The act of driving our cars, in the real world, whether in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, or anywhere else, is a collaborative act. Whether we are driving in straight lines, on curved roads, or even negotiating roundabouts. Which, before I go much further, are not my personal favorite.

But I digress.

The infrastructure of roads is simple, from the paving to the stoplights to the sidewalks for pedestrians. The problems really come with the cars and other vehicles on the road. And, of course, the drivers. Every driver in every vehicle is doing their own thing: Some are driving attentively. Some are distracted by their phones, or the radio, or the conversations with other passengers in the vehicle. And some are driving angry. In a rage about a circumstance that happened before they decided to pilot a 2,000 + pound vehicle collaboratively on the road with other people.

Why am I building up talking about driving, the roads, and vehicles?

Well, because on the Internet, what we used to euphemistically call the Information Superhighway, we have drivers with vehicles. Their vehicles might be social media accounts, email accounts, business accounts, blogs, or other services, but the users are driving their vehicles with a variety of mindsets, attitudes, and approaches. And while it is appropriate to urge people to behave better and drive their vehicles more conscientiously, the fact of the matter is that there are many cars on the information superhighway that are full of clowns.

Those of us who aren’t clowns shouldn’t be surprised when we get into a fender-bender on the Information Superhighway with one of these clown cars, which are usually garishly outfitted, and that when we angrily jerk open the door, clowns inevitably fall out.

Clowns aren’t ever there to help another person.

They may be there to entertain, to gaslight, to troll, or to creep an observer out, but they aren’t there to help. And, as humanity approaches fifty years of this glorious communication infrastructure known as the Internet, people would do well to modify their expectations of clowns' behaviors. And get better at spotting–and avoiding–both the clown cars and the wrecks they create.