I hate to break it to you, humanity, but we lost. We have officially been invaded by an alien power that is much, much smarter than us. I'm not sure when or where the invasion occurred; maybe it was "Roswell," maybe Neverland Ranch, maybe within the womb of whatever birthed Sarah Palin. Either way, we're screwed. How were we tricked? And how do I know?
YouTube. It's their secret weapon and we've been obliviously "liking," commenting, sharing and reposting ourselves into a trap. YouTube has managed to infiltrate the brain cells of supposedly independent-minded individuals in every social, economic, political and religious circle in existence. Seriously, think about it.
There are the people who have been conquered by "cute." These are the "slow loris gets tickled" suckers, cat people, panda lovers, puppy lovers, pandas-playing-with -puppies-lovers and most of all: the baby freaks. Cutest baby sneeze ever! Baby is afraid of lobster! Charlie bit me! You're all adorable, fuzzy alien toast.
A branch of CuteTube is the "small children singing pop songs" cluster, which is pretty self-explanatory ("oh my gosh, so talented!"). But once music videos come into the picture, oh my. Some of the first people to get sucked up into the spaceship were the hipsters, the too-cool crowd of trendsetters that felt obligated to share their clearly superior musical tastes with the common folk. Close to them are the guys playing acoustic guitar in front of their own laptops and anything dubstep.
TED talks, mini-documentaries about dramatic world problems and those cheesy videos where people go around and ask random strangers "deep" questions have covered the "so socially conscious I sit around and watch YouTube all day" demographic. Footage of the massive tsunami destroying Japan satisfied all of the sadistic news junkies. The aliens used Charlie Sheen to capture all the #winners and Christine O'Donnell to get all the #witches.
For a while, it looked like the extraterrestrials had met their match with the notoriously anti-fun Roman Catholic Church, but all of the old white guys finally succumbed on March 15 with the creation of the Pope John Paul II YouTube channel. This form of social media/universal weaponry is so strong, it made a pope rise from the crypts of Rome and post a video; "and on the third day He hath posted a comment."
And for everyone else, there was Rebecca Black. At over 65 million views and counting, I think it's safe to say that we failed as a species. Millions of years of evolution resulted in 65 million people humming that infectious, confusing and slightly disturbing song that occasionally lacks verbs and always lacks musicality. The first time someone clicked that YouTube link, humanity fell harder than a No. 1 seed in this year's basketball bracket (all of the important plays can be reviewed on YouTube, by the way).
My advice? Stop watching stupid videos; they'll rot your brain. Pretty soon, no one will know what comes after Thursday or what seat to take, and nothing about those dilemmas is fun, fun, fun.