Web 2: A Future Guide for Today
Written by Mandroid3000

Let’s face it, the internet in its current form is pretty average. Sure, you can quest your life away playing RPGs, but the majority of content is still basically magazine articles on a computer monitor, making the internet not much more than a worldwide microfiche reader with a Wonder Swan glued to the side.

As you may have heard, things are going to change! Web 2 is coming. It will be so advanced that it will know you want to see K-Fed’s Teen Choice video before you do! Web 2 will exist in so many dimensions that you can make your MySpace page stretch lengthwise, widthwise and timewise! The Web 2 will be integrated with everything! News tickers will be on g-string waist bands so brokers can cheat on their wives while following the market! Sounds wonderful! But will it be?

Not at all! Karate Party’s editor Mandroid3000 is from the future, apparently, and this is what he remembers about the Web 2, and how it turned the world into a scorched wasteland devoid of culture and human kindness.

Hypnotic pop up ads
Today people think of pop up ads as nice little surprises that give you the delightful news of an unclaimed prize or a new batch of spyware-filled smilies to download. But in 2010 pop up ads became dangerous when Belorussian crime gangs started spreading hypnotic pop up ads around the internet. If an internet user visited certain dubious websites, usually offering pornography or free music downloads, a pop up ad consisting of a quick series of coloured jolts would hypnotise them. After ten seconds the message “Please enter your credit card number” appeared on the screen.

No one cared for a while, as this only affected people who were too slack to turn on a pop up blocker. But in 2012 these ads caused a financial crisis when the hypnotic techniques grew more sophisticated and a security hole in a popular web browser was discovered.

The new technique (the inclusion of a jingle by Al Martino) put people in a deeper state of hypnotism in which they could be compelled to complete more complex tasks. Webmasters were targeted and instructed to install the pop up ads on their sites. The ads spread world wide so fast, that within 24 hours of the first ad 60% of the world’s available credit card debt (around US$900 billion) was transferred to Belarus. Only 75% of the money was ever recovered, resulting in numerous corporate and personal bankruptcies. Lawsuits eventually brought down the software company responsible for the browser security flaw as well.

A high school student from Delaware made a fortune when he invented special screen filters, and by 2014 they were standard on all new monitors. However, techniques for disabling the filters floated around the more dubious corners of the ‘net until the Solar Apocalypse of 2035.

The Flame Hat
Anyone who frequents web forums knows that flaming is a key skill in internet discourse. But it is a sad fact that ‘net rage directed at a 12 year-old with a serious lack of knowledge about obscure Star Wars characters from the original (read: only) trilogy has to be filtered through the imperfect lens that is language.

The Flame Hat (originally called The Dome of Empathy), introduced in 2013, was the first of the few non-sexual consumer applications that made use of brain wave reading and stimulation technologies. Marketed as a breakthrough in empathic communication, it could read a user’s brain waves and send this as data to a fellow user’s computer. The data was then translated back into an electrical current, allowing the recipient to “feel” the other user’s brain waves.

Seriously overestimating the general level of internet discourse, the Flame Hat was taken off the market two days after its release when an unwary eight year-old named Barry Winthrop used it in a WWE forum while posting “I think the Great Khali wil be champ soon lol. He is a beest!” The resulting jolt of rage directed at his brain was so powerful that his skull acted like a pressure cooker.

The Flame Hat was immediately withdrawn from sale after this fatal tragedy. But the gadget had a second life as a torture device. Immoral comic book geeks found themselves recruited by foreign country's governments to transmit uniquely caustic geek rage across international borders. This practice was designed to skirt laws by having the torturer in a separate country to the torturee, an arrangement the media dubbed the “We Just Put a Silly Hat on His Head Scandal.” The resulting court cases (the last of which was heard in 2032) set several important precedents in international law.

The Open Source Mad Science Project
For years scientific institutes have networked the spare computing power of home PCs to run research projects. By 2015 home computers were so ludicrously powerful that there was far more unused computing power sitting in private residences than could be applied to legitimate areas of research. A Norwegian software engineer, whose true name is lost to the future, started the Open Source Mad Science Project with the aim of harnessing these powers for ends both diabolical and pointless.

Projects included a partially successful attempt to reanimate a corpse, a tragically unsuccessful attempt at teaching a Donkey how to drive, a controversial attempt to write the perfect Haiku about Randy “Macho Man” Savage, and an algorithm to create the perfect shopping list that was stuck in a computational loop for 43 years. The movement reached its nadir with what came to be called “The Superman Fiasco”.

The plan was to use the magnetic field created by computer hard drives to make the world spin backwards and cause time to reverse, much as Superman did by flying at tremendous speed counter to the earth’s rotation in the Richard Donner’s film of 1978. At 1313 PST on May 13 2022 computers around the world surged in power, creating what was described by organisers as “A magnetic force so powerful even time will bow before it.” There were doubters; Harlan Williams, head of the Society of Magnetism, claimed that “there aren’t enough computers in the world to spin the planet backwards” and was proved correct.

The experiment did create 1250 people with the powers of Magneto, who fought numerous destructive battles over the right to use the name. The level of property damage got so out of hand that the President of China eventually lured them all to an auto wreckers for a “Super Tournament”, crushed them into a cube and shot them into the sun.

Body Guidance Suits
Using similar technology to the Flame Hat, by 2015 the sensor pad-covered pleasure suits of Sci Fi fame were a reality. Most people used these to have sex with virtual schoolgirls, but by 2020 users were able to wear one of the suits and have another person in another location guide their body's movements. For the most part the wholesome uses of the device were just marketing for coy consumers, akin to the labelling of vibrators as “electric toothbrushes.”

Included in these wholesome uses were musical lessons. Your hands would be controlled by a musical prodigy, usually in Eastern Europea or China. The theory was that this would teach your body to play the instrument without your mind needing to pay attention. But these devices got so sophisticated and undetectable that in 2022 it was discovered that their use was endemic in the classical music world. Several Symphony Orchestras fired their entire roster of musicians when the fraud was discovered during a surge in the earth’s magnetic field that caused the suits to malfunction mid-concert.

These body guidance devices also led to the Robinson Murtax Cyber Cheat Scandal. Murtax was a prominent New England politician who was caught controlling a male escort who was engaged in sex with his mistress while Murtax was having sex with his wife. They were also a boon for College pranksters. One could place them on a drunk friend’s body while they slept, and when they woke up to go to the bathroom you could make them piss all over themselves. The trend was popular until 2021 when it became the subject of a Wayans Brothers’ film.

Work Web
As the internet became more powerful, the need for businesses to occupy actual office space became less and less pressing. The perfection of virtual office software that came with the Web 2 led to the vacancy of many office buildings and a crash in the commercial real estate market. What some heralded as a new era of freedom for the humble wage slave was assailed by some critics as a further shifting of costs from company to employee.

Evidence of the critics’ case was the many employees who began congregating in the same neighbourhood as their workmates. In one prominent case of 2021, the employees of a New York law firm rented out their old offices as residential space and created a communal living and working area with office space, child care, and a rudiementary love hotel. The need for human contact and office romances was too much for many people to give up.

In other instances whole companies moved to picturesque seaside resorts. These migrations led many communities to disestablish broadband phone services to discourage the arrival of outsiders who forced up house prices and acted like prats. Despite this, company communities became so common that they lead to high levels of social exclusion and many delightful sitcoms.

In 2035, after the Solar Apocalypse, these communities became the new seats of tribal power. They frequently battled each other in the scorched wastelands using armies of mangy dogs controlled by nanobots. This era of warring super corporations came to an end when the 1250 now solar-powered Magneto clones (who obviously caused the Solar Apocalypse) finally finished the flight back to earth with the intention of turning it into the “New Sun,”

This clearly didn’t happen, as I’m from the distant future and get sunburnt really easily. From this point on (I had a ten volume set of history books and only read one of them. Sorry) I think things went like this;

• Using the hypnotising pop up ads the employees of a Scottish sock manufacturer made the fake Magnetos think they were one giant fridge magnet.
• This lead to a new era of co-operation as a giant fridge was built to attach them to. This was dropped in Lake Erie.
  
• The shopping list algorithm finally completed running after 43 years. The print out was found by Norwegian fishermen who took to the seas on a holy quest to purchase all of the items. They returned a week later.
• A new era of enlightenment followed, which ended when that somewhat successful reanimated corpse finally made its way out of a Calcutta slum and caused the Great Zombie War of 2120-2122. Someone used the Body Guidance Suits to control some zombies and infiltrate their ranks, if you’re wondering how the humans won.
• After that there was some sort of alternative world that was really a computer simulation, but it was really buggy and didn’t catch on. Or is it that we’re living in now, which explains Tori Spelling?
  

Sorry. I can’t be expected to remember everything. If you’re in Kiev on April 24, 2450 stay indoors because a blimp powered by dog crap is going to explode. I remember that because it’s on my birthday.

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