The Major Contagion By Titus Green

“The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence.”

(William S Burroughs)

Yahoo delivers a burning, broken, chaotic world in its little morsels of digital bait. 

US Journalist shot dead by the Russians

Millions in China Face Shutdowns as Covid Surges

Cunning Coroni isn’t finished with Asia just yet. It’s just getting restarted down in Seoul, dropping pathogen bombs from vast, invisible Zeppelins packed with Ominous Omicron.

South Korea exceeds 380,000 new cases in a day shortly after its presidential election.

Reuters and the New York Times dutifully spit out the miserable portraits of people stuck in kilometer testing lines, functioning, surviving only through the digital opium sucked in through fatigued optical nerves from the Android syringes they hold aloft, directly in front like mirrors of diseased reality. The virus is mutating, and so is the endless misery.

Back at Yahoo, its servers are serving up more spiritual junk food. London stabbings and dire economic forecasts juxtapose the celebrities announcing that they are happy with their bodies, sex lives, Botox doses and bowel motions. A few click spaces down succubus index fingers beckon from the confines of showbiz box stories, designed to be clicked and forgotten. 

Click! Click! Click! We want your attention baby. 

We want to suck the marrow of your mind dry. 

And take your IP address hostage.

Celebrities recline on beaches or have frozen grins on their real sweet-success, contract-ready faces filling binary-code boxes attached to blocks of vapid text

_________ rocks the reggae look at red-carpet in New York

_________ has fans stunned by her abs

_________ wows in red bikini 

_________ has fans talking with her wild new cleavage tattoos

that will be viewed and instantly forgotten, this rotten click-bait.  

Isn’t even clicked by the non-existent fans and stinks of PR methane. A sickening odor of triviality rules these segments of cyberspace. Meanwhile, more information war missiles are propelled across the borders of sanity.

PM ‘More than Convinced’ Putin will fail in Ukraine 

Says a party politico who likes parties, at the wrong time,

And whose convictions are no longer than YouTube commercials or the attention spans of Generation Tik-Tok or rap artists’ interview sentences

Putin’s rhetoric now more virulent amid Ukraine war says expert

Nothing is more virulent than conflict commentary now, not even Crafty Coroni, who’s been trying to ambush me for months. Opinions are spurting out of every species of screen, soaking senses with their septic touch, urinated by ‘experts,’ verbally incontinent and intoxicated with self-importance. TV and internet media has a non-stop conveyor belt of seated imbeciles contaminating language in soundbite factories. 

Facebook regurgitates the outside world, vomiting war, scandal, celebrity and the a.m. musings of people we haven’t known for years, who have suddenly awakened as philosophers ready to imitate the paid pundits, infected by the media pathogen with the insane craving to opine and excrete beliefs like diarrhea patients deprived of Imodium. 

This unsocial media platform feeds on our boredom and delusion like a ravenous parasite, a vast global tapeworm with a light blue logo wriggling through the membranes of our intelligence, sponging off our sentience, profiting from our mindless clicking, cultivating our ‘profiles’, trapping us in its gossamer web of distractions and making sure we share and share. Caring is sharing and scaring when you find out who’s sharing your likes and choice of emoticon.

The war videos are cascading down my news feed, alongside films of grown men falling down flights of stairs and one-trick ponies making themselves viral. I dare not return to Yahoo or Google because I don’t want to see any more stories about celebrities monetizing their orgasms or read copy from illiterate scribes about the elongated clusterfuck lives of D-list rehab’s usual suspects.

Facebook is Corona’s jealous twin, watching its sibling take the infamy awards and bask in the hatred of the world while it mutates unnoticed. Once Facebook, now Meta, its latest variant welcomes you to breathe it in, to swallow its protein and start replicating the memes, flying the flags, sharing the outrage, recycling the petitions, changing the profile pics, tweaking the statuses, finding less and less satisfactory versions of yourself to present in 21st century abnormality. 

The current, contagious mutation of this complex virus is infecting its host with violent sanctimony, causing the infected to present the following symptoms: an uncontrollable urge to post on moral, social and political issues with an amplified sense of righteousness, solicit agreement with these views and then insult and isolate any persons with contrary opinions. The pathology of the condition is caused by exposure to and absorption of these views and behavior patterns through contact with media channels, especially certain talk-shows and news channels known for their mind-corroding proteins.

 Nietzsche wouldn’t last long on Facebook. His erudite candor and withering witticisms would offend. They’d turn on him, these modern experts on right-think, and press the HATE SPEECH alert button, but not before convulsing at their keyboards and spilling their Fairtrade Skinny Lattes in rage. Friedrich would be arrested virtually by Silicon Valley, but not before pouring linguistic Greek Fire on its ‘community guidelines’ and safe-from-intelligence spaces. Would the woke inquisition then burn the philosopher at the stake, as the flames singed his handlebar moustache, and he cried ‘there is no such things as right?’

Meanwhile, back at Yahoo:

Holly Willoughby's animal-print M&S dress is set to fly off the shelves

And

Russia 'pulls back helicopters' from key airport in Ukraine's south as setbacks mount

The virus continues spreading, infecting and confounding. It will never disappear and will laugh at any sincere, well-meaning vaccines and spit out their needles for fun. It will last for eternity, because there will never be zero media!

Titus Green was born in Canada but grew up in the UK. His short fiction has appeared in numerous online and print magazines, including The Collidescope, Adelaide Literary Magazine, HORLA, Literally Stories, Sediments Literary Arts, Fear of Monkeys, Stag Hill Literary Journal, The Chamber, S.A.V.A Press and The Font. He teaches English as a foreign language for a living.