S Peter Davis is an editor for Cracked and a writer based in Brisbane, Australia. He is the creator of the Three Minute Philosophy series, and was recently judged the internet's most eligible bachelor. You can see more of his work at www.threeminutephilosophy.com
It's a good thing for companies that we all have the memories of peanuts, because almost all of them have completely reinvented themselves at some point.
If you want your memory to stay strong, you probably already know what to avoid -- excessive alcohol, beating your head on things, getting any older. What you probably didn't know is that there are other, lesser known everyday threats that may be slowly turning you into that guy from 'Memento.'
So, one day, you decide to amuse yourself by cursing into a microphone for two minutes and uploading it to YouTube. A year later, you're on the phone with a reporter talking about how you offended an entire nation, and will possibly be charged for inciting violence.
With a few alien-invasion movies on the horizon, this is a good time to ask ourselves why exactly the alien invasions we see on the silver screen always seem to end in disaster for the invaders, despite their ridiculously advanced technology.
The Internet is indeed uniting the world, but probably not in the way that the idealists were hoping for. While we're still waiting for a new era of cross-cultural understanding and peace, what we get in the meantime are memes.
