Most good writing has, buried somewhere in the mysterious, twisty passages of its inner caverns, a thesis statement. You may recall that this is the sentence that is supposed to sum up the point the writer is trying to make. Writings that do not have a thesis statement are vapid, nebulous, and generally irritating as the writer bloviates on with confusing combinations of words to conceal the fact that he does not, in fact, have anything to say.
This meandering brand of writing should be clearly distinguished from the writing that has a thesis statement but whose thesis is insipid, poorly-conceived, or flat-out wrong. This latter type of writing can still be entertaining to read, even while mentally filing away the author as one of the great intellectual lightweights of our time.
Still other types of writing have a thesis statement that may in fact be correct, and the surrounding writing actually provides some manner of coherent and logical support for its thesis. Unfortunately, the coherent and logical support is also boring to read and everybody would rather watch another lousy sitcom on Hulu.
Moving on down the line, we come to Twitter, which is possible to consume in parallel with the lousy Hulu sitcom. Twitter attempts to convince us that Mark Twain (the patron saint of misattributed pithy quotes) was really on to something when, at the end of a particularly lengthy missive, he wrote that he “would have written a shorter letter but had not the time to do so”. Unfortunately, it turns out the problem is there are two ways to get short writing. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one Twitter falls into.
The penultimate type of writing we shall consider today, when combined with Twitter, exemplifies a category comprising approximately 96% of the Internet. On the whole, I refer to them as YouTube comments. Need I say more?
All these categories together sum to 99% of all writing on the Internet.
And yet every once in a very long while, one stumbles upon an oasis of cool waters in the desert wasteland of spurious thinking, blind irrational hostility, and vaguely obscene cat memes—an oasis filled with the rarest combination of provocative ideas, witty insights, and humorous gambols, all rolled into one adorable and humble package.
Congratulations, dear reader, I am the 1%, and here you are.