A friend of mine sent me the following story “from the internet”:
On the planet Virgin Soil, the mainland foundation Transmissio, also known as TCP/IP, surrounded by the ocean communication, has been built. Around this foundation, various islands rise over the water of the communication ocean. The streams and rivers all flow into said communication ocean, which means they are all connected.
Virgin Soil researchers found out that the mainland foundation, along with the islands, has layers which, as time went by, rose higher and higher.
The most important and biggest of those islands are Mailanesia, Usenetasia and Minor-Complaint-City. Apart from those, there is also Efteponia, Telnetia and several others. Almost all the islands are or have been inhabited. As usual, the peoples of Humanum drifted apart over the years and now they speak different languages.
The cultures and behavioural codices of Mailanesia and Usenetania are closely related, so the people living in both islands can mostly understand each other. Whenever they want to talk with someone from the other group, the Mailanesians use SMTP, whereas the Usenetanians use NNTP. Both peoples speak languages which – apart from dialects – are rather similar to the language Mailanesians and Usenetasians use when communicating with each other in their own dwellings.
Some of the Mailanesians live rather lonely lives and have contact with only a few other Mailanesians. They are called “One-to-One-Mailanesians”. Other Mailanesians have contact with many of their fellow citizens, which gives them the title “One-to-Many” or “Listo-Mailanesians”. Consequently, the rules the Mailanesians gave themselves outside the SMTP culture are rather few and far between. The One-to-One Mailanesians decide among themselves, the Listo Mailanesians mostly leave it to a higher authority to come up with rules or to occasionally remind them of rules that had been agreed upon.
With the Usenetanians, it is different. For them, the public system and protection against alien intrusion is important. So their culture, called “NNTP”, created many places with identical design, which guarantees that an error at one place will not cause the entire public system to collapse. Instead, it can always switch to other places. For the Usenetanians, it is important that their culture and their many locations are not owned by anybody and that any person at all can join at any time. In order to be able to understand each other and exchange ideas, they made rules which make it possible for everybody to reach each of their locations and to be a free citizen with equal rights of their island.
However, we must admit that the population of Usenetania has now suffered from a dramatic demographic change for some time. This is not true to the same extent for some individual, remote Usenetanians who settled on small islands and, although still nurturing the NNT culture, no longer have any connection with the proper Usenetarians.
Minor-Complaint-City is an island the landscape of which is far more broken than that of the others. There are numerous layers and summits, all of which, of course, are based on the same series of layers as the other islands. However, the higher you climb, the more the structure will differ – and on the top layers of the mountains, the differences are rather significant. The Minor-Complaint-City culture is called HTTP. It is a place where they like it sharp and colourful. There are uncountable places and locations, but the public system and reachability is not as much of an issue as in Usenetania.
Every clan has its own place and its own special niche and an outsider will not find it easy to find it. This is how, in Minor-Complaint.-City, many dialects developed and nowhere near every inhabitant can start contacting any other inhabitant of his liking. Besides, the inhabitants of Minor-Complaint-City are not very interested in questions of ownership on their island, which means that they do not come up with so many prevention regulations concerning the closure of places or the restriction of their freedom. For them, the meaning of the word “freedom” tends towards being permitted to camouflage their own identities. In fact, the latest fashion is the “digital Burka” – which they call “locking mechanism”, because they found out that they are spied upon by unwelcome guests who never asked permission. Incidentally, they share this experience – along with the annoyance about it – with the Mailanesians.
Another characteristic of the people living in Minor-Complaint-City is that many of them believe they are the only inhabitants of Humanum and there are no other islands on the planet. In fact, some inhabitants of Minor-Complaint-City actually never leave their mountain. They expect others who have a question to come and climb their mountain. After having made this special effort – for which, more often than not, you need special equipment – you will find them a fairly friendly people. Provided the guest takes pains to speak in their dialect and does not belong to the aforementioned “unwelcome guests”.
So much on this. In my opinion, it is rather nice and you might find it easy to continue in the same manner. I looked for the source and found out that it is by Sabine Baer <baerks@t-online.de> in the Newsgroups: free.de.piratenpartei. The subject is “Post Card from Virgin Soil”.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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