The Internet is my friend

This is my little rambling about the Internet, my love letter to the World Wide Web.

Yes the Internet is my friend, but i guess not so the people who envisioned it in the first place.
It was born out of American military paranoia of the 1960s.
While i was taking apart old radios in my little room in my little sleepy Austrian village, the American military funded the development of the first systems to connect military mainframe computers in a networked fashion. In case of an attack on one cable, the information could flow thru other parts of the net and communication would never be lost.
Technically that was not so easy to do but at least that was the idea.

I guess they had no idea what they started ; D

Neither did I, even while i was studying electronic engineering in the late 1960s i never heard about the Internet. Maybe because i was more interested in reading Hermann Hesse and LSD and meditation ; ).

Personal computers happened then, Steve Jobs, Apple and Microsoft had some fun, cable modems, email became possible for some of us, ftp-file-transfer and peer2peer-file-sharing became slowly possible over the internet.

Well, fast forward to 1989 and meet my real hero, Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1989 “invented” the WWW, the world wide web and built the first ever web browser.

And – baaaam! – the internet went public and wild. The information revolution was born.
And it revolutionized the world as we know it fast and uncontrollable.
A vast amount of human knowledge, books and all became digitized and available to all people who knew how to find it.

People who know how to travel the highways, byways and the dark alleys of the Internet.
Who know the languages that are spoken there.

The Internet by now is the backbone of our civilization and almost everything is dependent on it.

Just imagine for a moment that the Internet would go dark, that it would collapse.

We would all collapse back into the Dark Middle Ages. Circa 1970 ; D

This would be fun!!!

Just reflect for a moment what has happened in just 50 years since then.
It is mind-blowing.

Well … thanks to the fact that this is a Inter-Net, it is not so easy to make it collapse.
Thanks to the American military i must say, they had this idea in the first place : )
Hahaha, life is ironic sometimes!

I guess by now you suspect it already:

>> I love the Internet <<

Everything it allows us to do, empowers us to know.
Become global.
Communicate instantaneous.

But there is more, much more that the Internet is in my eyes.

It is for humanity, what the nervous system is for a person.

And it is for Gaia – our Earth mothership – an externalization of the Noosphere, the field of Unity that connects us all.
Also called Collective Consciousness of Humanity.
And probably even more than humanity.

I hope i will still be around when the day comes that we humans have evolved far enough that we discover that the real Internet is actually a Innernet.
And that we can access it anytime without the need to start up our MacBooks or iPhones or PCs.

And its not digital!

And it has been there all along, always.

P.s.: There is a really interesting series of books, sci-fi books about the Internet, how the Internet becomes self-aware. Very fun to read or listen to.

The WWW Trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer