Internet is alive

Among my recurring fantasies is that the Internet is alive. What is being alive? To me, broadly, it means having the following properties:

• meaningful behaviour
• energy consumption
• negative-entropic interaction with the environment, both animate and inanimate
• a drive to survive
• a definable individuality

The Internet reminds me of those ant colonies that are fascinatedly studied by life scientists, where ants are but cells of a larger organism that displays behaviour and the other properties above. In the Internet, we humans are the cells. In addition, of course, to the electronic brains of the millions of computers that make its hardware.

What is the behaviour of the Internet ?

Consider this: the Internet has effected a revolutionary shift in lifestyle upon the global human population that's been exposed to it. Revolutionary because the majority if not all aspects of practical life have been altered by it, in addition to the creation/causation of entirely new patterns of behaviour among the human population. To me, the compulsive sharing and retrieving of information in all its forms is a glaring example. It is worth mentioning here that the flow of information is essential to the survival of the Internet. But regarding human behaviour as cells to the Net, it is uncanny how large a mass of people are driven (by their own volition) to committing all kinds of information to it. Music, film, books, pictures, art, knowledge, open source software, datasets from all sorts of capturing devices, business data and transactions, human communication, even spam and viruses, it is all being continuously fed to the Internet. What does it give us in exchange? An unprecedented level of information processing and retrieval ability - a level that we seem to need or feel otherwise compelled to address.

And we've only been talking about the human cells so far. Not the larger social organisms such as corporations, institutions, governments, interest groups which each has somehow extended itself into the Internet, like taking it as another limb. Scary stuff.

What energy does the Internet consume ? That's pretty easy: the electricity of the computers, their production and operating cost, their inevitable pollution and inefficiency, the effort put by the humans to build it, maintain it and populate it with information, time, 3D space.

Negative-entropic effect: well, it organizes our information, isn't that enough?

How does the Net strive to stay alive ? After successfully infiltrating every aspect of practical life, it has become a necessity to humans - subjectively of course - and therefore they behave in such a way as to maintain the system functioning.

Can we distinguish an individual in the Internet ? As yet, it's hard to understand the question because there's only one Internet as far as we can say. It is not unthinkable that several individual networks should form and start interacting, thereby revealing their individuality. But the Internet is definitely here, isn't it :-)