Since then, the little dirt path has been turned into the eight-lane highway it seems everyone wants going through their living room. and unfortunately, as I also predicted, it looks like the whole thing's just about paved with billboards. Like it or not, there's ads all iver the place about now. You know, all those banners and stuff you see pretty much all over the place on just about every page you can shake a bloatware browser at and get it to crash horrendously, dropping an anvil on that butterfly in China who's causing hurricanes in Florida (turnabout is fair play, isn't it?) Well, they're here to say, and this may not necessarily be a Bad Thing(tm)...
For anyone who's read The Dilbert Future, you'll know that Scott Adams predicts that the overall bandwidth of the net will increase to match the egos of those who are exploiting it, which means it will keep growing indefinitely. This means that most likely someone out there is gonna' be exploiting the bandwidth left over. Of course, seeking to grab as much of this as possible are such lower forms of net.life as the spammers, fraudsters, and other scam-artists out spewing forth their garbage onto the Internet.
Although these are at best a nuisance and at worst a threat to the Internet as a whole, it can be rather entertaining to watch them in a controlled environment such as the webspaces they inhabit. Like cockroaches, it seems that there are always a million more waiting in the woodwork somewhere for every one you see out there. Most likely you've seen their droppings in the form of Usenet or e-mail spam, or on one of the numerous "Classified" ads found throughout the net. Not only do they eat up bandwidth this way, but this is the manner in which they reproduce, finding more victims for their scams. The problem is that most people are of an intelligence level where it takes little brainpower to figure out that these people must be pretty gullible themselves, and to the casual observer, it's startling to see what these people will believe. As an example, We'll take the site located at this location (watch out, this one's got a hideous color scheme, a fairly typical identifying characteristic of the species. Magenta and yellow color schemes, which even a trained monkey could figure out can't be stared at too long without needing cornea transplants, are not outside of the realm of possibility, and have been observed before.) This individual apparently believes that this program, a blatant pyramid scheme which is not only impractical but also illegal in every developed nation I can think of) will result in his becoming a multi-billionaire! Now, pulling out and dusting off the official Sledgehammer IQ Scale, (available for $99.95 plus shipping and handling, credit card orders only, and if you believe any of this, I have some prime Montana beachfront property to sell you) puts this guy's IQ somewhere between that of an amoeba and a black hole.
And among the multi-level marketers filling every nook and cranny of the net that really didn't need to be filled in the first place, an IQ level in this abysmal range is pretty much typical. When they aren't spamming left and right, they're usually posting their various schemes on web classified ads or message boards. One parrticularly interesting MLM tarpit is located at this message board, an excellent place to view these fascinating(?) creatures in their natural habitat. Their behavior patterns seem to go something like this: