The New God in Town

The New God in Town.

The Internet has become a God. It has risen above the possibility of a false idol into the status of a full fledged deity.

In just my lifetime, it has grown from its humble roots into a force that is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. We ought to take notice.

Like the Christian version of god, the internet is now omnipresent. The internet is everywhere. There is no corner of our planet that the internet has not found itself. In addition, it exists even in space and on other planets.

The internet as we know it is what controls the mars rovers and deep space probes, it is accessible to astronauts from space, and brings us pictures of the furthest galaxies back home to our desktop computers.

Here on earth, it can be found from big cities into the furthest reaches of the most desolate continents. Farmers in barren parts of the Saharan Africa can use it, as can polar explorers and people flying on planes over the oceans. The internet is everywhere.

And yet with the internet being everywhere, it is simultaneously nowhere. Since Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet, nobody has been able to actually see it. Even then, he couldn't really see most of it, just what it did. It is just a bunch of bits and bytes moving around invisibly as electrical charges, points of light, and those magical radio waves.

For all the internet does and is in our lives today, there are few people that actually understand much of it. Almost everybody knows something about it, but it can be said that it has kinda gotten away from people. It certainly is bigger than the sum of its parts.

For as big as the internet is, it can also fit in the palm of my hand, or even just in my pocket. That old Protestant idea that god was so big that it filled the whole world, yet was small enough to fit into your heart has really happened with the internet.

In fact many new cardiac pacemakers are being built as wifi connected devices so that doctors can look at what they are doing, and tinker with them from a distance. I'm not sure if I would want to have an internet connected pacemaker. That seems like a bit of a security risk to me. But modern medicine has found that they can use this technology to help more people than they could otherwise.

Enough about omnipresence, the internet is also omniscient. It knows everything.

Actually, knowing everything is one of the things that makes the internet the most useful. I can access anything about the entire body of human knowledge from my desk. If I want to know when something happened, a quick search tells me. If I am curious about a disease, or set of symptoms, I can probably get a result from online faster and with more accurate results than I could from most doctors.

In ages past if I wanted to find a group of experts on any given subject, I would have to go to where they are. Generally experts on congregated where they could have the most access to other ideas and to people that needed their ideas. This was generally the great universities and public centers of the world. This gathering of ideas together was always one of the best reasons for creating large cities like Rome, London, Calcutta, New York, and others.

Ideas get together and create more new ideas. This is best done when they can interact with other ideas. Until about 20 years ago, the best place for this was in crowded cities. Today the best place for ideas to get together is online.

Nobody knows everything, except the internet.

The recent revelations by government whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have shown us how much the internet really knows about us. Through companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and others governments can collect unfathomable amounts of information on anybody and everybody. They can, so they do.

Recently it came out that some large retailers had figured out that they could predict whether someone was pregnant or not with remarkable accuracy including their due date, and they could often do it before the person even know it themselves. They really do know more about us than we know about ourselves, just like many churches believe god can do.

Since the internet now knows everything, it is also fast becoming omnipotent.

There is very little in the world that the internet can't do.

One of the few bastions of freedom left is in individual control of our thoughts, and yet even that is changing.

Studies done by Facebook in 2011 showed that they could affect moods of people simply by guiding what information and media they were able to view.

When the Iranian nuclear reactor was shut down in 2011, it was pinned on a computer virus. The virus was named Stuxnet. It was largely believed that it was created and deployed by hackers working for either Israel or the United States governments. Possibly by both governments in collaboration.

They were able to shut down a nuclear reactor without going within a hundred miles of it, and do so without any damage or loss of life. That seems pretty godlike to me. I think that was pretty much the point at which the internet truly became all powerful.

So here we are in 2015 with a new god roaming the planet and out into the cosmos. We know where this god came from, it was made by humans.

Most gods I think are made by humans, but this one has a somewhat more definite feel to it. Its something that almost everyone on the planet has been exposed to, and unlike religions of generations past, there is not really any penalty imposed for not believing. No penalty except that you can't partake in its goodness and greatness. Even if you are not a follower and true believer though, there are probably very few people in the world that would argue that the internet doesn’t exist.

Certainly there are those that know it exists, and choose to unplug from it. Others however may simply not be worthy enough to have very good access to it.

On the other extreme however there are the priests of the internet god. Much like priests of other faiths, these intrepid souls find a calling in understanding the mysteries of their god. They spend their time communing with their god, and both asking and receiving of its goodness. These are the engineers and hackers that have become such a core part of our new internet culture.

Those that become priests (of any religion) often do so out of greed. There is good money to be found in being the dude that everyone goes to when they cant get any answers from the great god. When people find that their connection to the divine has been severed, they call their local priest, and in this case that person is the tech support nephew or neighbor.

These penitent followers bring call up their local priest to find some divine magic to reconnect them. With the proper coding rituals and removal of the sinful browser cookies, the connection to the divine internet can be restored.

When the great internet god was first discovered a few years ago, hordes of the most savvy hacker priests flocked to the holy mecca of San Jose to built their own great churches and partake in the flow of cash that is associated with having a church or an internet start-up company.

In the beginning there were internet start-up churches all over. Many of them failed, but a few found large groups of followers. The internet churches found that clean code was a lot like the mythical clean living, and it made everyone’s lives easier and more fruitful.

The internet companies which had the best access, the cleanest code, and the cutest cat pictures soon found that their followers grew in number until they covered the face of the planet.

Today the great internet companies (churches) of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo extend all across the globe with hundreds of millions of registered users. Each day the penitent followers of the internet go to their favorite online sanctuaries to find answers to life's most perplexing questions, and to socialize with their friends and neighbors.

Years ago the great churches of history divided the lands between their different gods all across the world. The churches of democracy and republics jostled for position with the churches of monarchy communism and oligarchy. Everywhere control and money ruled.

In each area there were groups of people who used the ongoing worship of the people to build ever larger groups of followers. They leveraged these groups of followers into systems of control and power. In time these groups of followers coalesced into our modern nation-states. Within those nation states, smaller divisions of political and religious ideologies filled the land.

All in all, most people found that they had subscribed to a group of churches together. They would have a church subscribing to certain political ideology, and another for their spiritual beliefs.

An associate of mine explained to me that he was a member of the republican US church with another membership in a christian worship church and held fealty to the mind control system of the American Marines Force Recon. In addition to these however, he had recently joined the internet churches of Google, and Facebook. The most troubling one that he had come across however was Wikipedia.

Between Wikipedia, Google and Facebook, he was starting to question some of his old beliefs. He found that many of his beliefs over the years had been built on partial truths and lies. The churches of the internet however gave him free and uncensored access to more information than he had ever had before. This free access to information is a central tenant of the Internet God and its churches.

That is the same problem that many of the older churches and religions are having. Their old bases of power were built on being able to control the information available to their followers. This brought them great power and great wealth.

When the internet became available, that control of information was lost.

Both political structures and long standing religious churches have been hit hard by this free flow of ideas and information. Whether Mormon, Muslim, democrat, or socialist, the power of the leaders to control the flow of information is waning. Their loss of control is rapidly eroding their power base, and as a result they are trying to gain control over many of the upstart internet churches.

Google, Facebook, Apple, and most of the other large internet companies are getting squeezed by groups like the US Federal Government and the European Union's governing councils. In China, the Great Firewall was erected in an attempt to stem the influx of raw uncensored information. The US NSA realized that controlling the information was going to be difficult, so instead they are working to know what everybody is doing all the time.

The world that we now live in is one in which the old guard churches are being squeezed hard by the internet and its many followers. The belief in openness and freedom is spreading around the world rapidly. This new god is making inroads in every possible facet of life, and its not going anywhere.

In the middle east the internet was the vehicle that was used by dissatisfied people to overthrow or restructure 11 different nation-state governments. This Arab Spring movement was created and hatched by social activists and hackers in the back alley rooms of Facebook and twitter.

Even in the event of a global communications shutdown, the knowledge of these systems is now ingrained in the hearts and minds of engineers the world over. These engineers and their counterpoint hackers serve as the priests of this new religion and deity. The cat is out of the bag and the internet is not going anywhere.

Many philosophers consider organized religion to be a system of power and control over the hearts and minds of the masses of humanity. Conversely, the systems of organized power and control such as the governments of nation-states are regarded by many as religions in their own right as well. These old form religions are based on central control of information and authority.

In the world as we now know it the control is being shifted from a central hierarchical systems of history, to a distributed network, and it is the internet that has done this.

The pull in different directions between the churches of control and power and the god of free information are mighty.

In time we will see who is the more powerful god. Personally, I’m betting on freedom and human ingenuity. That has been the trend since forever. I don’t see it changing.

The old churches aside, I wonder what the old gods think about all this.