I totally misread the headline as âvirility.â
Virulence?
Just to play it safe Iâll stick to the emailed multi-attachment slide shows and powerpoints that my in-laws reforward
So did I, and was expecting a breakdown of how much pharmaceutical research money was going into first-world problems like impotence and hair loss rather than diseases that kill millions.
If by âeverythingâ you mean the internet dregs that feature ever recursive blocks of âviralâ âclickbaitâ ads. If you donât waste time on sites that host or advertise that crap everything is actually pretty cool.
Iâm pretty sure I have the moment this happened pinpointed. It was around 1999 when Cisco was wearing those silver pants, and Mountain Dew came out with Extreme Mountain Dew. Since then advertising has all been at volume 11 and subsequently become substance-less white noise.
Iâd be inclined to agree; but would argue that itâs even worse.
âViralityâ may be new, in that âsocialâ media is now large enough to substantially reward people who produce more potent memetic pathogens; but itâs really just another case of the abhumans in advertising and PR plying their trade and attempting to contaminate all channels of communication, cultural products, and inhabited landscapes, with their carefully crafted layer of shit.
Things engineered to be âviralâ arenât so fundamentally different from advertising jingles engineered to be catch and recognizable, mascots intended to encourage affective relationships between children and brands, and so on.
âViralâ is the latest front; but, like cockroaches, the same people are at work wherever they havenât been burned out with sufficient enthusiasm. Alas, we donât do that nearly often enough.
Now Iâm even gladder I didnât watch the halftime show (I have no idea why anyone ever would, it goes into the same category as the adverts for me - even when I do watch the game I turn off at HT) or read the BB stories on this shark thing.
Sounds like something that would have left me extremely pissed of like horse ebooks did.
Still not as glad as I am that I decided not to watch the game though. 
That stupid shark jumped itself by the time the game was over.
And I thought that the pic was just some cheeky reference to shark cartilage pills.
If his article is anything to go by, then I think this Drew Magary guy may be on to something.
In any case, I just canât wait until the cultural commentators of 3015 complain about the latest brand of yellow journalism ruining their lives. I literally canât. Because Iâll be dead.
How to become Left Shark using this one weird trick!
How to become left shark virile using things you can find around the house!
I was quite surprised that there wasnât a surfeit of Rhianna Grammy Dress memes based on the good olâ crocheted toilet paper covers⌠I guess that the meme kids are too young to have been exposed to this art form.
You must be thinking of that Facebook post making the rounds about
18 Tricks to Maintain a Boner
âI donât want everything I fucking see to be a stream of deliberately random shit pre-programmed to go viral.â
That is an awesome point. And so quotable. Iâm going to retweet it immediately!
The quest for virility is definitely making everyoneâs email inboxes shitty. And a lot of viral ads play on the same kind of tricks spammers use. So not too much of a misread, all in allâŚ
To be fair, the quest for virility hasnât done anyone any favors either.
I recall thinking âWTF?!â the one - and only - time I saw Star Wars Ep 1 (or 4 ⌠depending on how you count it ⌠the one with JJB). It wasnât exactly the quest for virality (virulence), but the movie seemed to be about anything, everything, other than the nominal story. The pod race was the thing that really threw me over the edge - I distinctly recalling watching it and thinking âOh, right. This has nothing to do with the story, itâs just an ad for the not-yet-announced-but-soon-to-be-released companion video game.â
