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20100207

I want the internet to look like Matt Damon

Over the years, internet has been visualised as the information superhighway (as introduced by Al Gore in a 1978 meeting of computer industry folk), cyberspace (in William Gibson's 1982 story Burning Chrome), the metaverse (in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash), the Net (in Irwin Winkler's 1995 American drama film with Sandra Bullock), the Matrix (in Larry and Andy Wachowski's 1999 science fiction action film with Keanu Reeves), "a series of tubes" (U.S. senator Ted Stevens in 2006), or even “an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop" (Popular Science Blog in a June 18, 2007 post). But what if it really should look a whole lot more like Matt Damon? Baffler - What Does the Internet Look Like?: "The problem isn’t really that we don’t know what the Internet looks like. It’s that what it looks like is so horribly ugly (...). I wish the Internet looked like Matt Damon. (...) With nothing but a handscan (read: a few keystrokes) and a bank account number (an IP address), he accesses the multiple identities that he has strewn around the globe like the little pieces of ourselves that we leave littered around cyberspace. (...) In the Bourne trilogy, Matt Damon is the Internet. He is mobility; he is the point of connection; he is search-optimization. He’s a Bing zombie, without the zombie part."
Wow.
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