Metaversal Mining

The BBC’s Virtual Revolution season kicked off yesterday with the first in a four-part series The Great Levelling ? Its OK, a decent history of things WWW and some of the people behind the whole ‘social change through techno-libertarianism’ movement.

Its mostly wrong of course. The program’s premise that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is somehow divorced from the infrastructure of the internet that it runs on is a stretch at best. To suggest that the web is non-hierarchical simply because you don’t have to ask to join in is falacious and the notion that just because addressing structures are not overtly government controlled, the traffic that they support isn’t subject to oversight is just plain wrong.

The presenter/writer starts from the wrong position. She takes the West Coast hippy route through the material casually disregarding the fact that the internet was designed as a command and control network. DARPANET and its progeny are/were all about hierarchy. Its in the DNA of the Internet Protocol. Domain Name Service is way to organise hierarchical lists of computers. The parasitic technology of TBL’s WWW cannot ignore this fact and at best disguises it through http addressing.

I just don’t see how you can paint over that core design philosophy with some vague San Franciscan musings that amount to a claim to have separated the physical infrastructure from the use of that infrastructure by power of the mind alone.

I prefer to think of the internet and www as a child growing up.
Born into a military family, DARPA laid out its morals, made sure that it ate its greens so that it had strong bones in later life. The de-militarising of the internet was the system going to school and meeting kids from the other side of town. Different folks but still recognisable, still ‘us’. The last 20 years have been it playing high-school football, getting to 2nd base with your best girl behind the bleachers, taking a part-time job to pay for a parts for a clunker to trick out. (I don’t know what any of that means by the way. I’m British. We have cricket. Its not the same)
The recent move to allow non-latin script in website addressing is the kid going to college, meeting radically new people and getting into all sorts of high jinx, maybe getting in trouble with the law over a misunderstanding. In parallel to that is the kid starting to take an interest in travel. Spreading to Africa, seeing poverty at first hand will change it, but still at its core is the Internet Protocol and the design philosophy of Cerf & co. This is where we are now.
Still to come the kid takes a trip around the whole world and graduates from college. Current WWW penetration is around 25% global population, so until over 50% of world population has access World Wide Web is not even an accurate name. That will happen soon enough and the East African Fibre Optic cable will help that process along.
At some point after the internet has reached everyone and everyone has had a chance to define their own space, exert their own influence, only then will we find out what is possible with this tool. The child will have grown up.
But unless a new infrastructure is put in place to run the traffic over, it will still be Vint Cerf and DARPA’s little nuclear resistant command and control network at heart. The values that it grew up with will not change.