A Friend is a Terrible Thing to Copy and Paste
By Jenni Wu

It seems that everyone’s up on Friendster’s dick these days. We wanted to do an article but then got bored and moved on to Yahoo! Pool. Our Midwest cornespondent, Jenni Wu is mad at Friendster and sent us the following. We, on the other hand, just got schooled in 9-ball by some kid named “versatyle_5pm,” and he kicked us out so he could play against “lil_miss_pool_biatch_2003”.


I wrote this in the twenty minutes I had before dinner, a quick ‘intro’ as it were.

Since stumbling blindly into the complex world of post-graduate isolation, my friends have become casualties in a nation-wide epidemic. Hopelessly ill-prepared to face life outside of the clannish environs of our college campus, one by one we’ve fallen prey to a cyber entity best likened to a rabid headless monster with thousands of venom-laced tails. (Battle Stats: Chaotic Evil, Level 99, High Charisma, Low Stamina, Even Lower Intelligence, Name: Friendster.com.)

Like drug abuse and promiscuous sex, initial indulgence in Friendster provided something of an illicit thrill. After all, nothing beats knowing that my friends are better looking, better read, and more articulate than your friends. However, involvement in Friendster soon degenerated into a dirty hobby as friends and “friends” alike loaded their network with false “friends” and fictitious characters. Moreover, Friendster corrupted our most valuable faculty: critical judgment. Unlike Kant’s ideal judgment, used to identify moments of the beautiful and sublime, a college graduate’s judgment is skillfully used to pick others apart through snide fashion commentary (“Did you see A—’s army boots? That’s sooo 1992”), degrading remarks about one’s taste in music (“Hey, I heard J— still listens to The Strokes!”) and general remarks about one’s lack of youth integrity (“Did you hear him say ‘indie cred?’ How un-very”). In the virtual eyes of Friendster, you and I are both cool for liking Robert Rauschenberg, despite the fact that you have never kissed a boy, wear leg-warmers on your hands, prefer wine coolers to cheap gin and secretly identify with Dawson’s Creek.

etc.

Usually, I would try to throw in more well researched facts and/or jokes about dead philosophers, but my mom says that I have to eat dinner RIGHT NOW.

Thanks for considering me. Oh— you can certainly learn more about me from my Friendster profile. My name is ‘Jenni’ and I have 91,603 people in my personal network.

Thanks,
Jenni