State of the Internet

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 until 200 years later his ideas and philosophy were not as widespread as even today's small fish influencers 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 and where the pu- blic is 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 where 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 ml and ai 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 sensibilities or else the maze of breadcrumbs and clickthroughs losing track of the many windows or tabs or backlinks all geared towards inching you 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 armies 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 never- theless struggling to find a place on the OS suddenly 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 chooses to to bring in the money. The internet is info- rmation, culture, education, dissemination but also prison. When I was younger my parents used to tell me that if I watched too much television it would rot my brain. I played so many video games and watched so 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 but people don't want to hear that kind of thing and some doctors will even lock you up for talking back to it. 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 correct- ly at the time. The only thing more difficult than turning on a TV in an empty room is not paying attention to the campfire hypnosis of a good kumbaya. 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 luxury, enough to deal with the bore of recitals and rawdogging 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 the reasons for existence. 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, but 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 apprec- iating 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. The benefit of building these technologies without the shackles of profit-driven constrainments is also its risk - they become ephe- meral as anyone's dedication to the idea, or else the marketing budgets. We've been building significant internet technologies for more than 30 years and we believe in sharing the best with those around us. 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. Marshal McLuhan wrote about the global electrified villages that "The medium is the message". The modern caveat incorporating software and ai should be adjusted slightly.

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