Mind Scalpel

Apologies for the short gap in posting. I’ve been thinking about how to respond to a surprising “cease and desist” letter I received last week. Normally, these things shower down upon me like snow in January, to as little effect, but this one was different.

You see, it was signed by a few people whose name I recognized: Bill Gates (yeah, the Microsoft guy — former minion of mine, now in open rebellion, due for a comeuppance, long story), Sergey Brin (Google, same basic siutation), Jeffrey Bezos (CEO of amazon.com) and Pierre Omidyar (EBay dude).

Rather than try to summarize the letter, I’ll just reproduce it here in its entirety:

Dear Mind Scalpel,

We have noted with some concern the initiation of your eponymous blog. Perhaps it would have passed unnoticed by us, like the millions of other blogs in existence around the world, but we have recently been testing a jointly-developed technology intended to measure the flow of information and users across the Internet and the Word Wide Web.

As you know, one measure of the popularity of a web site is called its “PageRank.” The PageRank algorithm is the subject of a number of patents owned by Google [MS note: Ha! They stole it from me, I'm telling you. Stole it!], and it essentially measures the number of references and visitors that a web site receives from, and routes to, other web sites.

We were recently conducting some experiments focused on determining with more precision the flow of traffic across the Internet. We were alarmed to notice a widespread decrease in PageRank of a number of very popular web sites. In fact, for the first time in history there has been a net decrease in overall Internet use.

This has negatively affected the revenue of the companies running these web sites and has resulted in a wide-spread economic slowdown throughout the United States.

To buy ourselves time to pinpoint the cause of this decrease in Internet traffic, we convinced the government and the general public that the economic slowdown stemmed from subprime mortgage loan defaults (which had the additional beneficial effect of decreasing property values so much that we were able to buy Florida on the cheap and will now be renaming it GoogleAmaSoftEZonBayMicropia).

The long and short of it is, we traced all the decrease in Internet traffic back to your blog. This was something of a revelation. We had initially thought it was impossible to achieve a negative PageRank — until we saw the statistics for your blog.

Since it was the only web site we’d ever seen with a negative PageRank, we initially suspected a flaw in our algorithm — but after extensive investigation were able to determine that after viewing your web site, most visitors ceased using the Internet altogether.

At first it was difficult to contact these former Internet users. We eventually found out why — most visitors to your blog appear to be so shaken by the experience that they give up not only the Internet, but all forms of technology, most of them choosing to move to Pennsylvania and join the Amish community.

While it’s still a matter of debate whether “Pennsylvania” actually exists, the tripling of the size of its (tax-exempt) Amish community is now apparently producing some significant decreases in the tax revenues of that (possibly fictional) state (or commonwealth, whatever the heck THAT’s supposed to be).

The consequences of this phenomenon are rapidly spreading across the world and are potentially becoming irreversible. People are shutting off not just their computers, but also their radios, televisions, IPods, DVD players and <shudder> VCRs! Instead, they are spending time with their families and friends, reading books — not “ebooks,” but rather books made of something called “paper” — and developing things called “hobbies” that do not involve generating revenue for any of the signatories to this letter.

Clearly this cannot be allowed to continue. We recognize that this all might be part of your Secret Plan for Global Domination; nevertheless, we are prepared to initiate legal action against you, as soon as we can find a lawyer who does not scream and faint when s/he hears your name.

We are also prepared to discuss an amicable settlement, provided that as part of the agreement you will remove all traces of your blog from the Internet; we are not quite sure what is on it (since we have been reluctant to experience the same phenomenon that drove your other visitors into their neo-Ludditism), but whatever you’re doing, please, we beg you, stop.

Sincerely,

Bill

Sergey

Jeff

Pierre

I thought about it for a while, and decided that this might be an opportunity to make some additional cash to fund my nefarious activities. So please keep an eye on mindscalpel.com for my upcoming SEDOK (“Search Engine DeOptimization Kit”).

In the meantime, I have to go terrorize some more lawyers.

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