Matmos, "Ultimate Care II Excerpt Five"

While the Internet is responsible for many terrible things — I was going to list them here but oh my God it would take days and really what with the way all of our attention spans have been diminished, probably terminally so (I was talking to a friend last week and she expressed her belief that you can’t ever bring anything back to the way it was before and as stupid and distractible as we’ve all become because of the Internet, that is the best we’re going to be from here on out and we might as well just recognize that fact while we still can because soon enough we are going to be too dumb to even recognize what we were once able to accomplish), even a brief elucidation of all the horrors which the Internet has wrought would cause you to wander off, mentally, mid-list — admit it, you already started to glaze over as soon as I began telling you about my friend’s theory on our society-wide attention deficit disorder and now you are so preoccupied with other things that even as you read this sentence you are unaware that the clause in which you are currently ensconced is a parenthetical phrase that is itself part of a parenthetical phrase, one which includes a separate and genuine parenthetical phrase (that is, one in actual parentheses instead of set apart by em dashes) alongside it; crazy, right? — although, believe me, you would nod in agonized recognition as I ticked off each item — it would be frankly unrealistic to acknowledge the many positive things it has brought about, particularly in the arena of opening you up to the interests and encounters of groups other than your own and showing you the vast and fascinating ways people engage with everyday experiences that you might otherwise ignore as irrelevant. This video, for instance, could be seen — and probably is seen, by most of us — as a series of connected images centered around the laundering process, but thanks to the Internet you now know that someone, somewhere, is jerking off to it. Enjoy.