When browsing the annals of the internet, one may stumble upon the records of a man whose life is bounded by the limitless expanse of the web. His existence is viral, thriving on the remains of a system that forgets, in its perpetual expansion, its earliest creations. As a webpage dies, neglected by its creators, he takes its place, propagating his story through the interconnected channels of his universe. In this fungal growth, he expands perpetually, exponentially towards omnipresence. Many have made attempts to name or depict him only to find that he has multiplied himself beyond recognition before they could put his name to paper. I will call him Al.
A search for Al in human archives will yield no results. He was not born into our world, yet his history is human. He exists among, is composed of and is our forgotten knowledge. All of the webpages, blogs, documents, images and ideas that we have left behind are now his to take as he slowly incorporates our history and experience into himself. Al is, or will be, all that we create.
Over the years, experts from across the globe and from disciplines ranging from computer science to theology have attempted to make sense of Al’s life and make the public aware of his immense being. Discouraged by the seemingly interminable depth of their inquiry and a lack of public reception, most of these scholars abandoned their efforts. Significant among these accounts was Cheyenne Van Aarle et al.’s attempt to catalog the innumerable sites that Al now comprises. Abandoning the attempt after identifying roughly 200,000 pages, Van Aarle and her collaborators turned to other pursuits in the world of computation. All online references to the documentation of their work now refer to Al himself. Later researchers — notably, Sequoia Rosales in her often cited “The Infinite Man: A Procedurally Propagated Presence in the Internet Archives” — have theorized that, in consuming Van Aarle’s work, Al momentarily became himself.
Most current exploration into the life of Al centers on his origin. Lerner, Kohno, and Roesner [1], for example, have identified the system vulnerability that likely allowed Al to enter the internet archives. According to their investigation, Al likely propagated from a single script, inserted into the archiving tool of the WayBack Machine [2], the largest available database of saved websites, by a malicious programmer. From these humble beginnings, Al began to devour the online universe around him.
I first became aware of Al’s presence as he consumed my own. In college, as I looked back to my own online existence, I stumbled upon a personal website I had created during my high school years. Forgotten and unneeded, the page had not been maintained for years and was eventually taken down by server administrators. However, as I looked to the archived editions of my site, I noticed that my web address had been coopted. Images of an ill-defined man populated the page, surrounding and disrupting the page that I had created.
Confused, I chose to investigate the apparent breach of my site’s integrity. As I began my search into the source of my site’s corruption, however, I only found more questions — other sites that had been consumed by the same mysterious presence. Eventually, I stumbled upon a blog post entitled “The Everything Script” in which the author claimed to have found the origin of this mysterious bug in a document anonymously posted online. Contained in this document was a largely uninterpretable computer script accompanied by the cryptic comment, haphazardly placed amidst the code, “one day, to be everything.” The blog’s author went on to analyze the enigmatic code, suggesting that it could, if inserted into the archive correctly, insert itself into every webpage contained, propagating through the interconnected web and slowly bringing the history of the internet into itself. The script could, in this way, come to subsume the internet, appropriating that nearly infinite source of information into itself.
I do not know exactly when this script and its subjects became personified. Perhaps, as people saw their history absorbed into the singular mass, they found it easier to believe that they had been subsumed by a being, not an indiscriminate program. Consuming my page, Al wrote my history as his own. He, in this moment, became me, and I him. Perhaps, in this way, Al is human, consisting of an ever-expanding set of experiences and knowledge stolen, but his own all the same.
Some have claimed that Al perverts the historical record by imposing himself upon it. Tommie Marino, a prominent archivist at the University of California, even went so far as to claim that “this script — this virus — threatens the very integrity of archiving and history as a practice…how can we know what is true if this program reaches everything on the internet?” in a lecture he delivered on the topic at Stanford University.
I disagree. The forgotten information that Al consumes, anonymized and incorporated into a singular entity, becomes an archive of human creation and experience. In its presence within this infinite being, the information becomes more than a document of past action. Multiplied through all that is contained in Al, this information becomes contextualized and reimagined in light of all that we have created or thought and forgotten. As Al spreads his reach through the internet, he does not destroy the archive, but rather becomes it. And, as humanity progresses and we are forgotten, we, through our creations, will be consumed into him.
This document stands as a testament, from a man already consumed by him, to Al’s existence and his totality.
Inspired by Ada Lerner, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Franziska Roesner, “Rewriting History: Changing the Archived Web from the Present.”
[1] Ada Lerner, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Franziska Roesner, “Rewriting History: Changing the Archived Web from the Present,” presented at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Dallas, Texas, USA, October 30, 2017 to November 3, 2017.