User:Kim/writing/along the edges of the web

Writing along the edges of the web a Methods writing exercise
notes Pad
fan fiction response to The Webs Grain by Frank Chimero

infrastructure

loose notes

Marseille as crucial area for (european) digital infrastructure
16 intercontinental submarine cables doc in marseille, landing, transiting and linking Europe and the Mediterranean to Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the United States
amount + presence of cables attract datacenters (of corporations like google, amazon, meta...)
datacenters (mega computers) are maybe most visible part of this infrastructure, facilitating techno capitalist endeavors, blocking/ extracting land and water resources, air pollution

how does this relate?

datacenter consume large amounts of electricity and water (for running continously and cooling), often connected to drinking water circuits
if not connected to drinking circuits they draw water form natural water bodies

"The growing energy use of the Internet is associated with two trends. First, content is becoming increasingly resource-intensive. This has a lot to do with the growing importance of video, but a similar trend can be observed among websites."
"The size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the 500,000 most popular websites) increased from 0.45 megabytes in 2010 to 1.7 megabytes in June 2018. For mobile websites, the average “page weight” rose tenfold from 0.15 MB in 2011 to 1.6 MB in 2018. Using different measurement methods, other sources report average page sizes of up to 2.9 MB in 2018."
"The size of the average web page increased at least threefold from 2010 to 2018."

references

text

It is early April and the sun is beating down on me while I am standing in front of huge a concrete building. The climate in Marseille has always been mild but for this time of the year it is too warm. I came here to visit the internet. When I studied the map (of internet cables) in preparation for this trip I imagined to see more of what is actually going on. But what I see is concrete, plastering the ground and arising into the sky. And water. Water that is utilized for cooling systems, keeping the massive computers that run day and night from overheating. The same water that more and more often becomes scarce for humans and animals, especially in near desert climates. Okay, lets take a step back. I travelled to marseille, to visit datacenters. You might think, but why marseille? The city in the south of france is a crucial area for (european) digital infrastructure. How so? Internet, especially over long distances like across oceans, is running on cables. No Internet is not just in the Air, there wherever, whenever it is needed but is dependent on material architectures like cables, that have a start and an end. In Marseille, no less than 16 of these cables reach mainland, linking europe to asia, the middle east and the US. This proximity renders Marseille into an attractive location for tech companies like google, meta and amazon. Since the mentioned cables are mostly running underwater, one of the most visible parts of internet infrastructure are datacenters - large conglomerates of computers and cooling systems, responsible for storing and processing information. The datacenters locations and actions are governed by economic aspirations, willfully ignoring the fact that the resources they monopolize are nothing of infinite supply but close to reach boundaries of exhaustion. Its hard to get closer, high fences rise into the flimmering air between me and the super computers. I start walking along them. Sizes are slipping out of proportion as I move around the building, getting closer, then the fence draws me further away again. As websites are getting bigger, larger in filesizes and dependencies, they require more energy and space on server storage. Even solar powered hosting services are connected to grid power, often as back up to, by all means, prevent a site from going offline. What a tragedy that would be! Excuse me - I am joking. I think most parts of the internet* and its users would profit from a little downtime once in a while. Just a moment, that enables you on the other end to recognize, the fragility of a system so deeply interrelated with our tangible environments.

domain names

loose notes

yu is the country domain for Yugoslavia
yu outlived its country by two decades

When a country ceises to exist, falls apart, what happens to its domain? who decides that? "When a domain is deleted, what happens to all of the websites and mailing lists under it, and all of the knowledge they contain?" "The political implications of country code domains, which have essentially baked borders into the internet, were not considered by IANA when they were established."

yu was 'retired' in 2010 (https://www.iana.org/reports/2010/yu-report-01apr2010.html official iana report) though other domains from not anymore existsting countries are still online like .su for soviet union

"Over 4,000 websites, some of the earliest examples of internet culture from the region, suddenly became inaccessible via their original domain. For many, the deletion of .yu represented the final loss of the former country, the erasure of its digital identity."

references

text

I am sitting on the couch, surfing the web, hopping from link link, without looking for anything to specific I go with the flow. I am moving fast and the internet connection is running smoothly this evening - my computer opens and closes tabs, windows and banners when I ask it to. And then full breaking: "This site cant be reached" check if there is a typo in .yu. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN. Wait, what? I try to refresh the page. nothing. it says "check if there is a typo". A typo? I did not even type this domain.

content and form

references

User:Kim/reading/Dividing and Sharing

text

For this section of my journey along the edges of the web I invited a few participants for a roundtable interview. Their names should sound familiar, so I will spare you the detailed introduction:

Writer: "Hello and welcome HTML, CSS and Javascript, thank you for agreeing to join me today! To get started, could you briefly explain what you do?"
HTML: I was there first. I am developed to transmit content, information.
CSS: But what about your styling tags like i or b?
HTML: glad you asked, since I aspire to be pure content, these soon got replaced by em for emphasizing, which leaves the styling part entirely up to you.
CSS: that is exactly what I was introduced for
Writer: wait but I dont understand, none of you remains neutral nor entirely separate neither do you HTML create formless matter.
HTML: well i do like to think of myself as the foundation for the same content, even if presented in different ways, always communicating the same message.
JS: yes, of course - and readers are also just pre programmed machines processing information? As someone wiht a lot of experience in interaction, I can tell you're wrong here! Content is always interacted with and perceived differently, with changing context, personality, culture and education.