Myspace

Consider the Lily. As you read this, Lily Allen is the hottest minger in UK pop. Okay, so she sings like her nose is bunged with wet bread and dresses like a horsed-up drag queen at the scrag-end of the seventies, but so what? She's zeitguyst with a capital Now.

Many cultural commentators wrongly believe she's got it easier than a dung beetle born in a cow's ass just because her dad is a famous comedian and film-maker. The truth of the matter is, Woody is too busy wrestling with the dual obsessions of jazz trumpet and neurotic monologues on his unorthodox sexual predilections to offer her advice and, moreover, his Semitic parsimony means she is unlikely to ever benefit from his heaps of immorally-accrued lucre.

The one resource Lily Allen possesses in spades, however, is friends.

Not real friends. Christ on a billy bike, man - real friends went out around the same time as cold sores and foods that start with the letter Q. Real friends take time and patience to source, both of which are zeitguyst kryptonite. Just imagine - you've put in eighteen months building an unbreakable bond between your good self and Tarka, a grinning Eskimo DJ, when the news comes in - Maoris are the new zeitguyst minority! How does it feel to be yesterday's news, loser? I'll tell you how it feels. Like being ass-raped by a clown. A boring clown.

Lily Allen has cyber-friends. In Roman times a person had to be made out of meat and make noises. Now, with the advent of the world wide web, you can group any three sentences together and call them a person. As I write this, I’m the Zeitguy, voguish gunslinger of the wild, wild wow. Later, when I post on the Bring Back Jayce And The Wheeled Warriors forum, I’ll be Palladins_Rawk_2000, a thirty-something-years-young web designer with a yen for insular electronic pursuits. One time, on MSN Messenger, I became Tickle_KiTTY, a twelve-year-old Ohio girl with a keen interest in viewing pictures of her peers. I am legion. (and prohibited from coming within a hundred metres of any school or playgroup)

Back in the bad old days, if you wanted to make a guy seem popular you had to round up half a dozen village-loads of peasants at gunpoint and force them to cheer and wave banners in a square. In 2006, the internet means you get to be the cheering peasants and the moustachioed dictator simultaneously. You just set up a Myspace page with your face on it, then set up fifty others with a bunch of fake names and claim all the other people are your 'friends'. Bingo! Instant clique! And cliques are the little bloodfarts that presage the late-stage colon cancer of full-blown zeitguystitude!

Myspace is a compound noun comprised of two parts: 'my', meaning 'belonging to me', and 'space', meaning 'nothing'. It sprang from the grotesquely shrunken loins of Rupert Murdoch, as a way of reminding ordinary people that he owns everything and they own nothing, not even their own faces.

Today, Lily Allen has so many Myspace cyber-friends she could probably form her own breakaway republic where everyone wears billowing canary-yellow frocks in a futile attempt to draw attention from their gurning bumpkin underbites. It would have to be a cyber-republic though, or else she'd need an army of androids - transhumanist pop-demographics are super-zeitguyst right now.

This is the Zeitguy signing off. (or is it?)