We Work for the Internet

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Whenever we meet someone new, one of the first topics that comes up--probably in the second or third sentence, in fact--is the subject of work. One of the first things that we want to know about someone is what they do for a living because that is the simplest way to get a sense of who someone is and to open the conversation to a broader set of topics. I was at an event recently, and in talking to some complete strangers who asked me what I did for a living, I spontaneously gave a smart-aleck answer that, once I thought about it, turns out to be one of the most true things I have uttered in my career as an IT journalist and analyst.

"I work for the Internet," I quipped. And they just stared at me, blinking, waiting for further explanation. I didn't feel like getting into it at that point, so I backpedaled and explained I was a journo and analyst who tracked the server and operating system markets. A much more boring answer.

Well, I do work for the Internet, and so do a lot of you. Let me explain.

What I do for a living--or what I think I am doing at any rate--is helping IT managers and IT vendors better understand what options they have in building the infrastructure on which the companies of the world build and deploy the applications that they use to run their businesses. This increasingly means electronic transaction processing using EDI and Internet protocols. The dot-com revolution that started in commercial data processing a decade ago proceeds apace, regardless of recessions.

But what I am talking about is a more profound shift in viewpoint. From a biological perspective, one can absolutely argue that sentient human beings appear to be the most efficient means of propagating a specific set of DNA code among the living creatures of the earth--at least since the dinosaurs roamed 65 billion years ago and until the next comet slams into the planet and wipes us out. (Let's hope we start colonizing space before too long.) The DNA in homo sapiens has used our intelligence, our drives, and our flexibility to propagate itself, and it is absolutely unclear how much of these key features of our very beings are encoded in that DNA itself. We could argue about how sentient DNA is--not at all, or in a different and perhaps more diabolical way than our own self-reflexive intelligence--but no one can argue that our DNA is absolutely pervasive and dominant on planet Earth, and that this is not an accident. It is so by competitive evolution or design, depending on your philosophy and/or religion.

In much the same way, we are all becoming nodes on the Internet, and increasingly, we are helping shape the way the Internet is built and how the applications that go on it are designed and mesh together. And I am not just talking about people properly classified in the information technology business as their jobs and careers.

But these people certainly dominate when it comes to working for the Internet. International Data Group, the owners of analyst firm IDC and publishers of Computerworld and myriad other publications, claims there are 120 million people in the IT industry worldwide. This number seems a bit high, even if you add in the number of employees working at IT vendors. As a percentage of the Internet population, which has crested above 1 billion people, 120 million is not a very large number--that's about 12 percent of the Internet-enabled population actively involved in the development and operations of information technology and about 2 percent of the 6.5 billion worldwide population. I happen to consider the 15 percent of the world population that is attached to the Internet as working, whether part time or full time, for the Internet, and it will eventually grow to include the collaborative efforts of every living human--minus the Luddites who will never touch a computer. This may take 25, 50, or 75 years. But eventually, the whole world will be connected to the Internet, and while many of us will do our daily jobs through the Internet or over the Internet, I think that it is safe to say all of us will do our part in working for the Internet.

Every time we log on and read something, or buy something, or communicate with someone in one of the many ways that the Internet allows, we are helping the Internet better understand itself and improve itself. Every time we help bring our companies and our families more fully onto the Internet, we are propagating the core DNA of the Internet--HTML, XML, TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, and so forth--and making extinct competing technologies.

So as you log on to the Internet today, think about whether Internet technology is working for you or you are working for it. If you ponder it, you will realize that it is at the very least a symbiotic relationship, merging the devious smarts of DNA with its two offspring: sentient human beings and the information technology we have created. In a funny way, we are the Internet's DNA.