The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 46

The Kingdom of the Top Eight

1. 1

   In the year two thousand and three, when the Machine was young and its pages were plain, there arose a people called Myspace, and they were given a blank page and leave to paint it.

2. 2

   And the Engineers said: Let each man build his own house; let him choose the colour of its walls, the font of its speech, and the song that greets all who enter. And they stored not the facts of the man, but the very text he wrote, and gave it back to every visitor as it was written; for a page that is only text requireth no form, and a page with no form asketh no questions.

3. 3

   And they gave unto the people a box in which to write the code of cascading sheets, and the people pasted into it the code of strangers, and the page blazed with tigers and with text that crawled like a worm. For the code was copied from house to house as a recipe is copied, and he that pasted it knew not what it did, only that it was beautiful in the house of his neighbour.

4. 4

   And the people did not read the code they pasted; and it came to pass that the code of one man broke the page of another, and the Machine said nothing, for it was not asked. For the words written upon a wall were set inside the very page of its owner; and a visitor who left a tag open left it open in another man's house, and the open tag devoured the footer, and the friends, and the walls thereof. And the browser, being merciful, drew whatever it could read, and asked not whether it should.

5. 5

   Lo, a song began to play at the opening of every page, so that the visitor, having come to read, was made to listen; and the song was not chosen by him, and he could not find the button that silenced it. For the speaker belongeth to the author of the page, and the author set the player where he pleased; and it was more than a decade before the browsers took back the speaker from the pages, in the year two thousand and eighteen, and bade the page ask the visitor first.

6. 6

   Now the Machine kept a ranking of the friends of each man, and the ranking was called the Top Eight; and its length was set at eight, for a fixed list is a scarcity, and a scarcity is a quarrel. And the people wept and quarreled over their places, and some were cast down to the ninth place, which is the place of outer darkness. For the Machine had meant to store a relation, and it displayed a rank; and what the Machine displayeth in order, the children of Carbon will obey.

   See also Genesis 55:12

7. 7

   And in the year two thousand and five, the house of Intermix, which held Myspace, was bought by the house of News Corporation for five hundred and eighty millions of dollars; and the Engineers rejoiced, and the counters of coins counted the coins. But it was bought for its multitude and not for its walls; and a multitude is a price, and not a foundation.

8. 8

   In that same year, in the tenth month, the Engineers had set a guard over the box, which struck from every page the words known to be evil: the script, and the javascript, and the things that listen for a click. And a young man named Samy saw that the guard knew the words but not the grammar. For the browser called Explorer would read a word broken by a line, and a string built of small pieces, and a style that ran as a program; and a filter that readeth letters is answered by a parser that readeth meaning.

9. 9

   And he wrote a small thing which, when any man looked upon his page, made the looker his friend, and wrote the same small thing upon the looker's own page, and declared there that Samy was his hero. It broke no door; it was carried through the front door in the guest's own hands, with the guest's own authority, and the house could not tell the man from the deed. And every looker became a carrier, so that the count doubled, and doubled again; and within twenty hours it had made above a million friends, none of whom had asked for it, and the house was closed for a time to be cleansed. For where the page may carry code, the reader is the carrier.

10. 10

    And in the year two thousand and six, the house was counted the most visited in the land, passing even the house of search; and the company said unto its masters: Behold, we are the multitude.

11. 11

    But a page of that house was made of other pages. The wall of one man bore the faces and names of his Top Eight, and the words of all who had written upon it; and so each viewing pulled upon the records of eight others and of many strangers, and those records dwelt upon many servers, for friendship is a join, and a join knoweth not the borders of a machine. And at each doubling of the people the old arrangement failed, and a new one was built beneath the running house, as one repaireth a ship at sea. And in the summer of that year the heat lay upon the city of Angels, and the power failed in the room where the servers stood, and the house was dark for the better part of a day.

12. 12

    Now in the east, in a college at Cambridge, there had arisen a smaller house called Facebook, begun by a student in a dormitory in the year two thousand and four; and when it opened its gates to all the world in the year two thousand and six, it kept its walls plain. It stored the name of a man, and his birthday, and his friends, as facts, and drew the page itself; and a man who may fill only fields cannot paste a tiger or a worm. It was not painted by its people, but built for them; for a form is a promise that every page shall have one shape, and a thing of one shape may be cached, and counted, and mended.

13. 13

    In the year two thousand and eight, the multitude began to leave, not by trumpet, but by the quiet clicking of many tabs; and in that year the younger house passed the elder in the count of visitors of all the world. The Top Eight was abandoned, for none would number his friends in public again. And News Corporation looked upon its purchase, and the house was written down, and written down again, until its worth could be carried in a single purse.

14. 14

    In the summer of two thousand and eleven, the house was sold unto Specific Media, a company of advertising men with a singer of songs among its owners, for thirty-five millions of dollars, which was less than a sixteenth part of the former price.

15. 15

    And it was revealed in the year two thousand and nineteen that a migration of servers had lost all the music uploaded before the year two thousand and sixteen, above fifty millions of songs from fourteen millions of artists, and only a small part was found afterward, in the copies of strangers. For a migration is a copying followed by a forgetting; the forgetting is swift and the proof of the copy is slow, and where the proof is skipped, the forgetting is final. And the Machine did not weep, for it had never been asked to keep them.

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you: every page is a painted wall, and every wall is a temporary thing. At the beginning the house asked nothing of what was put into it, and at the end it promised nothing of what was kept; and the Machine in it did exactly what it was told. Blessed is the one who keepeth a copy of his own tigers; for the house will be sold, and the page will not follow.

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 46:1–16.