When Bloggers Become the New Working Class

A few years from now, when weather-weapons become the mundane talk of basic cable talking heads and people in old age homes are getting misty-eyed at the thought of another Patton Oswalt Christmas special, being a blogger will carry all of the cultural currency and nose-to-the-grindstone workaday blandness that janitorial work and data entry bear today. For-profit bloggers will become a stable, taken-for-granted section of the working class, like dock workers or brick layers or school nurses, working an unglamorous, indispensible job so that more fortunate people may focus on the exciting, exotic, and cutting-edge.

"Huh?" you ask.

It's pretty simple: bloggers, in their daily labors, are creating an infrastructure -- albeit very subtle -- of conceptual associations, worn paths between ideas, fragile tendrils between memes, filaments of consciousness tying disparate themes together. Every day brings new connections, and slowly this associative network grows stronger, until one day it becomes a platform for something even bigger to stand on. Just as the atoms composing our floorboards have no idea what creatures they are keeping afloat high above via the power of the static electricity bding them together, we will barely be able to conceive what Beings will live, feed off of, and walk around the conceptual networks we've laid down. Ideas are atoms, blogs and wikis and forums are the molecules, and at some point soon, cells will emerge.

So consider that the next time you sneer at your bland iron-worker Dad before firing up your blogger account: what seems sexy-hip-cool to you today will become the staid beige blah-work future generations will rebel against with the increasingly invisible, arcane technologies awaiting our bodyminds further down the cyberpike.

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