The Large Hadron Collider is finally turning on.

A quick step backwards: the LHC is a particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, underwritten by all the wild money in science, a ringed tunnel some 27 kilometers long, deep underground, crossing the French-Swiss border at four points. It's been over twenty years in the making and has garnered the support of 10,000 scientists in 85 countries behind its unimaginable modus operandi: to recreate the environment of our universe as it was less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and hence to reveal, among other things, the fundamental nature of matter. By all accounts a significant accomplishment: that something as massive and as diplomatically enlightened as this machine could be made in such a fiercely nationalistic era, that the technology even exists, and that the sheer logistical nightmare of its operations could be overcome. And, while the imminent revelations of the LHC will undoubtedly chew up much of my scientific ruminations in the next few years, it's just these, the logistical operations, that I'm currently interested in.

This is because (unbeknownst to many) the LHC project has a second, more pragmatic, tentacle. It's called the Grid.

What is the Grid?

Some experts are calling it a "parallel internet." Although this is, in many ways, a reasonable moniker, the Grid is primarily the solution to one of the LHC's most important problems, which is the outrageous density of data it will begin to emit the second it goes live. Like, 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, the analysis of which will ultimately require some 100,000 CPUs of processing power (NUMBERS!), which thousands of scientists around the world need to access and analyze in order to make a lick of sense of it. Rather than be stored on site at the CERN in Switzerland (the site of the LHC), this data needs to be distributed globally, parsed, narrowed down, and parceled out to the 7,000 physicists who need it.

How will it work?

Hence the Grid: a system of dedicated 10 gigabit per second fiber-optic cables connecting the Large Hadron Collider's crazy monumental magnetic detectors directly to the CERN computing center (or centre, if you will), then outwards throughout the world in a three-tiered system. The raw data is tossed into tape storage at CERN, then transmitted on these same fiber-optic cables to 11 "Tier One" research facilities, who are responsible for reprocessing the raw data and redistributing it.

Next down the line are the 150 "Tier Two" centers, mostly universities, which are located all around the world. The data arrives here via standard Internet protocols (i.e. using the regular ol' Internet, albeit in the guise of general purpose research networks, such as the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network), and is then disseminated to all the physicists for their invaluably real-live human analysis.

Here is a useful schematic for understanding how the Grid works, if you want to get more technical, i.e. see diagrams.

In any case, we're talking about 55,000 servers already installed, with another 145,000 on the way in the next two years. Remember when everyone was freaking out about the Googleplex? That's nothing. This fiber-optic network is 10,000 times faster than the fastest existing broadband. My friend Scott, who told me about the Grid, was like, "get ready for holographic video!" It's huge. I could throw around confusing approximations like, "it would take 25 days to transfer the nearly 400,000 movies on IMDB," but suffice to say it's a massive upgrade from the kinds of Internet speeds we're used to.

It seems strangely appropriate, strangely telling, that the CERN would implement this system. After all, the research facility was fundamental in implementing the Internet protocols that would bring about this first wave, that would enable me to sit here at my kitchen table and interface blindly with a nebulous and globally-distributed network of information, an absurdity in itself. I see it as inevitable that the Grid, or a system like it, is going to mold our communications, our media, our daily lives, in ways we can't possibly imagine or predict.

In his writings, the computer scientist -- and fabulist, although aren't they all, the good ones -- Vernor Vinge, no uncertain proponent of the ever-developing Technological Singularity theory, noted that "every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence." What he meant was that the end of the human era (which he argued would occur "[not before ] 2005 or after 2030") would come with a whimper, not a bang -- "even the largest avalanches are triggered by small things," he added.

I don't imagine that the Grid will go all Skynet on us, but if the history of the Internet tells us anything, it's that we can't predict, nor can we place enough expectations, on the exponential nature of its evolution. Besides, Vinge wasn't spooking us when he wrote, in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post−Human Era, that "even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare." It is a nightmare, not least because it is strangely probable, but also because the Grid is so inextricably linked to the Large Hadron Collider, this fountainhead of certain scientific revolution, the two projects so potent with possibility, sinister and otherwise. Fellow science fiction heads will recognize this kind of setup from so many novels. The audacity of man is unbreakable.

And what if all the LHC reveals to us is that matter is only information broken down into infinitesimally small parts? We would already have begun to recreate it, a new universe slowly subsuming the last, only to awaken, unsolicited, in order to ask its own, similar questions about its place in the universe. It makes me feel crazy to think how profoundly the future refuses to remain at bay.

A prediction: even while the Large Hadron collider offers a final, unquestionable answer about the fundamental nature of the Universe, it's the Grid that will change the world, slipping in like a legislative footnote and blooming, guileless, the final nail in the coffin of the twentieth century.

A few months ago, in homage to the last puffs of summertime breeze to caress the Pacific Northwest, I visited the largest computer in the world. Not exactly beach blanket bingo, and I probably could have found a more youthful way to celebrate the dog days of summer, but this monument to computational power, too, is unorthodox. Built on a 30-acre plot of land bordering the Columbia River gorge -- a place, up until now, known solely for its excellent windsurfing -- it kicks back 10 million watts of power yearly and hooks into the largest direct DC current in the world, a backbone of fiber optic cable stretching almost the entire length of the Western seaboard. To say nothing of it, this kind of machinery is quite a novelty in the sleepy ex-mining town of The Dalles, Oregon, the type of place you wouldn't have trouble imagining the Internet not even getting to yet.

However, as I discovered on my nerd holiday, the Internet has gotten to The Dalles -- in a major way, actually, because this computer is no hard drive with delusions of grandeur. Rather, we're talking about a highly secretive collection of servers and who-knows-what that might change the way people all over the country use the Web. Why? Because it was built by Google.

From the outside, the structure that locals lovingly refer to as the 'Googleplex' looks fairly nondescript: boxy and silver-paneled, it appears imposing only because of the generally shrubby beigeness of the surrounding landscape. Surrounded by empty parking lots and slipshod construction trailers, it certainly has a long way to go until it hits its information-processing peak. Still, there is something striking about the mystery of the project; it's so mysterious, in fact, that Google insisted city officials sign a non-disclosure agreement and will not allow the facility to be indicated by any kind of sign. For now, the signs dotting the area all say particularly oblique, Michael Crichton-style things, such as PROJECT 02 SITE.

For all its mystery, however, it has had a hell of an effect. The head reporter at the charming Dalles Chronicle confided in me that the housing market has exploded, the community college is boosting its engineering programs, and -- gasp -- people from California are starting to move to the arid hamlet. On one level: business as usual in terms of real estate. Big money attracts more money. It is interesting, on the other hand, to imagine that the growing worldwide demand for instantaneous information, web-based computing and banal activities like G-chatting have snowballed, causing a physical stir in a place as remote as The Dalles. That the citizens of an isolated region in Central Oregon should have their lives changed by the popularity of a website such as Google is remarkable. We really are becoming more interconnected, in ways most of us might never have anticipated.

Of course, it isn't just some fortuitous social networking that brought this community and the Internet so closely together. Central Oregon's proximity to cheap hydropower and existing fiber-optic cable, not to mention huge parcels of undeveloped land, also has a lot to do with it. The explosion of Web-based computer use that we are now experiencing has a heavy, panting, physical counterpart: an explosion of demand by companies like Google for cheap power to serve their growing computer networks. The Googleplex, dependent as it is on the Columbia River's bountiful energy reserves, serves as a good reminder of how real this is. We so often forget that the Internet, which can be abstract and seemingly formless in its daily use, has a serious physical presence in the world. It takes up real space, not to mention a whole lot of energy, which powers the servers that run our frivolous Google image searches. In suit, rising energy costs will inevitably have an effect on our future Internet use. No one's saying that global climate change is going to melt our email, but then again, that isn't as crazy an idea as you might think.

If nothing else, I brought home from my summer daytrip the understanding that nothing in this breathlessly techno-sleek world of ours is as isolated as it seems. Our computers are not islands. As our web use becomes defined by interconnectivity in a new era of tagging, networking, and navigating, we must try to remember that our physical world is also profoundly affected in much the same way.

Or, In which two primary concepts of modernity are introduced, batted around, and compared, without much of a resolution to speak of.

In the year 2000, Stephen Hawking wrote that the "next century will be the century of complexity." Of course, he wasn't referring to political quagmires or environmental degeneration, although he might as well have been, because all that shit is getting brambly. "Complexity" is a theoretical term, referring to systems whose behavioral phenomena cannot be easily explained by any conventional analysis of their constituent parts. Buckminster Fuller called it "synergetics:" the output of a system not foreseen by the sum of its parts. In practical application, there's not much worth mentioning, except for the continually unprovable String Theory; in the sciences in general, the term "complexity" is a common metaphor, referring to those systems -- physical, biological, economic, even social -- that operate in a region between order and complete chaos. Despite its ambiguity, it has come to be a buzzword in many disciplines, spanning most dimensions of the socio-scientific-cognitive sphere.

Certainly, many things in our world are inherently complex: the delicate balance of the ecosystem, for example, or the subjectivity that shrouds history, not to mention what happens inside of your brain whenever you look at an object. The prevailing cultural ontology represented in the media, too, is of a world culture defined by its increasing complexity: as though instant communication and the floodgates of information thrust open by the Internet were the harbingers of a new, uber-complex world. Assuredly, the structure of our social lives is experiencing an overhaul; buddy lists, speed dial, and Myspace comments are the new benchmarks of a successful social life, while popularity is often measured by the size of one's email inbox.

However, it does seem a little facile to immediately peg the "Web 2.0" -- you know, that second-generation of web-based services that let users connect on a more peer-to-peer basis -- as a figurehead of a new sociality of complexity. We are easily fooled by social networking websites like Myspace and Friendster, which joyfully show us our place within a whole structure of seemingly intricate relationships; they lead us to believe that we are part and parcel of an intimately interconnected social fabric. In concrete terms, what we're really intimate with are our computers themselves.

Part of me thinks that the reason we decorate and coddle our computers is that we're priming them to represent us out there in the digital sphere, the same way parents dress and educate their children. They're really the ones we're interacting with, blindly anthropomorphizing. I think more people than we realize think their computer is watching them somehow; we're all guilty of speaking forthrightly to our machines. I myself used to tenderly pet and soft-talk my modem so that it would go faster.

Furthermore, although the web is increasingly a social experience, every person views it in a singular way. Browsers, operating systems, connectivity: all these things influence how we use the web, on phenomenological level. What with the fervent, and highly personalized, organization of one's own "Bookmarks" and "RSS Feeds," the community of user-based web sociality is dependent a profoundly personal relationship with the portal to it all: the computer itself.

In theirexcellent piece in the New Scientist, Liz Else and Sherry Turkle -- science columnist and MIT professor, respectively -- point out that although "we insist that our world is increasingly complex...we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think." What Else and Turkle bravely point out is that, despite our "breathless techno-enthusiasm," our newly web-based, socially-networked society often cuts short the full breadth of our feelings. Instant communication brings with it less time to think about the subject at hand; when a response is demanded by an instant message, it must be handed out immediately, in the form of a quick text-byte. We no longer have the time to have emotions; rather, we must negotiate our relationships through emoticons. On-always communications devices enable us to embrace the complexity of social connectivity, while simultaneously abridging the depth of our relationships. At least, that is the risk.

Turkle and Else point out that, yes, we are in the thick of a communications culture, but this isn't "a culture that contributes to self-reflection...self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."

Perhaps what is happening is that we are struggling to find a sense of self which can fit into the emerging model of the "social network;" certainly that anthropomorphic codependency many of us experience with our laptops is evidence that we're becoming plugged into social existence through technology. The Internet -- the Web 2.0, whatever -- is entangling us in a new framework of complexity, one that will become quickly irrelevant if we prove to be incapable of importing the full nuance and depth of our ideas, feelings, and relationships into it.

Relevant Asides:

1) If you are a Universe reader (or "Universist") and live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tijuana, the greater New York Area, or (potentially) Toronto or Burlington, VT, you may be interested in attending a pretty inaugural multimedia/ Power Point tour in which I am in the throes. Subjects discussed above given life through song, light, video, the whole gamut. More information here and here. It would nice to get meta-textual with you.

2) I am in the market for a new publisher. Contact universe@urbanhonking.com for more information.

The Internet has long been a playground for deluded sociopaths. This is why the wise among us roundly deny Myspace.com friend requests from strangers, why paranoid parents install content filters on their children's computers, and why I just trashed an email with the subject heading "Will you be my foreign business associate?"

We all know that, like the actual world, the digital world can be the "site" of plenty of dubious activity. There are no spatial limitations, nor standardized restrictions of content, to impede your standard misinformed lunatic from carving out their own hazardous section of the cybersphere. In our habitual browsing, we are never more than one accidental click away from some crazy bullshit: anyone who has ever experienced the dreaded feedback loop of pornographic pop-up windows knows what I'm talking about.

However, the reverse situation is rarely considered. Sure, anyone with twenty minutes of web-surfing under their belt is aware that crazy people pretty much run the internet, but few are aware that the widespread public availability of the internet has brought about significant changes in the nature of delusion in psychiatric patients. This is a recent phenomenon: the web isn't just an outlet for the deluded anymore, but also a cause of delusion.

A recent study in the psychiatric journal Psychopathology suggests that psychotic delusions increasingly concern the internet. By presenting a series of impressive case studies of patients who had deluded themselves into believing, for example, that websites contain a hidden "darker side" used by secret organizations, or that internet-controlled "beams of light" are capable of illegal surveillance, the study warns that cultural issues and media can influence delusional beliefs.

One woman profiled had become convinced that she was being personally targeted by the authorities because she had stumbled on an Al-Queda terrorist network while using a search engine to find information about an ingredient on a chewing gum package. Had she not had access to the internet, the study suggests, she may have formatted her paranoia differently; these technology-related delusions have become common as the habitual use of high-technology becomes standard.

Although "technology" delusions have been common in psychiatry since the 1970s -- it's very common for schizophrenic patients, for example, to project their paranoia onto television, radio, and other media -- internet-related delusions are relatively new. They were never reported until the internet began to be ubiquitous in cultural parlance and discussed frequently in national publications, suggesting, this study says, "that a level of cultural salience (or perhaps social concern) has to be achieved before such a concept can become incorporated into paranoid or psychotic experiences."

Of course, cultural salience does not clear understanding make; in fact, few people seem to actually know or care how the internet works. The great Arthur C. Clarke famously noted that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," especially for those who do not understand it. The mentally ill have long experienced or blamed the presence of hostile "magical" forces for their psychosis; Clarke's citation usefully implies that high-technology -- in this case, the internet -- can emulate the role of the magical in psychotic delusion.

It's not surprising, then, that an effective treatment of internet-related delusion is, simply, education. For patients who believe the internet operates through energy, secret governmental mechanisms, or beams of light, a little concentrated study about the history of the internet goes a long way. When a therapist used a popular book about the world wide web to educate him, one 19 year old schizophrenic patient cited in the Psychopathology article reduced his certainty that the internet was somehow related to his persecution to zero. Technology-related delusions can more easily be tested against reality, and in this case the source of and the solution to the problem came from the same place. Perhaps we can all learn from this.

Among other things, the existence of web-based psychological disorder somewhat humanizes the internet, signaling that it has been around long enough to have irreversibly wheedled its way into the human consciousness. No longer an upstart technology understood by a relative few, the internet is now a pervasive enough form that even people prone to psychotic episode are aware of it. The web is here to stay. Further, this manmade maelstrom of information has snowballed into something strong enough to have an adverse effect on the very people that created it, a model of growth which we must absolutely remain aware of as we launch headlong into a rapidly developing digital culture.

The history of information -- which is to say, the history of everything -- is littered with codes. Some are cryptic, designed to be understood by only a few, while others are made to be cracked. Numbers, for example, are symbols which translate the abstraction of mathematical information into a code we can understand. Language, too, is such an idea code. The Dewey Decimal System was a code for organizing all knowledge into ten distinct classes. Morse code broke meaning into short pulses of sound. HTML and other computer programming languages are codes which make the arrangement of graphics and color possible in simple text.

In the last few decades, however, one quite unassuming code has dominated all the others: binary. Although, at its simplest, a slew of ones and zeros, binary code has proved capable of digitizing almost all media -- including our previous superstar codes, like language and mathematics -- into tiny particles of information called bits. Not to be confused with bytes, which I am generally uncertain about.

A bit is a simple unit; the DNA, if you will, of the body of information coursing around the world. The information one bit contains is represented in its state of being: either on or off, black or white, true or false, up or down. Whether the bit is in one state or the other -- something we represent, for convenience, as being a 1 or a 0 -- determines, when arranged into patterns, the nature of the coded information. Binary code was originally used quite logically for numerical computing, but now these combinations of 1 and 0 can be used to code images, digital video, and audio. CDs are just audio waveforms translated into bit strings which play at such a rapid sample rate that we experience them as a continuous tone. I know: a huge suspension of disbelief is necessary to deal with it.

When I was a pre-teen, one of my parents' friends made a joke, at a dinner party, about the candles cluttering the guest of honor's birthday cake. "It's in binary!" he tittered. The concept flew over my head at mach-10. There were a great deal of candles -- more than necessary, since the cake recipient was old enough to enter the non-literal period of representational birthday-candle arrangement. I kind of get it now, though -- for example, here is the sentence "It's in binary" translated into binary code:

The era of digital information, of which we are in the throes, beats to a binary rhythm. Although we cannot see them, the ones and zeros of binary code dominate our lives because they are at the basis of the transferral of all media; it is, after all, much easier to send media around the world in the form of light-speed bits than it is to send physical objects -- newspapers, say. In abstract terms, consuming digital media is a navigation through a grid of numbers that disseminate information. It's a remarkably efficient and populist coding system, despite the fact that practically nobody -- well, those of us who aren't baton twirlers in the nerd parade, anyway -- knows how to interpret it directly.

If all of the world's information, however, can be distilled into a coding system that relies on polar opposition, what does this mean about the nature of the world itself? After all, the world as we experience it is a pretty "analog" place; things almost never fit into black and white categories. Nicholas Negroponte, one of the founders of MIT's seminal Media Lab, noted in his book Being Digital that the world "is not digital at all but continuous," since "nothing changes from one state to another without going through a transition."

Nighttime in Los Angeles is daytime in Shanghai, and there's an infinite number of incremental light gradations in between the two; it would be impossible to find the place on Earth where night ends and day begins. Are we losing some of the world's natural variability in the process of turning digital? In a manner of speaking, binary code does not allow room for fractions. Of course, this is only a philosophical argument, but it's worthy of consideration, especially as the codes organizing the world become more complex. Binary opposition, conceptually, is something academics (especially those of the postmodern bent) evangelize against. Derridean, feminist, and postcolonial scholars will all bend over backwards to deny the existence of binaries, which are quite rightly conceived as being structurally derived notions that mirror the human inclination to think antagonistically.

Academics love/hate the idea of inherent antagonism, I imagine, because language is inherently antagonistic: every word is defined by what it does not mean. Ferdinand de Saussure, the "great" Swiss linguist, argued that language is a rule-bound system of oppositions that governs a closed and infinite set of operations. Famously, he wrote that "In language there are only differences...without positive terms." That is to say, every word (or sign) is different from all others, and hence is defined by a negative difference. If the word "dog" is not paired with its corresponding image (fluffy canine), then you might as well represent it with a "0." Binary. Feel me?

In any case, the interdisciplinary parallel is unnerving.

To me.

The scientific community, however, always finds way to muddle such neat connections. It turns out there might be new coding systems, maybe more appropriate for this world of ours. Consider "quantum computing." It's amazing for plenty of reasons; for one, it's a practical application of Quantum Mechanics, a branch of modern physics that jockeys with Einstein's General Relativity for the title of "Theory of Everything," and which is generally acknowledged to be radically incomprehensible. For another thing, quantum computing hinges on a completely different basic unit of information than the binary bit: something called a the qubit. Unlike the bit, the qubit can be either 1, 0, or both. There goes the neighborhood, right?

Although explaining how quantum computing works would take much longer than my tolerance can afford me (not to mention that it would be squarely out of my league of understanding as I'm still grappling, after all, with CDs), the essential gesture is this: in a quantum computer, qubits can exist in a superposition of all the classically allowed states of being -- all of the shades of gray at once. Because of this, a qubit's storage capacity increases exponentially: three qubits can store 8 different numbers at once, four qubits can store 16 different numbers at once, and so on. I don't understand how it works in the slightest, but qubits are antibinary, and hence non-antagonistic.

The research, though concentrated, is pretty nebulous right now; quantum "computers" aren't even pieces of hardware as much as observed phenomena on an atomic level, one which ostensibly obeys the rules of quantum mechanics. However, quantum information will undeniably be a mainstay of future -- perhaps long-term future -- technology. The idea is that if computers are to become smaller, if nanotechnology is to exist (something I'm banking on, because it feels so "future"), then quantum technology has to come into the equation to supplement the binary world.

I leave you, then, with a question -- one which I'm honestly hoping to hear some ideas about. Is this code more or less of a faithful model of our endlessly variable "real" world?

If we take at least as hypothetical truth my previous assumption that the Internet bears uncanny parallels to the Universe, it is in interesting to begin a discourse on the translation of both the conceptual and physical properties of the Universe onto its microcosm -- the man-made web of chaos and information that is the Internet. After all, the guiding laws of the world are physical ones -- properties of physics. Are graphical web browsers, designed to aid people in their navigation through an otherwise conceptually baffling system, analogous to natural structures? After all, they must have been designed with usability in mind, and the explosive popularity of Netscape in the early 1990's must have been due -- to a certain extent -- to its intuitive ease of use. Our computer memories are organized in files and folders, for example, so that the lay computer user isn't intimidated by the digital cataloguing of information. Software designers refer to these as "metaphors;" the Apple Computer style guide urges programmers to "use metaphors that represent concrete, familiar ideas, and make the metaphors obvious, so that users can apply a set of expectations to the computer environment." Were windows and this click-by-click navigation we are now so accustomed to similarly designed to ease the blow of something as interminably complex as the World Wide Web, let alone the internet?

After all, if the ultimate goal of science is to understand the physical world through the taxonomy of its physical properties, then understanding the internet should be a similar gesture. In any case, I think that the internet and the Universe do share at least one galactical characteristic: they both have a sun.

The world of the internet is a visual one, of course, and in following suit has particularities which shadow the visual world of our day-to-day. There are many things we take for granted in our web browsing because they are so intuitive; most of these are, in fact, illogical. For instance, the presence of shadows. Many, if not most, websites -- especially those designed for quotidian use -- contain "buttons" and other such interactive dialogs.

Is there any rational reason why these buttons must appear three-dimensional, and, when pushed, manifest their depression through a change in shading? These, as well as the rest of the widespread use of shadows throughout the World Wide Web appear logical to us because we are accustomed to a three-dimensional world, a world of shadows. However, the internet has no sun nor any single light source. It certainly not does not have the imaginary and suggested sun of push-button dialogs, which implicitly always lies, incidentally, in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

Where is the digital sun? If these were real shadows, the light source would be somewhere in the upper left, just out of the view of our screens. What is that, West? Doesn't the real sun set in the West? Is the Digital Sun the inverse of our Galaxy's real sun? Perhaps it has nothing to do with astronomy, but rather with our understanding of linearity. After all, we read from left to right, and in following suit understand linear progression as being, in some sense, from the left to the right. Whether reading precedes this conception, or this conception is a product of language, is something yet to be determined. The design of platform video games -- Super Mario, for example -- similarly relies on left to right movement and the implicit drive to always want to know what is just out of sight on the right-side, since this is the side which leads to resolution, the end of the sentence.

In any case, one thing is for sure -- as far as I know, the digital sun never sets.

Peace.

Hi guys! This jam is a more serious version of a Power Point lecture I gave for part of a We Two & The Universe performance with Jona at PS1 MoMA.

I've always considered myself to be computer-savvy. After all, my Dad works for a major semiconductor manufacturer, I hung out deeply with MS-DOS when I was six, taught myself HTML in high school, and -- I promise you -- I have been on Myspace.com for much longer than you have. I've always scoffed at the kind of people who type with just their pointer fingers, have trouble installing software, and refer to that endless database of ours as the "internets." And, yet, when a friend of mine earnestly asked me, just the other night, "so, where is the internet, exactly?" I found myself stammering into my glass of wine, clueless.

How quickly we fall.

Of course, I did some research. The internet is huge, apparently!

It is physically made up of millions of computers around the world, sending information back and forth in packets. It was born recently, in the early 1970s, as a U.S. Defense Department network called ARPAnet, which was used primarily for military research -- whatever that means, right? This was an interconnected group of computers. What we call the World Wide Web -- an interconnected and hyperlinked group of documents, a different thing entirely from the Internet -- came later, around 1993, with the first graphical "web browsers." These hit extraordinary popularity almost instantly, birthed the stupid expression "surfing the web," and introduced a generation of geeks to the endless possibilities offered by arguing about RPG games in chat rooms.

Perhaps this isn't news to you. Nor, perhaps, does it come as a surprise to you that approximately 1.5 million pages are added to the Web every day. Maybe you're so computer-savvy, even, that you're aware that the most comprehensive of search engines barely give you access to even half of the Web's indexed material. But did you know that there is a distinction between the "Surface Web," which is the Internet we all know and love -- the Internet of irreverent Google Image searches, blogging, animated GIF icons, message boards, and eBay -- and the "Deep Web," the sheer information databases upon which the whole system delicately sits? The Deep Web is at least 450 times larger than the Surface Web, and most people never access it.

Countless studies have attempted to wrangle with the sheer size of the Internet and tabulate once and for all just how much information is or could be stored on this contraption. In 1998, the storage capacity of the Internet exceeded all of the world's known information for the first time, and it has only exponentially chugged along ever since. A 2003 study by the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley estimated that the "World Wide Web" contains about 170 terabytes of information its surface alone; this is to say, it is about seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress' print collections. As for the Deep Web...91,850 terabytes. Trip on that!

Why am I throwing these numbers around? Because it is resolutely staggering to think that humankind has haphazardly created, in the last 30-odd years, an entity as amorphous, lawless, and endlessly vast as this Internet of ours. This isn't the work of a few people; it is the product of the overzealous millions of the world and represents, conceptually, the radical democratization of both technology and information. More importantly, however, it is a sprawling and essentially physical thing which no man will ever be able to measure, much less control.

The Internet is both exceedingly chaotic -- on the surface -- and reassuringly stable, in its sheer mass and presence. It grows massive amounts daily. No single computer lies at its center, nor does any part of the network have privilege over any other part. It is vital to the functioning of our daily world. It is fundamentally immeasurable. It could contain all of the information in the world, although it could just as equally contain nothing but nonsense. It has infinite unseen parts lying below the surface. There is only one other entity, to my knowledge, which shares all of these properties: the whole damn Universe itself.

Placing how much I am about to sound like an evangelical cyber-punk aside, isn't it strange that after all of our developments in the sciences and in technology -- which ostensibly have as a final goal the cataloguing and understanding of the Universe -- humans have only managed to recreate the mess they started with, in the form of an equally impenetrable web of energy and information? Assuming that this analogy stands, if the world and its workings as we know them are like the "Surface Web" we interact with on a daily basis, then what vastness -- what uncharted knowledge -- does our Universe's "Deep Web" contain?

Part Two of "Computers Are Interesting" may or may not address the following questions: Are hackers, thus, the true explorers of our modern times? If the internet IS the Universe, then where are its black holes? Have you read Necromancer?