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NICK DOUGLAS — I'm not talking about Modest Mouse, those sellout rocker bastards, or Spiderman's transformation from comic-book king of the nerds to disappointing third movie. I mean all the things that separated indie tech geeks from the computer-using masses, or at least let us walk around smugly chanting "Think different," have lost that lean and hungry look. Favorites like Firefox or viral video are bloated, exploited, or overrun with morons. Let's kiss the corpses.

Firefox: I had my Firefox moment in college, when I found out that oh joy, this browser let me open five tabs in one window! And it had ad blockers! And OMG POP-UP BLOCKERS! Yeah, well, now Internet Explorer's got the same stuff, and it's quicker (partially because it's fused to Windows like a circus freak half-born Siamese twin). Meanwhile Firefox has turned into Fat Elvis, as Wired puts it. You can't run the damn thing more than a few hours without a memory leak taking over all the processor power and making you restart the browser. It's still a bit more useful than IE, and it's a hell of a lot cleverer than the other browsers on the Mac. But that's like saying, "At least Fall Out Boy is better than Dashboard Confessional."

Apple: Oh man, with Apple, everything just works, right? Until you trip on your power cord and your Macbook Pro fails to release its magic magnetic plug the way it's supposed to and now the hard drive's clicking and the schlub at the Genius Bar misdiagnoses it and you're waiting two weeks for it to come back from the repair shop and you're checking your e-mail at the iMacs downstairs along with a bunch of high school girls who come in every day to update their MySpaces and you start to feel like you're in Starbucks for computers. And then you turn to the poor guy next to you whose iPod busted and he's bewildered that now he's got to imagine music in his head or maybe listen to the goddamn people around him instead of listening to "Big Poppa" on "replay track" mode.

Digg: No dudes Digg was actually cool! It was for everyone sick of Slashdot and its slow crawl of stories that were never as the ones you submitted, no, those never got published because the editors didn't realize what an insightful wit you were, but on Digg you could finally get noticed and upvoted and get a link on the front page and be a star! And all the other stories on the front page were cool too, man, and if they weren't you buried them! Yeah, but then came a million users, a literal million registered users, and they clogged up the system with headlines all starting with "Breaking" as if all other news wasn't, and as if this story wouldn't linger for days and, well, no longer be breaking. They packed their headlines with "[PIC]" and "[VIDEO]" and "Amazing funny best ever" just to get noticed, and the whole show turned into an eBay feedback page, all A+++++, and god forbid you try to start a reasoned discussion no matter what side of an argument you were on, because you'd only get fanboys screaming "Death to Microsoft" and "Apple is for one-button tards" and then mocking the other side for mocking them, which of course must have felt terribly clever to the people who did the mocking but didn't get any closer to actual discussion of actual news. Plus there was all the blog spam from losers like this site Valleywag, whatever that site's about the stories were utter shit and obvious plays for your attention, and the bastards who invaded your site fed these asshat bloggers and voted them up to the front even if everyone hated the article.

Voting sites: And it's not like you could go to Reddit (like it won't get filled with ads anyway now that Wired's bought it); that site's full of wankers too now, but some of the wankers have college degrees and will make you feel terrible for misinterpreting line 6 of paragraph 32 of the article under discussion, unless of course you believe in God, in which case get the hell out of here. And the other sites? Netscape is just a rehash of top news for doddering fools who are too dumb to change their homepage on a five-year-old computer. The new voting sites keep getting worse. The newest, Truemors, is supposed to be a site for "true rumors that is relevant" (sic), and the about page says "we're not interested in crap." A sample story from the front page of Truemors: "The Wii is awesome but the non-existant multiplayer makes me want to cry. Nintendo has plans tho.. yeees." Just shut up and read the news the media wants you to; you don't deserve the vote.

Viral video: Used to be there was about one big video a month. It got spread around Ebaumsworld and College Humor and a few other video sites that just ripped it off and stuck a quicktime file on the web. This YouTube shit wasn't around yet. If you wanted Star Wars Kid or Numa Numa Kid or all the "fuck"s from Pulp Fiction in one video, you had to Google it, and it'd already be taken down from the first four sites you checked. Now you just look it up on YouTube and you're golden, and as soon as you've watched the funny video there are five others that you have to see because they're the new viral thing except half of them are from an ad agency that knows "viral" is just a new word for "actually decent commercial" and you're just watching ads all day, which is fine by me but don't pretend it's anything but the same media spoon-feeding you've been watching for years, but just the commercials, so you don't actually watch any content and you find yourself 40 years old and utterly uneducated because unless we trap you in a building and stick a book in your face and say we're gonna test you on it, you don't want to learn, do you? You asinine message-swallowing antididact pig at the video trough!

Photo: Paul Armstrong. Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. He's a happy person.