A tragedy occurred in a small corner of the Internet today. The ripple will recede unnoticed, lost in the perpetual motion of webspace expanse. There will be a viral video hack remake. A "you're" will be used instead of "your". Someone, somewhere won't be internetting hard enough...and no one will care. Today, the one internet visage pure enough to swallow and digest all of that badness took off his cape and cowl.
Was this man a hero? No. He was a dick. He was not "An," but THE Internet Snob. To be certain, this is no plea for #TIS. I think he can be a real dong. Instead, this is a lamentation for the point of no return. The nadir where actual life and supposed Internet life intertwine, and an idea dies forever.
In a vacuum, The Internet Snob was one of those perfect Internet entities. It's as though the Internet itself manifested this creature, because in so many ways, it did. An avatar plucked from Google images. A Twitter critique of Twitter and a Tumblr dedicated to the feed. At the helm, a generation of internet autodidacts who keep cyberspace in flux. This particular version is a guy I know personally, and that might be where there story has to go. Because much like the Internet, none of this matters, but it really...matters.
"You know what's funny? Some people are snobby about the music they like or the films they see or the books they read - you're snobby about the Internet." The genesis, a cute, throw away comment from a girlfriend about an at times nasty habit. There have been smaller kernels that produced bigger trees, so off we went.
Internet etiquette--one of the most upsetting and hilarious Google searches of all--belittles what The Internet Snob was really about. His discourse was that of Internet manners, nay....Internet sophistication. A parlor room, laden with plush leather and dark wood, where a man smokes his pipe and ruminates on his well bred Internet standing. My middle class Internetting ethic is diametrically opposed to painful Mac Lion references, but as an absurd slice of social media, it suited me. Then The Internet Snob, like Icarus before him, flew too close to the sun.
In this case, the sun was his actual life. Names were used. Friends called out. Hell, I even got mine.
(But am I right? Nobody is gonna use that f*cking thing. I almost posted "Oh...this is still here?" the other day, but I'm not even using my Internet 'B' material on that wasteland. And for serious, he was posting like every 30 minutes.)
The Internet Snob insisted on being real. He was the
(A bar. Actual life. Dusk.)
TIS: Did you block me from posting on your Facebook wall?
Actual Person: I did.
TIS: What for?
AP: Because you Internet snobbed that comment.
TIS: No! I just complemented someone else's Internet snobbery!
There is some evidence that it was my Internet snobbery being applauded, but this is really no time to point fingers. After that, the details are sketchy, but a FB de-friending occurred within the next twelve hours. Then it happened...
This is where the story should end, but there's no lesson here. Actual friends don't de-friend over a de-friending because of a fake person. We could buy into some vague hope The Internet Snob's heart grew three times that day, but his is not a morality tale. He was a symbol, and now he bleeds. An unmovable, dickish emblem of the petty elitism that the internet holds, collapsed in on itself.
It was never the content, it was the ceaseless commitment to the ideal. A symbol's burden is incorruptibility, but once the curtain is peeled back, there is no punchline. What's revealed instead, is the anti-symbol, a flaw. In this case, a mortal made to feel. A man, too human to be a symbol, elegantly crafted from the common threads of imperfection. And, you know...what am I supposed to do with snobbery from some commoner?
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