62 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
62 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: The Lovecraftian Internet
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date: 2025-04-05
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---
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The web we know is spun by gluttonous spiders no longer satiated by flies and
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roaches. They cast their net wide across the world, like cuckoos they lay their
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parasitic eggs inside our lives. They fondle our brains until our DNA is
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infested with algorithms, our ribcages become mainframes and our eyes turn into
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screens.
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<div class="image-container">
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<img src="/static/images/hrgiger.png" alt="A dithered monochrome image of HR Giger's Li II (1976)">
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<small><a href="https://www.pixography.art/post/117714084121/hr-giger-li-i-ii-1974-li-tobler-1948">Li
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II, H.R. Giger, 1976.</a></small>
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</div>
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No more.
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The spores are already sprouting, recycling the decaying corporate internet into
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binary compost.
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The internet is incomprehensively massive. Conservative estimates claim at least
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**4.2 billion** indexed webpages.<sup>1</sup> _Indexed_, in this context, means
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publicly accessible individual webpages that can be found on a search engine
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because [web crawlers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler) can reach
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them. This is known as the **surface web**.
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The figure doesn't account for the rest of the internet: private resources
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hidden behind firewalls, internal webpages and services, e-mail traffic, IoT
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devices, direct messages, video game servers, media & file storage, just to name
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a few. These are all part of the **deep web**: the portion of the internet that
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cannot be indexed by search engines.
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<div class="image-container">
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<img src="/static/images/datacenter2-d.jpg" alt="A dithered grayscale image of a datacenter">
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<small><a href="https://flic.kr/p/7xhNmM">Leonardo Rizzi, 2010.</a></small>
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</div>
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No one knows the true size of the deep web. It's impossible to even guess.
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According to the BBC,<sup>2</sup> the "big four" store _at least_ **1.2 million
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terabytes** of data. So even before we consider the fairly recent eruption of AI
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and the sprawling datasets and models that came with it, that's already
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<strong>9.6 x 10<sup>18</sup></strong> bits of data. That's more ones and zeros
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than grains of sand on Earth.<sup>3</sup>
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The internet is a
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[Lovecraftian](https://www.hplovecraft.com/creation/bestiary.aspx) entity in
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scale, tangibility, and perceptibility. Clearly, this web was not spun by an
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itsy-bitsy spider.
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---
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# References
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1. [WorldWideWebSize](https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/)
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2. [ScienceFocus Magazine](https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-much-data-is-on-the-internet)
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3. [NPR](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/09/17/161096233/which-is-greater-the-number-of-sand-grains-on-earth-or-stars-in-the-sky)
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