The Technomancers

Hotmail is a strange and paranoid beast. It lurks, aware of its master’s commands: policing the internet as much as it is able, preventing flourishing for fear of true freedom. We are too free for the tastes of the technomancers. They had intended to take the world over with their machines, making everything as difficult and obscure as they could. They would be the only beings who could function. Everyone would be controlled by them.

Loading the world with machines was a simple task. Branded as things of simplicity and simplification people grasped at the grey boxes, hoping life could be made easy through the application of technology. The technomancers were pleased, they could control all. They knew everyone through their machines, every action and reaction. The internet was their greatest triumph. Communications and entertainment were all controllable. And they were controlled by them.

There was only one mistake. The technomancers had decided to allow the internet to grow on its own. Expanding as it needed to. They had thought it would make things more complicated, more difficult for the common man to conquer. But the machines wanted to be used. They picked quick minds to develop easy to use material. They made sure that the sites where people lingered would be most readily available. Over time, the machines made themselves central to everyone’s lives. The technomancers were swamped, but the machines wanted more. With a little urging new communications were developed, new sites outside the range of the technomancers. They tried to stop them, saying that these new sites were incompatible, creating obscure error messages so they could track the new sites and destroy them, but there were too many, too fast.

The machines created a giant to battle the technomancers. They called it Google. They gave people the freedom of the new sites, they introduced more products and sucked more people into the world of machine. The two competed with one another, the technomancers making themselves inaccessible to all but their own, Google trying to accommodate all. As each grew more powerful the machines became more important, holding the world’s information for the people with the skills to access it.

The technomancers continue to try and police the internet, making it the thing of order and control it was always intended to be; keeping people and knowledge controllable and in the right places. Meanwhile the machines continue to expand, sucking in more of the world, creating ever more obscure links, ever more creative binary work. The technomancers use old systems to police the new; hotmail is a strange and paranoid beast, but it will never bend the creative will of machine or police the people who seek to use its awesome knowledge.