Yeah, Hello World and all that.

So, what does one really say upon starting a blog? Let's perhaps start with...

...the idea of cyberplankton. I'm sure you've encountered it before. It's a certain kind of absurdity between Kafkaesque, funny, and outright miserable. Cyberplankton is the promise of a neat future, where everything is sleek, and the interfaces are integrated into, well, whatever it is you want to integrate them into. Consider lightbulbs that won't work if the vendor suddenly goes out of business and the smartbulb can't fetch updates.

Consider just about anything that does not necessarily benefit from the IoT mantra, and, on top of it, has no fallback to just operate at baseline functionality any longer. How about smartfridges that may become a plain normal fridge if something inside refuses to connect to the right API (or, worst case, it's a fancy bricked fridge)? Yeah, that all is cyberplankton, not-quite-functional or only doable with a workaround if you look at it positively, and probably something entirely useless if discarded along the roadside. Nobody needs it.

Cyberplankton is the promise of automated transportation, when reality looks more like Waymo taxis keeping people up at night, stoically honking at each other because of their anti-collision rules, and damn, do these cars want to park and recharge... all at once... and once one of them found a spot, it's going to be just too close to an adjacent car that just found its place, but now it feels compelled to back out at once... which will force the next approaching taxi to hit the brakes and start honking.

Is it still a subset of the spherical packing problem at this point, or just something you'd expect Douglas Adams to write, rather than find it in the news? Automated transportation, luckily, works in narrowly defined sandboxes. Sometimes they drive over the unfortunate passersby who is invited to partake in the live environment experiment as if it were not even quite Grand Theft Auto, but rather the storyverse of Saints Row.

The other end of cyberplankton is more personal, driven by human intent rather than vehicular determination (or lack thereof). It's something that must have happened as soon as the first human being had succeeded in automating a task, and finding themselves lean back and ponder how nice life was now, they found themselves as well beset with the sudden question of what to do with all the free time, and if one could not possibly find a means of generating a more efficient automatization, so that there would be even more free time available. So, optimization,

Perhaps the assumption is wrong that Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a nice pyramid, and we have to rather imagine it as an asymptotic narrowing column. But along with that column follows also that we get an inverse column, due to the standing-on-shoulders-of-giants effect: for each iteration and generation that speeds up a process of automatization, or invents a new cogwheel of optimization that fits to the established machine, we are complicating the automated tasks by another fraction. This leads to an ever-branching specialization in each field.

So maybe cyberplankton is to a great deal a discrepancy between promise and reality. We still have no flying cars. Luckily. Ethical engineering would assume that we first figure out the small problems, say, on the size of a parking lot. Then we can think about deploying it. But meanwhile, companies are in a tight race to deploy their latest whatever-gets-branded-as-AI. Many of these things should not have left the lab before we ironed out the small and large problems. The current internet is already inevitably poisoned with computer-generated content, so future generations of more-or-less AI will likely include it in their training data as well.

It's been quite a few years since I last tried to make a website, and to be honest, at the time it was fine to slap a few html tags together and somehow it'd render well... kinda. Depending on the browser. It's certainly amazing that we reached a point of standardization, but at what cost? To get up to date with things, I've spent quite some time catching up with html standards (consider that <i> was perfectly fine at the time, and nobody had heard yet of semantic tags).

And so making this mess also meant a bit of css, php, and JavaScript. It lead down a few interesting lessons, such as figuring out how to get https up and running. Do we want HSTS or not? It involved taking at least a glance at what ARIA roles are, where and when you should use them... and after reading the documentation, I get a strong feeling that DO NOT prevails. But does it? That depends on the screenreader that must interpret it. This too is cyberplankton, I think.

That example alone means little in terms of judging whether these are good or bad changes, the point is really just that such things escalate quickly. It's by no means exclusive to (computer) technology, it's a process of finding nuance and diversifying what we have. Consider a similar result happening in folksonomy and its evolution towards a proper taxonomy: before Linnaeus, attempts at a systematic etymology and taxonomy of life had been made, but not quite as formal as the system Linnaeus proposed.

However, that new Linnean system did not necessarily mean that Aristotle and Theophrastus were entirely wrong, it's just that they were working within their frame of reference. They were certainly experts in such a systematic approach, working to sort all the creatures known to Greek Antiquity into categories, while most people would have been likely to know trivial names for the plants and wildlife locally encountered: a folk taxonomy.

But with specialization follows that one can be an expert in Holothuridae, without knowing necessarily much about Asterozoa, though both are Echinodermata, and the language of taxonomic descriptions shares roots down the line of biology. And yet a brittle star is worlds different from a Spanish dancer. Theophrastus may have confused them with jellyfish. But would a fisherman of the time have assumed the same, or named them as distinct species? To be fair, Pelagothuria can look like a jellyfish.

So we're close to plankton here, and it's fair to draw the comparison between the strangely slow speed of ocean life with the nothing-goes that cyberplankton sometimes might feel like. No, this post is still not quite a useful definition of what cyberplankton really is, but it's a start.

Hello World... and Hello Ocean.