"Ima have to steal that song. Good way to let them hoes know the deal. They be buggin"

"o werd, i like that pic u left on the page, shitz crack"

"I MISS U SEXXXXXXXXXXY....I LIKE THE PIC TOO....HOLLA BACK WHEN U GET THIS"

"Whats good supastar...tell the fan club to fall back while i make my way to the front..HA..just seeing you how you're doing..stay fly, and get me babe"

[Notes from visitors to the "YoU hAvE nO cLuE WhAt Ur MiSSiNg!!!!!!" girl at MySpace.]

We're in the middle of an epidemic, and the kids are watching 20,000 hours of commercials for junk food.

The purveyors of the children's trash culture dominate. The responsible adults have bailed or been sidelined. The pimps continue to expand their reach.

"Unlike the computer, or a magazine or television, the phone is a piece of you," says an executive at Visa USA, explaining "a broad push by marketers to create a new generation of 'up close and personal' ads by delivering video, audio, banner displays and text clips" to cellphones.[1]

A critic notes that "this is part of the creep of advertising into every nook and cranny of our lives."[2]

In case the youngsters flick on the news, the pimps rule there too. As retired "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel laments, most news programs "are designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences — most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers, who are presumed to be partly brain-dead, though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors."[3]

In former times there were calm spaces now and then. Today the shit torrent is non-stop.

"They are avid blog consumers," says a New York Times profile of a couple of the "millennials" (people born between 1980 and 2000) whose attention advertisers vie for. "They read celebrity gossip blogs like Defamer and PopSugar and shopping and travel blogs like Luxist and DailyCandy. And they learn of new sites through the tide of instant messages flowing into the pockets and onto the laptop screens of millions of young adults every minute of the day."[4] (The article includes some muted concerns from a researcher worried about lack of individuality, groupthink, and dependence on immediate feedback.)

It is as Charlotte Raven says, in her review of Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? "We're talking bad shit here." The book's authors, she adds, "are no longer susceptible to the culture's myths; they know that cool is a chimera."[5]

Today's young are enmeshed in a system. They think they're skeptics, but pursue a false cool that's been manufactured to exploit them.

Who might rescue the likes of Ms. "YoU hAvE nO cLuE WhAt Ur MiSSiNg!!!!!!"?