Once upon a time, adults used to question things: They would ask themselves and others why some things were good and why some things were bad. This was called "discussion" and some people enjoyed it.

However, one day, a very clever person discovered that if you kept repeating how clever you were and how wonderful your products were, then after a while other people got too tired to argue with you and so they just went out and bought these products however "good" or "bad" they really were. This was called "advertising".

However, because nobody discussed anything any more -all the people got sad and bored and didn't know what to do with themselves. The only thing they could think of was to listen to the advertisements and to buy all the things that they were told to buy. This was called "consumer economy".

Of course, this made them even more unhappy, but because they had forgotten how to discuss things, they couldn't talk to anybody about their unhappiness and so they didn't know how to solve the problem without going out and buying more things. This was called "commercial feudalism".

Unfortunately, the problems only got worse: Some people got very angry about not having enough money to keep on buying things -because the only work available were low paid jobs selling the things that people were told to buy.... Others didn't know what to do with all the things they'd bought -while a few began to notice that all the plants and animals were disappearing because there was nowhere for them to live under the huge great pile of useless goods -which many people still didn't know how to use. Some naughty people said that perhaps things ought to change -but nobody knew any more how to answer that. However, asking questions was called "plotting Revolution" and needed to be stopped.

Then a really clever person discovered that if they stuck their finger into a box, they could move it around and make it look like a whole lot of different things. This was called "The Digital Revolution" and it was very, very, good because it distracted everybody and stopped them from "plotting Revolution" which was very, very, bad...

After a while, a whole load of really clever people decided that they should all get together in a network and tell everybody else that all they needed to do was to buy new boxes, stick their fingers in and wiggle them about so they could see lots of wonderful things (including the emperor's new clothes which were reputed to be wonderfully beautiful). This made lots of people happy and was very good for business and for the plants and animals too -because people didn't need to buy lots of different new things any more -just new pretty boxes to stick their fingers in.

However, there was a small problem because most people had long ago forgotten how to be creative and didn't know how to wiggle their fingers properly. But the clever network people then realised that people would keep buying new boxes if there were always lots of instructions inside them telling people how they should wiggle their fingers to see "new" things.... and soon there were huge networks spanning the globe -with renowned theorists and artists telling everybody on the planet how to wiggle their fingers in exciting new ways -although it did get a bit boring after a while.

So then one of the really clever people said: "Why don't we build 'social networks' where all the people can tell all the other people about how much fun they are having wiggling their fingers... Then people won't get so bored trying to invent new things and we won't have to do anything except tell the people to keep using the social networks -and collect lots of money for the new boxes."

And so they did this -and it was called "Digital Feudalism" -and after that everybody was happy, with nobody ever thinking about anything (good or bad) ever again...