The Organic Internet

These days I came upon the notion of private and public spaces online. I think there is a misconception about that. Private or public spaces are terms that deal with property of space. First of all, the internet is no physical space, that means you can’t own it. The german word for owning is besitzen, which literally translated means, to sit upon.

You can’t sit upon digital spaces - you can draw arbitrary borders secured by … digital technology. But those borders aren’t physical either and don’t secure in the way we are used to that walls secure us.

I guess, we can’t really understand what information is - not yet. Opensource coders long argued that Information wants to be free making an analogy that free code is equal to free speech. I don’t think Information really wants to be free. It’s free from the beginning. The best metaphor I can imagine is water. Water is free, pretty much so even. Flows around shit and stuff and doesn’t cost a damn thing. But if you’re stupid you pollute it and if your clever you bottle and sell it. That’s what the big players do. Since water is free they do whatever they want with it.

Now, in comparison to water information can be treated even freer. We can copy information. We can pollute it without without the climate go all mad. But we can also bottle it an sell it. But unlike water, that might be polluted and now has to be bought in bottles, we don’t need to buy information to survive. Life and death don’t depend upon the internet, not yet, although it has a massive impact on the global society.

Information can’t be owned. But it can be bottled and sold because we see information in the same terms as all other commodities. Why else would to buy a license to read a book or listen to a song that actually only exists in ones and zeros. The clever companies make you believe that you buy value, while they can copy a song without costs infinitely. You have to realize what that means. When you buy an abstraction of reality, pure information, you reaffirm yourself and the company that they have the right to do so, like bottled water.

Meanwhile, all the information to produce the knowledge how to process and control the flows of information online are for free available online. It’s an asexual reproducing knowledge system. I can learn online how to help evolve the online system.

I know not everybody can become a webdeveloper, systemadmin or hardware crack. But the least you can do is trying to understand that information online can’t be owned, neither public nor private. We have the technology and the information to produce an internet, that is autonomous and decentralized. An Internet of things which all contribute to the global network of information. My kindle can be a webserver and so can your fridge. For that we have to get rid of the notion that the Internet has to there for us 24/7. That is an artifact of modern service design and not our own doing. What is more comfortable and cheaper for a financial corporation then having an office, open from 8 to 5? An online website where customers can do their business 24/7 and on the weekend.

I will go overboard now and end this article by saying that the Internet might be a living thing, our baby, which we have to care for, growing it in our own image.