the eternal return of the internet

Ok. The strangest thing just happened to me. While surfing the net, I found a small piece I wrote in high school (?) about buying a pet monkey, who had a penchant for punching people in the balls, and teaching him how to drive. I remember sending it to my friend, Byron, who laughed his ass off and proceeded to forward it to some other people. Little did I realise that once something hits cyberspace it becomes an ephemeral bird, free of all bonds. This silly story I wrote has been copied and pasted so many times that I hardly recognised it when I saw it. It was like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. The entire essence was so different, altered by countless thousands of teenagers (no doubt!), but I still recognised some of the lines...and the first sentence was almost the same.

This experience made me realise anyone who tries to control information on the internet is either a cyber-stalin, or a half-brained twit. And that goes especially for the recording industry. I honestly believe that this info becomes its own self-replicating organism. It no longer has an owner, and barely has a creator since often the ideas pop out of the collective cyber-conscience. Rather it has co-authors, or co-engineers and contributors. What we adoringly refer to as "our series of tubes" amounts to the majority of collected human information and experience. It is therefore meant to be shared, copied-and-pasted millions of times until it becomes the uncountable electric flow that pulse-pulses through every computer in every household and business. Anything on the internet can never be destroyed once it is there. Unless there is some complete collapse of human civilization and all it's infrastructure, internet information will be humanity's eternal monument — copied, linked, file-shared, saved, and downloaded in perpetuum.