The Point of the Internet
After reading an article that outlines the history of the internet, reading articles discussing flames and the internet’s effect on democracy, seems superfluous. The foundations of the internet, and what is has evolved to today, seem to outweigh any individual or localized action or effect, like flames and democracy. The internet appears to be a derivative of an idea of shared resources and communal information . . . which seems obvious, though the readings have enlightened me to the fact that this these concepts are embedded within the structural foundations of the internet. The article “Brief History of the Internet” outlines that the genesis of the internet comes from the idea of packet switching, which appears to be a conceptual evolution of the idea of circuit switching. Rather than having a dedicated circuit to a single connection, packets of information with a specific destination are signaled through a single circuit that networks through different computers. This makes the very idea of the internet as the communal use of a single resource, and with the establishment of the networks came the concept of the free flow of information. This seems to be an evolution of communication methodology, and to me this concept somewhat clashes with the concepts in the other two articles. Whereas the other articles are focused on the uses and effects of this evolved method of communication on the individual, it seems to me that what specifically is being sent over the internet is not important. Rather the exponential increase of information exchange through systems that previously existed (to some capacity) seems to be the larger point of the internet. It’s not important that a person is having a “flame” with another person, or that the privatization of democracy is being eroded, but instead that communication is being unified and expanding at an exponential rate.
Right now I am drinking a Jack and Coke. The ethanol that is blunting my mind that has been eroded from a day of classes is a biproduct of a bunch of yeast that long ago ate some glucose, pooped out alcohol, and then some bored worker at the Jack Daniels plant distilled it into the whiskey that I am now drinking. While the yeast lived a life that likely did not seem predictable and linear from its perspective, to the Jack Daniels company and myself, it lived a life that we have boiled down into a formula (specifically: C6H12O6 → 2 C2H5OH + 2 CO2). And not only is their life linear, but the point of it to the beings that perpetuate their existence is not the action or achievements of an individual. Their poop is their point.
The internet to me signifies that maybe the biproduct of humanity will one day usurp an individual purpose. 96% of the universe is made out of dark matter and energy, with dark matter being undetectable matter that affects the movement of stars, while dark energy is the undetectable energy that is causing the universe to expand even though the perceivable universe should be collapsing. So, there’s a lot going on in the universe that is not detectable by us, and there’s not a theoretical physicist on the planet that can say for certain that there are not dark matter people in the room that you’re in right now, waiting for us to finish making our “ethanol”. They could totally have our lives mapped out in a linear formula, just as we have mapped out the lives of yeast, and they’re like: “Okay, they got to the point where they’re exchanging data packets . . . good, now just wait for the robots to take over and kill them, and then we can huff the smoke from the robots and get really high”.
While I’d probably get the pushback given that yeast is a far simpler organism than a person, I would point out that our central nervous system is the certainly the organ that one would point to in order to separate us from yeast. But there are plenty of organism that whose behaviors we can predict in a nearly linear fashion that have central nervous systems. And while our central nervous system is somewhat more advanced than other central nervous systems, the concept that a little bit of gray matter propels an organism from a linear existence to a self-determining existence would be a hard point to defend. So, unless you’re going to argue that our fingernails make us unique, you need to leave open the possibility that our existence is linear and what links us into more complex purposes might be something that we otherwise consider incidental.
So back to the articles. The articles about flames and democracy have valid points, but they are only mapping specific actions among a big glowing web. Maybe the big glowing web that is illuminated by data packets is the point and maybe tracking the effects and actions of an individual or small group is like trying to track whether a yeast moves left or right. Maybe the homogenization of concepts and ideas across the same wire usurps any individual point or purpose being made. I really don’t know. But tomorrow morning I’ll wake up, poop some poop made out of yeast poop, read some comments on where people argue over college football, and dark matter will keep the world spinning.