The internet is filling up

Who filled the internet – and why? My jaded professional writer pal tells me that professional writing is dead – that the Pareto Principal On Crack applies to writing: 99.9% of writing is regurgitated fluff, and the 0.1% is original and makes lots of money. That doesn’t stop the 99.9 per centers from spewing forth the cut and paste, poorly researched gibberish that could easily be replaced by pictures of kittens with no harm to humanity.

When all is said and done, it costs virtually nothing (out of pocket) to start and run a website, and to publish more words than the King James bible on a weekly basis. The true cost is being inundated with advertisements, and the price of having your consent subconsciously manufactured by little flashing pop up windows telling you that you’re not a man if you don’t smoke the same cigarettes as me. I don’t know. I just can’t get any satisfaction. No, no, no.

The upshot of all of this free publishing is the tragedy of the creative commons – the commons being space on the internet. You remember the tragedy of the commons – everybody brings their fatted calf to eat on the town’s free grass until someone suddenly realizes that there’s no more grass to share and they have to invent a grass government to apportion grass rights to moo-cows and their stewards and before you know it, everyone has to vote for the mayor, the sheriff, the janitor and the lazy Susan. Which means everyone is subjected to more subliminal marketing from lazy Susan et al., delivered through the medium of free blogging sites.

This means the internet is filling up. Seriously. It’s a major problem. There’s only so much bandwidth people, and only so much sand to make computer chips out of. Can you imagine the hippie outcry when they realize that the deserts are no longer growing, but they’re shrinking as people churn out more laptops for disenfranchised teens to crank out bad internet poetry on? The Sahara is a beautiful place but the sand miners are chipping away at its edges, replacing dunes with iPad factories.

Alongside the undesertification of the planet, the internet is running out of addresses. Tomorrow is World IPv6 Day. Because IPv4 isn’t big enough. That’s right, whereas 192.0.0.1 used to be a good address, enough to be found in the world, now it will need to be 192.0.0.0.0.1. That way everyone’s phone, fridge, back door and grandma’s hearing aid can have an IP address. So it can have it’s own blog. Imagine my hearing aid in 60 years time having a speech to text engine that just blogs everything that I hear so that I can sell ads on my site. Awesome!

If IP addresses don’t mean anything to you, think of them as phone numbers for computers. Remember when calling in to Noel Edmonds’ Multi Coloured Swap Shop was the London phone number 01 811 8055? Well when the Great(er) London Phone Schism of May 1990 hit, the number would have become 017 811 8055. I love British Telecom, which by this time had made me hundreds of pounds by being given away to the public by Margaret Thatcher so that we could sell it to foreign investors a few days later. But their ability to plan ahead is a little lacking. So after changing London phone numbers with an extra digit in 1990, they had to do it again in 1999 – so the Swap Shop would have been 0207 811 8055. Would have been if Noel Edmonds hadn’t moved on to killing people such as hod carrier Michael Lush.

So on June 8th 2011, a few websites around the world are going to test the extra numbers in IPv6. Don’t be flying in a plane that day is all I’m saying. I remember partying like it was 1999.