Searching the dark recesses

The internet is pretty good at having information but not always so good at the sharing of it.

“Did you see that video? Thing You Did With A Banana? It was so funny!”

Nope. Never heard of it. Now I feel more left out and more like an outlier than ever before. Well played, internet.

You know what’s not well played? The video itself.

There I was, in my own living room, feeling all dejected because when it came to Thing You Did With A Banana I didn’t even qualify for a participant ribbon. Not only had I never seen it. I’d never even heard of it. Since this is how I measure my worth as a human being I was feeling sad and dejected.

Luckily we recently souped up our home entertainment system with a device that has YouTube built in. I decided to undertake a quest. I was going on a mission to search and destroy.

I loaded the YouTube search function. What do you think I entered, one character at a time, with 420 clicks of the buttons on my remote control?

“Thing You Did With A Banana.”

I’m so exhausted by this point I wanted to die. Yet somehow I found the strength to click one more button to make it go.

Ta da! Results, baby. Lots and lots of results.

Wait a minute. What the fuck is going on here? All of them say “Thing You Did With A Banana.” They can’t all be the same video, right? Well, at least they provide a tiny little preview image of the content. They all look remarkably similar, though, and they’re really too small to be useful.

Now what are we supposed to do?

Let’s try a few. Maybe we’ll get lucky.

Click. “And now a scene with Hitler discussing Thing You Did With A Banana.”

WTF? That’s not what we wanted. Try the next one.

Click. “Captain Kirk reacts to Thing You Did With A Banana.”

Bloody hell. We don’t want that.

Click. “Two girls and a cup react to grandparents reacting to Thing You Did With A Banana.”

I think I’m going to be sick.

Click. “This is a parody of Thing You Did With A Banana only it uses a cucumber instead.”

OMG.

Click. “Young Turks debate the societal impact of Thing You Did With A Banana.”

Help!

Click. “The Gregory Brothers auto tune Thing You Did With A Banana. The song is available on iTunes.”

Impending doom.

Click. “An amazing atheist is telling me why Thing You Did With A Banana sucks.”

Let’s click a few more since I no longer give a shit.

Apparently the only thing you are never supposed to see is the video itself. And no way to discern between the real content and all the narcissistic hanger-ons is provided.

How does this work? Apparently there is an entire caste system of content producers who publish to places like YouTube. They want to be famous and they have A/V equipment. They don’t have actual ideas of their own, though, and that presents a small problem. So what do they do? They watch. And they wait. Then, when something goes viral, they leap into action, perhaps making 2:30 of crap video that will hopefully steal the attention of people looking for the real thing.

If you can’t wow them with quality that’s when you bamboozle them with a mountain of bullshit.

Within 24 hours of a video going viral there are tens of thousands of copycat and response videos all hoping to capitalize on that search engine footprint.

In other words, non-inventive thieves.

Thanks for reading this far. Now I’m going to tell you what a fox sounds like while I do things with a banana and twerk on a sledgehammer.

What does the copycat say? “Action!”