seeing me

A million spiders crawl the web

Spider is a metaphor for what these search algorithms do. They scan, parse, and index this site, my words, my thoughts, the evident,viewable content that I pretend to handle through my keyboard.

Strange isn't it? I am considering the interface with this site as I write. It's writing. Such a strange creature to hone one's skill at pecking words in a predefined constellation that was determined in a gilded, steam-powered, mechanical era--the 19th century. That's when according to one James Beninger, our society grabbed hold of one of the technologies of central control--writing. And in setting type through typewriting machines, communication was standardized. That revealed its other kin--information.

I only pretend to handle my keyboard and reveal some historicity to this communication, qua information-production, interface. As I said, I only pretend to handle my keyboard because as flights of fancy occur, I am tethered to a now that wasn't predetermined by my sitting down. I need to grab a hold of this writer inside my hands and wrestle him to the ground. But I digress. I like the notion of a writer not thinking of his writing but of considering it a spawn of the nervous activity of his hands. That was the characterization that Philip K. Dick arrived at and I find it a quite lovely one. His world is one that I find myself within in my ideas and stylings and ravings. I like this notion that a sub rosa reality controls that which we call consciousness, common sense, 'my world.'

But as I was going to say. A thousand, or was it a million? Yes, a million spiders crawl the web, and they are the ones, the only ones, reading my missive to no one, issuing from a no one about no thing.

So here's to Google.com and Yandex.ru. I hope that finding a meta-tag in your 'crawling' causes some kind of recursion bug to rear itself and render your bug a mute pigeon carrying the note of a long-dead man.

After all, GNU is Not Unix.

The software creators get a guffaw.