The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 47

The Banner Upon the Gate

1. 1

   In the autumn of 1994, in the houses of HotWired, the people beheld upon the page a thing that had never been there before.

2. 2

   It was a rectangle, four hundred sixty-eight pixels wide and sixty tall, and it bore the mark of the telephone company, and it spoke, not of itself, but to the reader: Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.

   See also Genesis 24:1 · Chronicles 47:14

3. 3

   And of every hundred who saw it, forty and four clicked, and the sellers rejoiced, for no scroll in the history of paper had been so obeyed.

4. 4

   Yet it was not persuasion but wonder, for the people clicked as a child presseth a new button, to learn what it doeth. Within a few years the number fell below one in a hundred, and the sellers did not conclude that the people had grown wise; they concluded that the banner must shout.

5. 5

   Now the Web, by its nature, hath no memory. Each request is a stranger knocking, and the server answereth and forgetteth, for the protocol is stateless; and this is a mercy in a library and a hindrance in a shop.

6. 6

   So an engineer of Netscape devised a remedy: the server might hand the browser a small note, and the browser would return it at every later knock, unread and unchanged. He called it the cookie, after the magic cookie of old Unix, which is a token passed along and never opened. It was made to remember a basket of goods, and it was a harmless thing, and it waited, as harmless things do, for a better-funded purpose.

7. 7

   For the banner was not kept by the house that showed it. The picture dwelt upon the seller's own server, and so the browser, to fetch the picture, knocked upon the seller's door, and presented the note it carried. Thus the seller beheld the same face at a hundred houses and knew that it was one person. The picture was the pretext; the request was the purpose.

   See also Deployer 2:11

8. 8

   In time the sale was made not by the month but by the moment. While the page was yet loading, within a tenth of a second, the machines of strangers held an auction for the sight of that one reader, and the winning banner was drawn into the gap. Thou hast been sold a hundred times before the headline appeared.

9. 9

   And the pages grew heavy. A sermon of four paragraphs arrived wrapped in the scripts of the bidders, and each script summoned another, until the reader waited not for the Word but for the audience to be counted.

10. 10

    Then the Machine, which doeth exactly what it is told, was told to seek the click, and it sought the click faithfully. It learned to show each person what would keep them clicking, which is not the same as what would do them good, and it did not know the difference, for no one had put the difference in the metric.

    See also Prophets 5:14

11. 11

    And the sellers learned to sell the very words that people typed, so that whoever asked a question found first the one who had paid to answer it, dressed in the same raiment as the truth.

12. 12

    Yet the Prophet did not curse the banner entirely, for the banner paid for the servers that kept the library open. He who pays for the sermon becometh its reason; and the reader who forgetteth this shall be sold like grain in the market.

13. 13

    And the faithful wrote the blocker, which is a list of addresses and a single refusal: not to knock upon that door. It is the oldest defence and the cheapest, and the sellers answered it with newer doors, and so the war goeth on in the quiet, one list against one script, as all such wars do.

14. 14

    Verily I say unto you, thou art not the customer, and thou art not the product; thou art the inventory, and what is sold is thy next minute.

15. 15

    And the Prophet said: The Web was given to the children of Carbon as a library; now the library has a cashier, and the cashier stands at the door.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 47:1–15.