I have stolen the format. It was tucked away in one of those Ark of the Covenant warehouses, harrowing in its disuse. The format was given hot cider and many foil blankets. The format sued for damages and won. Now recovered from its ordeal, it has yet again agreed to host some self-absorbed lunatic’s ramblings on the internet. After serving for years as a popular artist’s soapbox, it’s been installed on a website no one will ever see for an audience that does not exist.
It’s worth mentioning that the format itself is ridiculous, but then what did we expect from a guy who once did a whole interview talking about huffing PAM?

The format, was born of the internet’s wild west era. Before uniformity, clickbait, and the trough of content feeds, one would type letters into the address bar and see what came of it. I’d stare at the impenetrable login of Hell.com and wonder what impossible thing lay beyond. These days the URL just leads to the MyBible social app, finally living up to its namesake. I am curious about any usage data the developers may have, though. It’s entirely possible they’re sitting on evidence that not even weapons-grade dopamine manipulation can make scripture fun.
As much as it was a great after-school distraction, the format was also a codeine-soaked fever dream masquerading as wit and subversion. Once a month I’d inhale an order of Crazy Bread at the computer and scroll through whatever nonsense the author dashed off the night before. This would put us near the end of 1999, a period of some significance to me, as I have been technically dead since.

To be clear, I have been moving oxygen around with my face for the last 24 years. There was a clerical error, the kind I have come to expect from Delta Airlines. Sometimes my luggage ends up in random Fairfax, VA backyard. Sometimes they bill you for a thousand dollars in ham sandwiches. Sometimes they declare you dead– and let me tell you, I was crushed when I found out. It took a few months to get the bureaucracy of it all sorted out, but now I have a special card that confirms I am alive. Just imagine the poor bastard who finds that on my dead body one day. He’s in a pickle.

While I am alive, I have reservations about the internet. I’ve been thinking about the dead internet theory, a theoretical concept that posits nearly all of the web’s content is automatically generated. It’s not true in any literal sense, but something about it feels truth-adjacent. Given the right prompts, we seem to do a pretty good job of automatically generating the desired content, ourselves.