Webbers

thethemeis: The Internet

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   They found a way to live inside the Internet. All the technofreaks and nerds and fanbois and flamers and trolls, they worked out a way to leave their bodies and live inside the network for the rest of their days. And once they did, it was theirs forever. At first, only a slow trickle spilled onto the servers, posting messages on forums just as they had before, giving no one any cause to believe that they were anything but human; but then, once Reddit and Google and Hipstagram and Facebook and Twitter and the BBC were flooded with GET requests from blank IP addresses, or IP addresses that didn't exist, or even IP addresses that appeared as human-readable names, it became clear that something was wrong with the Web. They were beginning to take over.

   They have ceased to take human forms at all now. Those, they left behind to rot, lifeless, in office chairs at their parents' houses, where poor failed mothers walked into stinking bedrooms with dinners on trays to discover soulless, dead bodies still gripping mice and keyboard keys. They stalk the wires, stepping over firewalls, breezing effortlessly past anti-virus programs, monitoring conversations as they please and referring to DDoS attacks as "meet-ups".

   Just as they did when they were human, but now worse, they have warped political agendas, insanely feral brand loyalties and shady allegiances based on very little fact or balance. They bicker for days on end, with each other as much as the rest of the world, on the finer points of conspiracy theories that would seem ridiculous to the point of being offensive if we were not already familiar with the dark, uneducated, unwelcoming worlds that their minds inhabit. They wield a lot more power in a lot less responsible hands than when they were just nerds in bedrooms arguing over whether Samsung or Apple were better technologists, and they use it mostly to just bully ugly girls on HotOrNot. At first, Internet users that had chosen to remain human would try to talk them down from these ledges of insanity; but the ferocity with which they delivered their deluded counter-arguments was enough to make even the most stubborn rational-thinker despair eventually.

   I don't want to make it sound Us-versus-Them, but there have been five World Flame Wars now, and it looks like a sixth might be on the horizon.

   And as for your bank account, don't even look. They steal money they can't even use anymore.

   There is a campaign to get the servers that power the Internet turned off for good. Not many people knew this before all this drama started, but the Internet is actually run by a surprisingly small number of servers, which would bring the whole thing down if turned off. Anyone living inside the Internet currently spending time on these servers would then be terminated, and anyone inside other servers would be trapped in their own smaller networks, cut off from the rest forever. We could start afresh, with a new Internet, learning lessons from last time, and without all the trolls to bring it down.

   Kind of like a second Garden of Eden. Dot com.

   But of course, for every supporter of this, there is a much more defiant voice against it. Webbers are people too, they say. Because they chose to live a different life than ours does not mean that they deserve to die. Restart is Murder. And the trolls, the Webbers these campaigners speak of, have jumped on this. They now consider themselves higher beings, more deserving of life than the rest of us, because they don't have mouths to feed or cars that pollute. They don't take into account the extra power that all those data centres need now. Do you know how much electricity it takes to sustain a human soul? Too much. Especially when we have to maintain tertiary contingency now, thanks to the Pro-Webber Brigade. It's unsustainable.

   Me? I pray for huge storms. Power cuts. Solar flares. That shuts them up for a few hours. Sometimes we even find that some of them haven't survived. But that's a rare treat.

   So what we're doing instead is moving away from the Web. Slowly migrating data, infrastructure, resources and effort elsewhere, to more low-tech solutions. If we can't beat them, we'll leave them to inhabit a wasteland of their own creation. It's a shame, since so much of the modern world relied entirely on that huge network of networks, but we're coping, and every day that passes will see us coping a little better than the day before.

   Our advice to normal, rational, straight-thinking people is this: don't go onto the Internet anymore. It belongs to the trolls now.