The Web is alive. Not as a sentient being or mega-meta-supercollective consciousness, as the technorapture contingent joyfully imagines. Right now, the Web is more like a gigantic, sprouting slime mold.
Ecologist Thomas Ray wants to keep his artificial life-forms, called Tierrans, from escaping into the real world. But he needn't have bothered. The real world already has an artificial life-form crawling all over it in the form of Web pages, which have both replication and open-ended evolution. When you click, the Web comes to you; the page is downloaded from the server to your computer - an act of replication.
Yet while the reproductive frenzy of Web pages is growing worse, intelligent agents are becoming increasingly complex and directed. A team of computer scientists at UC San Diego has created an artificial life-form - a bot - that replicates in the presence of relevant information and dies off in its absence. Some Web sites are, in practice, nearly infinite in depth, generating new pages in response to queries. Thus agents have become a significant Web growth factor - possibly the cyber equivalent of a tumor promoter. Likewise, public indexers are another engine of growth, as the indexers index indexes, in infinite regression, world without end.
Some say the expected increase in bandwidth will solve the problem of overloading. But building more freeways in Los Angeles didn't solve the traffic problem. Expect the same for the Web. Life expands to fit the dimensions of its environment. A slime mold, for example, can exist either in a single-cell form (a Web page), or as a multicell creature (a Web site or intranet) that tosses off spores. And with the advent of object-oriented programming, Web pages can evolve into something smarter. Different classes of objects can be modularly combined, so that a cybercockroach and cyberserpent, for instance, might share portions of their programming, in the same way that human proteins function appropriately in fruit flies.
Right now, the Web still requires care and feeding by human beings. If we disconnect all the servers right now, and scrub all cached pages off our hard disks, the Web won't exist anymore. But it is probably too late to do that; the Web is becoming an important part of our ecosystem. We are dependent on it.
We have some remnants of control, but the Web is evolving at astonishing speed. In evolution, complexity is built on simple things that work. Each of the millions of cells in a human being contains a huge quantity of DNA, only about 2 percent of which codes for anything. What are the costs of carrying it around? A bacterium, which contains almost no noncoding DNA sequences, can replicate in 20 to 30 minutes. A human cell takes a minimum of 12 hours and a human being about nine months to reproduce. With that kind of replicative disparity you might expect that the bacteria are winning. In fact, while we have a precarious symbiotic relationship with bacteria like E. coli, there are signs it is breaking down.
Excess noncoding DNA represents a kind of inefficient "legacy system." At this point, we still are in a position to design the simple things that work, to keep the legacy systems of the Web from being too kludgy. Ultimately, we can't control the complexities that will emerge. Whether the Web evolves a mega-meta-supercollective consciousness or falls prey to a global E-cyberi infection may depend on how we attend to the simple details now.
At some point, life had to develop a standardized system for encoding proteins in the order of DNA nucleotides. Standards for the Web are set in an ad hoc manner, usually by businesses that have enough weight to manipulate the system (or lack of it) to their advantage. Recently, a large group of companies caved to the Clinton administration's demand for a key recovery program, which would allow the federal government to break encryption software in the interest of fighting terrorism or prosecuting money launderers. Encryption, however, is a necessary part of the Web's immune system, protecting the security and integrity of information. The government is here adopting the role of the AIDS virus, whose greatest trick is to infect the very immune system cells whose job it is to defend against it.
The Web is wonderfully weird, unpredictable, and alive. In more poetic moments, I imagine it as a virtual coral reef, providing shelter and nourishment to many exotic communities that could not exist anywhere else. Unfortunately, coral reefs of the nonvirtual variety are sick from pollution as the oceans become cesspools. We can keep the Web from suffering the same fate if we take seriously our duties in the husbandry of cyberspace.
Steven Alan Edwards (salaned@aol.com) writes about science and technology. His work has appeared in Technology Review, Internet Underground, and 21C - Scanning the Future.
