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🔬 State Of The Internet

An important aspect to remember about the internet while exuberances
of applications and mobile supercomputers dominates our thoughts is that
it's only been upon us for few decades now. When Newton first published
the Principia, a work of art commonplace at the time but not officially
accepted by the church and meisters until 200 years later his ideas
and philosophy were not as widespread as even today's small fish influ-
encers amassing thousands of likes on platforms that have un-inundated
villages and onto online megacities alike.

The real difficulty with backwards compatibilities isn't so much in the
short term on whether or not you have to update your browser's flash pro-
files. No it's on progressing too quickly through early adopter behaviours
upon testing, demoing, sharing, bragging and unboxing to the race jams of
social media fanfare which takes us out of our routines and into new esta-
blished standards penned by tech-oligarchs, for tech-oligarchs where pu-
blic sentiment is found somewhere in between a user and a human, unsure
which takes precedent.

Much of the early internet was, as expected an emanation from the military-
industrial-complex where academia stood as experts of pioneering languages,
Cobol, DOS, Basic, Pearl and authors took on new meanings as information
technology assemblers. In the words of Stackoverflow "There will always be
a need to communicate technical specifications clearly to computers" and
we've gotten so much better at it, where new Ai and ml architectures have
streamlined out much of the formalisms that once stood as the price of
command. Command line operations, Powershells and Terminals were quickly
replaced by GUI interfaces and the warm and fuzzy designs of modern sensi-
bilities or else the maze of breadcrumbs and clickthroughs losing track
of the many windows or tabs or backlinks all geared towards inching us
closer and closer to the ad-
vertisers given the ultramodern title of 'clickbait'.

After a few decades of open-source, homebrew DIY cultures, all kinds of exp-
erts, artists, engineers, architects and even children are now emersed in
computer code as a printing press, commanding cultures of bits and bytes bet-
ween California, Thailand and back again.

Browsers were once the start gate of search, but now they behave much
differently nevertheless struggling to find a place on the new OS sudd-
enly emphasizing natural language in handles and hooks for intellectual
purposes, whereby culture is both flourishing and in spotting the differences
between an amateur and a professional, also judgemental and if you aren't
entirely sure best to consult professionals. That isn't entirely fair - there
are all kinds of amateur musicians on Youtube who cloud probably be considered
professional if the right contract and agent were to to bring in the money.
The internet is information, culture, education, dissemination but also prison.

When I was younger my parents used to tell me that if I watched too much tele-
vision it would rot my brain. I played so many video games and watched many
soap operas - they almost tried to bribe me with money or else threaten the
looney bin if I didn't get myself bored outside for a bit with local friends.
Television was broadcast by our local union, making
all sorts of deals with foreign and local networks, curating an especially apt
collection of Saturday morning cartoons and late-night infomercials that I managed
to incorporate into the background of my life, homework, dinner, telephone, books.
I'd almost dare to say television had taken on a life of its own. In any event, I
really wasn't sure how healthy it was. Occasionally distracted or
showing up to class even more disinterested than during the Simpŝons and whereby
the E on that assignment really didn't make a difference in the end, as I had
argued it correctly at the time. The only thing more difficult than turning on a
TV in an empty room is not paying attention to one that's on.

It wasn't until I started living on my own, extricating myself from those childhood
routines I had gotten used to, experimenting with PDAs and mobile music players that
I eventually built up the endurances of amateur boredom, aluxury enough to deal with
recitals and rawdogging it at the bus stop for 2 hours on a Sunday without service.
The point is that breaking from some routines is a necessary part of growth as a
human, exploring your full potential but other routines are more than healthy they be-
come existence itself. Like coffee and a newspaper in the morning - ridding
yourself of keyboards instead of voice Ai is a very serious consideration that people
should not take lightly. Say what you will about the Blackberry or the Palm Pilot in
the face of global competition, at least they kept with tradition no less a typewriter
than the smartphone is a person. The capitalist model is a good one and it's served us
well for centuries, transforming ship bounties and piratic bureaucracies into downtown
park benches and public water fountains. We believe the time is ripe for appreciating
these new infrastructures built in crowdsourced pyramids of trust and friendship and
paying homage to the clever scientists and engineers who brought us these new tech-
nologies currently empowering the globe, learning our world better. Exploring the
Congo with Google maps instead of committing to the safari. It brings the global
village from the couch of broadcast TV to the digital relationships we've imbued into
laptops, mobile phones, outdated mp3 players and wearable devices showing us who we are
at any given moment, if you'd care to look.

For us, the benefit of building these technologies without modern shackles of profit-
driven constrainments is also its risk - they become as ephe-
meral as anyone's dedication to the idea, or else the marketing budgets.

At Traditional Ai we've been building significant internet technologies for more than 30
years and we believe in sharing the best with our communities. The internet has changed a
lot during that time but humans have grown alongside it and where man and machine are now
locked in a dance of how to lead that which does lead itself.

Marshal McLuhan wrote about the early global electrified villages that
"The medium is the message". The modern caveat incorporating software and Ai should be
adjusted slightly.


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