Our Fragile Universe

Ever wonder how cyberspace has blown up from a way to play Pong to a trillion-trillion pile of cybercrap?

After a while on the web a lot of it all seems the same.

There's a reason for that. There is one Great Writer in cyberspace. He pounds out deathless prose on an old Apple IIe in a cold, clammy basement in Ponca City, Okla. The guy puts in 18 hour a day, but every moment of that 18 hours is a gift to history.

Today everybody Googles his work. How? One guy found him in 1997.

The guy started to rip off his work. Some other guy needed a source for a term paper, and another guy used it to make Christmas cards. (The Great Writer had this Robert Frost thing going some Tuesday in 2001.)

It grew until nobody knew his name anymore, they just start to credit each other as Great Writers after ripping off his stuff. Then other people started to reference each other. They sounded so good, other people ripped them off.

They started selling stuff to each other after one night the old guy was watching 187 channels of used car commercials and weight loss products on cableTV. (He was mulitasking that day.)

This went on into the universities.Teachers had grown up with the stuff folks stole from the old guy. They crammed it down the mouths of a whole new generation of kids.

The old guy died in 2004, but his legacy lives on. Copied crap after crap from crap to crap some stole.

Now he's the God of Everything You Do or Learn.

The old guy finally gave it up and drowned in a pool of his own drool. They found him slumped over his vintage Apple, still hooked up to AOL with a telephone modem.

He had one last floppy disk pryed in his cold, dead hands. Curious, they ran it through Mac's orginal system... one they had to get from an old Apple file.

And what did they find the The Father of All Things Webbed left as a legacy?

It was an episode of Pee Wee's Playhouse. He was about to destroy the Internet by dominating it with trillions upon trillions of Pee Wee's pals and chums.

It was luck. It was an Act of God.

It was a lesson on how fragile our universe really is.