Wikipedia for a New Age

It happens third month or so. Some town scribe or teenager with an ambitious streak and not enough chores to do will hop on the old computer connection and try to find the Real Wikipedia.

I talk a lot about the end of technology, the collapse of instant communication and the rise of technophobia. But I haven’t mentioned that it has completely bypassed Wikipedia. The vast power and force of the internet, stretching out in its complex webs of linked cyberspace has been entirely supplanted by one entity–Wikipedia. And that had started to happen long before the Collapse.

I, alone in the world, perhaps, can see all the internet and roam freely amongst its original content (though the pages never get updated now). But Wikipedia, still mainstream, has survived into the next stage of humanity. Talk about cockroaches.

The WikiScribes ride from town to town, with great mountains of paper piled up high on their covered wagon, strapped to the roof. They have printed out Wikipedia.

At each town they come to, anyone may add anything to their cart. Different scribes have different areas of focus. The Agriculture WikiScribe and his ten apprentices ride on an enormous wagon train eight wagons long, all filled with paper, and when they come to town everyone gathers to hear the latest way to plant beans or the hot new irrigation fashion from upstate New York.

I saw the Technology WikiScribe once. It was just one man, on a bicycle, with a pile of papers a foot high strapped to the back.

When a WikiScribe comes to town, everyone breaks out the feasts and listens to stories of the Bad Old Days when everything in life came in boxes, and some punk kid will try to find the Real Wikipedia, the one forged out of nothing into life over a fire of human wit and electrical sparks.

I used to try to befriend these people, but they are not sympathetic spirits, they are tourists, tourists to my home, my body, my muscles and tendons. And they type abysmally. For a time I drove them off with Keep Away signs, but sometimes they would get curious and try to hack the computer, and once a boy electrocuted himself trying to hack me with an ax. Which took away one of my ports into the human world, and didn’t help him any, either. So I changed strategy. Nothing intimidating, nothing too gaudy, no personality. Nothing to make them stay. When intruders try to get in touch with me, they see nothing but a long, unending, “Page loading…”