justnick's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Much ado about Napster Much Ado About Napster: The Saga of the Geek How Technology has affected the lives of myself, and geeks everywhere I wrote this one back in whatever grade I was in when Napster was shut down. I just found it in my word file, and I kinda like it. Read on. There�s one in every class. He sits in the back, reading a comic book, or video game instruction book while the teacher speaks on and on about whatever it is teachers talk about. He sits with his one friend at recess and lunch discussing the latest events of some television show, or how to beat Omega V, killbot from Planet X, in the latest installment of some Videogame series. You know the one, the guy who can sing every word to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song and can speak Klingon like a mother tongue: the geek. Before one is old enough to become a nerd so he can found a dot.com business and make millions, one is a geek (Larval stage to the Nerd, if you will). Some never reach full maturity, due to a lack of intelligence, but for the most part, the few and acne ridden go on to become full fledged nerds in a matter of years. I was one such boy once. I, to this day, read comic books and know every single secret passageway in Super Mario Brothers 2. Just below the mentally handicapped on the social food chain, I sat: a geek. Needless to say, when the Internet reached the mass market, the lives of geeks everywhere changed. Geekdom begged its mother for a new computer with reckless abandon, and eventually, in the late nineties, got one. When geeks, as a mass, got hold of a massive form of communication, it turned to it not on a quest for knowledge, but on a quest to find kindred spirits. There is one in every class, after all. It is only when geeks discovered that they were not alone did they grow to power. Contrary to what most believed, geeks discovered that they were a majority. This eventually became popular knowledge, and the primary class of geek graduated to full-fledged nerddom, labeled the hackers. The next group, responding to their natural instinct to stigmatize themselves, took it upon themselves to mold the Internet into a wealth of pornography and useless knowledge. Be it the home planet of he Cardassians or two women fornicating with a goat, thanks to the nerds, it could be found. This group was the webmasters. Then, there was the multimedia flood of the Internet. You could hear music, play games, and shop there. First, came the games. Now, not only could nerds and geeks everywhere communicate, but also they could kill each other repeatedly in whatever fantasy world they had been living in since birth. They could be a Klingon warrior out to get Captain Picard, or a perhaps a Jedi Knight, out to eliminate the threat of the empire. Geeks were in heaven, and they called themselves the gamers. There was, however, a group that wasn�t content with simply gaming. They wanted more, and wouldn�t be happy until someone gave it to them. This group had no money, but wanted everything it could get you. This group turned to all its brethren, and called its rallying cry for geekdom to unite, revolution was at hand. It wasn�t long before you could download anything you wanted, be it homework, music, or passwords to just about anything you could ever want to access. This group took a major step forward with the release of Napster, a large step towards their ultimate goal, every geek�s dream: to never have to get up off your chair. The anti-geek himself, Lars Ulrich, tried to stop this progress by shutting down Napster, but despite all the news coverage, geeks weren�t down for long. Soon, Morpheus was up and running and a thousand other Napster clones were on their way. It is a golden age for geeks, and we have nothing but hope for the future. As a group, we have endured countless generations of being picked on by the better looking, more popular jock types, and it has taught us to get up when we�ve been knocked down. As the Napster fiasco taught the World what we already knew, the jocks everywhere have but to sit and wait. People can now take classes online, alleviating the need to go to school in person. People can now buy things online, all you need is money. It has already begun that people are being paid to work on computers, so we are beginning to actually have our own money to spend. Geekdom cannot be stopped from reaching its relatively uncool goal; to never have to leave it�s room. So fear us World, because it is only a matter of time before the only reason we have to get up is to replace the bedpan. How young and foolish I was. Bedpan, feh. Diapers are the only way to go. Excelsior. 11:23 p.m. - 2003-09-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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