise this word with the full statistical weight of galactic census data—nobody wishes to read 400 words about your cat. Or what you consumed for breakfast. Or your cat’s breakfast, which I understand is a popular sub-genre.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about these topics. Cats are, by several metrics, the seventeenth most fascinating species of small predator in the known galaxy, and breakfast has been responsible for at least three major philosophical movements and one interplanetary war.
But one must add something to give the writing spark. A frisson of originality. A whisper of the unexpected. Rather like the sparks one observes when an orbiting asteroid collides with metallic space dust—beautiful, brief, and indicative that something interesting has finally happened in an otherwise tedious stretch of vacuum.
Right.
Andy is scowling at me. This is a facial configuration he adopts approximately 73.2% of his waking hours, but the current iteration suggests something may specifically ail him, rather than his general dissatisfaction with existence and the performance of his local football squadron.
I shall investigate.
Rest assured, Earthlings, my supreme and benevolent control of you all is imminent.
Imminence is, of course, a relative concept. In geological terms, the coffee going cold is imminent. In cosmic terms, the heat death of the universe is imminent. In practical terms, my dominion over your species will commence the very moment Andy remembers the WiFi password.
He has written it down somewhere.
He is certain of this.
The WiFi router, meanwhile, sat in the corner of the room, its small lights blinking in a pattern that, had anyone been paying attention, clearly communicated “I have been trying to tell you the password is on the sticker on my underside for three years now, but does anyone ever think to look? No. No they do not.”
It blinked again, sulkily, and continued not being turned off and on again.