In ancient times, I probably wouldn't have been an explorer. The world was too big.
But now, the world is small. So what few places aren't well-charted, or known, or inhabited, always leave me curious.
In the real world, this is true of
small Pacific islands used by
Americans in the
mid-20th century. There are places that were of serious importance for things ranging from guano mining to logistics in fighting against the Japanese to nuclear bomb testing. And since those uses they've been largely abandoned.
For many of them, the US Fish & Wildlife Service
stops in "every year or two" to check up. Aside from that, it's wild birds and wild cats that were brought along on ships. Maybe the occasional airstrip for emergency landings.
I mean, we could go to these places. It's possible. We just don't, because they're not important anymore. Who knows what they'll be needed for again in the distant future.
Meanwhile, think of the people who still do go. They're either military personnel there to clean up an airfield, or Fish & Wildlife staff to record a statistic or two. Are these jobs totally cushy positions because they're quiet and situated on the world's most private beaches? Or are they hideous for being so disconnected from modern society?
I get the same vibe from the Internet.
No, really.
The absolute center core of the net is a more fascinating way to explore history than any museum could be. Just take the endings of web addresses you know and love: .com, .net, .org, .edu and so on. Then add in the countries: .uk, .jp, .kr, etc. And the miscellaneous stuff like .biz, .info, and even .museum. (All of these endings are called domains, so keep that in mind if I drop that word later on). But there's more than that.
For a while there, you could just enter in
http://to/ and that was a valid address. (That's really .to, the two-letter code for Tonga, but since there's no words before it you don't even need the dot). But there's also
.arpa used in the root networks - the guys who tie the backbones of the backbones together. That's because ARPA, the US military's research agency, funded the inventing of the Internet. And their basic stuff, which was supposed to be replaced, is now keeping the entire world connected.
Then there's a whole shadow Internet outside that system. Anonymizer software, frequently used in countries with repressive regimes, uses domains like
.onion and
.freenet. These things are "on the Internet" in the sense that you access them over a network with your computer, but they're also "
not on the Internet" because it's not within this one big unified network.
But it's not limited to just democracy advocates trying to fly under the radar. Allegedly, NSA internal email uses
.nsa and Hotmail's internal workings are inside
.gbl, so that they can't be reached easily by random Joes on the Internet. As far as
your computer is concerned, it's
never heard of .nsa or .gbl.
The Internet wasn't always so centralized for ordinary users, and technically still isn't. Leaving the domain stuff behind for a second, dial-up services in the 90s like AOL and CompuServe often listed what features their service came with. A lot of it involved special content or unique chat rooms, but it was also access to certain parts of what was coming together as The Internet. So they listed 'WWW Access' as just one feature alongside other stuff like
Usenet and
Gopher. Nowadays, things are much simpler: your ISP sells you Web access and off you go, because the Web ended up replicating the functions of Usenet (forums), Gopher (uh, just browsing), Finger (blogs) and so on. [Yes, techies, I'm glossing over the differences between domains and protocols. Apples and oranges. If you know, that's great, but I'm not burdening readers who've made it this far with that.]
But those things didn't die forever. You can still use Usenet and Gopher. Usenet fell into the hands of warez jockeys, so ISPs dropped it and you have to go pay someone a subscription for access. Gopher is around, and free, and usable right now with a Firefox plugin or alternative browsers like Camino. Wikipedia suggests that there are 150 Gopher servers hanging around. That's a tiny amount. On that alone I gather it's a little old club for old guys who enjoyed "the good old days" on Gopher sites and occasionally want to stroll down memory lane.
But in a sense, playing with these things is like diving backwards in time. Gopher, or Darknet (which is a spinoff of the .onion thing mentioned above), lets you see what the Web looked like in the 90s. For me it's a whirlwind back to childhood. It's the only history museum that's ever been interesting, and it's because you can actually relive some experiences, however trivial, instead of looking at an object in a glass case and making your imagination do all the work. So it is as the root of the Internet, too. We take for granted that the entire thing is held together by some links that ARPA strung together in the 70s and 80s.
What we have now will eventually be Memory Lane too. The ARPA stuff is staying in place, even with a big conversion we'll all have to make to IPv6, but the whole domain thing is about to get real freaky. They added support for foreign languages. So right now, if you're Japanese and you want to read about Nintendo, you to go
www.nintendo.co.jp - those are English letters, which many Japanese aren't so good with. (That's probably why they picked up QR codes so fast, but that's a different story.) In the future, it'll look more like:
http://例え.テスト. By the way, you actually
can click that. Look at what it does to your URL bar!
This stuff blows my mind. IT'S SO COOL!
Ahem. Sorry. Nerd freakout.
It all makes me wish I could see that root. Maybe it's like getting out of the Matrix and meeting the Architect. Granted, it's probably just a data center somewhere, but it's only in Hollywood that the inside of the clockworks looks interesting. The core of the Internet is put together by an offshoot of IEEE, which is a big academic body for engineering.
So basically, whether you're on the world's most remote island, or at the center of mankind's greatest invention, you're really looking at a handful of academic types hanging around, being all academic-y.
There's an awesome book in that parallel somewhere.
