This is where the money is nowadays, so I am launching my own internet start-up. This will be a top investment opportunity for all of you people reading this. My company, Grotesque Machinations, will launch a top new app that will re-define the way we think about the internet.

A small child (source: every single newspaper in the world) has recently designed something called Summly, which uses an algorithm “based on evolution” to summarise parts of the internet as you search for something. Instead of having to click on a webpage and expend any of your valuable time sifting through all the information that the machine deems non-essential, you can use Summly to make it into a short series of bullet points. Exactly how this works, I don’t know, but it sounds like if people actually started using it for things they needed information about then everyone would start talking like and having the opinions of a group of clumsy robots.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that the general trend in what apps do, what the internet makes us do, how it makes us engage with the world, is exemplified by this Summly thing: it is to make everything smaller, faster, more convenient and, ultimately, stupider. And lazier. (indeed, this thing was apparently invented by homeboy in order to help him revise for his History GCSEs, which btw I really hope he failed)

Whereas, my app, will be designed to do precisely the opposite. Where Summly contracts, Xpandr (for, that is the name of the app!) will expand; where Summly glosses over, Xpandr will obsess about the minutest details; where Summly allows you to quickly digest and move onto the next thing, Xpandr absorbs you in such impossible depth that you can do nothing else all day.

The internet is in fragments, but no fragment can ever grasp the whole. Summly only shatters these fragments still further, making the life-world even more damaged and cracked. Xpandr seeks to stick it back together, by moving all web pages closer to the whole. It uses a complex algorithm based on Schellingian organicism to take the bare, brief content that adorns your average website like earrings on a corpse and expands it outwards, giving you what the algorithm tells us is the related information, written in full and excellent prose, in order to move the original content closer towards the whole.

The app can be stopped at any point (in beta versions), but if you leave it, it will just keep running and running. The disadvantage of this is that no version I have yet designed of it has actually been able to move the content towards anything we might common-sensically recognise as ‘the whole’ (which I would take to be: the sum of all facts available everywhere on the internet): rather, entropy seems to set in, and nonsense is allowed to enter the system. Once it does this, the app ends up riffing on its own nonsense, spiralling further and further away from the whole until eventually we are just left with an infinite string of meaningless letters and other, increasingly alien symbols, which cannot be stopped without shutting the computer off manually.

One possibility is that this in fact is the whole that we are aiming for, and thus the entropy Xpandr allows in is precisely the desired effect. However, more research will be done, both computer-scientific and philosophical, in order to fully establish this.

This is a top investment opportunity and I am currently selling shares in Grotesque Machinations at £2000 a pop. Consider investing today.