Terry Pratchett, one of the most brilliant authors writing today (or any other day, for that matter), proposed that “Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” (Guards! Guards!) I’d like to take his theory a few steps deeper into logical absurdity. At some point in the mid-1990s, the Internet amassed so much “knowledge” that it collapsed in upon itself, forming a supermassive black hole that can both read and write (mostly in broken lolcat English).

One of the features of a black hole is gravitational time dilation. The closer you approach to the center of the Internet, which I estimate to be somewhere around 4chan.org, the slower time passes. (/b/ is, of course, located directly atop the singularity.) While those poor souls trapped in the pull of the Internet’s gravity perceive time to be passing at a normal rate, those on the outside can only laugh as they watch the fast-motion Benny Hill-esque sketch as it plays out.

Some may attribute the Internet denizen’s short attention span to a culture of instant gratification or shrug it off as “kids, these days.” The truth behind most of these people’s inability to remember more then two years into the past or consider more than six months into the future is that those nearer to the center of the web are simply living faster.

The lifespan of your average /b/tard, from the point of view of an outside observer, is approximately that of the mayfly. A MySpace or YouTube junkie’s life can be measured in dog years. Everyone witnesses about the same number of memes circulate in their lifetime, though the number is climbing higher every day due to advances in viral therapy.