We're getting to the end of this decade only to realize it was all one big clip job linked to URLs that perhaps ultimately all link to a blank screen in the brain.

Along the way to despair and ruin came a television show called "The Soup," which airs lightning-fast highlights from the worst that the boob tube and YouTube have to offer. One night, "The Soup" showed us a few minutes of Tila Tequila forcing her would-be paramours to eat specially prepared slices of obscure parts of a pig.

That's a lot to take in, isn't it?

Too bad. That is the world now.

Here is where some of you will say: Tila who? A pig's what?

(If you don't know, we wish we were you.)

"She was here," Joel McHale says, about Tequila, the bisexual skank of reality TV's "A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila."

"I said that I will only do it if I get to wear a hazmat suit when I give her the Entertainer of the Year award with tongs," he says. "And she agreed."

McHale makes a living out of saying the meanest things he and his writers can think of to say about people on television. He has special scorn for people like Tyra Banks, the Kardashian family, Miley Cyrus, and, most of all, his E! network colleague, the height-challenged Ryan Seacrest.

Having McHale notice you, and snark about you — it is not a negative thing. In fact, it's the best thing that can happen to a quasi-celeb. The worse he disses you, the more likely you will get on his show and let him say it to you in person. Meta-contempt is the only evidence of love anymore.

Life is reduced to people telling you about all these videos and highlights and bloopers and gotchas you have to see, things you have already missed, things that whiz by you in a constant battle of mind mush. You gave up on breadth and depth and comprehension and the New York Review of Books. You fell into the arms of Arianna Huffington and Entertainment Weekly magazine. You bookmarked the Web sites of ESPN and Funny or Die.

People who will survive this particular era of culture have all armed themselves with the weapons of aggregation.

They are cruel and fast.

This has the weird, added effect of making them sexy.

McHale is a prime example of this: whip-smart about nonsense, which becomes somehow attractive. He is 6-feet-4 and built like a handsome, high-wattage streetlamp.

Women (and a few men?) slobber all over his MySpace wall. He is about to turn 37. His hair is beginning to thin. He is married and has two sons, a 3-year-old and a 7-month-old. He grew up in Seattle, and was on the University of Washington's football team. He was an altar boy. He moved to Los Angeles and got little parts in TV shows. E! hired McHale and some other writers to breathe new life into an old idea — the clip show formerly known as "Talk Soup."

"The Soup" was relaunched in 2004; it airs Friday nights on one of cable's junkiest channels. "The Soup" is not like "Talk Soup," which E! aired in the 1990s and early '00s, and was hosted by Greg Kinnear (and others who followed). Back in the day, "Talk Soup" assembled the most shocking moments from daytime talk shows. To look at old clips of "Talk Soup" is to be struck by how slow and simple and innocent it seems, even with Jerry Springer and Morton Downey Jr. supplying the raw fodder.

Today, "The Soup" is the capital planet of we-watch-so-you-don't-have-to. Six million or so viewers watch it each week (according to the network).

"So much of pop culture is awful, so much of it, and unless they cut electricity to the world, it will never stop, there will always be more of it," McHale says. "Ninety percent of what's on television is not good and 10 percent is a little better. We show the 90 percent."