Based on Jes­si­ca's six main cat­e­gories of "op­por­tu­ni­ties for pros­per­i­ty and plea­sure". Or, "You must be new here? I can't be­lieve you ad­mit­ted to work­ing in ad­ver­tis­ing."

Be fas­ci­nat­ed, en­grossed, de­light­ed

As long as it's not NSFW. Nice po­lit­i­cal­ly cor­rect com­pact con­tent that is usu­al­ly viewed dur­ing work hours by me­dia pro­fes­sion­als when wait­ing for a down­load or soft­ware up­date or any­thing with cof­fee. The qual­i­ty isn't that high that you will waste your own time watch­ing it, is it? Or when you come home af­ter a hard day at the plant you'll re­lax and watch a cou­ple of hours of stuff like that? Sure, some of that in­ter­net stuff is nice­ly done, but the fas­ci­na­tion of the in­ter­net is more go­ing on in down­load­ing ter­abytes of pop­u­lar full movies and pr0n through The Pi­rate Bay or some­thing. Not some mid­dle of the road PC RT to show you're in the loop. And even then, if you pro­fes­sion­al­ly need to pro­vide a steady stream of such con­tent you'll re­al­ize soon it's not even enough to fill prime time with it on a dai­ly ba­sis, and it stays pop­u­lar be­cause new gen­er­a­tions are fas­ci­nat­ed, en­grossed and de­light­ed by it, not be­cause a sin­gle per­son is fas­ci­nat­ed, en­grossed and de­light­ed by it again and again. It's some­times good bub­blegum, but still bub­blegum.

Re­search/An­a­lyze/Fan

Un­til one day you get "I must find this out to­day!". Then you'll soon no­tice most of the in­for­ma­tion on the in­ter­net is use­less crap. It's like that phe­nom­e­non where if you see some­thing in main­stream me­dia that you know a lot about, you'll no­tice they get most of it wrong. And you start to won­der how they will get the sub­jects you don't know much about some­how right? And that's usu­al­ly in an en­vi­ron­ment where peo­ple can get fired for be­ing wrong. On the in­ter­net no­body cares. It might be nice to find a non-cov­ered area in the OpenStreetMap project and fill it, but are you go­ing to main­tain that data? Check it all to see if some­thing has changed every once in a while? There's no glo­ry in that, so why both­er? Just leave it to the peo­ple who are stu­pid enough to use the data and find out it's wrong to up­date it. When the in­ter­net was new all the in­for­ma­tion was up to date, a cou­ple of decades lat­er you're most­ly look­ing at some­thing that's way past it's sell by date.

Play/cre­ate/remix

Cheap, quick, easy? Even if there are thou­sands of movies do­ing about the same thing on the youtube, that doesn't mean about a hun­dred times more peo­ple tried it and failed mis­er­ably. A lot of stuff that might pre­tend to be done by am­a­teurs is done pro­fes­sion­al­ly, semi-pro­fes­sion­al, or by me­dia stu­dents who have all the knowl­edge and re­sources to pull it off. And prob­a­bly in more than one take. The av­er­age in­ter­net user doesn't have a chance, and doesn't have Adobe Premiere skills. And this is close­ly linked to the pre­vi­ous chap­ter. A lot of tu­to­ri­als ad­ver­tise them­selves by claim­ing how easy some­thing is to achieve, but for­get to men­tion the back­ground need­ed to make it easy. And that back­ground usu­al­ly is that you'd have to have writ­ten a tu­to­r­i­al on the sub­ject your­self to see how the tu­to­r­i­al makes it easy. Is there a How­to for your job? Or is your job the only job in the world that can't be cov­ered by a How­to?

Ex­press your­self/build iden­ti­ty/cu­rate your per­son­al­i­ty

Make stuff up. And most peo­ple are bad at mak­ing stuff up. I can't find the quote right now, but it was some­thing like "I use my real name be­cause I don't want to re­veal to much about my­self". I can't hate some­body for what they are, but I can for what they made them­selves to be. Joe Six-pack will prob­a­bly end up with an iden­ti­ty worse than in re­al­i­ty. It's Google who de­cides who you are, not your­self in some pro­file form. And com­ing back to the tu­to­ri­als, you might find some that ex­plain how easy it is to fake what you lis­ten to on last.fm.

Make friends/con­nect

Friends are part of the show­cas­ing of your own iden­ti­ty! That's the most pow­er­ful part! That's how you build your echo cham­ber. Con­nect to peo­ple who share as much as pos­si­ble and don't both­er you with dif­fer­ent views. Friends that you can rely on to an­swer every one of your ques­tions with the an­swer you'd ex­pect. Friends that un­der­stand that deep down you are in an un-hip rur­al or sub­ur­ban ex­is­tence, feel­ing iso­lat­ed and alone, and en­cour­age you to go for that spec­tac­u­lar school shoot­ing. That will show them fucks not to fuck with Frank Si­na­tra!

Have your say/Achieve Change

Well, it's like be­fore a match both teams are pray­ing to have some god let them win. You nev­er hear the losers com­plain about that af­ter the match. And John and Hil­lary didn't have an ac­tive on­line com­mu­ni­ty sup­port­ing them? How do the mem­bers of those com­mu­ni­ties feel about achiev­ing change? About the same as how the peo­ple on the streets of Tehran feel now?

What does this all mean?

Read all the Terms of Ser­vice and the legalese of all the stuff on the in­ter­net you are us­ing to see how lib­er­at­ed you re­al­ly are. You're not pay­ing for those ser­vices be­cause you are not the cus­tomer. You are the prod­uct. You're the pi­ano.

Via mon pe­tit vole.