Imagine Bill Gates launching into a full-on voodoo rhythm rant about how much time is wasted fiddling with his company's software, doing needless but mentally-masturbating tasks... ok, maybe that's too close to reality. Try this: Imagine one of the developers of a popular news aggregation site putting his own creation in the cross-hairs of his cursor and blasting away.

That's exactly what Aaron Swartz does in a Raw Thought "rage against the machine" missive that takes us all to task for wasting time for all the right reasons.

While we were developing Reddit, we always used to run into people who'd recognize us and come up to say hi. "Oh, wow," they'd say to us. "I can't tell you how much your site has killed my productivity. I check it a hundred times every day." At first, we just laughed these comments off. But after a while, I begun to find them increasingly disturbing. We'd set out to make something people want -- but what if they didn't want to want it?

For too long, simple popularity has been the only metric of a startup's success. Another startup, known as Twitter, has recently broken into the mainstream. And I constantly hear people saying things like "Yeah, well, I know it seems like a pointless waste of time. But it's so popular!" As if anything so popular had to be worthwhile.

Swartz makes the claim that while we are really capable, and maybe even desirous of reading War & Peace, what we end up doing is reading blogs and hitting the browser bookmark for Twitter because it's just so damn easy.

The same goes for reading stories on Reddit or your friends' pointless twits about their life. Looking at photos of sunsets or reading one-liners takes no cognitive effort. It's the mental equivalent of snack food. You start eating one and before you know it you've gone through two cans of Pringles and become a world expert on Evan Williams' travel habits.

Swartz, well into a full-on lather now, goes right for the virtual jugular: We need to stop pretending that this is automatically a good thing. Perhaps Procter & Gamble doesn't care if they're making us into a nation of fat slobs, but there's no reason why programmers and the rest of the startup world need to be so amoral. And no doubt, as pictures of cats with poor spelling on them become all the rage, people are beginning to wonder about where all this idiocy is leaving us. Which is where apologists like Doctorow and Steven Johnson step in, assuring us that Everything Bad is Good For You.

It isn't. YouTube isn't going to save us from an Idiocracy-style future in which everyone sits at home and watches shows like "Ow! My Balls!" (in which a man is repeatedly hit in the balls) -- YouTube's damn-near creating that future. As I write this, YouTube's #1 featured video is titled "Farting in Public".

Is all this beginning to make you squirm just a bit? Good. Back in the "good old days" of the Internet, circa the mid-1990's, I hung with a crowd that began to question all the time "everyone" was spending online (forgetting the fact that we were all on dial-up lines at a scorching 9,600-bps... and if that is greek to you, well, wiki it) and wondering if it were an "addiction."

We got over that... the Blackberry was invented and our "crackberry" addiction just became a running joke because when everyone paints their nose green only those with purple hair are outcasts... or something like that.

Point is, Swartz is sounding a goddamn clarion call here and it deserves some attention... just as soon you IM your BFF and send her a link to this article. TTYL.