The Information Superhighway

I like a good rant and this one was too good to avoid mirroring from this site of stuff to look at. This is not my work, but I sure wish it was. So poetic...snif... I don't think we'll ever know who the original author was since it was probably found on USENET before it started being archived by the likes of Deja and others.

This link from May 26, 1995 is the oldest record that I can find. Is the author really Jim the Prophet?

By the way, I am not the only person to find this rant poetic. Try searching for the key words "dead wombats and rotten cabbage". Google comes up with 282 pages today.

There it is again. Some clueless FOOL talking about the "Information Superhighway." They don't know JACK about the Net. It's NOTHING like a Superhighway. That's a BAD metaphor.

Yeah, but suppose the metaphor ran the OTHER direction. Suppose the HIGHWAYS were like the NET.

All RIGHT!

Winston Smith - Life As We Know It A highway HUNDREDS of lanes wide. Most with potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member VIGILANTE POSSES with nuclear weapons. 237 ON RAMPS at every intersection. NO SIGNS. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. AD HOC traffic laws. Some lanes would VOTE to make use by a single-occupant vehicle a CAPITAL OFFENSE on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just SHOOT you without a trial for talking on your car phone.

AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking BUS with hundreds of EBOLA victims and a TOILET spewing out on the road behind it. Throwing DEAD WOMBATS and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been ASSEMBLED AT HOME from kits. Some are 2.5 horsepower LAWNMOWER ENGINES with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn NITROGLYCERIN and IDLE at 120.

No license tags. World War II BOMBER NOSE ART instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or VAMPIRE EAGLES. Bumper-mounted MACHINE GUNS. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a WHITE PHOSPHORUS GRENADE up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks with ANTI-AIRCRAFT MISSILE BATTERIES to shoot down the Traffic Watch helicopter. A little kid on a tricycle with a squirtgun filled with HYDROCHLORIC ACID.

Now THAT'S the way to run an Interstate Highway system.

--

Erik Rossen <rossen@rossen.ch>
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Last modified: 2016-02-07T12:43:36+0100

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