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We are the Web

Worth reading: When I got home I cracked open my new issue (yes, I still enjoy a good dose of printed pages) of Wired (August 2005) and came upon Kevin Kelly's article "We are the Web." He gives his view of where the digital world came from and where it's heading.
Written by Dan Farber, Inactive

Worth reading: When I got home I cracked open my new issue (yes, I still enjoy a good dose of printed pages) of Wired (August 2005) and came upon Kevin Kelly's article "We are the Web." He gives his view of where the digital world came from and where it's heading. It's a romantic, profound and compelling vision, and likely more right than wrong. Here is Kelly's coda:

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.
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