1. In the beginning, there were some wedged-shaped marks on a block of clay.

2. And some time after that, there was epic poetry, Norse sagas, Petrarchan sonnets, the complete works of Shakespeare, the great, sweeping narrative arcs of the 19th-century novel, the playful experiments of the Modernists, the crusading journalism of Orwell, the harrowing gulag memoirs of Solzhenitsyn, and the tender joy of an ee cummings poem.

3. And now, in 2013, we have the list.

4. Yes. Really. This is literally what it has come to.

5.Forget what you've read – 2013 is not the year of Miley Cyrus. Or twerking. It's the year of the list. (Though Miley Cyrus and twerking appear in more lists than you can shake a flesh-coloured latex bikini-covered arse at.)

6. You might think I'm being overly dramatic.

7. And am splitting sentences with numbers just for the sake of it.

8. But at some point in the last 12 months, the list broke free from its end-of-year shackles. Where the list was once the sausage meat in the stuffing of the December special issues, when weary editorial staff would rack their brains to remember what happened in February, and some bloke who happened to be in when the editor called was tasked with ranking a load of films you'd already forgotten into some sort of spurious top 10. In 2013 that all changed.

9. The list mated with what we used to call a "news article", and like some terrible Chinese pig virus that has found its way into the human population via a dodgy bacon sandwich, it has mutated and spawned and taken over all media outlets giving us the present moment in which the diminished nature of people's attention spans coupled with the rise of search engine optimisation and an ever-expanding appetite for pictures of kittens falling into toilets, has led to the birth of … the "listicle".

10. On the one hand, this means that you get to look at photo montages of "otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch". And you can nod sagely at the wisdom of the selection intelligence behind the 11 Most Influential Animals of 2013 (not to be confused with the 30 Most Important Cats of 2013).

11. Or enjoy Time magazine's pick of 2013's Top 10 Miley Moments, and its Top 10 Best Dressed (winner: Miley Cyrus), and Top 10 Worst Dressed (winner: Miley Cyrus). Or its pick of 11 Most Memorable Selfies of 2013, not to be confused with Buzzfeed's 23 Most Important Selfies of 2013. Or, you can cut to the chase, with Rolling Stone's 20 Best Lists of 2013.

12. On the other, it means that Buzzfeed, the website that has pioneered the list as the defining genre of this, the age of monomania, re-envisaged the history of Egypt's revolution as a list. Or more specifically, as a list of plot scenes from Jurassic Park.

13. If you are unfamiliar with the finer plot details of the Egyptian revolution, here's a tip: Jeff Goldblum did not win the country's first free presidential elections; Mohamed Morsi was not retro-engineered out of leftover scraps of woolly mammoth DNA and a pellet of dry ice.

14. That we know.

15. Still, given that Buzzfeed is one of the fastest-growing websites on the internet, trebling in size in the last year, attracting 85 million unique visitors in August, it suggests that in 2014 we can look forward to the 11 Syrian War Atrocities First Seen in Home Alone 2. Or, 33 Death Camps that Look Better on Instagram.

16.There are a lot of people betting on the listicle being the future of news. Buzzfeed one of the few media sites that is hiring. It'sis pursuing an ambitious expansion strategy, venture capitalists are throwing money at it, and when Jonah Peretti, its founder, noted in August: "By this time next year we should be one of the biggest sites on the web," he probably wasn't wrong.

17. And yet.

18. There is probably a reason that neolithic man didn't sit around a campfire and read off a list of 18 Cool Things You Can Club With a Hand-Axe. Or 33 Ways Ryan Gosling Looks Hot in a Loin Cloth.

19. Because lists are not stories.

20. They don't have a beginning, a middle and an end.

21. They can't move you the way a work of literature can, or even, I would dare to suggest, an actual newspaper article.

22. They're just a way of connecting random things together.

23. And making it appear like there's some logic there.

24. When there isn't necessarily.

25. Mostly, it's just a matter of cutting and pasting some guff of the internet and then throwing in a kitten. Videos of kittens now employing roughly the same cultural space that bread once did. (In the Age of Carbohydrate, circa 9000BC to 2002AD, the year of the publication of the Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution).

26. Because a list has yet to hold power to account.

27. Or bring down a government.

28. (Though God made quite a good one in the Old Testament. And Martin Luther's 95 Theses was, arguably, a proto-list. Though if he'd called it "95 Bitchin' Lies the Catholic Church Told You" he might have got greater traction outside Germany. Think about it. The Protestant reformation might have succeeded in Italy. The papacy would have been abolished. The world's population would be half what it is now. Pope Francis would not have been nominated Time's Person of the Year. And the whole of Latin America would be known for its dour Lutheran behavioural codes and overly conscientious work ethic.)

29. I may possibly have painted myself into a corner there.

30. What with some people claiming that the reformation and the ensuing rise of the printing press being quite important.

31. But then that's the beauty of a list.

32. You really can write any old bollocks.

33. But it ain't news.

34. It's a listicle.

35. [Or, as some people call it, the future.]