The megaliths and monoliths of the Internet are crashing around our ears. Vast sprawling networks of advertising sponsored garbage have almost brought the fastest servers in the world to a standstill in the recent past, now after years of investment, technological advancement and forays into new and unexplored regions many lay almost dormant in comparison.
The global crunch is devouring the dreams of the CEO's of all the major information technology giants, they can't hold onto the gears and levers, the steering wheel is stuck and everything is for the immediate turning in circles, and for the longer term, drifting backwards on a tide of financial gloom and doom.
The once hailed emancipators of communication, the enablers of free speech across the world, bar China and other regions with little respect for liberty and the opinionated expression, are quaking in their soft Italian leather boots, fearing the inevitable cuts and wounds to their beloved corporate bonus culture. There are steps they can take, slash the workforce, slash department budgets, terminate expensive pipe-dreams where once solid, even buoyant financial projections burst forth with multi-coloured graphs and 3D extravaganza of untapped shores and golden horizons.
Google amongst others, however others are for now inconsequential, (seeing as the world is hooked on this search engine as heavily as a crystal meth addict on their fix), is considering taking the final step, they're considering the F-word.
Fees. Fee-paying subscription searches to fund their collapsing empire, built from a garage filled with half a dozen second-hand PC's, and the hopes and dreams of a couple of whizz kids with eyes filled with burning ambition, set firmly on the future of the Internet. Oh those heady days, those before the boom, before the crash, before the boom. When this global configuration of networked server technology, wrapped around a skeletal backbone of arcane military communications hardware, was seen as the new Wild West, virgin territory to be conquered. Now it's like everything and everywhere else, overcrowded and overpriced and most likely soon to be rejected in favour of something better.
I read somewhere recently ,some awful sales pitch most likely, that over 30% of searches on the Internet are actually for people, either friends, aquaintances, or god forbid, celebrities. Amongst other more censorable thoughts it made me wonder what the hell are people doing? Shouldn't the giant virtual brain we've been teaching to do our bidding all these years be teaching us something or other? I must deliberately block out this reality for the fear of confronting truths like these, people are, for te main part, stupid. I'm sorry, it's true, you know it is, you know some yourself, you must do. Sure intelligence is relative, I am relatively subnormal compared to some vastly more learned and erudite individuals I've met along the way. There are human brains out there so crammed with information, mostly academic mind you, but still more than I could pack into an external hard drive.
Saying that, I can understand why stupid people choose to store their intelligence externally, what's the point, we have Google now… and there's the rub, our communal giant brain maybe finally turning against us, and unless a few, or rather a million or so intelligent minds out there take it upon themselves to offer feasibly vast alternatives, we will all be reduced to gibbering idiots before you know it. Pay for your information, pay for your external consciousness, pay to appear as if you are thinking. Life is full of cheats, luckily most of them simply want to appear intelligent to their boss or a potential sexual mate, okay some will try and win the odd pop quiz at the pub, or brush up for a game-show, but those in power, those who actually turn the wheels of industry, run the governments, decide on the fate of man, they don't do they? No, but their staff do.
A small subscription won't affect the rich and powerful, money can be extricated from the huddled masses in a snap, be it by snazzy advertising campaigns or secret tax hikes, but those without the mandate of the people, without unlimited resources to finger, what will they do? They will look dumb, again, unless they are intelligent, unless they've stored all the information they've absorbed in the last decade or so. Even then, facts don't make intelligence, dates for instance are not history, events and their causes and effects are. We focus so much on minuscule facts these days we don't ever see the bigger picture, in fact it's so big it doesn't even it on Google, it's called the decline of Man.
We hit the brink years back, probably around the time man started experimenting with psycho-active stimulants en-masse, it's in our blood stream, or at least your genes, if you're younger than me, which you probably are, unless you're old, and then I'd ask, why are you reading this, shouldn't you be the wiser out of the two of us? Perhaps it really is time to hold onto the handrail, the roller-coaster is about to hit the ground running, I think I am going to be sick. A thought that didn't involve double-checking my facts on Google (for once).
