1999, Novem­ber.

I stare out of the win­dow of my third-floor apart­ment, my eyes sur­vey­ing the unend­ing stream of busy shop­pers push­ing their way through the still-falling snow in the streets below, until one man in par­tic­u­lar catches my eye. A poor man, but young – a stu­dent per­haps – stand­ing despon­dently as an island amongst the river of passers-by, uncar­ing if they read his sand­wich board and car­ing only for the end of the day, a few pounds’ worth of cash-in-hand, and a warm home. It’s the adver­tis­ing slo­gan that he car­ries that’s caught my atten­tion. It’s a com­mon enough one these days, but every time I see it I can’t help but smile.

“The End of the World is Nigh.”

It began with the Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian schol­ars and the half-crazed fol­low­ers of Nos­tradamus, but it spread like wild­fire amongst the peo­ple. Every­one got caught up in it. Even­tu­ally, although we held out for a while, we got the bug too. The End of the World. The Mil­len­nium Bug.

The media got hold of a tiny frag­ment of truth – our short-sightedness, back in the eight­ies, when the first com­put­ers that kept track of the date became pop­u­lar – and blew it out of all pro­por­tion. Peo­ple believed that it was a prob­lem, believed that com­puter sys­tems would come crash­ing to their knees in Y2K, believed we’d all be with­out money, with­out food, with­out the Inter­net. Even­tu­ally, we started to believe too…

We’ve got one advan­tage though – we realise some­thing that the mun­dane world doesn’t.

The Inter­net will not die. The Inter­net can­not die.

The Inter­net is more than some sil­i­con and cop­per net­work that’ll fall over when it thinks it’s 1900 again. It belongs to the hearts and minds of peo­ple, not just to their com­put­ers, and it stretches far beyond mere cabling. I’ve seen it, I’ve fol­lowed the snaking crys­tal vine of data all the way to the Hori­zon. And I didn’t see its end. It con­tin­ued, fainter but nonethe­less there, far into that which lies beyond our world.

It can’t die because it’s not just one thing. The Inter­net is tree from whose branches there hang many worlds. BBSs, Usenet and forums; Dark­nets, Under­nets, prox­ies and shell servers; MUDs and MUSHes and MMORPGs. It’s all out there, and it’s all in here, in our minds and on our hard disks.

There’s so much more, too. Extrater­res­trial intel­li­gences read our data, ever learn­ing. Spir­its haunt web­sites for­ever labelled as “under con­struc­tion”, ghosts haunt the packet over­heads, and mon­sters lurk under the hood of every chat room. Faeries don’t trick us down strange paths in the for­est with their illu­sion any more – these days, their tools are HTTP prox­ies and self-installing diallers.

We’ve cre­ated a myr­iad of worlds, and together they are greater than the sum of their parts. We’ve cre­ated the next reality.

Think of Y2K as the Internet’s ado­les­cence – an unpleas­ant time, full of new things both inter­est­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing, but a period of life we can push through and dis­cover what awaits us on the other side.

The old real­ity is senile and dying. The new reality’s life is just beginning.