Eulogy for the World Wide Web (1993-2025)
How hard is it to put into words what it has meant to us.
This ephemeral network of networks, connecting us from all corners of this globe through its spokes. No person who was not alive for most of its existence will be able to understand what it was like to have its vastness by our side in the waning years of the 20th century and beginning of the new millennium. Incandescent, it was, a light unlike any other invention than Gutenberg’s press or Edison’s bulb.
I will not regale every epoch of its time but the moment that stands out in the brief life of the World Wide Web was the demarcation of the Eternal September.
In that immediacy after The Web was public, that very moment, a blip flashed in many mind’s eyes, a complex future in that farsight where The Web would succumb to its own success in a gradual degeneration.Many of us can hear its echoes as we move to-and-fro in the wasteland of its absence in what is now just: online. We’re reminded in this sparse desert of the internet not to stray towards mirages, those hallucinations that include proprietary solutions among other dead letters. Discord helps reign over those shifting and empty dunes; opaque tendrils choke, fuzzing rational thought.
The Web’s predecessors, ARPANET among them, and like and unlike children, IRC and Tor among them, mourn if they had corporeal form with tears to shed.
In between our lamentations it may not feel that it is so, but it’s better to be gone and remembered fondly than alive and hated. Another father, one of flesh, outlives his son, and it was not war that brought down the deceased but many of those who-shall-not-be-named as to not sully this epitaph—many low men and women alive today, our Unix time 1,763,479,427—who drained the World Wide Web of its life for their own machinations.
For this we must remember.
The World Wide Web lived because of our thirst of knowledge, and brought us closer to harmonising the natural chaos of the mind. From our collective efforts it served humanity at all moments of its existence, never wavering in its creative excess, never ceasing to grow without giving, it taught without expectation of return, and it provided an outlet for our every desire.
It lives on in our minds, marking all future knowledge with its brand of magnanimity and towering brilliance. And be that as it may, the world as we knew it no longer exists, but from those eventual sands that constitute decommissioned blood-red, deep-green, and blue-lustre wafers can rise something more permanent and everlasting: the World Wide Web’s human depth at its core.
Go forth and celebrate a digital life well led, we head back into that familiar darkness but not without the thought of our Web's uniquely illuminating legacy, let it guide us.
Tags: Technology
