The Internet: Internet Society

At some indeterminate time in the ancient past, the Earth's first sentient beings awoke to their higher state of consciousness to find a rich virgin planet before them. It was a world in which — of all its many life-forms — they alone possessed conscious self awareness. With this came the power of abstract thought and the ability to communicate through symbolic language. It was these unique properties that gave these early humans their dominion over all the Earth.

Some speculate that an already large population of primitive hominids somehow acquired these properties in parallel gradually over time, by a process called evolu­tion, and thereby became human. Others postulate that these properties were int­entionally installed in a purpose-designed mated pair of bio-mechanical vessels that were pre-equipped with the necessary neural, vocal and manipulative sub-systems.

Ancient Idyll

Left unhindered, human society should have naturally gravitated, under the influ­ence of a dynamic attractor [inherent to the physiology of the human brain], into an agglomeration of anthropological communities, each dividing, as population grew, to maintain a community size of between 50 and 150 souls, grouped into families or households.

A household comprises a bonded pair, usually with children. Within a household, communication between individuals is always presential, being frequently face-to-face. It is also multi-dimensional: verbal, gesticulate [using hand movement to illus­trate, punctuate and emphasise speech] or, kinesic [involving facial ex­pression and body language] and sometimes tactile. It is on-going, with frequent conversational exchanges that are both interactive [full duplex] and of high intensity. It is what, in communications terminology, is called super-wideband; that is, the rate at which individuals exchange information is extremely fast. It is also very short range, thus affording precise privacy control.

Within an anthropological community, communication isn't on-going the way it is inside a household. It is more intermittent, taking place only on relatively rare occa­sions when community members visit, or otherwise encounter, each other. But it is still presential, although of a somewhat reduced bandwidth. It also still has a short range, although with diminished exposure control. In other words, it is less secure against eavesdropping. It still has a high individually-decided level of turbulence. Community members are free to encounter face-to-face by chance or by intention. Each knows who's there and what's there and thereby has both active and passive inclusion control. The presential situation within a natural community thus facilit­ates appropriate high quality communication between all its members.

In society as a whole, some anthropological communities may stay put, while others may be nomadic. But even from static communities, travellers and traders journey to and from other communities. This provides what we may call inter-community turbulence. It facilitates what is a less direct but nonetheless presential interaction, through which ideas, culture, economic surplus, specialist produce and even people are exchanged.

When stage coaches rattled and wagon trains rolled, the journey was the reward. Travel was slow and itinerant, giving the traveller a strong connection with the hint­erlands through which he passed during his journey. This, in turn was a rich source of directly observed knowledge about the world and nature, which the traveller con­veyed both to his destination and back to his home community. But now, as motor­ways hum and airliners roar, speed is of the essence. And speed isolates. It erects an impervious barrier between a traveller and the rich hinterland over and through which he is passing. He has almost no connection with it. It rewards him nothing.

How Did It Start?

At the dawn of the Holocene, just as the Earth had finished its arduous 1000-year climb out of the last Ice Age, I imagine that ancient societies began to form by vor­aciously gobbling up small idyllic communities through belligerent conquest. By all accounts — from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Judaeo-Christian bible — the event horizon of history presents anything but a benign picture of peace, tranquillity, pro­gress and happiness. It was a picture of waxing and waning war, oppression, bully­ing, hegemony, containment and exploitation that has been with us from that fate­ful beginning unto this present day.

Scientific evidence suggests that it is the physi­ology of the human brain that sets the maxi­mum size for an anthropological community at 150 souls. However, not all souls are the same: they have different kinds of personality. The particular aspect of personality we are concern­ed with here is conscience. The prevalence of conscience, within any sample of human popul­ation, follows a standard distribution bell curve. And this standard distribution remains valid all the way down to the population of an anthropo­logical community.

Practically all human beings have the ability to see and feel from another's point of view. Most have a moral conscience to act and react in ways that do not thereby prejudice others. They exhibit good manners one to another and take from their natural and social environments only what is sufficient for each, thereby ensuring that others may eat and be included. This provides a progressive negative feed-back, which ensures that inter-personal relationships are kept within benign bounds. The Ancient Idyll would thereby form and remain forever self-regulating.

To my mind, had it continued, such a world would have been an ideal cradle for human development. However, if it existed at all, I think it would have been very short-lived. Why?

Unbridled Predator

Unfortunately, at one extreme edge of the personality bell curve, there is a rogue 1% who lack moral conscience. It seems to be something with which nature failed to equip them. Thus, in every anthropological community, on average, there will be 1½ people who are complete psychopaths, plus a few others in which the absence of moral conscience is progressively less apparent. These relative few consequently don't participate in the negative feed-back process that would form and sustain the Ancient Idyll. So instead of giving and taking sufficient unto the day, they seek to take wealth and control without limit, to the full extent that power and opportunity makes possible for them.

Within the animal kingdom, predators kill to eat. But they only kill sufficient unto the day. Once they have enough to satisfy their hunger, they stop. They don't con­tinue to kill prey indefinitely, just leaving it dead and uneaten. There are, of course, abnormal situations like a fox in a hen pen. But hen pens are not natural. The al­most exclusive norm is that predators kill only to eat.

On the other hand, humans, devoid of natural regulatory negative feedback, kill to kill. In the animal world, carnivore predators kill herbivore prey. But human pred­ators kill human prey: they kill their own kind. They do this to remove competition for terrestrial and social resources. They don't merely kill to eat: they kill to control and enslave, or to exterminate and displace.

This contrast was well depicted in the Sci-Fi film "Elevation (2024)" when the protagonist observed that the invading alien beasts did not eat or sleep: they just killed humans. From this, she deduced correctly that the invaders weren't animals but machines, sent by sentient aliens to exter­minate humans to clear the planet for their free unopposed occupation.

Within an anthropological community, the disruptive potential of these one or two exigent individuals is sufficiently moderated by the rest of the community. Like as speeding neutrons in an atomic reactor with the carbon rods fully deployed, their erstwhile endeavours are forever adequately stifled. And in the absence of any inter-community intercourse, all would remain well.

Eventually and inevitably, however, through inter-community travel and trade, such exigents, from many anthropological communities, meet and conspire. Uneasy bed­fellows they may be, but together they conquer, wrest control, oppress, contain and exploit their several communities, as a single agglomerated whole, to serve their malicious ends and quench their voracious greed.

But how does this exigent few overcome the natural endemic self-determination of each and all of the other individuals in their communities? From where do they get the power of persuasion to beguile them into such willing subservience?

Hierarchical Control

It is because of another aspect of human pers­onality, which also follows a standard distribu­tion bell curve. It concerns whether an individ­u­al be self-directed or socially-directed and whe­ther he be of good intent or of evil intent. Self-directeds are few and are at the extreme edges of the bell curve. People become increasingly socially-directed as you progress towards the vast majority in the middle of the bell curve.

The self-directeds on the extreme right of the curve tend to be more introverted and of good intent. They don't presume to exert proactive influence over the vast majority of socially-directeds. The self-directeds on the extreme left of the curve, on the other hand, are exigent and of evil intent. They proactively influence and dom­inate the vast majority of gullible socially-directeds. The exigent few are thus able to persuade — and hence rule — the gullible socially-directed majority.

Thus, the few self-directeds of evil intent beguile sufficient of the gullible socially-directed majority to be the agents of enforcement of their masters' will upon the rest of the socially-directed majority plus the essentially powerless self-directeds of good intent. The means through which they do this is the command and control hierarchy, which governs according to a system of artificial law, which inflicts pun­ishment for infraction, where infraction is any act that is contrary to the will and desire of the exigent few.

Though never admitted, the law is only and always enforced within the strict context of 'Might is Right'. Whether or not one will receive 'justice', according to the law of the self-directeds of evil intent, depends entirely on whether one be the stronger or weaker party in the dispute.

I think the initial tendency would be for the one or two exigent psychopaths from three or four anthropological communities to form an egalitarian clique — a kind of mafia — to dominate the people of their agglomeration of communities. This clique would doubtless recruit and arm sycophantic yes-men from their agglomeration to police and enforce their inevitable plans for expansion. Consequently they forcibly annex and incorporate other anthropological communities into their agglomeration, adding the incumbent exigent psychopaths to the ruling clique.

At this point, the nature of human psychology imposes a change in the mode of governance. Once the number of exigent psychopaths in the clique expands much beyond seven or eight members, it can no longer operate in an egalitarian manner. It is forced by its very nature to become hierarchical. When the number of clique members passes much beyond 12, it needs a boss. From then on, as minders be­come police and raiders become armies, belligerent annexation explodes and the agglomeration eventually becomes a sovereign state. The masses become dispos­sessed, contained and exploited. The boss becomes king.

Kept in place through hired enforcement, this hierarchical structure adopts a meta­stable state. Decree, command and propaganda flow down the hierarchy, evoking an upward return flow of produce, service and deference. Sideways flow between minions is restricted by fear to include only that which is necessary to produce and serve, plus the mutual reinforcement of obedience and conformity.

Decree, command and propaganda are disseminated through mandatory church at­tendance and later through child education. Each individual is thereby compart­mentalised and conditioned. But he's still human. Part of his natural human condi­tion is to crave the deeper social connection with his peers, of which the powers-that-be have deprived him. The tension created by this situation could eventually explode into social insurrection. So the powers-that-be dissipate this possibility by allowing trivial diversions such as a hoedown or cèilidh.

Thus, social evolution, over the past 10,000 years since the dawn of the Holocene, has been continually engineered to forcibly increase the social and intellectual isol­ation of individuals from each other. But hierarchical control is an uneasy construct. It is inherently unstable, being held together by a wholly artificial force. Like an atom of a radioactive element, it has only one inevitable destiny: spontaneous dis­integration. Hierarchy is not necessary. It exists only within the human mind as a means of trying to understand the world by mentally classifying the things that are in it. Nature isn't inherently hierarchical.

Industrialisation

Whether free or enslaved, people — especially the self-directeds of good intent — can think. No matter how Draconian a governing regime may be, it cannot invade, police, control or influence an individual's free thought, provided he mindfully re­fuses to allow it to do so. Thus, even while burdened with a menial task, a slave can be thinking great thoughts. He can — and naturally will — think freely and deeply about philosophy, science, politics, engineering and socio-economic conditions. He's able to dream, invent and plan within his own virtual world. He alone can choose which of his thoughts and ideas, if any, he reveals to his peers and his masters.

He is involuntarily driven by an inner urge to invent. He devises means and mech­anisms to make his slavish work easier and faster. Sometimes his master will notice and approve, then furnish him with the resources needed to develop and realise an invention. Thus is paved the road to industrialisation. Industrialisation demands the concentration of labour. Workers [waged slaves with their families] gravitate to the hinterlands of factories. Industrial communities expand and proliferate. Technology increases and diversifies. A system of mass education is needed to supply industry and commerce with the right amount of the right kinds of overspecialised human cogs for its factories, warehouses, means of transport, offices and outlets.

Fine-tuned specialisation becomes geographically polarised. This forces employees to commute then, ever more frequently, relocate far from their communities of origin. Those of working age become geographically separated from their forebears. Old family ties become severed. Men and women become equals in an increasingly specialised workforce. Expedient career-moves force couples to separate and farm their children. The nuclear family is broken. The individual is isolated. One-bedroom accommodation becomes the norm by demand. Stress and loneliness reign.

Individual isolation spawns a catastrophic metamorphosis in human personality. It causes people to lose social skills through lack of opportunity to use them. Subse­quent generations are denied even the opportunity to develop them in the first place. The only opportunities to socialise become limited to profit-driven enterprises like night clubs. These facilitate only shallow fleeting connection, without the neces­sary and sufficient depth and diversity of the human interaction that was inherent to the ancient anthropological community.

Consequently, people don't talk to each other as much any more in the street and around the neighbourhood. Such small-talk as "hello", "nice day", "how's it going?" have all but gone. If you deliberately complement an unknown passer-by this way nowadays, they will probably give you the gen-Z stare then quickly shuffle off, assuming you're a bit weird or kinky. The only time it still works for me is when I take the dog for a walk early on Sunday morning. Only then will the odd passer-by say "Bom dia!" [I live in Brazil], although that's a bit formal. An "Olá, tudo bem?" would be a little more connective.

As an aspie, I impulsively regard small-talk as superfluous. Intellectually, however, upon mindful consideration, I can see that it isn't. It's an important — indeed an essential — part of social communication.

Small-talk has a counterpart in the telecommunications technology of the Internet. It comprises what are termed "keep-alive" or "heartbeat" data packets. These are sent from the user [subscriber] device to the server to which that device is connected. In the absence of, or a lull in, normal data traffic, they are sent frequently enough to be received before the server times out and closes the connection. These packets are essen­tial to the correct and proper operation of the link.

An observation made by my daughter, who lives in Scotland, illustrates well how the industrialisation and commercialisation of society trivialises social connection by passive­ly inhibiting small-talk:

In a village pub, everybody goes to the bar to get their food and drinks. Everybody speaks to everybody else. All know each other as friends and neighbours. In a modern city pub, where waiters serve at tables, people confine their conversations to the small clique of family or friends at their own table. Those at other tables are strangers, like trees in a forest.

Without small-talk, anthropological social connections fall into disuse and die. The servers [people's minds] time out. The channels [interpersonal relationships] close. Individuals become isolated and lonely. Mental instability ensues.

Social Unrest

The system of mass education, created to provide industry and commerce with its overspecialised human cogs, has an unwelcome side-effect. It teaches the masses how to think, particularly the self-directeds of good intent. Through them, know­ledge — both technical and social — becomes proliferated throughout the wider population. The masses become increasingly aware of — and vociferously critical about — the poverty and disparity under which they live.

At first, to dampen the voices of the wise, the exigents preside over a social order that financially rewards the acquisition and application of wisdom and knowledge. But it is short-lived. With the advent of free-market capitalism, the intrinsic ability, knowledge or wisdom of a person becomes irrelevant, no matter how much effort that person had to dedicate to their acquisition. The only measure of value in a neo-liberal world is the current extrinsic supply-and-demand value of what the indivi­d­ual is perceived to be able to provide.

With this, the poverty and disparity begins to invade the former middle classes at an accelerating rate. Scientists, engineers, managers, academics, writers and self-taught thinkers are callously cast on to the dole. The social unrest of the disposses­sed masses has gained a cogent mind. And this is dangerous. It must be quelled.

Politicised Education

Throughout most of the Current Epoch the exigent contain and exploit the masses through religious fear. However, with the advent of mass education, as people be­come able to think and reason for themselves, the power of religious fear wanes rapidly, eventually becoming insufficiently effective. Another means must be found.

A part of the solution is to politicise mass education, especially for the very young. Within their formative minds is thus created a strong sense of national pride that pro­motes deference, obedience, duty and effort in support of the image, wealth and endeavours of the powers-that-be. But this is not enough. And it doesn't last.

The reason is that, as they become older and learn how to think for themselves, the masses begin to deploy the 86-billion neuron supercomputers in their craniums to analyse their socio-economic situations within the context of the Gaian biosphere of the planet on which they were born and live. Consequently, despite propaganda to the contrary raining incessantly down upon them from on high, they clearly see that things simply don't add up. So unrest sets in anew with each rising generation.

Complex-Dynamics

To me, the self-evident scenario for the evolution of government is as follows. The nuclear family, comprising parents and children, is a hierarchy. Parents rule their children. Children grow to become adults, marry and have children of their own. The grandparents are older and wiser than the parents so the grandparents advise the parents. The parents now rule their children. The resulting hierarchy of family gov­ernment works, in a benign way, because the number of participants is small and each level, moving up the hierarchy, contains individuals of increasing wisdom and life experience.

Beyond the family, however, relationships between the hierarchical levels of each family contain individuals who all have ostensibly the same level of wisdom and life experience. Consequently, the relationships between individuals of the same gener­ation within a community should naturally be egalitarian, not hierarchical. It is only through the belligerence of the relatively few self-directeds of evil intent that hier­archy is imposed among community members of the same generation.

It is only because the vast majority of human beings take the lazy option of being socially-directed, rather than self-directed, that large hierarchical systems of social control can be enforced. So as tribal populations rise, chiefs and kings build and enforce what emerges as a hierarchical system of communities. Each level of the sovereign hierarchy is thus a community of bureaucratic enforcers. Thus a king with a 3-level hierarchy beneath him rules a kingdom of 100 × 100 × 100 = 1,000,000 people: about the population of the British Isles in 1000 CE.

Notwithstanding, this is an anthropologically unnatural situation, which can only be sustained, by deliberate force, to subjugate, oppress and exploit the people. Like the atom of a high-order artificial element, it can only be held together precariously for a short time before unrest explodes into rebellion.

British Population

2020 CE	67·1 million
1800 CE	10·5 million
1000 CE	1·3 million

From 1000 CE to 1800 CE, the population of the British Isles grows slowly at a fairly steady rate, albeit with a few ups and downs due to wars and disease epidemics. But despite the positive comments from 'royal' historians and poets, it is never a picture of tranquillity: dissatisfaction and rebellion are never far below the surface.

The million or so population around 1000 CE is forcibly held together by sovereign forces to operate as a functional society. Notwithstanding, by the time the popula­tion reaches over 10 million in 1800 CE, the artificial mechanism of hierarchical government can no longer maintain social control. The natural laws of physical complex-dynamics increasingly make their presence felt.

Hierarchical control tries to govern a population by treating it as if it were a machine, comprising inter-linked functional components like the organs in the human body. But society has neither the form nor the nature of a machine. It has more the nature of a cloud, a weather system, an ocean with currents, a shape-shifting shoal of fish or a murmuration of starlings. The two are conceptually different in both form and functionality.

Around 1800 CE, the population of Britain makes a tight upward turn, increasing far more rapidly, to reach over 67 million by 2020 CE. Complex-dynamical structure and function are independent of scale whereas hierarchical control is not. Consequ­ently, as population explodes, hierarchical government becomes progressively less effective whereas the effectiveness of complex-dynamical protocols remains const­ant. The officially unadmitted catastrophe of poverty, disparity and dysfunction in modern society is the apocryphal witness to the observed fact that hierarchical society doesn't work for the benefit of the people.

But the self-directeds of evil intent don't want society to work for the benefit of the people. To them, society is merely a resource for them to contain and exploit exclu­sively to benefit themselves. Maintaining the minimal well-being of the masses — at least, that fraction of the masses that has economic value to them — is simply a means to an end — a cost, which must be minimised. Care of the elderly, infirm, deficient and inept is something they externalise onto the shoulders of a tax-funded bureaucracy, whose existence they reluctantly tolerate and increasingly squeeze.

Mass Tranquillisation

A complex-dynamical system, by its inherent nature, cannot be centrally controlled. Having an average population of over 40 million, the human society of a modern state is — and cannot be other than — a complex-dynamical system. A complex-dynamical system is intrinsically self-governing. Consequently, any attempt to sub­ject it to hierarchical control is bound to be disruptive; creating the cauldron of poverty, disparity, stress and uncertainty that is characteristic of the current world order. Incumbent social unrest is therefore inevitable, along with the ever-present threat of civil disobedience and the spectre of social revolution and war.

It seems to me that the elite cliques of self-directeds of evil intent realise — at least in part — that they can't control a modern society of tens to hundreds of millions of people through hierarchical control alone. People nowadays think too much for this to work. They must tranquillise the masses. But how can they possibly achieve this without abandoning their neo-liberal modus operandi?

Firstly, they disconnect the vast majority of the passive socially-directed population from the introverted self-directeds of good intent. For this purpose, they create a mainstream, which they proactively imbue with public credibility. They then restrict access to all public media, permitting it to broadcast only censored and approved mainstream content. Finally, they inductively discredit and marginalise self-directed scientists, writers and self-taught thinkers by publicly labelling them as 'amateur', 'reactionary' or 'conspiracy theorists' — terms which, through repeated immersion in disparaging context, become publicly imbued with a universal air of negativity.

Of course, these terms are not intrinsically disparaging. An 'amateur' is simply somebody who pursues a subject out of love and intense interest. There is less reason for him not to be adept at his subject than there is for a so-called 'professional', who pursues it merely as a source of income. A 'reactionary' is simply somebody whose ideas are not exactly in line with mainstream thinking. In other words, he thinks 'out of the box' or beyond the cloisters of current academic thought. His is the only way to discover something new or to otherwise make progress. A 'conspiracy theorist' is somebody who, through mindful consideration, observes that the powers-that-be are not acting according to what they say. As such, there's no inherent reason why, what a conspiracy theorist says, shouldn't be true.

Secondly, they divert and contain the attention of the masses by fabricating, within their minds, a web of delusion which, despite the obvious poverty and disparity of their socio-economic reality, convinces them that they are living a life of freedom and prosperity. How do the elite minority of self-directeds of evil intent achieve this? Through a process of trivialisation: focusing the minds of the masses on things like football and soap operas, pubs and night clubs, hobbies and pass-times — away from the undesirable kind of socio-political thought that could so easily be provoked by the reality in which they live.

Thirdly, they attenuate dissent by dividing the masses against each other. They do this by maintaining a proportion of the population in poverty — poverty that stings. This has the effect of keeping the employed majority subservient, through fear of losing their jobs and ending up like the engineered minority that they see and hear about through the media. They compound this division by generating antagonism between the employed and the unemployed through divisive propaganda, which conveys and continually reinforces the message: "I've got a job. So if you haven't got one: it must be your own bloody fault, you lazy good-for-nothing layabout". Of course, this induced infantile view has no part with the complex-dynamical reality of a modern socio-economy, in which the lot of each individual is determined uniquely by complex circumstances, which are, for the most part, way beyond his control.

In the idyllic anthropological community, healthy benign social interaction occurs naturally without cost. In today's post-industrial societies, however, where comm­unal human connection has been severed, diversion of the mass mind provides a profit opportunity. People have to pay to go to football matches, attend night clubs and holiday camps, pursue hobbies and pass-times. And guess what? The trivial­isation of the mass mind yields a convenient collateral bonus: corporate profit.

Birth of The Internet

It is within this socio-economic context that the Internet was born. I was there, and had part, in the computer and telecommunications industries when international government, corporate and academic email and file transfer networks were taking shape. I was also there as document presentation mark-up scripts such as IBM's Text/360 were being experimented with. I was working in a unit of ITT-Europe at the time where we were toying around with a publishing mark-up script of our own. But the one that ended up in the limelight and became the de facto standard world-wide was, of course CERN's HTML [Hyper-Text Mark-up Language].

I think that the most widely known use of the Internet is the Worldwide Web of HTML documents. These are passively served via the HTTP protocol and accessed via a web browser. When I first subscribed to a personal Internet access service in the mid 1990s, it was a wonderful experience. I searched for documents on any topic of interest by emailing a search engine. I then received back an email giving me the title, summary & web address of each available document relating to my requested topic. I then displayed my choices out of the listed documents in my web browser for reading and study. And every document on the list was relevant.

Form & Functionality

Presential communication is essentially binary: it is, for the most part, an exchange of information, knowledge and sentiments between two individuals in close prox­imity. It's the most frequent way in which individuals interact within society. It's two-way and mutually interruptible. It is known technically as: point-to-point full duplex.

Less frequently, it can take place between a small [egalitarian] group of up to about seven individuals, also in close proximity, such as when sitting around a table or standing together in a group. In this situation, only one member of the group can be speaking at any given time. Otherwise cacophonous chaos will rapidly set in. The speaker may be interrupted, provided it is done so within the bounds of the protocol we know as Good Manners. But generally, one speaks and the rest listen: point-to-multipoint half duplex in telecommunications speak.

Least frequently, presential human communication can take place in the form of a single speaker addressing a large audience of 12 to 1200 people [or even more]. In this case, although the audience may respond passively, by applause for example, only a single designated individual speaks. This is known technically as: point-to-multipoint simplex or broadcasting.

But what makes these encounters occur? What drives the process? The answer is what I refer to as turbulence — complex-dynamical turbulence within the 'fluid' of meandering human 'molecules' that we call society. It is the physical moving around of people as they go about their daily lives. Encounters may be chance meetings. But they can also be by prior arrangement. Either way, complex-dynamical 'chance' plays a part. After all, arranged encounters essentially arise from chance thoughts arising within a person's mind that result in an arrangement being made.

So essentially, presential communication between individuals within human society is orchestrated by a process of complex-dynamical turbulence, as depicted in the left half of the following diagram.

The material structure and underlying functionality of the Internet, as illustrated on the right above, aren't complex-dynamical. Its main components — nodes [routers], links [transmission cables] and leaves [end-user devices] — do not move: they are geographically static. To be pedantic: some of its components, such as satellite-borne edge routers and mobile leaves [smartphones and tablets], can and do move geographically. Notwithstanding, their motion doesn't constitute complex-dynamical turbulence like that which facilitates presential communication within society. So, though some of the Internet's components move geographically, they're all func­tionally static. The Internet, as a whole, is fixed/static/rigid infrastructure.

Physical Turbulence

Physical social turbulence is driven by individual human beings moving about geo­graphically upon the 'static' ground. A logical equivalent of social turbulence can be built upon the material structure and underlying functionality of the Internet. The latter, however, operates without the need for people to move about geographic­ally. Any pair of users [leaves] can converse across the Internet, by way of a temp­orary virtual circuit, be they in adjacent rooms or on opposite sides of the planet. The same is true for discussions in small egalitarian groups whose members are connected via what's called a virtual network and for an individual speaker making a point-to-multipoint broadcast to a large audience.

In physical society, turbulence comprises the myriad chance presential encounters, which occur continuously between arbitrary pairs of individuals. Social turbulence is motivated or driven by the natural day-to-day comings and goings of people within physical space. This, in turn, is, for the most part, driven by economic necessity.

A layer of protocols, which operates above the basic functionality of the Internet, facilitates the connection and disconnection of virtual circuits between leaves [user devices]. This enables users to encounter without having to circulate physically. But this is not the equivalent of social turbulence. It does not determine if or when any particular pair of Internet users connect with, or disconnect from, each other by chance. Virtual turbulence — the Internet equivalent of physical social turbulence — comes from somewhere else.

This virtual turbulence comes from the users. It emanates from chance thoughts that take place in a user's mind that inspire him to search [using an Internet search engine] for a particular document, subject, person or service that is of interest to him. From the results returned by the search engine, he selects the remote leaf with which he wishes to establish contact. But the virtual social turbulence comes from the user's mind: not from any Internet hardware or software. So the Internet itself is not strictly a complex-dynamical system.

Physical social turbulence can produce chance encounters with people, information and knowledge, which neither individual may initially know exist. It enables both to encounter and learn about people and things, which are new and original to them.

The memories [information, knowledge and wisdom] in his brain are built from his observations, experiences and sufferings, which he accumulates as he travels along his life-path through time, space and the social order. The memories [information, knowledge and wisdom] in her brain are built from her observations, experiences and sufferings, which she accumulates as she travels along her life-path through time, space and the social order.

The Universal Exclusion Principle states that no two objects [in this case, observers] can occupy the same place in space at the same time. This is observable common sense. In direct consequence, no two observers can travel exactly the same life-path through time, space and the social order. Consequently, the information, knowledge and wisdom that he accumulates as he travels his path through life must necessarily be different from, and independent of, the information, knowledge and wisdom that she accumulates as she travels her path through life.

He knows something she doesn't and of which she is probably unaware. She knows something he doesn't and of which he is probably unaware. When they encounter presentially by chance through physical social turbulence, they very likely have something new and original to share.

I have, of course, used a he and a she here for clarity of prose. Presential social encounters between two men or two women are equally valid.

Virtual Turbulence

Virtual social turbulence, on the other hand, can only invoke desires within a user to know more about what he already knows exists but about which he wishes to know more. It can't inspire him to seek to know more about what he doesn't know exists.

This is the crucial difference between the physical social turbulence of real world society and the virtual social turbulence that governs connections through cyber­space. The element of chance, randomness, chaos — or, to be more accurate: det­erministic complex-dynamical motion — within the swirling ocean of people we call society, is vital to one's ability to discover anything that is new and original to him.

A connection between two subscribers, over a virtual circuit across the Internet, fundamentally cannot facilitate deterministic complex-dynamical motion. The very fact that the searcher entered keywords into a search engine to seek what he was looking for necessitates that he must have initially known of at least the idea of what he was looking for.

Any physical presential encounter, on the other hand, has the inherent ability to generate the possibility of a participant discovering something new, about which he can honestly say: "I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams that such a thing as this could even exist". Hence the Internet fundamentally can never replace the full essential functionality of a physical presential [face-to-face] encounter.

I think it appropriate here to emphasise that by "something new", I'm referring to what's already a part of the body of human knowledge but which is new to a particular participant of a presential social encounter. I don't include potential new knowledge that has not yet been discovered, such as "Warp Drive Technology", "The Theory of Everything" or whatever nobody has yet thought about.

Internet Society includes both the hardware and software of the Internet plus its human users. The hardware and software provide the virtual connection between two encountering users. The users' minds provide the complex-dynamical turbul­ence that selects who encounters whom and when. Consequently, Internet Society is complex-dynamical.

But proactively, it can invoke encounters only between users who already have at least some degree of particular knowledge in common. It cannot invoke encounters between users who initially share no particular knowledge. Notwithstanding, it can still, on occasions, result in a user inadvertently learning something truly new. While reading a document that contains knowledge he is looking for, he may also en­counter knowledge he was not particularly looking for and might not have known even existed. But it grabs his interest. He researches it further. He thereby gains knowledge about something he previously didn't know even existed.

The element of complex-dynamical chance has thus been taken beyond the bounds of the user's own previous knowledge, just as in the case of a chance presential encounter through natural social turbulence. The Internet encounter thus has the full functionality of a presential encounter. But we must beware here. In the case of the Internet encounter, the element of chance is a combination of separate chance thoughts within the minds of the two encountering users. This is very differ­ent from the element of chance generated by the day-to-day movement of people within society. The Internet encounter still can't invoke encounters between people who as yet share no ideas in common, which is vital to a healthy inclusive society.

Thus, in comparison with a presential encounter, an Internet encounter has the ad­vantage of instant connection but the disadvantage of vastly reduced bandwidth. It can invoke the instant presence of any other user in the world, but only via text and speech: it cannot convey personal appearance, personality, facial expression body language, smell, touch and all the other channels of presential human communica­tion. Voice and video links can convey only very depleted versions of the real thing.

Presential encounters have yet another advantage: direct observation. Both face-to-face and trans-Internet communication use syntax — the spoken and written words of a natural or artificial language + graphic illustrations — to convey information. A language encapsulates information by encoding it into representative symbols. The symbology of language has no direct tangible link to the reality it represents. It has to be encoded within the mind of the sender [speaker or writer] and interpreted by the mind of the recipient [listener or reader]. This makes the sender free to encode what he likes: be it true or false. Consequently, the recipient has no direct means of knowing whether what he is hearing or reading be truth or lies.

However, only presential encounters afford the recipient a means of assessing the validity of the syntax, namely: direct observation of kinesic and tactile signals from the sender. These give the recipient subtle indications about the sender's honesty, credibility and accuracy. But they are only indications: not facts. And beyond this, they suffer inevitable further distortions resulting from the recipient's own inherent fallibilities of observation, perception and reason.

Virtual Structure

The relationships between Internet subscribers [end-users] are not inherently hier­archical. All are equal before the Internet — at least, as it was originally conceived, designed and implemented. Physically, its core routers, edge routers, leaves and the data links between them form a network, which is the antithesis of a hierarchy. This network is physically fixed.

That some leaves [such as tablets and smartphones] move geographic­ally and some routers are in satellites orbiting the Earth, doesn't drive, or contribute to, social turbulence among Internet users. Logically speaking, all Internet hardware is geographically stationary.

Likewise, the functionality [software] that operates upon the Internet hardware is also logically stationary. There's neither physical nor logical turbulence among the leaves [end-user devices]. So logically too, the Internet is a network: there exists no hierarchical relationship between leaves. They are all equal Internet citizens.

Logically, the Internet simply facilitates a virtual communications link between any two subscribers at any time, providing the called subscriber is not busy [connected to another subscriber]. Just like the old circuit-switched telephone services. So it provides a somewhat inferior deficient version of a face-to-face social encounter that is currently in progress; except that the virtual encounter is instigated by user-deliberation: not by complex-dynamical 'chance'.

The virtual encounter thus has more the nature of an arranged meeting between two people than that of a chance meeting. Consequently, a virtual encounter can't expose the proactive participant to anything that's unknown to him that he wasn't specifically seeking. That's the inevitable deficiency of virtual encounters. Notwith­standing, the arrangement of a virtual encounter is done by the proactive user, with the help of a search engine, from ideas that originated in his own mind.

Buddha likened random thoughts to little monkeys jumping around within the subconscious mind. Once in a while, by chance, a monkey jumps up into conscious view. We can consider this [reasonably, I think] to be a complex-dynamical process taking place within that 86-billion-neuron analogue supercomputer that the user has in his cranium.

Consequently, the user's thought [whose upshot is the keywords he enters into the search engine to seek what he is looking for] is generated by a complex-dynamical process. This, by consequence, makes the virtual encounter a complex-dynamical 'chance' phenomenon. So the Internet + the user's mind, together form a system that can generate one-on-one complex-dynamical encounters across the Internet.

The only deficiency of virtual encounters is that the user can never learn anything new that is outside what he already knows to exists within the bounds of all human knowledge. Whereas, a physical presential encounter can — at least sometimes — throw up information, knowledge and understanding about parts of the repository of all human knowledge of which previously he had been completely unaware.

Thus, although the Internet can host a complex-dynamical society, it fundamentally lacks the facility for learning anything truly new. And this has, over many decades, manifested itself to me in a very concrete way.

Its Golden Age

The Worldwide Web was, at the beginning, a universal open channel for the free and unencumbered distribution of information and knowledge. I soon mounted my own web site — this one. It has been caringly grown and groomed since April 1997.

My driving principle is that it must be legible for as many people as possible. Hence the plain large format with no frivolous artistry. In those early days, the de facto standard graphics-based web browser had every facility for writing and illustrating informative articles and essays. I inserted pictures, diagrams, repeating anima­tions and even embedded programs written in the Java programming language. I used a lot of these so-called applets in my web site to illustrate complex-dynamical principles, navigation & flight control applications, interactive financial systems and much more. With such enriched content, my web site needed — and still needs — to be viewed on a large computer screen. A smartphone is definitely not the horse for the course.

In writing my web site, my motive has always been — and it still is — that I do not write for money: I write because I have something to say. This I publish on the Web just in case it may be of interest to others, however many or few.

I began to receive emails from people who were interested in what I wrote. From 1997 to 2003 my relevant incoming email traffic increased at an accelerating rate. And the content of the responses was certainly not trivial. It was deep, insightful and edifying. But then, for no immediately apparent reason, these email responses began to tail off. By 2010 they had disappeared. There was a small hump between 2013 and 2016. But this was nothing like the first wave. There were even tinier flurries in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2025. But these were nothing of any significance.

What was the cause? Were Internet users becoming disinterested? I don't see how, statistically, the interests of Internet users would change so rapidly and drastically. Had my content become dated? No. Most of my content is not date-sensitive. Was it because there were now more web sites with content similar to mine? In my own searches, I haven't come across evidence of this. Was it because people could no longer find me? Had my web site somehow gone off the radar? That seems to me to be a much more plausible reason for the catastrophic fall in responses around 2004.

Commercialisation

I couldn't help but notice that my own searches were not returning lists with the same level of relevance that they formerly did. The Internet no longer seemed to be the deep and diverse repository of information and knowledge that it once was. My searches now returned references that were either trivial or irrelevant. Except, that is, when I was looking for where to buy something.

It thus became painfully apparent that the web site, as such, was being re-purposed from a free and unencumbered source of information and knowledge into a money-gobbling retail outlet. And to facilitate this, the old passive search engine was being re-purposed to become a proactive commercially-biased censoring engine. Like the land & resources of the planet before it, the free open range of the Worldwide Web had become fenced off as the private property of governments and corporations.

Notwithstanding, this commercially-driven cack-handed re-purposing of the World­wide Web brought with it many problems, some of which verged on catastrophic. The whole principle of web technology is to make all served information open, freely available and accessible to anybody & everybody; the operative word being open. Excellent for education, academia, research — and indeed anybody wishing to part­icipate in free and open discussion about life, the universe and everything.

But uncontrolled openness is anathema to government, administration, business and commerce. They want and need strict privacy, which is the antithesis of the fund­a­mental design principle of the Worldwide Web. The free and open underlying tech­no­logy could not be adapted or shoe-horned, in any practicable way, into a design that supported restriction, privacy and exclusivism. The only option was to const­ruct a layer of security to run on top of [above] the established technology.

This brings to mind the first time Microsoft put password protection into their oper­a­ting system. My friend had a Windows computer. He'd already set up a password. He powered down his machine. "Now boot it", he said. I started the machine and was presented with a password 'dialog box'. I didn't know his password and felt affronted by the 'dialog box'. So I clicked the 'X' at the top left of the frame to dismiss the 'dialog box'. And in I went. I could access everything. I expect Microsoft soon corrected the problem but it did hammer home to me the danger — and indeed the futility — of trying to implement security as a bolt-on afterthought.

What I think business and commerce should have done is design a publicly acces­sible 'TradeNet' to run independently of the Internet as do the Interbank Networks. It should have been designed 'from scratch' [from the bottom up] with an entirely different packet protocol and with security as its fundament. But, so predictably, because of their blinkered focus on profit — and hence cost-cutting — government, business and commerce, using their overwhelming financial muscle, opted to take over the Internet.

Thus we lost our free, open and unencumbered access to that wonderful universe of information and knowledge. And government, business and commerce gained an on-going succession of well-deserved and blatantly predictable security problems.

Wide-Eyed and Legless

I remember when this process of commercialisation began and how my colleagues and I commented as to what would be the blindingly obvious outcome. But the movers and shakers of business, finance and commerce don't listen to tekkies.

Consequently, the commercialization of the Internet was essentially market-driven. Software development was focused on providing what the market demanded. And the market doesn't know what is systemically best for it. It can't spot [or doesn't want to see] potential dangers. It has the mentality of an "I want" two-year-old for the instant gratification of its meandering impulsive desires.

One of those desires was for geographically distributed teams to be able to work seamlessly across the Internet. And providers responded. This involved applications in one person's computer to be, at least in part, temporarily or permanently placed under the control of a person using a computer in another location. It was very sad for me to see that Java was extended to include this type of distributed team functionality.

Essentially everything that takes place in the commercial arena of the Worldwide Web operates through a web browser, which, in turn, operates as an application program running within a GUI [Graphics User Interface] on the operating system of a personal computer. Bolt-on security, at least initially, operated at the application level. So if a hacker entered through the operating system shell terminal, he had freedom of the city.

It's like a condominium building with digital and biometric security at the main gate. But just round the corner are open steps leading down to an unlocked door to the basement providing free upward access to the rest of the building.

Through this and other means, hackers are able to enter in to become ghost mem­bers of corporate workgroups seamlessly connected across the Internet. From there they can steal sensitive data and cause havoc within corporate networks such as by cryptographically locking up corporate data and demanding a ransom payment to unlock it.

Because of its extensions, devised to enable it to compete in the arena of geogra­phically distributed teams, Java became vulnerable to hacking. So, like other offer­ings of its ilk, it became obfuscated and eventually died. From then on, none of my totally benign illustrative Java applets would run as embedded web page illustra­tions. What a needless loss of valuable web functionality. Why couldn't they have just left Java alone as a completely sandboxed facility? All I could do was replace all Java applets with [sometimes animated] image files and offer the C-programs [from which the applets had been derived] for download. But it was never the same.

Divisive Web Sites

Back in the Golden Age, web site design was clear, practical and pragmatic. What the web reader needed to know about web display and navigation was compact and self-intuitive. Everybody knew [or rapidly came to know] what underlined blue links were for. Documents were linked into a web [or network], which allowed people to follow any one of a multiplex of hierarchies according to the particular point of view from which they were approaching their researches. All was neat, plain and simple.

But with commercialisation came arty-farty web design, ostensibly to give web sites what government and commerce perceived as a 'professional' look. Web pages be­came filled with low-relevance pictures, graphics and colour gradients. The univers­ally known underlined blue links disappeared. Web navigation became a frustrating game of 'find the click spot'. What ever it looked like to government and commerce, to me it simply looked tacky. And also increasingly difficult and confusing to use.

Commercialisation brought with it another problem: false attractors. Throughout the Golden Age, HTML documents were categorised by embedding relevant keywords in a special list within the document. Search engines use this list to set references to the web site in the appropriate places within their indexes. A writer has no motive to place anything but relevant keywords in his web page. But with commerce came the business motive. A businessman wants to attract as many victims as possible to his web site. So, as well as placing relevant keywords in his web page, he adds fur­ther popular keywords called false attractors. Hence, users searching for something entirely different end up on his web site, and perhaps buy what he has to sell.

Search engines thus became essentially useless. Chaos reigned. Consequently, search engine proprietors abandoned the embedded keyword lists and switched to analysing the main text of the document for keywords. But keywords people think of when searching for documents on a particular subject are invariably what we call 'big' words that are unlikely to appear within the text of the document itself. Well-written text explains things much more powerfully using phraseology made up of lots of 'little' words. Thus the precision of web searches deteriorated drastically. In desperation, writers sought to pad their text with 'big' keywords. Unfortunately, this practice significantly degrades readability.

Also with commercialisation came another unwelcome challenge for the Web user: a change in the objective of navigation design. For ages I thought that commercial web sites were simply designed by imbeciles. However, I later discovered that there was sound purpose behind their apparent ineptitude.

A prime example was with the web sites of the two largest ISPs in Brazil. The first time, I wanted to report a technical fault. The second time, I wanted to report that my monthly payments were not being credited to my account. I enter the web site and try to navigate to the appropriate place. I soon find myself being pestered and distracted by irrelevant jazzy interloping advertisements to get a more expensive plan. Always and inevitably, I find myself back on a sales page from which there's no appropriate exit.

To this day, I haven't been able to resolve either problem. The alternative option of calling them by phone hasn't worked either. The phone is always answered by an Artificial Imbecile whose stock options don't include my problem and I eventually get defaulted to a menu that doesn't contain an appropriate option either and always finally defaults to a sales menu.

Thus, to me, it seems obvious that the web site navigation logic has been tuned to facilitate sales and strongly discourage the reporting and resolving of technical and administrative issues. Another example is the way in which airline booking sites are designed to encourage young-to-forty-something passengers and to discourage [or filter out] elderly passengers who may require extra care or facilities.

Its Trivialisation

In the free and open territory of the Internet during its Golden Age, users conversed privately by email and voice. They published on their web sites what they wanted to share. Content was universally accessible and searchable according to unbiased rel­evance. Email and voice conversations could be monitored by governments and hackers, but couldn't be restricted or controlled by them. All functionality that users needed, for the free and open distribution of information and knowledge, was there.

Everyone had become free to exchange ideas independently on an individual basis. It was thereby impossible for governments and corporations to influence users of the Internet commercially or capture their minds politically. This was dangerous. To exert control over the Internet by law or decree would be seen as antidemocratic. So government and commerce had to devise inductive covert means to influence, capture and control the collective mind and behaviour of the new Internet masses.

The inductive covert means through which governments and corporations chose to do this was corporate owned social media. By what looks to me like a combination of marketing, publicity and search bias, the big social media corporations cajoled the gullible masses to open accounts on their gaudy mega sites, which provide vari­ous styles and combinations of public email, short message, voice-over-Internet and audio/video streaming services, user content-hosting and blogs, plus the means to search for users and content within each respective site.

I can see nothing provided by these mega sites that isn't already freely and indep­endently available from the open Internet. It's just that the services are provided by the small clique of familiar names with which the generic user has been beguiled to feel most comfortable. Thus captured and contained, his habits, preferences and behaviour are watched and analysed to facilitate his economic exploitation through precisely targeted advertising and condition his mind through political propaganda.

So, as in the Industrial Revolution of 1760–1840, so too in the Internet Revolution of 2004–2012, we, the people, were passively expelled from our natural anthro­po­logical habitat of open lands to be corralled into stifling human zoos we call cities. We were beguiled away from the individual riches and freedoms of open cyberspace into a handful of corporate incarcerative social media mega-sites, where we could be incisively and ruthlessly surveilled, contained, manipulated and exploited.

It is just that the Internet Revolution, due to the speed afforded by computing and telecommunications technologies, occurred in only a tenth of the time. Of course, the process didn't stop in 2012. It is on-going and accelerating. But that formative period 2004–2012 is when the actual paradigm shift took place. And that shift is far more pervasive than it was in the Industrial Revolution.

The physical nature of the Internet frees the social media sites from geographical boundaries, rendering sovereign frontiers and border controls irrelevant. The social media corporates thus not only influence and control the people of the country in which they are registered: they influence and control the people of the world.

Thus, the profound essays, discussions, hypotheses and conjectures of the indivi­dual passively served pre-revolution sites of the open Worldwide Web were replaced by the trivial quips and 'sound bites' of commercial, political and personal postings on social media accounts, which reflected nothing but current fads and fashions. Millions of people each resolutely declaring to the world such otiose revelations as what colour, texture and hardness of shit they did that morning.

The apparent but false sense of anonymity of a virtual connection beguiles the individual into thinking that it's perfectly safe to spill everything about himself to total strangers. This is ideal for analytical software to build a very detailed profile on him for the purpose of commercial or political exploitation.

The Internet Revolution thus had two effects. The first was to tranquillise the mas­ses by focusing their minds on to trivia. The second was to implant un­considered acceptance that the structure, function and fruits of neo-liberal capitalism was best for everybody, despite the war, strife, poverty and disparity that was omni-present before their eyes. It created an insulating moral disconnect within the minds of the masses like that in the conscience of the archetypical American carpet bomber as he dutifully pulls the lever to rain down the napalm that barbecues the little bodies of the screaming defenceless Vietnamese children below, in a quest to impose his nation's unwelcome political ideology on those who don't want it.

Addendum 24 July 2025: The Gaza Genocide, currently being perpetrated by the State of Israel, is now taking place while the world simply looks on. Another example of total moral disconnect. "Never mind the collateral genocide, just so long as we get the few bad guys."

The Worldwide Web has thus, through social media, become the universal channel whereby this covert concoction of 'digital chlorpromazine' is continually dispensed to the masses, tranquillising their minds to facilitate their ordered and peaceful con­tainment and exploitation by the political and commercial elites.

Imposition of Hierarchy

Thus, through social media mega-sites, government and commerce have reigned-in the inhabitants of cyberspace and placed them under hierarchical control, just as ancient kings and emperors did to the inhabitants of terraspace. It's just that the kings and emperors are now the 'big-tech' impresarios of search and social media who orchestrate the elections of psychopathic narcissistic rulers. They have thereby forcibly superimposed upon today's Internet Society the same oppressive system of containment & exploitation that their ancient counterparts did on physical society.

I read somewhere that Google advocated — nay, mandated — that a web site should have its pages arranged in a hierarchy. Out goes the natural network-structure of knowledge. Perhaps nature should re-wire the net­works of the 86-billion-neuron supercomputer in each of our heads into a hierarchy. Then everybody would have the same level of intelligence as those omnipotent cretins we know as governments and corporations.

At the present time, Planet Earth is host to 195 independent sovereign states. Each is ordered according to a hierarchical system of government. Each functions accord­ing to, and is held together by, the rule of physically-enforced national law. Busines­ses within different countries trade with each other. But the post-Revolution Internet is now in the process of rapidly changing all this. Corporate mega-sites are domin­ating and even beginning to monopolise buying and selling within an instant global marketplace. Product choice is narrowing. Competition is dying.

Through the social media mega-sites, the inhabitants of Planet Earth are clearly in the process of being monitored, profiled and categorised for the purpose of exploit­ation by multinational Internet corporations. In effect, the world's 195 independent nations have been covertly integrated to form a single global socio-economy, in­ductively ruled through a hidden hierarchy, which concretises the whims of a small clique of ideologically-motivated manipulative psychopathic narcissists.

My Ideal Internet

In my opinion, the interloping Internet of government & commerce should be separ­ated from the original Internet of information and knowledge. Perhaps the old IP Version 4 addressing could be dedicated to the original open free exchange of infor­mation and knowledge. After all, IPV4 has much more address space than the num­ber of households in the world. All the government and commercial stuff could be confined to IPV6.

My concept of an ideal Internet leaf for the Internet of open and free information and knowledge is my own home-based static installation as follows:

I do all my work essentially on an off-line computer running Linux. I do update it on line from time to time. However, provided it is doing everything correctly as I would wish, there isn't any real need to update the operating system. Off-line, security is not an issue. And it is diminishingly doubtful that any hacker-originated nasties could propagate across a memory stick in Linux EXT2 format. My off-line computer is not equipped with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or any other kind of radio device.

My on-line computer [which also runs Linux] contains no permanently stored private data. All that I send to family, friends and colleagues passes through this computer only within strongly encrypted files. These files are transferred to and from my off-line computer only in strongly encrypted form. Encrypting and decrypting is done only on my off-line computer. The files are passed to and from my on-line computer via a memory stick: not by cable or any form of radio device.

Although I do subscribe to commercial email services and cloud storage, significant email with family, friends and colleagues is exchanged via my own email post office mounted on a non-standard listening port within the range not blocked by most commercial ISPs. Email archives are stored on my off-line computer only.

A Silver Lining

So where does that leave those of us who relished and thrived within the old Web of deep, diverse, free information and knowledge? It's still there. It's simply that a large vociferous censored search monopoly has put it out of reach for the majority of Internet users. But there are other search engines and other ways of searching.

One way is to do a Kademlia search of the eDonkey network. Also search the G2, Gnutella and Freenet networks. Here you will likely find a list of stub-files that act as indexes to otherwise invisible web sites. And no: these networks aren't just for porn: they contain anything and everything. There is also the option to exchange links with people you know via email. You can even get together with a group of friends to form a private email network based on a non-standard listening port that isn't blocked by erstwhile ISPs. You can even go off the Internet onto informal natural infrastructures such as LF & HF radio, VHF global relay and moon bounce.

Thus, even within the present Internet environment, an open free egalitarian global society could form and grow. The ghoulish nightmare, that currently envelops us, contains the seeds of its own collapse. Something needs to be there to pick up the pieces and turn them into something beautiful. But to do this, technology will have to be used wisely. The Internet is of enormous value to humanity, but only as an adjunct to presential interaction: not as a replacement for it.

For example, I am 83 years old now. I live in Brazil. My daughter and one of my sons live in Scotland. My other son lives in Quebec. Travel for me is now difficult to impossible and I don't want my children to visit me in Brazil because for non-streetwise foreigners like them, Brazil is now ex­tremely dangerous. But we have daily contact via the Internet. And it is as if we are present with each other. Notwithstanding, it is only this way be­cause I spent at least 25 years raising them. That daily presential contact was absolutely vital in making our current virtual contacts feel totally adequate and real.

Internet users of like mind could, by mindful deliberation, link up over the Internet to form virtual anthropological communities that could work according to the per­ceived tenets of the Ancient Idyll. But these can only form a template for the real thing. Virtual encounters must be consummated by presential encounters. The virt­ual community must spawn a real one. For this to happen, members must meet in the flesh. They can plan in the virtual. But to build, they need to live together on physical land — terraspace. And in this present world, that is impossible.

An Ominous Future

We are currently entering a frightening second phase of Internet censorship.

The first paradigm shift rendered us invisible through passive censorship. It discon­nected us from the Internet public in general, and also made us unable to find each other. It labelled us as non-approved, irrelevant, dodgy. It pushed us off the radar. Notwithstanding, it didn't actively stop us writing on the Web. Although most people may have no means of finding it, our content is still there and accessible.

A new paradigm shift is now starting to take shape. Major governments are visibly becoming ever more authoritarian. They are now starting to apply active censorship to Internet content. But in the highly populous societies of today, simply enforcing censorship would not be democratically acceptable. They need a legitimate excuse.

And that excuse, as always, is that they are taking a necessary step to protect their people from something bad. The carpet bombers of Vietnam protected their people from communism. The Israeli food-queue snipers protect their people from Hamas terrorists. UK parliamentarians are protecting children from porn and paedophiles.

As in war, so too for Internet censorship: the sledge-hammer mentality is the same: "Never mind the collateral genocide, just so long as we get the few bad guys."

The legislation is an almost unrestricted licence for censorship. It provides such a broad brush that it could be used by the powers-that-be to proactively and forcibly prevent any information, knowledge or discussion entering the public domain that could possibly undermine their comfortable status quo.

So how long do we have?

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© 28 June—09 August 2025 Robert John Morton