It is hard to believe considering how much we depend on it that less than 20 years ago nobody had even heard of the internet, it was possible to go online, but there was no point because there were only about 3 people there and all they were doing was playing a really slow game of chess. Today many people cannot even unlock their cars if they don’t have internet access on their smartphone, it’s insane.

The economy on the internet is unique in that removed from the physical constraints of the analogue world one resource and one resource only is uniquely precious to the internet, and that is people. Since you can have any amount of any thing you want virtually at very little cost, today’s capitalists have had to come up with ways to get people flocking to their website.

With incredible sums of money being thrown around to buy the major websites and portals, just because of how popular they are and nothing at all to do with the data that they have collected about people, social media marketing services are one of this decades first indisputable new industries. The modern equivalent of cinema.

It is disorienting for many to be placed in this seemingly surreal netherworld between virtual and actual existence with their entire personalities being transferred into a strange sort of limbo existing neither on or offline. We try to make sense of it all with ever more rapid updates and smaller thoughts, but we still end up back at square one, alone with a monitor whichever path we choose to take.

It is even possible to reverse this exploitation for those with a lot of talent for snappy and regular updates it is possible to make money with twitter and other platforms by attracting the commodity of people to read our witty remarks.

The truth is that there are no golden rules about how to get more followers on twitter or friends on Facebook. Ever.

As we try to overcome virtual dragons to get virtual swords which we can sell for virtual money and suddenly one day wake up in a wheelchair unable to support our own bodies with our withered limbs. Only then do we realize that despite all of these connections we are more alone than ever.

Once again drowning in a cold sea of isolation we rejoin the real world and cast aside our digital prison as a last gasp of meaning.

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