Attacked By the Blob!

Horror-movie buffs may recall The Blob as the 1958 film in which Steve McQueen had his first starring role on the big screen. (He had a smaller role in Never Love a Stranger the same year.) That particular version of The Blob might have been any one (or some combination) of three things:

1. An allegory about the Cold-War threat which had most of the world (and all of Hollywood) sweating bullets. (No. Not Bullitt. That was a different flick, starring Steve McQueen, Jacqueline Bisset, and a really cool car.)
2. An allegory about the mundane, stultifying, inconsequential nature and the existential ennui of our humdrum lives, from which we make feeble, futile attempts to escape but that ultimately ends us consuming us like an Anaconda consumes an unsuspecting capybara.
3. A B-movie bomb that never should have been made but that somehow achieved cult status.

But the blob that attacked us was not that one; although, this one was mundane, stultifying, and inconsequential. And it, too, caused us existential ennui. It was an ostensible blog post, published by someone who had no concern for being intelligible, someone with no regard for the language, or an engineer. It started like this:

To iterate an effective ecosystem of innovative technological platforms, it will be mission-critical to disrupt the existing ecosystem by leveraging the IoT to productize revolutionary solutions to emerging-market challenges. At the same time, the only way to acquire 24/365 mindshare in our experience-marketing channels will be to incubate dynamic content that will utilize leading-edge convergence to reach Gen-Z consumers as they evolve toward visionary communication paradigms.

Okay. In actuality, the experience of reading that kind of gibberish was more like being mugged than attacked. And while were finally able to quiet our gag reflexes after spraying about a quart of lignocaine down our throats, the attack left us deeply traumatized.

It’s possible that post was supposed to be an allegory about the technological threat to our sanity which has most of the world believing we’re all about to be displaced by mechs. It’s also possible it was an allegory about the dangers of creating new languages when the old ones still haven’t been mastered. Or it could have been an allegory about the gullibility that enables us to fall for a cut-and-dry example of garden-variety incoherence. We don’t care.

Writers beware: The difference between a blog and a blob is just one letter. Use your alphabet carefully.

We were attacked by the blob. And it was scary as hell.

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