A SUPERIOR LIFE FORM

New thread in D&D about a recent Forbes article on Network Neutrality. During the discussion, various analogies were thrown around: highways, telephone networks, classified ads, etc. Forum Superstar LaFarga issued the following challenge:

All analogies for computer technology suck and people need to stop using them. If you can’t explain the situation without an analogy then you don’t fucking understand it properly in the first place… When everybody in this thread can agree what the best analogy for the internet is, let me know.

My response is worth archiving here:

Here’s the best analogy: John Carpenter’s The Thing.

No, wait, hear me out.

The Internet was built by ARPA for a very clear reason: they needed a communications network that was plastic and dynamic and could still operate under sustained heavy damage. Even if you knock out one or two central servers, network traffic could still flow end-to-end. As long as the network is still coherent (that is, as long as there is some connection between the end points), then your communications network was still operational. In other words, the internet is built the way it is in order to be almost impossible to kill.

The solution to this problem is IP, the internet protocol. The key to IP is that it is dumb as rocks. A packet only knows its desitnation, but it doesn’t give a damn how it gets there. It is up to the network to determine the path between endpoints, and with a sufficiently connected network, there are always tons of paths to take. The upshot is that there are no preferred paths between end users, so if you kill some paths, there are always alternates available. This is absolutely essential to the way the internet works.

And its just like The Thing. The Thing contains in it’s DNA all the information it needs to replicate. But each cell of The Thing is dumb. The Thing in its original form can’t really do much. But what it can do is latch onto some other organism and assimilate its DNA in order to simulate basically any other creature it wants. Because of this, The Thing is extremely difficult to kill. You have dumb pieces which, if it is hooked up in the right way, become terrifically awesome.

Now, if you have seen The Thing, you know that the only way to kill The Thing is by divide and conquor: catch each of its little pieces, and burn it until it is no longer active. Without fail, some pieces survive, so you need to track down those pieces too and kill them. The Thing is extremely hard to kill, just like the Internet.

And guess what, by opposing neutrality the telecoms are trying to use exactly this strategy to kill the internet. When you start dividing up the network into preferred paths for specific kinds of data, what you have done is divided the internet into pieces dedicated to specific purposes. You’ve turned a dumb network into a smart network in order to make sure certain kinds of information only take the routes you want. In other words, you’ve trapped The Thing.

But we don’t want a smart network. We want a dumb network that is unable to discriminate between types of data, and that is entirely indifferent to the paths it takes through the network. Because once you start discriminating, then it becomes easy to regulate the flow of content over the internet. More importantly, that power of control is put firmly in the hands of the telecoms.

And thats a Very Bad Thing. Of course, I’m being hyperbolic. No one is looking to kill the Internet, and I doubt anyone really can. But by opposing Net Neutrailty, the telecoms have taken the first step towards doing just that, by undermining the very principles on which the internet was created.

Dr. Blair: [throwing a fit in the radio room] You guys think I’M crazy! Well, that’s fine! Most of you don’t know what’s going on around here, but I’m damn well sure SOME of you do! You think that thing wanted to be an animal? No dogs make it a thousand miles through the cold! No, you don’t understand! That thing wanted to be US!