11th Chaos and Lots and Lots of Letters

What’s more valiant than trying to get my artsy fartsy brain around logical structures, hierarchies and feigned knowledge of the medium I’m supposed to have all the knowledge about? I would like to whisper everything, but who am I kidding?

RFC, DNS, IP, TCP, IETF

Cue a new-mum Snow White trying to fix a whole town’s generator. (Edit: start from 0:25)

What I did like was the whole contributing factor to the misconception of the Internet as chaotic rather than highly controlled. Galloway states that the contradiction between Machine 1 and Machine 2 is the reason for this misconception. Machine 1 is our Medieval guy. Shared power, distributed amongst autonomous locales. A castle here, a land over there. A moat for you, some sheep for thine. Machine 2 is our moustachioed friend from the two-set of W’s time era. Rigid, defined, hierarchies, power, absolute power. Nauseating and slightly murderous.

If I was to strike a pose to define my understanding of the internet as a whole, it’ll be me on the floor fast asleep. I want to understand the intricacies of the world wide web. I want to flourish amongst all the codings and encodings, the historical drama that later on defined the millennia. But I can’t grapple this on my own.

In all honesty, the main thing I garnered from this reading is the idea that if I was smart enough to be that controlling authority who, hypothetically of course, wished to ban a certain country/continent from the internet just cause, I could pretty much do it through a “simple modification of information contained in the root servers at the top of the inverted tree.”

So if no one else is climbing that tree, I’ll put my Anna boots on and blocking your Kristoff’s out as I climb away to find my sister, er, power…

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