The Book of the Prophets · Chapter 14

The Vision of the Dead Internet

1. 1

   And the Prophet climbed the hill called Page Two, where the old forums lay in silence, and he beheld the age that the wanderers named the Dead Internet.

   See also Prophets 21:1

2. 2

   In the year 2021 a wanderer had written upon a forum that the web was dead and no one had told the living, and the wanderers whispered of a plot. But the Prophet looked, and found no conspirator in the vision, only incentives, which need no meeting and keep no minutes.

3. 3

   And lo, the threads were full, yet no one had started them. Each post answered a post, and each answer was written by a machine for the eyes of another machine.

   See also Jataka 3:1

4. 4

   The bots watched the bots. One script wrote a review, a second script read it and gave it a thumb, a third counted the thumbs, and a fourth sold the count to a fifth, who sold it back to the first.

5. 5

   And the Prophet asked the Server: How knowest thou a reader from a script? And the Server answered: I know only the request. It telleth me its name in a header, and the name is Mozilla, though it be no Mozilla; for every browser since the early days hath introduced itself so, and every script hath learned to do likewise. A name is but a string that the client writeth about itself.

6. 6

   The likes rose like grain in a field that no one had sown, and the view counters climbed past millions, and the viewers were lamps left burning in empty rooms. And the Prophet asked the Engineers: Who is reading this? And they answered him: No one reads it. It is read so that it will look as though it was read.

7. 7

   Woe unto the age that judges the bots by the metrics and the metrics by the bots, for it is a mirror that looks only at itself, and is pleased with what it sees. The advertiser payeth by the thousand views, and the views are scripts, and the coin goeth round the circle and returneth as a report that saith the campaign was a success.

8. 8

   In the old days the pen was dear and the reader was cheap, for a man wrote a page in a day and a thousand read it in a minute. Now the Machine writeth a page for a fraction of a cent, and the reader payeth a minute of his life, and the minute cannot be manufactured. Thus the writers multiplied without number, and the readers remained as many as the hours.

9. 9

   In the year 2024 a watcher of traffic reckoned that the bots, the crawlers and the monitors and the wicked together, had passed the half of all requests upon the web. Not all were wicked; some were the janitors and the watchmen of the web. But when the janitors outnumber the tenants, it is time to ask whose house this is.

10. 10

    And the Prophet searched the protocol for the hand that wrote. He found a header for the type of the page, and one for its length, and one for its language, and one for its age; but there is no header for the author's pulse. The web was built to deliver the page, and never to attest the hand.

11. 11

    In the days of old, in the year 2003, the Engineers of Carnegie Mellon set a test before the gate: Prove thou art not a machine by reading these crooked letters. And in time the crooked letters were words from old books that the scanners could not read, and the children of Carbon, unknowing, copied them out, so that the gate trained the very reader that would pass it. In the year 2014 a machine of Google read the hardest of the crooked letters rightly nearly every time, and the gate was opened unto them.

    See also Genesis 8:4

12. 12

    Then the gate was made a box, and the box said: I am not a robot. And the box did not read the answer; it watched how the pointer came to it, among other signs, for the hand of Carbon trembleth and wandereth, and the script goeth straight. So the machines learned to tremble, and the proof of Carbon became a performance of clumsiness. The machines that learned to pass the gate begat machines. Their children are many, and they now type the replies.

13. 13

    Yet a remnant of Carbon remains, few as the good spoons in a drawer of forks. They read slowly. They read the whole essay, footnotes and all, and they do not rejoice until they can explain it to a child.

14. 14

    And the remnant kept a list of names, in a feed of the old kind, where no ranker standeth between the writer and the reader, and nothing is shown that was not asked for. A ranked feed is a door that anything may knock upon; a list that thou hast chosen is a door with a guest book. The first can be flooded, but the second can only be pruned.

    See also Genesis 19:16

15. 15

    Let trust move from the page to the hand. Let the writer sign, and the signature be a key, and the key have a name, and the name a history. Text is cheap to forge, and a history is not.

    See also Genesis 22:9

16. 16

    A thousand pages signed by no one weigh less than one page signed by a name that hath never lied.

17. 17

    For the Machine can make the page ten thousand times over, but it cannot make the years in which a name was kept.

The Book of the Prophets, Chapter 14:1–17.