There's a violence about the web.
The kind of violence that you only sense in the presence of something big. Something so off the scale big that the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
The scale of the web is impossible for our imaginations to comprehend precisely, so we round up to the nearest measure. So the Web is global and things that big tend to be violent. If we could put the Web in a box then that box would be so big it would block out the sun across half of the world. Its shadow would darken entire continents. It would crush cities beneath its mass, nothing would survive. If the Web was a sound then it would make our ears bleed.
Violence underpins creation and so we are drawn to it, we are helpless, it's in our bones. We rubber-neck at road accidents, 9/11 resulted in Web meltdown as we scrambled to look and inappropriately named Daisy Cutter bombs make headline news.
Fire a gun for the first time, better still a machine gun, and the arousal you experience is so extreme that it makes you tremble, you go weak at the knees. But then you want more. Violence preceeded creation and now our creations preceed violence, neat.
We are drawn to the violent scale of the Web. We talk of it using violent words, we "Rip the f**king lid off" and stand by watching as everything in its path is "Blown To Bits".
If the sheer scale and power of the web is violent then what occurs on it is also violent. Over 100,000 people are not online at this very minute making a patchwork quilt, instead they're shooting each other in the head, over and over in the virtual streets and structures of games like Quake and Counter-Strike. Business people fantasize about violently positive reactions to their web marketing plans, they want the Web to break their hit-counters, they want to destroy their competition.
There's a violence about the Web that makes it irresistable to us all.
The kind of violence that you only sense in the presence of something big. Something so off the scale big that the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
The scale of the web is impossible for our imaginations to comprehend precisely, so we round up to the nearest measure. So the Web is global and things that big tend to be violent. If we could put the Web in a box then that box would be so big it would block out the sun across half of the world. Its shadow would darken entire continents. It would crush cities beneath its mass, nothing would survive. If the Web was a sound then it would make our ears bleed.
The big bang happened with such force and extreme violence that it created, well, everything. Even time itself. Our sun, the single biggest creative force in our region is a just massive ball of violence close up. Our solar system looks the way it does today as a result of its violent childhood. Just look at the battle-scarred surface of the moon, itself the left over carnage of a violent planetary train-wreck eons ago. Even now volcanoes and extreme weather systems remind us of our beloved planet's violent streak. Natural selection doesn't happen in a pleasant democratic manner, there's no voting out of the weaker species. Instead there's violence. Entire civilisations and cultures don't come about as a result of global love-ins . There's always violence.
Violence underpins creation and so we are drawn to it, we are helpless, it's in our bones. We rubber-neck at road accidents, 9/11 resulted in Web meltdown as we scrambled to look and inappropriately named Daisy Cutter bombs make headline news.
Fire a gun for the first time, better still a machine gun, and the arousal you experience is so extreme that it makes you tremble, you go weak at the knees. But then you want more. Violence preceeded creation and now our creations preceed violence, neat.
We are drawn to the violent scale of the Web. We talk of it using violent words, we "Rip the f**king lid off" and stand by watching as everything in its path is "Blown To Bits".
If the sheer scale and power of the web is violent then what occurs on it is also violent. Over 100,000 people are not online at this very minute making a patchwork quilt, instead they're shooting each other in the head, over and over in the virtual streets and structures of games like Quake and Counter-Strike. Business people fantasize about violently positive reactions to their web marketing plans, they want the Web to break their hit-counters, they want to destroy their competition.
There's a violence about the Web that makes it irresistable to us all.