Free speech is fine, but where would we be without tech support
If ever you find yourself bowled over by the potential of the networked age - dazzled, shall we say, by visions of a collective human consciousness throbbing in time to the pulse of data as it rushes from node to node in a virtual frontier with the power to accelerate and eventually transcend the evolutionary tempo - you may want to remind yourself that the worldwide web is stored, for the most part, in a collection of warehouses just off the M25.
I only mention this in the light of an experience I had at the height of the recent floods, when I switched on my computer to find that one of the websites I am responsible for had gone mysteriously offline.
Contacting my tirelessly patient systems administrator in barely suppressed panic, I was reminded that said website was served from a web-hosting facility in Gloucester, and that there was a distinct possibility that the machine that did the serving was submerged in flood water.
There is a stark contrast between those who eulogise the web and those who maintain it. John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, may have looked utterly convincing as he despatched his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from Davos in 1996 (the text begins: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind . . . " and proceeds to announce, in 16 succinct paragraphs, the arrival of a new metaphysical life for humankind). Yet I would feel oddly nervous, were he to be the man actually looking after my web server, dealing with the nitty-gritty of connectivity and hardware.
When it comes down to discussions of independent power supplies, nothing beats a chap in a suit and tie. This is not to say that, in order to have a website, you need to do business with these people. Thanks to the in-house tech support, my personal blog was served for many years from a machine in the basement of my house in east London. But, oh, how we laughed on the day one of the most popular blogs online was linked to the site, and the in-house tech support, attempting to finish his PhD at the time, was booted off his own network by a tsunami of incoming web traffic.
I've had several opportunities to visit the warehouses that power the web. Some look after websites so vital to national security that those who manage the buildings in which they are housed dare not even have signs outside. Some insist that visitors pass through security airlocks; other sites have central control rooms that look like replicas of the captain's bridge from Star Trek's Enterprise. But all are staffed by chaps who spend so much of their day worrying about back-up cycles and guaranteed call-back times that, one imagines, they have little time left for the niceties of evolutionary paradigm shifts.
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