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Beware the populist mash oozing out of Facebook and YouTube

Lies better served as solids

And Ninthly Yep. It felt just like that, didn't it?

For scenario one, place your tongue between teeth. Let your tongue relax and give it a few strict but not too rough clamps with the teeth. While repeating this exercise, imagine that your mouth - no, make that your head - has filled with some manner of corn mash. Not just any old corn mash. But rather the corn mash that comes out of a pig with a heroically short intestinal tract.

You know the pig has crapped out mash, and think it's still mostly corn rather than just digestive goop, but can't say for certain. That's the substance filling your head.

For scenario two, imagine that you have fingers for legs. Also, you're wearing a cheerleader's skirt.

You're so pathetically short and gimpy finger-legged that not even the most perverted homeless degenerate under a bridge would even - for a single moment - entertain an erotic thought in your honor. You're that sad and hopeless. You're a cheerleader skirt wearing sap that no one wants.

Mash-brained and full of gimp. . . Revolting.

Didn't we all feel like this when seeing the Facebook logo during the recent Republican and Democratic debates on ABC?

The underlying hilarity of both Facebook and YouTube being tied to the election process is the theory that these online services lend some measure of energetic populism to an otherwise dull, corporate affair. Such reasoning would hold if you considered America's Funniest Home Videos and stoners as fresh examples of populism in the US. Which is to say these services exhibit all the populist weight of a visit by Stalin to the Ukraine.

Still, the networks and politicians inspire with their ability to latch onto these Web 2.0 buzzwords in an attempt to secure a dose of hipness or youngitude.

Shot of Oprah's cleavage from YouTube video

Can 100 Osmonds fit in there?

Never mind that Facebook is so desperate to find a business model that it will sell out as many users as possible at the drop of an online tracking system. Or that no heterosexual male uses Facebook anymore. The site has degenerated into the refuge of hormonal teenage girls and desperate divorcees. Hillary Clinton has the only hope of finding support from Zucker the Sucker's virtual Tupperware party.

Er, and let's ignore the fact that the top videos on YouTube right now are of Bill Gates retiring, Bill Clinton stumping, CES products, a car losing its bumper, Hillary Clinton crying, Ron Paul going insane and 100 Osmonds visiting Oprah. (Word of advice: Stick with the cleavage, Oprah.)

We've ended up with one site for chatty women and another for hawking products and stump speeches.

Honestly, how fucking embarrassing that some of you are gullible enough to buy into these notions that YouTube, Facebook and MySpace provide the citizenry with a louder, more vibrant voice. Those of you supporting such ideas should be disgusted with yourselves. You've done little more than embrace another facade. Only this time it's delivered via TCP/IP instead through a pamphlet or phone bank.

Oh the mashy, mashy, finger-legged sadness.

I'll take my lies without a web feed please. ®

Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He has closely monitored the IT industry's intersection with America's role as a world leader for 30 years. You can find Stern locked and loaded, corralling wounded iLemmings, talking, drinking and driving, reflecting on Anna Nicole Smith's American chest, fearing Intel Inside Chinese golf clubs, suppressing Bill Gates U, digesting head mash, developing strong Mexican engineers, fearing pink Yahoo!, corrupting his youth in Sadville, masticating beta culture, booing our soccer team, following Jimmy Wales, despising U-Haul, nursing an opal-plated prostate, spanking open source fly boys, Googling Bro-Magnon Man, wearing a smashing suit, watching Dead Man, dropping a SkyCar on the Googleplex, spitting on Frenchmen, and vomiting in fear with a life-sized cutout of Hilary Rosen at his solar-powered compound somewhere in the Great American Southwest.

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