Two Principles of the Internet as Diety

I don't usually think about things unless I can tie them to other things I conjecture about, no matter how loosely I tie them together - unless it is just that interesting. For instance, I'm still trying to assimilate my research on consciousness without linking it to anything other than relativity and quantum physics. So I'm going to try an assimilate some ideas pertaining to the internet, since the censorship of the internet is a really hot topic today.

In light of my post "All Hail the LORD Internet" I have received a few comments from some friends. Most have tried to point out to me that it's either anti-religious or had major flaws in my logic, both of which are absolutely true. First, my logic had flaws, but doesn't all religion (or institutions in general) have flaws? I think I can leave that one right there. Second, the post was not really meant to be religious (though, admittingly, it does read that way), but was rather meant to be sociological. We are so dependent on our computers, our internet, our Facebook and Wikipedia (I say "our" because the internet is meant to be democratic), that we don't know how to function when websites blacked-out on January 18^th in protest of SOPA and PIPA. The Redditor's wife finally had sex, people actually got some work done, and some people realized how lazy they were without the internet. We worship at our computers. If the earliest gods were created as an institution (as Giambattista Vico claims), then our sociological dependence and worship of the internet's attention elevates it to the status of an "institution." Let's explore the internet as an institution to assert its sociological function as deity.

The Internet as an Institution
Vico had to say this about cults, gods, and institutions: "First came the myths of the gods, which were histories from the crudest age of pagan civilization, when people believed that all institutions  necessary or useful to humankind were deities... The first pagans conceived of institutions necessary or useful humankind, and which gods they variously imagined then, inspired by the fearful religions which they themselves had invented and embraced." (New Science).

The internet is essentially an institution, meant to serve humankind and feed us information (which we think should be free and accessible). In short, the internet is a democratic institution. We all contribute to it, and we all benefit from it; as it should be.

And to top it all off, the internet, computers, computer technicians and users have a patron saint: Saint Isidore of Seville. Saints don't become patrons of anything that isn't an institution (i.e. traveling, wealth, health, fertility, et cetera, all being an institution of some sort that benefit us).

So what happens to institutions when they no longer benefit humankind? They are abolished. When slavery was considered no longer acceptable as a democratic institution it was abolished. The problem is certain institutions have more political power than others, so they tend to trump lesser establishments. For instance, the Catholic Church held more power than the reemergence of Hellenistic cults in Greece, thus began the vandalism of the Christians. Likewise, the US government and corporate America hold more power than the internet. The former two are more concrete, unified, and have lots of money. The latter is an amorphic creation of millions, held together by dispersed servers, encryption, codes, and processors, to which anyone can anonymously access at any given moment. The former requires the collapse of civilization to abolish, or a coup d'etat. The latter can just have the plug pulled, or simply censored.

If the internet exists as an institution, just as the gods served as human institutions, could we not consider SOPA, PIPA, and PCFIPA the heroes of rising up against the gods? Just as Perseus in Clash of the Titans  (1981) defied gods? (See my "All My Heroes are Dead, They Died in My Head"). Zeus claims if there were more people like Perseus, then humans won't need gods anymore (apparently the government doesn't think we need the internet anymore). Contrariwise, the problem is more of the 2010 Clash of the Titans, where the hero is really an anti-hero, especially in our objectivist, capitalistic social order. If we have the internet, then we won't need the government. And the Arab Spring has shown that no matter how much a government tries to control their country, the internet allows the people to circumvent all of that. (Can we call our government an anti-hero for threatening our LORD Internet? Or simply a villain?)

Deus Ex Machina
There is an old term that has become rather corrupted over the centuries that I think applies well to the internet: deus ex machina, or in the Greek apos tekon theos. The term literally means "the god out of the machine," but more properly means "the god of our making" or "god out of our own creation." The term applies to Greek theaters where gods were lowered and raised on and off the stage using a crane, hence machina. But humans make the machines, so it is a god out of our making, out of our machines. (See my "Apos Tekton Theos").

Gods being represented by our human institution, and the internet being an institution of our making... one can start to assimilate what I'm getting at here. For sociological purposes I attribute the internet as a sort of deity, but not exactly divine, but artificial. I won't debate if we invented God and gods, but I will debate God and the gods as artificial governors of our invented institutions; that much should be clear. We made the internet and call for it when we need that institution to assist us in our endeavors.

Is the internet an actual god? No, not really. But it has been in the interests of religious institutions throughout history to conflate and "confuse" the deity with the institution. Saying the internet is a god is sociological sardonicism.

The point here being two fold, first, the internet is one of the most useful institutions humankind has ever invented; second, its usefulness is reflected in our love for it, which turns into sociological dependency. Seriously, where would we be without it? I can't even imagine the hours I would have to spend in a library searching for certain information. Now I can just pray to Isidore of Seville to guide my Google search to help me find how to grow a potassium ferricynide crystal. Otherwise, I would have had to scour the Dewey Decimal system for the right books, find them, and pour through volumes on crystaline growth structures in elemental chemistry. That process is much more simple now.

So let me clarify the internet as deity: it's sociological, not religious. And I don't need a lot of rhetoric to say that if we shut down the internet, civilization is fucked.