The Inter Net

More and more, we see ourselves tied to brands more than our friends and family. People are all using (and flaunting) their new iPhone and browsing Internet sites like YouTube and Bluesky.

Not only that, we are in a time where entertainment is at its highest popularity peak: movies and games move millions of dollars and have high staying power in the cultural zeitgeist; and overlapping with this, site algorithms reward shorter texts.

This results in people referring to things as hashtaggable acronyms, which are readily picked up by the fandom and spread everywhere. And I, a mere technoboomer trying to survive in this technological landscape, suffer quite a bit.

My way to combat this trend is to honor the technoboomer in me, and divide the names of brands and media content (yet another cursed word, personally) by their fundamental morphemes.

The Git Hub. The You Tube. The Blue Sky. The War Hammer Forty Thousand (this last one, I am quite proud of).

The smart phone. The Ubi Soft. The Face Book. And so on.

I don't want to show reverence to brands. I don't consider them to be close friends of mine. I don't wish for mere tools and entertainment products to appear more and more in my speech. And the more contempt I feel towards a certain brand, the more likely I am to doing this.

By pulverizing those names in this manner, it disfigures them and makes them look like some kind of unpalatable word salad. Because that's what they are at the end of the day: unpalatable. It does shed a light on how absurd it is for us to be loyal to a certain brand name.

Does this actually change anything, though? Not really, honestly, but it does bring me a modicum of personal enjoyment. At the very least, it makes me noselaugh (you know, that puff of air you let out from the nose when you see a mildly entertaining meme). It's not like I can choose to abandon those services and devices if I want to keep contact with my beloved friends and family, at any rate.