The Internet is potato salad. We're all just suspended in it.

It’s time for us to spit out the “cloud” metaphor like so much expired mayonnaise. As thousands of Kickstarter backers intuitively sensed, potato salad - multi-nodal, decentralized, cross-platform - is a much more apt model for The Way We Internet Now.

Rather than a mixture of mayonnaise and mustard, this potato salad is lubricated and bound together by billions of casual, spontaneous interactions. The pokes. The yos. The tumbls. The vicious, unaccountable small-town character assassinations on Topix. Such is the fluid in which we all swim.

The little bits of hard-boiled egg are the tasty but highly perishable frissons in the salad of our collective e-consciousness. Life would lose its zest without the likes of Bass Dogs and Terrible Real Estate Photos, but caution, intrepid netizen: such morsels can quickly turn rancid.

Finally, we come to the chunks of potato. Substantial. Hearty. Optimized to simultaneously absorb the flavors around it and define the flavor of the whole. These are the nodes around which virtual communities cluster, where the vision of the future unfurls its dance 'pon our tongues, where we buy our deeply discounted iPad mini shell cases. As I speak today, there is really only one online location that achieves what I define as full potatohood (and which, totally coincidentally, is also paying me to write this): meh.com. Meh is potato salad. Potato salad is meh.

If you’re wondering what the other stuff in potato salad represents - celery, pimentos, green onions, etc., well, that’s where you come in. Join with me in the forum, to help overextend this metaphor until we’ve crushed every bit of joy, and devoured every pleasant morsel from this event, at least until the next stupid Internet trend shows up and we can all write pretentious, pointless thought pieces on it.