ICANN Backs Move For Separate Internet For People Who Don’t Get Satire

Anyone who has ever looked at comments on links to The Onion or The Daily Mash or a ‘shreds’ video on youtube knows the problem.  There are just too many people out there who just don’t get it. This can make any reasonable exchange of opinions amongst normal people very difficult.

Extensive experiments were carried out by W3C where ‘special’ users of the internet were provided with irony filter software,  but inevitably some of the satire got through:  maybe a tongue-in-cheek review of a product on Amazon or a sarcastic bit of customer feedback on an eBay user.

For this reason it has been decided to set up a separate internet for people who don’t get satire, who are asatyrical.  After 29th February 2015, when a customer signs a deal with an ISP,  they will be required to answer a short questionnaire which the designers are confident will detect if the customer is asatyrical. If they are asatyrical they will not be connected to the regular internet,  but the new network, Literalnet.  This won’t simply be divided from the regular internet by firewalls,  but will actually use different cables,  satellites,  earth stations and 3/4G networks.

Many sites will have a presence on both networks,  but many sites simply won’t bother with the new network.  Asked if this wasn’t all a lot of hassle,  Scott Leibkind of ICANN (whose former slogan was ‘One World. One Internet’) replied

“On the face of it,  this move is a giant pain in the ass, but when you consider the long term benefits it will bring,  and the appalling consequences of inaction,  I feel we have to act now”

According to Dr Fahrouza Postlethwaite of the Maudsley Hospital London, the problems of asatiricism have only been recognised by science in recent years:  

“until recently we thought these people were just really, really stupid, but now we know that there is a gene that carries the asatiricism trait”. 

She agrees that sufferers need the protection of a separate internet for the sake of themselves and all others.

Although only recently recognised by science,  it’s nothing new.  When Jonathan Swift published ‘A Modest Proposal’ in 1729 it garnered the following actual comments on Facebook: