Webtop Mania

This sacred text, written by some unknown hagiographer, pretends to depict the theory of Creation of the Fundamental Search Engine and how it was conceived by the gods. The original texts are thought to have been translated from a lost page somewhere near the end of the internet at babelfish. They probably date from a pre-semantic web era, but it's difficult to say which.

We're back in 1994 (or so), at the Computer Sciences Department of Stanford University, California. Two friends, let's call them Laurel and Sargi, have just engaged an amene conversation:

L: Hey Sargi, look here.
S: What?
L: Consider an internet page. I know where it links to ... but ... I don’t know where it’s linked from.
S: Why should I care?
L: Ok, remember our professor’s papers? And the citations they contain to their peers?
S: What about?
L: Well, citations to peers in a paper are pretty much like links to other pages in a webpage. You know who the paper cites to, but you don’t know whom the paper is cited from.
S: Boorriiiinnnng! ....
L: Wait, but the thing IS what determines the relevance of a paper is the number of citations it gets from its peers.
S: So?
L: So, It’s a pain in the butt to actually calculate it. Editors spend a lot of their effort in counting how many citations a paper gets. That way scholarly colleagues may rank the relevance of their papers.
S: Sheesh, you really have weird interests.
L: Maybe, BUT if we could tell how many links a page gets, then we could rank it!
S: Well Laurel, that must be the most pointless idea I've ever heard in my whole life!
L: Yeah! And I convinced my teacher to endorse it as my final project. Wanna help me?
S:Ok, sure! Let's do it.

Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.

Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal. He happens to play ball - real hard - both at the White House AND at Google. He's playing with fire though, and it could easily backfire on his employers.
The new Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the XXIst century, a prototypical example of the lacquay that out-wits the masters of the house he serves. This article, and the Edward Snowden case, are a glympse iMHO to a silent-war going on, mostly between the future world-dominating nations (or corporations???), US, China, ..., but also Facebook, Google, Baidu, etc ...

Scenarios outcomes? I would bet on political borders to become obsolete, and on social-network based new nations (or tribes?). Alexander, Julius, Napoleon, Adolf and Benito, they all had big plans, but they just missed the right technology to make the entire world yield into whole "Gaia Pax". Today, technology is almost ripe, almost, to make it a breeze to administrate over 100 billions of citizens, within the blink of a byte. Not only there CAN be only one, but I'd wager, there WILL be only one. It's only a matter of WHEN, and it's definitively not an IF.

For those who fight on good side of the force, I have only one word for advice (or is it three?): "peer-to-peer". Stick with this notion deeply incepted in your mind and we'll be safe enough. Nrº1 enemies? Anything that qualifies as a "walled-gardens" ;-)