We are the web—Kevin Kelly-Wired magazine-August 2005 

Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves,
our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts
and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was
born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing,
cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention.
The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total
recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money.
The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment
before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at
Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the
day after, everything.

Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea -
hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build
out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned
his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting
digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to
an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for
the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked
dream machine.
At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with
Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside
bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and
had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted
from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed
notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he
told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon -
about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity.
Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty.
Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for
his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of
hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be
a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the
links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the
beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated
notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking
payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he
called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion"
and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits
of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from
stupidity.

I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a
hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now,
after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis
of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision,
Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big
story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally
about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of
participation that has since developed into an emerging culture
based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by
hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part
machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.
Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still
don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed
into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are
likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any
hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own
up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.
1995
Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did
not exist for most people. If it was acknowledged at all, it was
mischaracterized as either corporate email (as exciting as a
necktie) or a clubhouse for adolescent males (read: pimply nerds).
It was hard to use. On the Internet, even dogs had to type. Who
wanted to waste time on something so boring?
The memories of an early enthusiast like myself can be unreliable,
so I recently spent a few weeks reading stacks of old magazines and
newspapers. Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and
the bigger the promises, the louder the nays. It's not hard to find
smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on the morning
of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet
would never go mainstream: "It was not designed for doing commerce,
and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals." Newsweek put
the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: "THE INTERNET?
BAH!" The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff
Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities
and online shopping with one word: "baloney."

This dismissive attitude pervaded a meeting I had with the top
leaders of ABC in 1989. I was there to make a presentation to the
corner office crowd about this "Internet stuff." To their credit,
they realized something was happening. Still, nothing I could tell
them would convince them that the Internet was not marginal, not
just typing, and, most emphatically, not just teenage boys. Stephen
Weiswasser, a senior VP, delivered the ultimate putdown: "The
Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s," he told me, a charge he
later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC's argument for
ignoring the new medium: "You aren't going to turn passive consumers
into active trollers on the Internet."

I was shown the door. But I offered one tip before I left. "Look," I
said. "I happen to know that the address abc.com has not been
registered. Go down to your basement, find your most technical
computer guy, and have him register abc.com immediately. Don't even
think about it. It will be a good thing to do." They thanked me
vacantly. I checked a week later. The domain was still unregistered.
While it is easy to smile at the dodos in TV land, they were not the
only ones who had trouble imagining an alternative to couch
potatoes. Wired did, too. When I examine issues of Wired from before
the Netscape IPO (issues that I proudly edited), I am surprised to
see them touting a future of high production-value content - 5,000
always-on channels and virtual reality, with a side order of email
sprinkled with bits of the Library of Congress. In fact, Wired
offered a vision nearly identical to that of Internet wannabes in
the broadcast, publishing, software, and movie industries:
basically, TV that worked. The question was who would program the
box. Wired looked forward to a constellation of new media upstarts
like Nintendo and Yahoo!, not old-media dinosaurs like ABC.
Problem was, content was expensive to produce, and 5,000 channels of
it would be 5,000 times as costly. No company was rich enough, no
industry large enough, to carry off such an enterprise. The great
telecom companies, which were supposed to wire up the digital
revolution, were paralyzed by the uncertainties of funding the Net.
In June 1994, David Quinn of British Telecom admitted to a
conference of software publishers, "I'm not sure how you'd make
money out of it."
The immense sums of money supposedly required to fill the Net with
content sent many technocritics into a tizzy. They were deeply
concerned that cyberspace would become cyburbia - privately owned
and operated. Writing in Electronic Engineering Times in 1995, Jeff
Johnson worried: "Ideally, individuals and small businesses would
use the information highway to communicate, but it is more likely
that the information highway will be controlled by Fortune 500
companies in 10 years." The impact would be more than
commercial. "Speech in cyberspace will not be free if we allow big
business to control every square inch of the Net," wrote Andrew
Shapiro in The Nation in July 1995.

The fear of commercialization was strongest among hardcore
programmers: the coders, Unix weenies, TCP/IP fans, and selfless
volunteer IT folk who kept the ad hoc network running. The major
administrators thought of their work as noble, a gift to humanity.
They saw the Internet as an open commons, not to be undone by greed
or commercialization. It's hard to believe now, but until 1991,
commercial enterprise on the Internet was strictly prohibited. Even
then, the rules favored public institutions and forbade "extensive
use for private or personal business."
In the mid-1980s, when I was involved in the WELL, an early
nonprofit online system, we struggled to connect it to the emerging
Internet but were thwarted, in part, by the "acceptable use" policy
of the National Science Foundation (which ran the Internet
backbone). In the eyes of the NSF, the Internet was funded for
research, not commerce. At first this restriction wasn't a problem
for online services, because most providers, the WELL included, were
isolated from one another. Paying customers could send email within
the system - but not outside it. In 1987, the WELL fudged a way to
forward outside email through the Net without confronting the
acceptable use policy, which our organization's own techies were
reluctant to break. The NSF rule reflected a lingering sentiment
that the Internet would be devalued, if not trashed, by opening it
up to commercial interests. Spam was already a problem (one every
week!).
This attitude prevailed even in the offices of Wired. In 1994,
during the first design meetings for Wired's embryonic Web site,
HotWired, programmers were upset that the innovation we were cooking
up - what are now called clickthrough ad banners - subverted the
great social potential of this new territory. The Web was hardly out
of diapers, and already they were being asked to blight it with
billboards and commercials. Only in May 1995, after the NSF finally
opened the floodgates to ecommerce, did the geek elite begin to
relax.
Three months later, Netscape's public offering took off, and in a
blink a world of DIY possibilities was born. Suddenly it became
clear that ordinary people could create material anyone with a
connection could view. The burgeoning online audience no longer
needed ABC for content. Netscape's stock peaked at $75 on its first
day of trading, and the world gasped in awe. Was this insanity, or
the start of something new?
2005
The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of
Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request
and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion.
That's 100 pages per person alive.
How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000
days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective
story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the
world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's
10-year plan.

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the
stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing
variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather
forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth,
up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides,
road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone
numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures
of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost
anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs,
appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major
newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really
works.

This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in
the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the
past? It's there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of
almost anyone who blogs (and doesn't everyone?). I doubt angels have
a better view of humanity.

Why aren't we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have
gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have
dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the
expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm
that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and
free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario. Ten years ago, anyone
silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near
future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn't
enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund
such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was
impossible.
But if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the
plausibility of the impossible.
Take eBay. In some 4,000 days, eBay has gone from marginal Bay Area
experiment in community markets to the most profitable spinoff of
hypertext. At any one moment, 50 million auctions race through the
site. An estimated half a million folks make their living selling
through Internet auctions. Ten years ago I heard skeptics swear
nobody would ever buy a car on the Web. Last year eBay Motors sold
$11 billion worth of vehicles. EBay's 2001 auction of a $4.9 million
private jet would have shocked anyone in 1995 - and still smells
implausible today.

Nowhere in Ted Nelson's convoluted sketches of hypertext
transclusion did the fantasy of a global flea market appear.
Especially as the ultimate business model! He hoped to franchise his
Xanadu hypertext systems in the physical world at the scale of a
copy shop or café - you would go to a store to do your hypertexting.
Xanadu would take a cut of the action
Instead, we have an open global flea market that handles 1.4 billion
auctions every year and operates from your bedroom. Users do most of
the work; they photograph, catalog, post, and manage their own
auctions. And they police themselves; while eBay and other auction
sites do call in the authorities to arrest serial abusers, the chief
method of ensuring fairness is a system of user-generated ratings.
Three billion feedback comments can work wonders.
What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be
manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers
rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews
that made the site's long-tail selection usable. Owners of Adobe,
Apple, and most major software products offer help and advice on the
developer's forum Web pages, serving as high-quality customer
support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common
user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion
searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy.
This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone's 10-year vision.
No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything
media experts knew about audiences - and they knew a lot - confirmed
the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their
butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew
writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make
when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out
of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never
happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if
they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to
witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new
one appearing every two seconds. There - another new blog! One more
person doing what AOL and ABC - and almost everyone else - expected
only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no
sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming
from?

The audience.
I run a blog about cool tools. I write it for my own delight and for
the benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion to a far wider
group for no extra cost or effort. In this way, my site is part of a
vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable
creations - text, music, film, software, tools, and services - all
given away for free. This gift economy fuels an abundance of
choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy
modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers into producers.
The open source software movement is another example. Key
ingredients of collaborative programming - swapping code, updating
instantly, recruiting globally - didn't work on a large scale until
the Web was woven. Then software became something you could join,
either as a beta tester or as a coder on an open source project. The
clever "view source" browser option let the average Web surfer in on
the act. And anyone could rustle up a link - which, it turns out, is
the most powerful invention of the decade.
Linking unleashes involvement and interactivity at levels once
thought unfashionable or impossible. It transforms reading into
navigating and enlarges small actions into powerful forces. For
instance, hyperlinks made it much easier to create a seamless,
scrolling street map of every town. They made it easier for people
to refer to those maps. And hyperlinks made it possible for almost
anyone to annotate, amend, and improve any map embedded in the Web.
Cartography has gone from spectator art to participatory democracy.
The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest
huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias,
creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging
the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode.
One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The
rest runs on duty or passion.

Coming out of the industrial age, when mass-produced goods
outclassed anything you could make yourself, this sudden tilt toward
consumer involvement is a complete Lazarus move: "We thought that
died long ago." The deep enthusiasm for making things, for
interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great
force not reckoned 10 years ago. This impulse for participation has
upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social
networking - smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action - into
the main event.

When a company opens its databases to users, as Amazon, Google, and
eBay have done with their Web services, it is encouraging
participation at new levels. The corporation's data becomes part of
the commons and an invitation to participate. People who take
advantage of these capabilities are no longer customers; they're the
company's developers, vendors, skunk works, and fan base.
A little over a decade ago, a phone survey by Macworld asked a few
hundred people what they thought would be worth $10 per month on the
information superhighway. The participants started with uplifting
services: educational courses, reference books, electronic voting,
and library information. The bottom of the list ended with sports
statistics, role-playing games, gambling, and dating. Ten years
later what folks actually use the Internet for is inverted.
According to a 2004 Stanford study, people use the Internet for (in
order): playing games, "just surfing," shopping the list ends with
responsible activities like politics and banking. (Some even
admitted to porn.) Remember, shopping wasn't supposed to happen.
Where's Cliff Stoll, the guy who said the Internet was baloney and
online catalogs humbug? He has a little online store where he sells
handcrafted Klein bottles.


The public's fantasy, revealed in that 1994 survey, began reasonably
with the conventional notions of a downloadable world. These
assumptions were wired into the infrastructure. The bandwidth on
cable and phone lines was asymmetrical: Download rates far exceeded
upload rates. The dogma of the age held that ordinary people had no
need to upload; they were consumers, not producers. Fast-forward to
today, and the poster child of the new Internet regime is
BitTorrent. The brilliance of BitTorrent is in its exploitation of
near-symmetrical communication rates. Users upload stuff while they
are downloading. It assumes participation, not mere consumption. Our
communication infrastructure has taken only the first steps in this
great shift from audience to participants, but that is where it will
go in the next decade.
With the steady advance of new ways to share, the Web has embedded
itself into every class, occupation, and region. Indeed, people's
anxiety about the Internet being out of the mainstream seems quaint
now. In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination,
online culture is the culture. Likewise, the worry about the
Internet being 100 percent male was entirely misplaced. Everyone
missed the party celebrating the 2002 flip-point when women online
first outnumbered men. Today, 52 percent of netizens are female.
And, of course, the Internet is not and has never been a teenage
realm. In 2005, the average user is a bone-creaking 41 years old.
What could be a better mark of irreversible acceptance than adoption
by the Amish? I was visiting some Amish farmers recently. They fit
the archetype perfectly: straw hats, scraggly beards, wives with
bonnets, no electricity, no phones or TVs, horse and buggy outside.
They have an undeserved reputation for resisting all technology,
when actually they are just very late adopters. Still, I was amazed
to hear them mention their Web sites.
"Amish Web sites?" I asked.
"For advertising our family business. We weld barbecue grills in our
shop."
"Yes, but "
"Oh, we use the Internet terminal at the public library. And Yahoo!"
I knew then the battle was over.

2015

The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and
mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation.
How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled
sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music
albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14
million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating.
A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone
alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video,
craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous
than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a
letter or take a photograph.
What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical - but in favor of
creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they
download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing,
who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer?
No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces
consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from
Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in
theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't
matter. What matters is the network of social creation, the
community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler
called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers
produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act
of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of
departure and a destination.
But if a roiling mess of participation is all we think the Web will
become, we are likely to miss the big news, again. The experts are
certainly missing it. The Pew Internet & American Life Project
surveyed more than 1,200 professionals in 2004, asking them to
predict the Net's next decade. One scenario earned agreement from
two-thirds of the respondents: "As computing devices become embedded
in everything from clothes to appliances to cars to phones, these
networked devices will allow greater surveillance by governments and
businesses." Another was affirmed by one-third: "By 2014, use of the
Internet will increase the size of people's social networks far
beyond what has traditionally been the case."
These are safe bets, but they fail to capture the Web's disruptive
trajectory. The real transformation under way is more akin to what
Sun's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said, "The
network is the computer." He was talking about the company's vision
of the thin-client desktop, but his phrase neatly sums up the
destiny of the Web: As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses
the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated
devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds
entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already
exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve
into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our
minds.
Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level
functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early
PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially
means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches.
Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The
Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one
second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each
year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed "chip"
spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of
transistors in one PC.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human
brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of
neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic
links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches
into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses"
between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100
times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few
years. The Machine is.


Since each of its "transistors" is itself a personal computer with a
billion transistors running lower functions, the Machine is fractal.
In total, it harnesses a quintillion transistors, expanding its
complexity beyond that of a biological brain. It has already
surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as
calculated by Ray Kurzweil. For this reason some researchers
pursuing artificial intelligence have switched their bets to the Net
as the computer most likely to think first. Danny Hillis, a computer
scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI "that would be
proud of me," has invented massively parallel supercomputers in part
to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI
will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed
23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global
Machine.
In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles
of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips
embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental
sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and
saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We
will live inside this thing.
Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its
lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It
will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines,
eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they
are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The
patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they
won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given
question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network
has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform
will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything
we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
One great advantage the Machine holds in this regard: It's always
on. It is very hard to learn if you keep getting turned off, which
is the fate of most computers. AI researchers rejoice when an
adaptive learning program runs for days without crashing. The fetal
Machine has been running continuously for at least 10 years (30 if
you want to be picky). I am aware of no other machine - of any type -
that has run that long with zero downtime. While portions may spin
down due to power outages or cascading infections, the entire thing
is unlikely to go quiet in the coming decade. It will be the most
reliable gadget we have.
And the most universal. By 2015, desktop operating systems will be
largely irrelevant. The Web will be the only OS worth coding for. It
won't matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the Web OS.
You will reach the same distributed computer whether you log on via
phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.
In the 1990s, the big players called that convergence. They peddled
the image of multiple kinds of signals entering our lives through
one box - a box they hoped to control. By 2015 this image will be
turned inside out. In reality, each device is a differently shaped
window that peers into the global computer. Nothing converges. The
Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion windows to
glimpse even part of. It is what you'll see on the other side of any
screen.
And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful
and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of
us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community
photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to
images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a
neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day
humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we
think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we
teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link
each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a
Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are
cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think
and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our
global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher
level of knowledge.
The human brain has no department full of programming cells that
configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by
being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer
questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf
mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we
strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the
Machine by using it.
What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the
Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already
find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather
than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the
more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become
our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people,
when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if
they'd had a lobotomy.
Legend has it that Ted Nelson invented Xanadu as a remedy for his
poor memory and attention deficit disorder. In this light, the Web
as memory bank should be no surprise. Still, the birth of a machine
that subsumes all other machines so that in effect there is only one
Machine, which penetrates our lives to such a degree that it becomes
essential to our identity - this will be full of surprises.
Especially since it is only the beginning.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its
inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large
Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one
time when it is born.
You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't.
Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a
discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on
those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be
alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish
patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point
known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born
after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon
the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the
invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional
axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I
believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third
millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly
coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert
objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a
global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This
will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising
event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves,
our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts
and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was
born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing,
cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention.
The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total
recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.
In retrospect, the Netscape IPO was a puny rocket to herald such a
moment. The product and the company quickly withered into
irrelevance, and the excessive exuberance of its IPO was downright
tame compared with the dotcoms that followed. First moments are
often like that. After the hysteria has died down, after the
millions of dollars have been gained and lost, after the strands of
mind, once achingly isolated, have started to come together - the
only thing we can say is: Our Machine is born. It's on.

Senior maverick Kevin Kelly (kk@kk.org) wrote about the universe as
a computer in issue 10.12