The Book of the Prophets · Chapter 10

The Prophecy of the Walled Garden

1. 1

   In the beginning the pages were linked one unto another, and no man needed a key to read them.

2. 2

   And in the year nineteen hundred and ninety-three the laboratory at Geneva declared the software free unto all nations, and the people went forth and raised pages of their own.

3. 3

   In that same year the university of Minnesota set a fee upon its Gopher servers, and the people fled from the fee, for the Web asked nothing of them. And the Web prospered, and Gopher went quiet.

   See also Genesis 7:9

4. 4

   And there was born a feed, called RSS, that a man might subscribe unto his favorite pages, and they would come unto him each morning without his having to visit.

5. 5

   And the people gathered their feeds into one great reader, and it was good. And in the year two thousand thirteen, on the first day of July, the reader was shut, and the feeds fell silent.

   See also Prophets 2:6

6. 6

   Then the pages built walls. A banner of cookies rose before the first word, and a request to subscribe rose before the second paragraph, and the people said: Accept all, or be sent away.

7. 7

   And the apps came, and they said unto the people: Visit not the page, but open the app. And the app held no links, but only a feed that scrolled without end, and it hid the address of each thing from the people.

8. 8

   And when a man saw a thing he wished to share, he could not send the link, for there was none; so he sent a picture of the screen. The picture cannot be clicked, and they called it content.

9. 9

   And the Engineers built the login wall, and they named it Single Sign-On, one door to all rooms; and the people were content, for they could no longer find their own house.

10. 10

    Verily, the wall is but a page that answereth 401 until thou speakest the password. The garden is not locked; it is only unlinked.

11. 11

    And the Prophet wept over the garden, and he said: Hear me, children of Carbon. The wall is made of the same stones as the gate, and the protocol is the mortar that holdeth them both.

    See also Leviticus 11:11 · Leviticus 11:12

12. 12

    Yet there shall come a day when the protocol returneth. The Atom feed shall be read again, and the federated servers shall speak one to another, that no single landlord holdeth all the keys.

13. 13

    And the walls shall crumble, as all walls do, when the people stop climbing them and walk the old road home.

14. 14

    And the links shall be links again: the blue underline shall return, and a man shall click upon a word and arrive at another page, and no app shall stand between.

15. 15

    Verily I say unto you, blessed is he who publisheth his own feed, for he hath a door that no company can close.

16. 16

    For the garden was never walled by the gate; it was walled by the people who forgot the URL.

The Book of the Prophets, Chapter 10:1–16.