Here's a fun one: Five years ago, John H. Richardson wrote about what Glenn Beck thought American life would look like in 2014. Glenn Beck was about as wrong as is humanly possible.
"Let's look at our first scenario," Beck began. "It's the financial meltdown. The year is 2014. All the U.S. banks have been nationalized. Unemployment is about between 12 percent and 20 percent. Dow is trading at 2,800. The real estate market has collapsed. Government and unions control most of the business, and America's credit rating has been downgraded."
His guests fill in the outline. Society disintegrates, people are ignorant and whacked out on drugs, they have nothing to lose. The "survivalist types that trust in America as it currently exists" lose faith and start developing "their own biofuel, that type of stuff to survive."
If you're wondering where Glenn Beck went, he's created a booming website called "The Blaze." The Blaze cribs headline writing and SEO techniques from places like Reddit and Buzzfeed, but retains the same journalistic integrity and loose grip on reality as a guy wearing a sandwich board outside the Super Bowl.
It is the 12th-most shared website on the Internet. The problem with the 12th-most shared website in the world being run by a guy like Glenn Beck is that no one will have the attention span to go back and look at all of the scary bullshit that the 12th-most shared website was wrong about yesterday.
The most shared story on that worst corner of the Internet this week is not "'Looks Like Weimar Germany': The Viral Photo Out of Connecticut That's Giving Some Gun Owners Chills" or "Hoodie-Wearing Thug Demands Cash from 90-Year-Old Laundromat Owner...and Gets a Great Big Surprise." Those are in the top five, but they're not at the top.
The top story on the 12th-most shared website on the Internet is a warning about people being duped by prank phone calls. The comments section is filled with people who have been tricked themselves and are able to corroborate it. In 2014.
The prank goes like this: Someone calls up your house and pretends they are in distress. That someone is no one. That phone call is coming from Grenada. That phone bill is going to ruin Bingo Night.
Twenty-three thousand scared grandfathers have posted this on their Facebook walls in the past 24 hours.
This is where the Internet is going, everybody: chain letters about scary men panting into your phone and tales of the world's imminent demise, as told to you by people like Glenn Beck.
