I had an interesting conversation the other day: my interlocutor was the kind of person who barely, barely knows the difference between an internet connection and an internet browser, and who seemed content with it. Fair enough. The guy only had one email address (the one his ISP set up), which, he told me, he couldn’t even use because of all the spam.

A second went by as I tried to process the thought. I blinked. Spam? Those things our ancestors used to fight with bare hands? But I thought they were extinct!

And that’s the beauty of virtual worlds; the world we see is the one we choose to make. Remember the annoying web pages of yore, the ones that tried to hypnotize you with a sea of  ridiculous animated GIFs? Well, they’re probably still out there. The difference is that no one sees them anymore, because we collectively (yet unconsciously) decided we didn’t want to suffer their sight anymore; they got buried by the magic of Google’s PageRank.

If Internet was a physical world, our cities would be build on top of heaps of crap. Thank God it isn’t.