Sunday, February 23, 2020

Invisible Networks #23: More Noise Than Signal

How do you find a needle inside a planet-sized haystack, when the needles are painted to match the color of the hay? That's the current issue that GalaxyBrain faces. With a social network that reaches the millions of colonized planets and space stations, the collective voice of humanity is always on broadcast. The sheer amount of information makes even the most niche of hashtags and narrow of searches provide billions of results. A recurring joke among some colonies is that seeking knowledge within GB will only yield madness.

Despite its original purpose quickly proving useless, people find a way to integrate it into their lives and culture. Many people treat their posts as being effectively anonymous, a void to scream into that leaves confessions and sentiments so deeply buried to might as well have never happened. Others practice divination through GB, using some detail of a person as their search parameters so they can define meaning from the seemingly meaningless results.

Recently the GalaxyBrain servers were made fully automated, so that even if neglected for millennia it will still be available. Ever present and too vast for a single mind to understand, the impression it leaves on each successive generation becomes closer to that of a deity. Public terminals to connect to it are now decorated like shrines, with varying designs pulling from different religions of the distant past. As the preachers who spend their days near those terminals often say, "What does the nature of God matter, so long as they are here?"

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