We'll be archived, you and I.

In case you’ve banged your head and suffered a bout of amnesia lately, let me inform you that we are currently living in the year 2009. The Internet, if Wikipedia is to be believed, originated in the 1960s, as little more than a couple of computers joined together like two creepy, telepathic twins. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that it became a wide-spread phenomenon; a technological spurt in the direction of scientific advancement which led to hundreds of millions of computers all fundamentally interconnected by something which doesn’t even technically exist – The Internet.

I think it’s fair to say that it would be pretty hard for any of us in a modern society to imagine life without the internet. It’s like trying to imagine life without telephones, or the wheel. The era we find ourselves fettered to is a fickle one. An era where society is changing faster than most of us can keep up with (unless you’re a social elitist, in which case please go bathe your eyes in a pool of acid), where we rely more than ever on the electronic and the non-existent. The Internet; the economy; even our own imaginations as we obsessively strive to improve upon what we have.

I think the Internet is rather unique in its unprecedentedness. I mean, most inventions like the car, the aeroplane, even the telephone, are built upon over centuries of observation; slow and gradual improvements which make what we have faster, safer, more beautiful, etc. The Internet is something which has no precedent. No one but a handful of crazy, white-coated scientists in an underground lab somewhere would have guessed thirty years ago that we would have this. Not even twenty years ago would they have expected it to become such an integral part of our lives; something which our society thrives on. Leans on, even.

But here’s the really interesting part. You and I are both part of a generation that dominates the early stages of the Internet’s life. A hundred years from now, people will be studying the origins of the Internet; to them it will be a fascinating and truly pivotal point in our history, en par with the invention of the atomic bomb, or the formation of The U.S.A. as an independent country. And while they trawl through the archives of websites, forums and data caches alike, our words will be etched in the very annals of the Internet itself.

A hundred years from now, all of us will be dead. In five hundred years, we’ll be very dead. But people will still choose to study the Internet and the history of; and we’ll be there, right at the beginning of it all. You and I.

It’s rather fascinating when you think about it. To think that one day, people will be studying forums which we, in our time, primarily used as a means to call people rude names and insult their mothers. People will speak differently too. They’ll look at our (mostly incorrect) “Classical English” with their post-modern eyes and guffaw at the way our pronunciation hardly matches our spelling, or how the word “sleep” doesn’t have four ‘e’s or whatever. And then they’ll look back at Shakespeare and say: “Why is it written in Ancient German?”

But we won’t be offended, because like I said, we’ll be dead. Some of us will die peacefully in our sleep at the age of 87, with four generations of our family crowding around the bedside, expressing their love and gratitude for us. Some of us will die alone in an unheated, one-bedroom flat in an obscure, dilapidated apartment block, completely forsaken by society and forgotten by anyone who ever loved us. Some of us will die in the inevitable World War 3, in which the revived Allies (now including Germany) take on the whole of Asia, resulting in a nuclear holocaust which will devastate approximately 96% of the entire world, and cut the human populous down to numerous diasporae with a cumulative total of about 100,000.

And the vibrant, sparkling phoenix that will arise from the ashes as a broken and schizophrenic society will pick up the pieces and start all over again, blaming us for their troubles. Maybe they’ll even learn from it; finally recognising the importance of people over things.

Because, let’s face it, you can gab on about the divine gift of human life all you want, but at the end of the day most of us are so un-unique and token that the only reason we don’t attach a monetary value to ourselves is because we know it’d make us feel bad. The sooner you recognise that your own individuality is just an illusion and that your contribution to society is ultimately NIL (in most cases, probably even profoundly detrimental) is the day when you can stop trying to prove to yourself that you’re more important than you actually are. I mean, if humans theoretically were traded on some kind of modern day version of a Roman slave market, I daresay that most of us would be worth less than a reasonably new car.

“Everyone knows how to make another human, but the secrets of a Ford Mondeo are all but lost.”

But this is getting a bit off-topic now. My main and summarising point is that each and every one of us will have a place in history. What with the government national database archives, most of us will be a name, a face and a brief description. Nothing more, nothing less. What we leave on the forums, on the websites, and yes, I’ll admit, even in the books will be a catalogue of our long-lost personalities. Our ideas, our thoughts, our prophecies and our emotions. And in much the same way as we read a Shakespearean play, we’ll be misunderstood, misinterpreted and stereotyped as “the age that could never find self-satisfaction”.

Sometimes the only thing I feel is an innate loathing and fear of human beings.