twenty-seven years and one million words
No doubt about it, traffic to emuu.net has collapsed since I moved from Joyent to Linode.
I'm now running at around 1/4 of the pre-move traffic volume. I don't know if it's Google that's cut me off (they might not like changes in IP address) but I don't recall the same thing happening the last time I switched servers (which would have been about two years ago).
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)