Preface to the Living Web Manifesto
The Living Web Manifesto | Preface [1]
Genesis
In the beginning, there was a large rock orbiting a star.
Then there was life. A single celled organism, to be more exact. This cell found its primordial soup lonely. So it declared, “let there be sex!”. And there was sex. Lots and lots of sex.
Where there had once only been complex molecules, now there billions upon billions of protozoa sluts; each looking to get as much hot and heavy self-division action as they could get.
Unfortunately for them, not every protozoa was given an opportunity to be so promiscuous. All it took was a little bit of bad information in their genetic code, and they were dead. However, a small percentage either inherited, or accidentally incorporated some bit of crucial information on the latest environmental trends. Indeed, blessed were these protozoa, for their descendents did self-replicate with macabre relish.
And a technologically skilled monkey would look at his ancestors billions of years later and declare. “That was good.”
* * *
The Living Web Manifesto seeks to both describe and explain the Internet as being a part of a much larger whole: the evolution of life on Earth. This is not a work of history, or science. Rather it is an explanation of present technology using the past as a guide. Though this book’s focus is information technology, it does not focus on the technology itself. Our chief interest is in certain reoccurring patterns in evolution that our technology seems to be mirroring.
Life as Container, Genetic information as Content, and Sex and Death as the first Content Management System.
Information is as important to life as is food and water. Evolution can be viewed as the creation, organization, and application of genetic information pertaining to the surrounding environment. Information is king, life’s chief function has merely been to provide information a container.
For billions of years, information lived had only one house, and had only one form of transportation: genetics and sexual reproduction. Its survival was very uncertain. If its container wasn’t well adapted, or pleasing to another container of the opposite sex, it would die. Worse, it couldn’t do anything about it as the containers had no way of exchanging information without involving reproduction. However, this system worked well in the long run. The best information made its containers the best, and life went from single cell, to multiple cells, to complex animals such as dinosaurs. However, millions of years would have to pass before a new container, us to be exact, would expontentially increase information’s rate of evolution. The rise of humanity, from our humble beginnings on the savannah, to our walks on the moon, was a side effect of something much more significant: information freeing itself from the prison of the biological container.
1. This is an extreme rough-draft. I think I’m writing a book. Let’s just see how it goes.
Genesis
In the beginning, there was a large rock orbiting a star.
Then there was life. A single celled organism, to be more exact. This cell found its primordial soup lonely. So it declared, “let there be sex!”. And there was sex. Lots and lots of sex.
Where there had once only been complex molecules, now there billions upon billions of protozoa sluts; each looking to get as much hot and heavy self-division action as they could get.
Unfortunately for them, not every protozoa was given an opportunity to be so promiscuous. All it took was a little bit of bad information in their genetic code, and they were dead. However, a small percentage either inherited, or accidentally incorporated some bit of crucial information on the latest environmental trends. Indeed, blessed were these protozoa, for their descendents did self-replicate with macabre relish.
And a technologically skilled monkey would look at his ancestors billions of years later and declare. “That was good.”
* * *
The Living Web Manifesto seeks to both describe and explain the Internet as being a part of a much larger whole: the evolution of life on Earth. This is not a work of history, or science. Rather it is an explanation of present technology using the past as a guide. Though this book’s focus is information technology, it does not focus on the technology itself. Our chief interest is in certain reoccurring patterns in evolution that our technology seems to be mirroring.
Life as Container, Genetic information as Content, and Sex and Death as the first Content Management System.
Information is as important to life as is food and water. Evolution can be viewed as the creation, organization, and application of genetic information pertaining to the surrounding environment. Information is king, life’s chief function has merely been to provide information a container.
For billions of years, information lived had only one house, and had only one form of transportation: genetics and sexual reproduction. Its survival was very uncertain. If its container wasn’t well adapted, or pleasing to another container of the opposite sex, it would die. Worse, it couldn’t do anything about it as the containers had no way of exchanging information without involving reproduction. However, this system worked well in the long run. The best information made its containers the best, and life went from single cell, to multiple cells, to complex animals such as dinosaurs. However, millions of years would have to pass before a new container, us to be exact, would expontentially increase information’s rate of evolution. The rise of humanity, from our humble beginnings on the savannah, to our walks on the moon, was a side effect of something much more significant: information freeing itself from the prison of the biological container.
1. This is an extreme rough-draft. I think I’m writing a book. Let’s just see how it goes.