I’ve been an internet junkie for years now, searching out new bits of information, adding some occasionally, and taking in articles, movies, multimedia and whatever else the greatest communication medium in human history has on tap.  I’ve tried to rely on the internet, and computers, I really have.  I’ve tried to push as much reliably searchable info out of my head to provide room for more neural-hyperlinks; I’d rather know how to find the information than knowing the information itself.  Some have described this as Google dumbing us down, others have understood that this is a pre-requisite behavior for technologically augmented post-humanity.  I see it as an efficient method for managing surplus data.

A side effect of that focus, on using the internet to my benefit in order to gain the upper hand on everyone who doesn’t, is that I spend a lot of time on the web trying to make it useful for me.  It’s an amazing tool, one whose uses haven’t all been understood, like a Swiss Army knife with fractal bits and doo-dads becoming exponentially more complex the closer you look, a tool that defies a simple printed legend.

The danger, as I have been told, is that relying too heavily on the web (and, when finally available, on virtual reality) will desensitize me to real reality (the existence of which I will not discuss here) and prevent me from ejoying the real world.

Tl;dr: “Get off that damned computer and go outside!”

I, a devotee of the internet, try to swim against that current and use the internet for whatever I see folks refusing to use the internet for: shopping, news, sight-seeing, watching sports, communicating, etc.  I know it’s not the same thing and has its own Pros and Cons (e.g. Amazon has a huge selection, but the place down the street actually has the item you want) but I like to think I’m supporting the improvement of the online mechanisms that will one day overtake the brick & mortar alternatives.  Yes, Amazon will be 100x more devastating than Wal-Mart, whose local-economic-devastations I deplore, but I still <3 Amazon.

Virtual sight-seeing, whether browsing Flickr albums, spanning the globe in Google Earth, or watching YouTube videos, has provided me access to more locales and details thereof than I could ever have hoped to experience directly.  Old refrains of “it’s better in person” or “seeing it is nothing like being there” ring true, but I’ve been some places and, for my purposes, seeing it in enough detail is often enough.  (See also: war journalism)

However, it has recently come to my attention that there are some things our technology can’t provide over the internet.  I knew there were such things, of course, the internet only mediating 2 of our 5 senses, but these examples were new to me.  It turns out I’d taken all the modern advances in computer imaging and high resolution ultra-high-contrast display devices to be more miraculous than perhaps they are.

As it turns out, the internet, your computer, and (most importantly) your computer monitor are unable to show you a decent Cyan.

Not the makers of Myst, but the color.  The ‘C’ in the CMYK color model actually can’t be displayed (properly) by the devices specifically programmed to understand that it exists.  Another color (and probably not the ONLY other color) is International Klein Blue, or IKB.

Tetrachromacy (extra rods and cones to distinguish more different colors) and color-blindness prove that vision defects exist in real life, but at least someone can see those shades; it’s not a complete loss.  When we look all look at computer screens with the same abilities and disabilities then none of us can experience these real-world phenomenon.

Reading articles on the internet with pictures of colors I cannot see evokes the Magritte pipe, but with an aqua bowl and an ultramarine stem, and should remind us all (again) of the treachery of images.

Cyan and IKB, I miss you, though I think I’ve never met you.

One of many things that stuck in my memory from Snow Crash was the motorcycle chase between Hiro and Raven.  How could one be faster than the other in a digital environment? Who or what moderated the speed at all in the Street?

There’s a billion other questions about the Street virtual environment, ranging from the plausible or existent (hyperlinked virtual books in Hiro’s library workspace) to the nonsensical (sword fights in the Black Sun).  I place street racing in a shared virtual environment right in the middle of that plausibility spectrum: it seems possible, but the mechanism isn’t obvious.

I’ve considered the problem since first reading the book and my thoughts ran along the lines of “speed has to be earned”.  Obviously your opponent wouldn’t be reliable so there would need to be independent observers (be they server software or client software) to “approve” of your speed.  For you to move from point A to point B in a peer-to-peer-mediated environment (as I imagined a real-life Street to be, despite the text stating that corporations owned the servers) you’d need all those peers who might see you to accept your high speed travel.  What incentive could you give them?

I figured there must be an answer that could be provided by doing work for them, but what kind of work?  What kind of useful work can I do for the people I drive by to induce them to respect my claims of superior velocity?  And how can I count on them to be fair?  I could offer up my bandwidth, mirroring their content to passing neighbors, taking the load off the observers.  That sounds nice, but you’re bandwidth limited and that’s an increasingly depressing plan given the bandwidth caps ISPs are enforcing.

I recently stumbled onto BitCoin, which reminded me of this whole question and induced me to write this post.  Your computer does work, crunching numbers and processing data, and this earns you credit that is reviewed and respected by your peers.  BitCoin isn’t a perfect model, because it has a randomized payout effect, but it’s an interesting model.  It seems like an evolution of the distributed processing projects I participated in during my youth (such as the RSA challenges on Distributed.net, but also SETI@Home and its ilk).

Some kind of CPU/GPU-processing based, non-random, communally respected system for generating “credits” could be useful for putting petrol in the virtual tank of your digital dragster.