June 25th, 2009 by Hoopleton

It began with the use of natural obstacles, mountains, rivers, then it passed over to building walls, first of wood then stone. Sometimes a moat or a chasm. Eventually wire replaced wood. Concrete and steel replaced stone. The barriers got bigger, longer. Then they became electronic. Digital. Infinite. Walls built out of binary code that stretched across the full span of the metaverse.

It began with rival tribes. Cities warring for resources of food and water. Walls were built to keep the barbarians at bay. To guard against the onslaught of Alexander, Hannibal, Attila. A hundred other conquerors bent on immortality. As the technology of war improved increasingly walls were built to keep people in, not out. And to guard against invasions not by armies but by the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. With digital walls came digital enemies. Viruses. Bots. Spammers. Trojan horses. An array of binary conquerors obsessed not with immortality, but the chaos of anarchy, the beauty of annihilation, the desperate desires of consumption.

Globalism reverts to tribalism. Instant information and instant revelation connecting human consciousness as not since the days of tiny fishing hamlets, and disparate city-states. A vast planetary town square, a billion voices raised.

We gather round the nodes. Drunk off the information overload. A million frames per second. Soundless flashes of light. Bebop fantasia without the prerequisite of muscle mass. All of infinity jammed within a single terabyte of near indistinguishable computer code. Light replaces flesh. The residual static a new language for a new species.

Whereas the universe arrived in an explosion of electrical energy, so we return, evolving, devolving back into a stream of dancing electrical strings. God is absent. We have become the new Creator. Molding bodies, landscapes, entire worlds out of cybernetic clay.

It began with walls and it’ll end the same way. Constricted. Marginalized. The limits of life itself determined not by intelligence, ideals or the brute force of strength, but by the terrifying perfection of bandwidth. Our obsessive desires for freedom replaced by a desperation for peace. Self-imposed purgatory. Even the anarchists will be begging for the reassurances of mortar and brick against the onslaught of data seeping through their binary walls. And in the end we will render worlds like those we left behind, back to a time when we had blood and skin and we worked with our hands to lay stone along the ground. And those virtual worlds will become real worlds. And in time the barriers will again become electric. And the loop will start over again.