I launched waePoint.com (more or less) on September 18th, 2000 for (more or less) no good reason. The following passage christened the website and served multiple functions as a diatribe, a statement of purpose, and a dyspeptic meandering on the nature of media consumption. The personalities originally cited have grown stale with time, so I’ve edited them out to keep the sentiments as timelessly fresh as a box of McDonaldland cookies.

We are a society of voyeurs.The news media, late night entertainers, and “the public” hunger for flawed individuals whose lives are laid bare for dissection. These sacrificial lambs are the poster children for our fascination with sticking our collective nose in places where it doesn’t belong. In a society where all basic threats to survival have been vanquished, our fractured egos have sought out those poor unfortunates who make us feel better about the enlightened selves that we were supposed to have evolved into.

The Web feeds this habit like drinking promotes the need for overpriced fast food. In between episodes of Cops and Springer, the Internet lets us peer into virtual bullshit on a whim. Everything from lonely prison chicks to seamonkey soap operas is available to us 24/7. Our tolerance is only limited by bandwidth, so those of us with Cable, DSL, or T1 have an extra-wide sewage pipeline into our brains.

So here’s my stab at feeding the beast. Just one more drop of drool in a sea of pabulum. But if historians of the millennium come across a digital remnant of me rather than more of the same bad porn, sports scores, or lonely Turkish ping-pong players that currently clog the world’s servers, then my own arrogance dictates that we’re all a little bit better off.

I promise not to feel guilty if you won’t.