Internet People… If there is a bottom to the Internet, it must be where all the Internet People go to talk about how being Internet People has made them the people they are today – irreverant, witty, popular, appealing, insightful OH GOD please just let me block out my horrible mundane existence for a few more seconds!

My first clue that Internet People were a mixed bag was while following the crackup of Steven Den Beste, a neo-pederast and headcase who went from championing the Iraq War to writing obsessively about warped Japanese cartoons twenty four hours a day.*  The desert wastes can break a man, but all the way in San Diego?  At a Starbucks?

After that I started to notice the Internet People more frequently.  They all had "blogs" in which terribly important things like why they hyphenated their last names and their struggles with drive-through attendants were discussed in insane detail.  They often wrote at length about their personal lives at a level of revealingness that would be awkward for a spouse or sibling to deal with, and when they weren't writing about their closeted emotions they were cramming onto the screen novellas of personal trivia – ask me which comic book character I most resemble and the nerd quiz I took which proves it.  Do you seriously not know anyone to whom you can tell all your boring secrets?

Most Internet People I came across were straightforward nerds like Den Beste – afraid of life's surprises, seeking comfort in an electronic hugbox where everyone talks and thinks alike – but the nerd is only the first among many Internet People:  cat ladies, partisan apparatchiks, forum bros, overweight tweeners, earnest academics whose best hope for a captive audience are search engine spiders – these and many others fill out the ranks of non-nerd Internet People.  If it weren't for the Internet you'd never know they existed.

I once thought I had found the quintessential Internet Person in the form (such as it is) of James Lileks, perhaps the most pompous and self-obsessed local newspaper columnist ever born.  There is something of the failed local columnist (Lileks was sacked from his job in 2007) in every Internet Person, someone having a myopic belief in his own importance far beyond what reality would support.

Before there was an Internet, there was the local column, a place where losers with some mysterious hold over a newspaper publisher could publish volumes of retarded and meaningless prattle.  The local column was basically a sinecure, as I only ever saw death remove one of these entities from its perch, at least until the newspaper began its decline at the mercy of the Internet's banal narcissism.  You just had to put up with them as they had yet another epiphany about a pumpkin patch or run-down historical site.

But as the signal quality of the Internet Person is his mediocrity, Lileks may be too successful (on his own failed terms) to qualify anymore.  Perhaps a better candidate for transcendant Internet Person is the anonymous Gawker Media "editor" (more at intern), the snarking thirtysomething who writes ephemeral catty put-downs for food and who is literally interchangeable with his co-workers (it keeps them in line and preserves the inimitable Gawker house style).**  Such beings embody both the frivolity and the transience of Everything Internet and eagerly trade dignity for a very small currency of status.  Do you even know anyone who knows anyone who once wrote for Gawker Media?  Perhaps no one does.

Yet I loathe to give the title to a non-nerd.  The Internet has been such an impressive facilitator of nerd defects – everything from Slashdot to libertarian blogs to Wikipedia stand as awesome monuments to the nerd's homely values – that it does not seem right to allow a non-nerd the dubious prestige.

The Internet is a weird place filled with weird people and I'm not entirely sure anymore that it really exists.  It seems that if you just unplugged every computer at once the whole embarrassing mess would simply disappear, so much the better.