Word Soup

Perusing the news wires this week I can tell it's going to be one of those weeks that highlights the American obsession with ranking.

Oh no! Toyota is now number one!

A condom company says we're not having enough sex to be number one.

The U.S. must have the most broadband subscribers.

Your blog must have the most feed readers.

You must be the number one answer solver on Yahoo answers.

And everyone knows you must hold the number-one position in worldwide 8-bit microcontroller revenue.

I mean that last one's really fucking important.

I don't think you can truly appreciate the raw volume of mindless god-damn jabbering this culture outputs unless you're in the business of tracking the news. You're ranked number one and the world must know. You're not number one, so you hire a PR department to spin the statstics until you are.

Bloggers and news outlets must then bring out their wisest sages to inform you, the supposed ignoramus, conflicting opinions what exactly all this means. I monitor technologists and pundits out of occupational necessity and am ceaselessly amazed at not only what they deem important, but how they believe said analysis is actually accomplishing something (this applies to all topics, including the "Web 2.0" obsession, which I consider to be an egomaniac circle jerk of oceanic enormity).

On bad days I am ashamed for contributing to the sound wall.

Thanks to inadequacy-pushing marketing departments and the mindless need for quarter-over-quarter improvements this entire country has mutated into a sysiphisian seven-year-old suffering from OCD, trapped in a hamster wheel of productive delusion. But god damnit they're number one!

Or maybe I'm just suffering from technology news burnout and it's time for more coffee.