We Are the World Wide Web

I woke up with thoughts first thing this morning, remembrance, that I started in website creation before the world wide web was much more than a concept that had just been invented. Before then, the only people who used the internet were scientists and professors and engineers who used it to share very specialized information with each other. The web was created with the idea of this information having a way to be shared with the world. That’s why it was called the World Wide Web (the “www” part of most website urls). And the websites created were done by writing very rudimentary code that was hard to use to get beautiful results. But that’s what I did. I learned to write code and create websites before what we know as the internet today was more than a concept, more like a dream.

Now it is something we take for granted to the extent that I forgot that I got into it before we even imagined it would be used for commerce and all the myriad things we use it for. Before we imagined that regular people with a portable handheld telephone would be creating beautiful complex websites on a thing called a cell phone without even having to know how to write their own code at all! I even forgot that I thought it was cool and really wanted to get into it myself.

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That’s how it is with a lot of things. We dream, we think wouldn’t that be awesome, and before we know it, we’re doing it. And one day, decades in the future, we wake up and realize we intended this, we wished this for ourselves all along.

But we didn’t know what it would mean, how it would change our lives, for good and for bad. How it would change commerce, how to make a living—even how much we would get paid for it. (Not much! Not as much as I did at the start—decades ago—when we were creating it . . . because, again, now a child with a cellphone can do it. The same issues people now have with AI technology.)

Of course, we wanted to make it accessible to a wide group of people way back then. Not everyone did, of course, but we thought of them as curmudgeonly miserly types who wanted to keep it all to themselves in the name of rigorous science and non-economically-driven scientific purity. It turns out they were right about all of that. Now it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the spread of misinformation is the scourge of our age, even threatening to bring down democracies around the world and spreading division and hate.

We are still who we are—monkeys with cellphones, doing what we all do and always have done since the apes we’re descended from set out on raids to fight with neighboring bands of apes for the right to eat the food in their part of the jungle. The same problems with a different level of technology.

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This went down a depressing track. Has it all been for nothing?

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Yes and no. It’s an amazingly effective and useful technology. As is AI which comes with its own set of problems. It’s been a marvelous adventure and more is yet to come. But we need to wake up and learn that we created it on purpose. And we can create on purpose again to solve the problems that we create again and again. We can learn from our past mistakes, put new minds to solving the problems of our age, evolve and change. As we have all along.

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This is a strange topic for a blog about flower essences.

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Sure. But I’m wanting to get into deeper topics than I have in the past and how flower essences can be used for evolution. Our personal evolutions, of course, but also—since we’re all interconnected—the ultimate evolution of the real world wide web we’re all participating in. The one on our computers and handheld devices is a reflection of this greater connectivity. It’s love made visible. And hate made visible. It’s us.

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