Once upon a time, there was tiny blue planet.
It was spinning peacefully in the lower left corner of the Andromeda galaxy around a pale yellow star, called the Sun.
The inhabitants first discovered weapons, than fire, then the wheel, a bit later electricity and half conductors, and it inevitably lead to the development of computers, networks and Cisco routers.
A special breed of people had also developed, who found pleasure in fostering automation and widening networks, the locals called them Operators, Programmers and Network Specialists.
The funding rich military eagerly supported the planet wide connections of these computer networks, of course to be able to use them for their dark and sinister purposes.
But then they generously - although not without ulterior motives - allowed the common population to gain access.
Thus the internet came to live, a global communication network.
They also called it the "world wide web" - but this was a misnomer as it was only connecting the computers of their little blue planet, and the bandwidth was also rather narrow in the first few decades.
As soon as it became less expensive and broadly available, most of the population started to use the network.
In the beginning they logged on to enjoy the quick and cheap long distance messaging, called e-mail.
Some exhibitionist started to broadcast their personal messages through web-logs, blogs.
But most of the population logged on to get entertained by porn, games, free movies, gambling and gossip news.
Almost forgot to mention an insignificant number of people who logged on to look for some actual information, but this was negligible, and useful information was also rare.
The smartest users, the entrepreneurs quickly saw the opportunity to sell things, utilizing the possibility to reach a large audience with relatively low costs.
They called it "making money on the internet".
But they did not really make money, the banks had.
Due to the diligent work of such online marketers and the overwhelming amount of SPAM they sent out, buyers also started to appear.
But it meant hard work.
To sell online one had to research the market, optimize websites, write meaningful articles, provide interesting information, be active on other forums and blogs, read the posts of others and comment intelligently, build a faithful audience, lists and back links...
So it was a fulltime job again, nothing to do with the promise of freedom they came in for.
Thus came the era of the even smarter marketers, who wanted to make more money with less work, and reach total independence from the system, the system of their dreams, the holy grail, a cash machine, which deposits a constant stream of money in their bank account day and night, without having to do anything, except logging on and seeing the heaps of cash that arrived since the last log-on.
And maybe a little brainwork of how to spend it.
The smart marketers figured, that more automation would be the solution, because this way they can create a mass of websites with a mass of content reaching a huge number of potential buyers and building top rankings to their sites in a very very short time.
Their allies, the Programmers designed systems for them to automatically create new websites and fill them with auto-content.
Blogging robots started to create auto-sites, write auto-blog-posts and post them automatically day and night by the millions.
The robots also created auto e-zines and send them out to automatically built email lists.
The readers did not notice that it was all automatically written, because the Programmers were really smart.
The readers got used to reading crap anyway, or they used advanced spam filters.
In the same time, to alleviate the hard work of building back-links by reading the blog of other writers and commenting, the solution of auto-comments was also born.
It worked brilliantly, generating billions of smart sounding comments daily, including back links to the sales sites.
We did not even mention automated article writing and customer support - this was usually solved by applying inexpensive organic slaves from the poorly developed regions of the planet.
By the time we found this little blue planet, which is still spinning peacefully around a pale yellow star called the Sun, all human life was entirely wiped out by an accidental launch of mass distraction weapons that sent the radiation level out the roof.
But the internet remained intact and it still works, and it is very rich in content.
Blogging robots constantly post and refresh the content, comment robots read it and reply.
Spam robots send out automated e-zines and newsletters to robot generated email recipients and automated lists.
Automated buyers purchase automated products, and the virtual money is deposited in the online bank accounts.
All automatic, no work required.
It is a pity that this special breed of Programmers also died in the cataclysm, we could have used them to automate our planet, too...