We build our computers the way we build our cities — over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. - Ellen Ullman

A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet, in a world where ‘truth’ is a variable concept — where any belief can find its adherents — how can a consensus be formed? How can we arrive at the compromises that must underline the workings of any successful society?

Somehow, even if it means laws and rules and governments, we must find our way back to the technologists’ dream of the internet, the free exchanges among millions of equals; the following of links to links, unobserved, as we desire; the personal web pages we created, of our own designs, defeating the domination of Microsoft’s and Apple’s standard human interfaces. We must go back to that internet, even if it existed for only a flickering moment, or never existed except in idylls and nostalgia. We must route around the new bad corporate net; or create a superset of it; or an alternative. Or something.

I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we belonged to — had a true stake in — those lives full of code we had separately stumbled into. I like to think it would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye — going on without pause or cease; simulated, imagined, but still not caught — was life.