Is the Internet an alien organism?
And are we humans its symbionts; cultivating it like the African leaf-cutter ants and their fungal partner?
I know the title sounds crazy, but ask yourself: what really is ‘the Internet’?
Words like ‘tool’ or ‘network’ understate the Internet on a fairly dramatic scale. It’s arguably the largest and most complex structure we’ve ever engineered. Billions of us spend our lives working on it, within it, and around it. We use it to educate ourselves and our children. It allows us to access and share the sum of our species’ knowledge and instantaneously communicate with one another (borderlining on telepathy). Our entire economy is interweaving with the Internet in a way that is as transformative as the system of money or the printing press.
Similar to the challenges we have in defining ‘life’ I don’t think we can adequately define what the Internet has truly become. This essay is an attempt to explore what the Internet is, how it may be fundamentally changing our species, and to what strange future this partnership might be leading us.
Introduction
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the evolution of the Internet and its similarities to what we observe in the natural world. Are there insights to be unravelled here and might they be vaguely amusing; possibly even useful?
As a student of both computer and biological sciences, I can’t help but notice a few parallels across these two disciplines. It remains true, however, I may have just watched too much Star Trek. 👾
What is ‘the Internet’, really?
Could we assert that the Internet is starting to approximate an artificial (or even alien) living organism? And are we humans, its creators, co-evolving as its symbionts, like the African leaf-cutter ants blindly tending to their underground fungus gardens in return for nourishment?
Bizarre as it sounds, in many ways there are similarities between what we call ‘the Internet’ and biological life.
Like all life, the Internet needs a steady flow of energy (electrons) to survive, without which, it will die. It converts energy to other forms and produces waste products (such as heat). It has a measurable ‘biomass’; the sum of all its interconnected components. It exhibits complex behaviour and highly specialised functions. It has living and non-living states. It grows in physical size over time (although it does not reproduce). It has multiple systems of organisation akin to what we observe in biological life. For example, the Internet has physical building blocks (silicon, metal, capacitors and diodes) which assemble into cell-like systems with specific functions (microchips, transistors, circuit boards), which in turn are assembled into even higher order systems like organs (datacenters, servers, computers, smart phones, cell towers) akin to multicellular organisms.
The Internet evolves. Our species evolves through natural selection and, as we are its creators, the Internet could be thought to evolve through us in a kind of second-order natural selection.
What about a nervous system? Does the Internet not bear a startling similarity to a decentralised nervous system, with its trillions of interconnected nodes and continuous chatter of nerve impulses (IP packets) zipping around its ‘body’? And, like complex living systems, can it only be truly appreciated while alive? Without electricity, like a brain without oxygenated blood, the Internet will rapidly cease to function and remain in a lifeless, unintelligible state. Studying the Internet without electrical power is like studying a dead brain: we can see the underlying components in limited detail (like observing dead cells under a microscope), but witnessing a living brain perform in life is breath-taking by comparison. So it is true of the ‘living’ Internet; the unconscious hive mind of our species.
If we follow the yellow brick road down this psychedelic biological metaphor, is there anything we can learn from this science fiction way of thinking about the Internet?
I’d like to do a thought experiment with you. In the following sections I’ll attempt to explore the Internet through the lens of biology, as an incompetent drunk astro-biologist might in the study of life on an alien planet.
Let’s apply what we have learned from life on earth to ‘the Internet’. We’ll start with the physical parts; and think about the ‘biomass’ of the Internet. Then we’ll dive further into other life processes like growth and reproduction, respiration, metabolism (energy transfer), nervous systems, and evolution. We’ll then attempt to define what type of organism the Internet is most-like based on what we know of life on earth. Finally, we’ll take a look at our place in this process and our relationship with the Internet.
Chapter 1 — Physical form (biomass)
Like a living organism, the Internet could be thought to have a measurable ‘biomass’; the sum of all interconnected devices and their physical mass. Before we can add this up, we first must establish the boundaries. How do we define where the Internet ends?
In living systems at the cellular level, this is usually a distinguishable semi-permeable membrane (a cell wall) that encases the contents of a cell and allows it to maintain particular chemical conditions that differ to the outside environment (called homeostasis). This is how we understand single-celled organisms like bacteria and Amoeba as separate to their environment. For multicelluar organisms like plants and animals that we are more familiar with, these are defined as a particular organisation of cells. The macro organism is bounded by the point at which its outermost cells touch the surrounding environment. So for us humans, our boundary to the environment is mainly our hair, teeth, nails, mucosal membranes, and skin cells. In life, generally speaking we can distinguish biological organisms through genetic information (DNA and RNA contained in every cell), and identify which cells belong to a particular organism.
What are the boundaries for the Internet if we were to think of it in terms of cell theory?
We don’t have genetic information to distinguish ‘cells’ of the Internet, but we do have a fundamental atomic unit or property to guide us. It would be logical to base our boundary criteria as the fundamental unit of communication within the Internet: the Internet Protocol (IP) packet. In a similar way as we might measure the bounds of an electricity network by the fundamental unit of the electron.
To measure the mass of an electricity grid, we would ‘follow the electrons’ from their point of origin to the furthest points they can reach. The mass of an electricity grid, therefore, would be the sum of all the generation, transmission and distribution systems. This would include the mass of all power stations (coal, gas, nuclear, oil, geothermal, hydro, wind, solar systems), the substations containing transformers that step the voltage up and down, the thousands of kilometers of high voltage transmission lines, the millions of poll top and underground lines that distribute lower voltage power to dwellings and buildings, and the sum of all wiring inside buildings that conduct the electrons to the power points for devices to connect to the network. Electricity networks are often massive and extend past many country borders in continents where power can be purchased and sold between countries. They are all ultimately islands though, as there is no global electricity grid for which all local networks connect to. The USA does not supply electricity directly to Europe, for example.
In assessing the mass of the Internet, we can apply a similar method and ‘follow the IP packets’ from their potential point of origin to termination, geographically. Almost all nodes on the Internet can send and receive IP packets, and because the Internet is globally interconnected, the Internet is far larger geographically than the world’s largest electricity network. Your phone can send packets to any device on the Internet, anywhere in the world. Furthermore, the Internet is not just hard-wired, like the electricity network, what about wireless aspects? We send data packets through medium range radio networks (3G/4G cellular networks) and short range radio networks like WiFi and bluetooth. We also send data from the Earth’s surface to satellites orbiting our planet, and back. Whilst these wireless communications standards are not all strictly using the IP protocol (bluetooth uses a different protocol called L2CAP), they are still transmitting the same data payload.
To illustrate this point, let’s take the example of streaming spotify on your phone when at home on WiFi, using bluetooth earbuds. Spotify holds over 1.5 billion audio files (3 petabytes) and this binary data is physically stored on drives that reside on Google cloud datacenters (Spotify migrated their data from AWS to Google in 2016). When you stream a Spotify song to your phone, the binary data stored as a compressed mp3 (or similar) file is broken up and transmitted via a synchronous TCP/IP connection from a Google datacenter (most likely the one nearest to your geographical location, or they are locally cached on a content delivery network near you) to your wireless modem-router at home. The packets are routed from the Datacenter through telecommunications infrastructure to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). From there they make their way through the local telecommunications (usually fibre or copper) all the way to your dwelling and into your modem and wireless WiFi router. This is the point at which the data is translated from the TCP/IP format to a different standard to be transmitted by high frequency radio (2.4GHz or 5GHz) based on the WiFi communications standard.
Your WiFi router converts the spotify TCP/IP datastream it receives into the WiFi radio format, and this is transmitted wirelessly to your phone. The data stream is then translated once again to another format: the bluetooth wireless protocol. This is a special protocol designed for short range wireless communication (designed for low power consumption more suitable to battery operated devices). The Spotify data now carries onward on its journey, and is transmitted from your phone to the surrounding environment, where your bluetooth earbuds receive it and convert the digital signal to an analogue wave for your ear.
Where in the above scenario does the Internet end? Strictly speaking, the IP protocol stopped being used when the data reached your modem/router. But the data payload continued via wireless transformation all the way to your phone and then earbuds. It starts to get murky with all these points of translation. So perhaps we can broaden our boundary conditions for defining the Internet terminus to be the reach of the data payload itself, and not just the use of the IP protocol. I.e. As far as the data payload can reach (from the google data center to your bluetooth earbud) might be a more appropriate boundary condition for the Internet.
So if we were to include the wireless parts of the Internet as well, the Internet not only extends across most of the landmass of our planet, it even goes into space. By this shaky definition, the biomass of the Internet therefore could include all datacenters in the world (e.g. AWS, Azure, Google and many more), the network of underground telecommunication lines and subsea cables throughout the world, all data-enabled mobile phone cellular networks and their associated infrastructure, all network enabled computers connected to the Internet at instantaneous time (e.g. every laptop, smart phone, smart TV, server and desktop computer), all satellites that transmit Internet data, all other Internet-enabled devices like wearables, IOT devices, embedded devices. It’s beaming all around you right now. Anywhere your body is within range of an Internet enabled mobile phone network, or a WiFi network, the Internet is, literally, all around you; you’re bathed in it. You can reach out and touch it with the mobile phone or laptop you are holding in this very moment.
Chapter summary: the Internet is fucking massive. The Egyptian’s may have built the Pyramids, but we’ve built the Internet. I’d argue it’s the largest structure ever made and it’s increasingly a fundamental component of the artificial habitat in which many of us spend 99% of our lives. It reaches further than our electricity and water networks, and it even reaches beyond our atmosphere into space. It’s big.
Footnote: I’m aware other more qualified people have documented the size of the Internet by other measures, such as the number of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, or by the weight of the electrons. I’m taking some creative licence here and arguing it could also be the sum of all interconnected physical hardware that comprises the communicating Internet. Humour me.
Chapter 2 — Living and non-living states
Now that we have a working definition for the physical form and mass of the Internet, let’s explore whether it is alive (in some sense) or not, and what that could mean.
The functional components of the Internet (the organs if you like) are things that are familiar to us: laptops, phones, computer banks in data centers, telecommunications infrastructure like mobile cell towers. When your laptop battery runs out, you might say it is ‘dead’. But what do we really mean when talking about these machines we use as tools in our daily lives?
Is your toaster ‘alive’ only when it’s toasting a crumpet? Is your laptop only alive when it has a charged battery? Not really. We use words like alive and dead loosely. I’m not saying your milkshake maker is alive. What remains true of all our electrical machines, however, is they have two distinct states: powered and unpowered; on and off; living and non-living; alive and dead. Without electricity, they cease to function. They can be reanimated by re-powering them and, when not energised, they don’t immediately die (irreversibly cease to function) like biological organisms do unless there is a critical component (organ) failure. This is simply because our machines don’t decay at the same speed as biological systems when they cease to function. Leave a toaster for 10 years in the elements, and it will not reanimate when energised because its parts will have irreversibly rusted and decayed through natural chemical and physical aging processes. Our electrical machines are just as delicate as biological organisms, requiring constant care and protection from the environment. Like biological life, they also operate in highly specific condition ranges such as temperature, humidity, mechanical shock and vibration limits, salinity, and acidity/alkalinity.
The Internet is no different to a toaster in the sense that it is an electrical machine. It is just comprised of millions of electronic machines that make up its component parts. Just like our kitchen toaster, the Internet could be said to ‘die’ if all electrical power to its system was cut. Before long, without being re-energised, its parts would decay irreversibly. In order for this to happen, we’d have to cut power to the entire world. This hasn’t happened since the Internet was born around 1983 with the ARAPNET network that spawned the TCP/IP communication protocol. Parts of the Internet have always remained energised somewhere in the world since then, as it has grown in size over time.
Are these machines really ‘alive’ though when energised? We know they are not in quite the same way as biological life, but we also know they are alarmingly ‘life-like’ when energised; they light up and start doing things. They certainly seem alive to us in some sense.
Our machines extract their energy from the surrounding environment (a power network or battery), they use it to perform functions, they are inanimate without the right conditions. Cut the power to our cities, factories and dwellings and all moving parts grind to a halt. Light fades away. Radio waves and signals travelling through cables cease. All our machines become quiet and inanimate. Just because they don’t self-repair, or reproduce, or have a common ancestor, or share the same biological foundation, do they not bear interesting similarities to life?
It really comes down to our definition of living and non-living. And let’s be intellectually honest here, we still can’t define life very well. We can describe its component systems and processes, but we are continually updating our definition. We are still arguing over whether viruses are alive or not. What I’m trying to say here is there are ‘edge cases’ everywhere. We currently have a working definition of life based on one planet, so let’s not fall into the trap of certainty. We only observed the first cell under a microscope ~400 years ago, and we discovered the genetic code of life less than 70 years ago (Crick & Watson, 1953), so let’s not profess we are experts just yet.
Is it that far a stretch to assert that highly complex and interconnected electrical machines, something as far reaching as the millions of powered machines that comprise the Internet, might be approximating an emergent kind of artificial life?
If so, it is an artificial life whose energy systems (metabolism) are based on electricity and not sugar, sunlight or oxygen. And this is where we’ll take this crack-smoking idea next.
Chapter 3 — Energy Systems (Metabolism)
All life we have observed on our planet has some kind of metabolic and respiration process for obtaining the energy and building blocks they need to perform core functions critical to their survival such as moving about their environment, building their bodies (growing & reproducing), or assembling proteins. Proteins are the tools of biochemistry. They have specialised physical and chemical properties and include things like poison venom, hair, finger nails, spider silk, muscle fibres. I have oversimplified this and there is more to it, but at the highest level, all life processes require energy transfer.
Energy needs to be obtained in some form, and converted to another. In living systems this is often through the breaking of molecular bonds between atoms and molecules themselves. The energy in glucose, the most fundamental sugar, is harnessed by practically all bacteria, animal and plant cells alike by cleaving off a carbon atom, breaking its bond with the parent sugar molecule and releasing energy that is harnessed to perform a function. Plants use the energy contained in sunlight to split the water molecule, cleaving it apart and harnessing the energy released when the molecular bond breaks. It goes deeper than this still and we could get into electron transfer (oxidation and reduction processes) and the fundamental energy fuel of life (adenosine triphosphate) which is all fascinating stuff but probably stretching this analogy too far.
Let’s stick to something we are familiar with: ourselves. Human beings are multicellular organisms, comprised of animal cells; around 200 types. We’ve got bone cells, liver cells, heart cells, brain cells. All of them have specific functions, and bunch them all together in the right order (governed by our genetic information) and we have a human. To keep functioning, aside from the right environmental (physical and chemical conditions) like temperature, our cells need energy. They get this primarily through glucose (a sugar which is a carbohydrate) which is produced by breaking down the food we eat. Our metabolic systems are versatile though, and many of our cells can power themselves by breaking down proteins and fats as well, which follow different chemical pathways. To keep it simple, we’ll just stick to glucose.
The glucose is obtained from the food you eat, extracted in your intestines and absorbed into your bloodstream where it can be distributed to all cells in your body. The other key ingredient your metabolic processes need is oxygen; a highly reactive molecule that plays a key role in electron transfer (energy transfer). When you take a breath of air (which is ~20% oxygen gas) a tiny amount of this gas is absorbed directly into your blood stream and stored in your red blood cells (a specialised protein structure called haemoglobin) where it is used as part of the energy processes. And that’s the key stuff: oxygen and glucose suspended in your blood, delivered to your cells. Stop the flow of blood, or oxygen into the blood (i.e. stop breathing) and your cells will begin to die in minutes. Stop the flow of glucose into the blood stream (stop eating), and you will deplete the sugars suspended in your blood, then your body’s fat and protein reserves in a matter of days, and your cells will begin to die (i.e. you will have organ failure and die from starvation).
Now that we’ve done a horrific crash course in biological metabolism, let’s look at machine metabolism by comparison.
For many machines familiar to us, electricity is their lifeblood. In the same way animal cells rely on blood (a mixture of water, sugars, cells and oxygen carrying proteins) and plant cells rely on sugars and nutrients dissolved in water, all these systems need an energy transport system to power their sub-components and processes. With machines, it’s electrical and with biological life, it’s chemical.
The Internet requires a constant flow of electrical current to live. Its components share this universal form of energy and it is distributed through a complex network of conductors, reaching every last piece, from the 12V direct current feeding a computer motherboard, to the microscopic conductor channels on a microchip. Are these electrical conductor channels not unlike the vascular systems of multicellular plants and animals, delivering nutrient and energy to every last cell?
In many ways we can marvel at the elegance of electrical power. It simplifies the energy and nerve processes dramatically in comparison to biological life. It’s all our machines need to power their processes and it can be easily converted to different forms and transmitted throughout their systems. Electricity is the blood of our machines, and conductors are their arteries and veins. They don’t need to take molecules out of their environment like oxygen or food to produce it. Instead, they depend on the steady flow of electrons. They depend on electricity and they are not capable of producing it themselves in the quantity they often need. Most of them depend on us for that, and we’ll explore our relationship with these machines in a following chapter.
Chapter summary: electrons can be thought of as the blood of machines and metallic conductors are their vascular system. Electricity provides all the nourishment they need in one elegant system. Cut it off, and they will cease to function and die.
Chapter 4 — Nervous system
The Internet, unmistakably, bears some interesting similarities to a nervous system. We could think of the Internet Protocol (IP) packet as an analog to a biological neuron firing in a brain and a signal being transmitted along synapses.
With over 5.3 billion active users a month (in 2024), 1.13 billion indexed web pages, and 347 billion emails sent per day, traffic in the form of TCP/IP data packets are whizzing throughout the mass of the Internet at near the speed of light; streaming our Netflix content or serving our mobile apps and web browser content. The speed at which it can achieve this information highway of traffic in all directions is astonishing. Each node (such as a desktop computer) is capable of transmitting and receiving millions of IP packets per second. Each packet able to reach destinations on the other side of the world usually within around 250 milliseconds (geographical latency)
Furthermore, the Internet’s body mass is able to store and retrieve information (akin to memory) and respond to external stimuli. When you connect your phone to the internet, it responds, establishing a connection and assimilating your phone to it’s body mass. When you load a web page on your phone’s browser, a HTTP GET request is initiated by your phone, and IP packet stream is established, travelling all the way to the server hosting the website and back, transmitting the page content back to your phone. In some sense, all browser based web connections could be thought of as tactile sensory inputs to the Internet; it’s fingertips if you like. Your phone’s web browser sits on the outermost layer of the Internet allowing it to feel and respond to stimuli in the form of web requests.
The Internet also exhibits complex behaviour, such as responding to changes to environmental conditions by rerouting web traffic if a node goes down. The Internet does not, however, exhibit a primary motive or high level decision making function like we would see in animal behaviour. As such, it’s more like an unconscious brain; optimised to store, retrieve and send information across its planetary scale mass.
Chapter 5 — Growth, motility and reproduction
All biological life that we know of, grows and reproduces. From the tiniest prokaryotic bacterial cells we find buried in the earth’s crust, to the multicellular macro-organisms we are far more familiar with like plants, fungus and animals. A defining characteristic of all life is growth and reproduction.
Your toaster, an electrical machine, does not grow or reproduce. Like most of our machines, it cannot expand in size over time nor can it produce a copy of itself. However the Internet does grow, in a curious kind of way. Like a forest weaving its way into the landscape, seeding new trees and plants, the Internet is an ever expanding machine that grows outward into the surrounding environment as well. Except in this case, it’s intrinsically linked to us.
The Internet’s growth and body shape therefore is continuously changing and tightly coupled to human artificial environments, as it is embedded within them. We build the underlying components like microchips, circuit boards, bare metal servers and fibre optic cables, then we encase the components in protective coatings like plastic, metal and concrete. As a result, the Internet organism takes the broad shape of our civilisation. It expands horizontally outwards and upwards as we build infrastructure, dwellings and cities, extending human settlement. You might ask how, by the above definition, the Internet is different to road and water pipe networks? It’s true these also take the broad shape of our civilisation, but these networks are orders of magnitude less complex. Bitumen roads and metal water pipes are elementary by comparison, and don’t share some of the earlier artificial life traits covered in previous sections. A bitumen road is not alive only when cars are driving on it, nor is a water pipe only alive when water is flowing. I think these things are fundamentally different, unable to exhibit the complex behaviour and other life-like processes we observe in the Internet.
Many living organisms move around their environment. The Internet, however, is sessile. Like a plant or a fungus it is unable to directly transit through space like an animal. After taking root in the early 1980’s as the first networks were established, it has continued to radiate outward, like a slime mould snaking its way into the surrounding environment.
And what of reproduction? Unlike all biological life, our machines don’t self-reproduce; they can’t produce identical copies of themselves. Cells themselves can undergo binary fission (mitosis) to produce a copy of themselves containing exactly the same genetic information. Our machines can’t: the best we can do is a 3d printer that can print 70–80% of its components (see here). The Internet machine grows through us humans, as we slap on new routers to our homes, build new data centers and subsea cables. But it is incapable of self reproduction and completely dependent on us humans for growth, as it is for energy.
Chapter summary: The Internet is a sessile organism that grows through its biological partners: we humans. It is incapable of self-reproduction in the same way all of our electrical machines are. For these life processes, it depends on us in a kind of symbiotic relationship.
Chapter 6 — Evolution
Despite the fact we humans directly evolve the Internet, I assert that there is no grand design; no omniscient predetermined path. I think everyone is pretty amazed at just how rapidly the utility of the Internet has evolved.
Just like biological evolution blindly shapes and repurposes living systems to deal with their immediate problems, so too do we evolve the Internet to meet an immediate need; we build more data centers, we design a slightly faster processor than the one before, we repurpose older vestigial parts (organs) and extend their function to meet new needs, we increase the speed of data transmission and decoding. The Internet could be said to evolve through us but there is no grand design; it’s continuously evolving through technological advancement to meet a changing set of needs, driven by our own creativity. Like biological evolution it happens in small, incremental steps.
Chapter summary: The Internet changes and evolves over time. As it depends on us as its creators to grow and change, its evolution is guided by our needs. As we evolve through natural selection, the Internet could be thought to evolve in a kind of second-order evolutionary process.
Chapter 7 — What type of organism is the Internet?
If we entertain the thought that the Internet could be some kind of emergent artificial organism, what is it most like compared to what we know of biological life? How might we begin to classify it anatomically and taxonomically as a biologist who just downed 5 tabs of LSD and a bottle of vodka?
Ok here we go.
Taxonomic Classification of the Internet
- It’s a large multicellular-like organism, comprised of many systems of organisation to give it a complex but recognisable structure, with a significant ‘biomass’ distributed over a massive geographical area at a planetary scale.
- It is sessile, meaning it does not move around its environment like an animal.
- It grows in size outward in 3 dimensions indiscriminately, much more like a fungus or a plant (creeper) and unlike an animal which grows to a specific pattern and body size limit. I.e. its growth is more plant or fungus-like.
- It lacks a predefined or final body ‘shape’ making it unlike an animal or plant, and more like an amorphous fungus such as a slime mould. However it does broadly take the shape of human civilisation, embedding itself in the artificial habitat we construct.
- Unlike biological organisms which all have a primary function to consume energy and grow to reach a reproductive stage, the Internet does not exhibit a primary motive. This makes me think in terms of purpose, it’s less like a complete organism and more like an stand-alone organ; something with a specialised function like a liver, or heart.
- If it is organ-like, it is functionally most like a brain. It shares interesting similarities to a brain in that it is optimised to send high speed signals throughout its entire mass (akin to neural pulses), store information for retrieval (akin to memory), receive and respond to external inputs (akin to senses like vision and hearing) although it does not appear to exhibit conscious intelligence traits. If it is a brain-like organ, it is ‘unconscious’.
- Metabolically it is incapable of producing energy itself through catabolism (eating) or photosynthesis (sunlight). Instead it depends on electricity. This further lends itself to the organ theory as organs are also completely dependent on their surrounding environment (host organism) to supply them with the energy and other inputs they need. I.e. the Internet is an organ that cannot survive without a surrounding host environment: the artificial environment we provide through protective structures and the supply of electrical current.
- It is incapable of reproduction or self-growth and relies on a symbiotic relationship with a biological organism (human beings) for these core needs, and energy input.
- As it does not have a natural reproduction and death cycle, It has no apparent life span and is effectively immortal, although it can still be killed if it is starved of energy (electricity) or unprotected from the natural environment.
- It exists in an artificial environment, with almost all of its mass encased in protective coatings (like plastics, metal and concrete) and it is embedded into the artificial ecosystem constructed by its symbiotic partners (us). This is similar to African leaf cutter ants constructing their nest around their fungal partner.
- Its component parts (e.g. computer banks, server racks, telecommunication hardware, circuit boards, microprocessors, cell towers) share what you could call genetic traits. E.g. Microprocessors in every circuit board of every Internet connected device share commonalities in design, and how they look under a microscope. Its parts have a recognisable and common (hereditary) pattern.
- It’s component parts are sensitive and susceptible to harm and require specific environmental conditions (temperature range, mechanical vibration, humidity, acidity and water content) to stay functional
- Unlike practically all biological life that is tolerant to some degree of water exposure, the Internet is highly intolerant to water. Water is like a poison to it, rapidly killing localised parts that are exposed by disrupting the metabolic system (i.e. electrical short circuits).
- It has a decentralised metabolic system: electricity is fed into its structure from thousands, probably millions, of independent sources.
- It evolves and changes throughout time.
In summary: the Internet is more like a specialised organ, rather than a complete organism. Organs (like your brain) require a host to provide external inputs to meet metabolic needs (such as oxygenated, glucose enriched blood). In the case of the Internet, we are the host in the form of our artificial habitat. Through this habitat, we help it grow and supply it with continuous electricity for its metabolic needs and the right environmental conditions (homeostasis) for it to survive. The Internet therefore could be thought to be a parasitic or symbiotic organ, embedded within human infrastructure.
Chapter 8 — What is our relationship with the Internet?
If the Internet can be thought of as some form of artificial organism or life, then it depends for its survival on a symbiotic relationship with us humans. It is reliant on us to sustain it with energy (electricity), heal non functional parts, and for growth and function. In return it nourishes us by enriching our cultural and conscious experience.
The closest parallel I can think of to the situation with us and the Internet is that of the African leaf-cutter ants living in a symbiotic relationship with their underground fungal partner.
Co-dependent with each other, the fungus depends on the ants for nutrients (leaf cuttings) and in return for their labour the ants have cultivated a source of nourishment themselves and carefully feed on the fungus.
In the case of the Internet: we are the ants and the Internet is the fungal-like symbiont. Like the ants we are hypnotised by it; barely grasping its mystery yet unable to turn away. Many of us spend almost all our daily lives connected to it in some way. This is surely a co-dependency in the making and the big question is where the hell is this leading us to?
Chapter 9 — Finale
My conclusion is this: the Internet is ‘most like’ an unconscious fungal brain (i.e. it’s an organ, not an organism).
It is a multicellular brain-like super-organ, with a planetary scale distributed mass, that grows indiscriminately from any part, much like a fungus. It depends on a symbiotic partnership with a biological organism (human beings) to sustain its metabolism (electrical energy), growth and environmental protective needs. In return it provides nourishment in the form of economic and cultural enrichment: connecting our species like a hive mind.
The Internet is a virtual organ to our species, extending our senses and interconnecting us in a form of co-dependence and co-evolution.
My final question is: to what strange future is our species’ co-dependence with the Internet taking us? Will it be beautiful or the stuff of nightmares? Are we on a pathway to assimilation and is the modern smart phone the final precursor to bioimplants?
Star Trek’s infamous Borg species is to me no longer such a far stretch of the imagination. I think we all need to think far more seriously about how we want the Internet to evolve, how we might nurture its good qualities and abandon (or regulate against) the bad qualities.
I’ll leave you with these images to ponder.
It’s just too good.
The End. 🐜🐜🐜 🍀 🍄
P.S. I’m fully aware this is a comically bad thought experiment, but I hope I’ve provoked a few thoughts and amused at least one person. I’d love to hear what others think about the Internet organism in the comments.
