Ant World (5)

 

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Computer networks are ant networks. Computers are comprised of a trillion ants, all doing their business together. China is an ant country. Ants work well when they work together. Wikileaks uses the power of an ant; one ant to challenge a system. That one ant merely happens to know where the off switch is, and becoming irritated by the misuse of his own function determines to use it. It stands to reason that one well-placed and dissatisfied ant is now capable of such powerful activity, because we have followed the ants into their world but we meddle more than they. It only takes one ant to notice a weakness. DON’T DO THAT! the leader might say. They might know that the switch shouldn’t be toyed with. But they cannot be aware of how big that switch is going to make things. Because we don’t know. We are not in our world any more. We are in Ant World. No one person, no group of people make a wikileaks happen. It’s beyond the control of we. Our mobile phones, our cars, our refrigerators come now with computers, and computers, when they meet up in the Ant World, are seven degrees away from our nuclear power plants and our military facilities. Ant World. Wikileaks provides us with a new window into Ant World. If we are smart, we will be thinking. How is the wikileaks effect going to spontaneously manifest itself in our Ant World? We could be in for a bumpy ride.

Apologies to Lehan, this should have been published prior to Between Two Worlds