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| Monday, August 8, 2005 12:12 PM |
| Nodes in the Machine |
 by Fëanor |
- Because I hate The Da Vinci Code so very, very much, I found this story very amusing. Apparently they're having a hard time rounding up extras in the town where they're currently shooting the film. Heh. Nobody there even wants to be in your crummy movie, losers! Heh heh.
- Call me a nerd (you'd be right, anyway), but this story (which I read recently in the print version of the latest issue of Wired) about the past, present, and future of the internet not only gave me chills, it also got me a little choked up. On the occasion of the 10th birthday of the internet (if you count its birth, as the author does, from Netscape's IPO, which is when the web really became a popular phenomenon), Kevin Kelly looks back on what the internet was then (and what people thought it was going to be), what it is now, and what it could be ten years from now. He says that whereas the prevailing opinion ten years ago was that the web would either be a fad, or just another place for people to go to passively consume information controlled and output by huge corporations, it has in fact become a wildly popular, ever-growing, world-wide phenomenon; an inextricable and essential part of our lives; an extension of our own minds and memory; and a repository for incredible amounts of information mostly created and controlled by us, the people. The audience has become the producer, the performer, the maintainer; the machines have become The Machine, a hyper-computer that is on the verge of developing its own intelligence.
Anyway, I thought the article was fantastic, insightful, and really moving, and that the obvious way to show my approval of it and its content was to post about it, and thus contribute to the web of pathways and neurons that is the mind of the Machine. And to that Machine I say, many happy returns!
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