In one of his sci-fi trilogy, either Neuromancer, Count Zero or Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson there is a scene where the cybercowboy  Case is chatting in cyberspace with his dead college, an artificial intelligence rendered from a the legendary cybercowboys personality. They have just finished some major operation online and the AI says something like: these crazy people who say cyberspace has its own god, you know what, they are right.

But that is in the future. For now the closest we can get is the catholic idea of assigning a protecting saint of the internet. In 2003 there was a ballot on the italian internet were seventy thousand votes were cast from all over the catholic world between six saints.
Supposedly a strict rule of one computer-one vote was enforced and yet there were two thousand some votes cast in the Vatican state. Supposedly there are five hundred fifty eight citizens living in the Vatican so that’s interesting.

I don’t know how this concluded and who is now considered the patron saint of the internet, or the strongest candidate. I still think the best saint for the job is Isidore of Seville; it was in conjunction with him that I first heard about this divine angle to the internet. As a librarian in training I can only like the scholar who compiled the first encyclopedia know to western civilization a millennium and a half ago.

One can only wonder what his times might had looked like if everybody owned computers in the latter part of the sixth century. If technology had somehow bypassed the industrial age and gone from antiquity directly to computers, powered by the Baghdad battery.

Then again, perhaps it would not have made much of a difference to him personally. Might have saved him a lot of travel by lobbying the Visigoths via email to convert.Latin would be the online language and Wikipedia would have existed a lot sooner except it would have been known as etymologiae.com.

Have a good one and stay profound.

TFH

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