By coincidence, my last two jobs involved working on TV productions that will be airing on websites.

I use the web a lot, obviously, to write, upload photos, to do research. But I cannot sit for a half hour and watch a drama unfold.

On KPCC this morning, there was a story about the production of a new program for MySpace-TV, created and directed by Marshall Herskovitz, one of the original (the other was Ed Zwick) producers of the 1980s show, “Thritysomething”. They are now creating a new drama about 25-year-olds called, “Quarter-Life.”

Audio excerpts sounded annoying. “We were all brilliant in high school, but nobody seems to have gotten the message about us in the real world.” The struggles of the world as viewed from Pacific Palisades, written by men who haven’t gone east of the 405 since 1990.

What makes watching an online show so unappealing? Perhaps sitting 12 inches from a monitor, or maybe the poor technical quality of the broadcast. Or maybe its the sickening feeling one gets that we are all being played for suckers by an enormous corporate octopus.

Laughably, the same creators of TV who made so much money from it 10 or 20 years ago, are now doing shows on a “shoestring” budget. But what are they paying the actors, writers and shooters who work on these shows?

Can’t you just see the day when there are 10,000 internet TV shows being produced in LA, each one paying an average of $350 a week in wages?

I get no small pleasure in thinking how difficult it will be to even find these internet TV shows on such chaotic sites as Yahoo or Myspace. Both venues are masters of disorganized, ugly, confusing and advertising splotched greed that turn away as many surfers as they attract.

But the web octopus, he is growing bigger everyday….

The octopus is spying on us, placing cookies on our computers to track our every move. He knows what books we read, what sites we like, where we live, how old we are, what our income is, what we buy. Mr. Nielsen is now God himself. And he is going to turn us all into zombies who think we have free choice, but are steered into highly studied little podcasts that manipulate us and sell us, and rob us blind.