The Internet

Tenets: REUSE, trees, sum, worse, hier

Central concept: If worse is better, then the plethora of bad Web pages out there guarantees the Net's longevity.

With over three billion Web pages on the Net, the World Wide Web has shown itself to be a veritable beast rising out of the sea of humanity. While promoting the best that humankind has to offer, it also probes the nether depths of depravity. Every time you think that you've seen it all, the Net comes back with a vengeance to make you feel like you're chipping away at an iceberg with a toothpick. With a track record like that, it's likely to be around for a very, very long time.

Reuse is a popular concept on the Web these days. Not only are millions of people illegally sharing and reusing each other's copyrighted music CDs, they're also legally sharing favorite HTML code snippets, graphical images, icons, and JavaScript programs to make their own Web pages. In fact, the nonprogrammer individuals out there are probably better at reusing code than most software developers. It matters little that there is a lot of garbage out there. What counts is that the garbage is freely available to anyone through the feature provided by most Web browsers that allows the user to view the HTML and JavaScript source code. It is as if the Internet is the world's largest dumpster, and half the world has gone dumpster diving.

Of course, the World Wide Web has lots of great content. And text-based search engines make it relatively easy to find. As long as you realize that on the Internet there are at least 10 times as many ax grinders as there are axes to grind, you'll do fine. You may even enjoy grinding a few axes of your own.

The World Wide Web may redeem itself by finally stemming the torrent of paper spewing from printers everywhere. Remember when everyone said that the introduction of computers into the working world would lead to the paperless office? Well, much to everyone's surprise, it was discovered that computers help generate more paper use, not less. But spreading around reams of paper to one's coworkers in the office is not nearly as much fun as flying it on a worldwide flagpole to see which individuals across the globe will salute it. And so the World Wide Web, in eminently practical fashion, may actually fulfill one of the Unix philosophy's lesser tenets by helping us save trees.