1991-1996
Yet the omnipresent chaos of the den here (One of these days, I may put up some pictures of the place) is nothing compared to that of the Net. The whole thing was originally designed to withstand a nuclear assault, but at this point, the Net has sprawled to the point where it could most lilkely withstand the Vogons. But nature, of course, abhors a vacuum. Unfortunately, the stuff that nature replaces a vacuum with isn't that much better than the vacuum itself.
It seems at this point that everyone has some revolutionary idea on how to use the net. A lot of these ideas don't end up doing much more than taking a whole lotta' bandwidth that us mortals might find some use for. Pardon my unused metaphor, but on the Information Superhighway, there are millions of on-ramps but no off ramps, and plenty of people out there are trying to take aim at the trafficopter with bazookas. In addition, there's AOL, ensuring that there will always be a Yugo stalled somewhere keeping the previous 27 miles of FDDI line resembling a parking lot.
Of course we all remember the old children's story of Chicken Little. The small chicken got conked on the noggin by an apple, and used that as an excuse to begin mass hysteria. "The sky is falling!" he exclaimed. Of course, nobody believed him.
Now, the same thing is happening all over the Internet. There are predictions almost daily that the sky really IS falling on the Internet. A major meltdown of the net backbone has been predicted by many people. The question is whether or not such a thing would really happen?
Most likely not. If the Net was really going to crash, it would most likely have happened by now. In fact, most of the predictions for this collapse were to have happened by the end of 1996. This wopuld mean that two months from now, the Internet would have turned into a rather sizable black hole. In fact, there is already a black hole on the Web. This can be found here.
Unfortunately, even a real gravity well is better than some of what people out on the Net try to pass off as content. Let's face it, there's some pretty horrible stuff out there (and to think that most of the bad content out on the net is getting us to try and actually BUY stuff? Give us all a break.) At the rate that the available web space is being filled with this kind of garbage, a virtual black hole could just form for no apparent reason. We would all watch in horror as our web browsers drained from our screen, through whatever link we have to the outside world, and into oblivion.
Maybe then, we can all go fry our brains with television again.