The post that started it all…

In order to understand the general tone of this blog it might be best to read the psychotic breakdown that started it all. This was originaly (And still is) posted at “The E-cclesiastic Manifesto” over on Blogger.

So, without further ado;

It finally happened.

I am now an official victim of what some have called ‘Information Overload,’ while others have given it even more overwhelming titles including some variant or another of the words ‘Information,’ ‘Technology,’ ‘Overload,’ ‘Disorder’ and ‘Anxiety.’

For me personally it’s just a mild, panic-infused desperation begat of saturation.

I’ve been online since before the World Wide Web reared its GUI’d head. When I was a mere lad of six I was already using CompuServe and chatting on IRC, keeping up on Prodigy and the precursor to what is today AOL (Although I forget its name), reading Usenet threads and making silly graphics on the Amigas and Macs at my school.

Then my family moved back to Israel and I discovered that this otherwise underdeveloped country (Which for me, at the time, meant that McDonald’s had not yet opened their first Israeli franchise, a fatal flaw that would be addressed and corrected a year or so later, to my utter delight) was way, way, way far ahead of the states when it came to giving me new ways to jack up my parents’ phone bill…

I had a choice of about 300 BBS’s to choose from (Where we would download game cracks and ZIP archived MP3 files which took an hour each to download) and the Holier-than-the-Pope ‘Snunit‘ system which the Ministry of Education and The Hebrew University constructed so that us young geeks could have free (Free!) access to IRC, Telnet, Usenet, FTP and above all; Winsock!

Winsock let us access the very first WWW sites (Back when ‘The Big Red Button’ took over a minute to load) and once Yahoo! was up and running every last geek on earth went underground for 3 or 4 years, absorbing.

Perhaps luckily for me, I was spared this hermetic fate by the fact that I was a total delinquent as a kid. Considering that I was spending my days cutting school and going downtown to commit major misdemeanors and minor felonies (I literally ‘cut’ 2 entire years of school, not having seen the inside of a classroom during the 9th and 10th grades…), I only had about an hour or two a day of surfing before I collapsed off of my chair and fell asleep on my exceedingly uninviting carpet. Now then, having established that I’ve been online for a full 19 years, we can return to my initial statement.

I’m done.

I’m worn, beaten, battered, abused, violated, tired, shaken and more than a bit broken. I’ve read millions upon millions of pages, seen tens of thousands of videos, made enough ‘e-friends’ and ‘e-nemies‘ to populate a burgeoning Chinese metropolis, I’ve gone through scores of keyboards and hundreds of mice, absorbed and subsequently forgotten more minutia and trivia than a human mind should ever need contain, seen enough advertising to plaster the moon in 1:1 scale, accidentally (And occasionally intentionally…) viewed more porn than an army of 10 million pubescent youths could ever work their way through in 10 million years and have completely and utterly lost my will to fill out another form for the rest of my natural life (And then some – If there’s a form you need to fill in order to gain entry into heaven then I’ll be the first to press the ‘Down’ button on the elevator to St. Peter’s right…).

Today I write my Manifesto. Today I make my New Year’s Resolution (6 days belated, albeit) for All New Years Yet To Come.

Today I tell a lie.

Honestly, I wish it were that easy. I would decide in the space of time it takes to click ‘Submit’ that I submit no more. To never again go to Reddit or Digg, to delete my bookmarks, to declare myself a Persona Non Grata on MySpace (and its satanical social brethren), to cancel my Yahoo! account, divorce myself from NetVibes, vow from this day forward to become an e-troglodyte in the virtual cave that is my nascently offline brain.

I would travel, read poetry, cook hearty meals made from fresh ingredients collected in distant locales…

I would volunteer my time saving puppies and orphans, I would take pictures of leaves and streams, I would keep a dream journal.

But alas, I know I’m doing nothing but creating a delusional and self-indulging fantasy, a Utopia for the Mind which will likely never come. Us addicts are by our very nature not quitters – especially when the addiction is enriching by nature and condoned by a society that is collectively coming towards the very same affliction.

Were I to travel it would only be after confirming the hotels all had WiFi and my touring route sported both natural beauty and cellular phone reception, were I to read poetry it would be at Bartleby.com or some such abomination (And I’d be referred to the poem by a friend via email – and they rarely recommend Tennyson), were I to cook it would be Ramen nine times out of ten.

If I were to save puppies or orphans I’d do it with a credit card – not a warm embrace, were I to take photographs of anything at all it would be with my phone and the purpose would most likely be a pictorial Caller-ID and, alas, were I to chronicle my dreams I’d do it in XHTML to preserve formatting

This is my reality, my quiet desperation, the burden of ‘e’ that I must bear. I have resigned myself to this fate, call me E-cclesiastes and leave me be to scour for new videos of psychotic German porkers molesting their displays, to forward silly links to my fellow net-junkies, to add another friend from Timbuktu to my MySpace account, to buy land on the moon and to invest in Nigerian oil fields, to learn of discounted viagra and penile enlargement, to read Blogs about Blogging and Wikipedia entries on Wikipedia Flame Wars… Leave me be to (Click) ’submit’.

Oren Goldschmidt