Source: Bigstock

Because . . . people are sick of data-mining, and cookies, and the profiling of their purchasing decisions, and the monitoring of keywords in their private emails, and what is seen as an unholy alliance between Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue, and the shadowy CEOs responsible for things like opioid addiction (yes, it started with legal drugs). People are sick of feeling like everything they write, every place they go, every phone call they make, is an opportunity for someone to sell them something or, more likely, sell them to someone else in a demographic package.

People are sick of “Your Privacy Is Important to Us” messages, which usually means yet another company is going to harvest their online footprints and offer them for sale in a Turkish bazaar called Digital Marketing. Fortunately, most users of the Internet have never been to a Big Data class at Carnegie-Mellon or the Wharton School, so they don’t realize that Big Brother is no longer a faceless government agent but more often takes the form of 26-year-old trust-fund babies fresh out of the Ivy League, brandishing their marketing degrees at Brooklyn craft-beer taverns.

So when the Internet goes down, there’s a feeling, however briefly, that the world has returned to the days when an unlisted phone number seemed eccentric and the only thing Procter & Gamble knew about you was what you told them in your entry form for the Ivory Snow sweepstakes.

Breaking the Internet is a big “screw you” to the Man.

Numero Three-o: Why do you get credit for success when your online product causes chaos even before it can be consumed?

Last week, in this same space, I wrote what now seems a very naïve piece about the need for communal theater and the reason people gather on the Web to experience media in real time. I suggested then, and I’ve proven now, that the gathering can be more important than the content they’ve gathered to watch. Thanks to the Shudder TV service, the complete 24-hour marathon has now been posted online, available for streaming, one movie at a time, but what if it sucked? What if everybody was showing up for the equivalent of Howard the Duck or Heaven’s Gate? What if the hype was better than the material?

We would never know because I broke the Internet.

I don’t wanna break the Internet. I want it to do its job and I’ll do mine. And maybe if the guys in the marketing labs would use a few less pop-ups and cookies and stealth keyword-searchers, we would all get along better. Maybe if we could go back to what it was intended for, in 1992, the Internet could become our friend again.

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