The War Bug by Biff Mitchell

It started when I took a course on building online communities. I was working in sales and marketing for an educational software company (hmm…come to think of it…that’s what I’m still doing) and I figured it would be cool to create a learning community on the Internet where people could take computer-based training and mix it up with other students through things like email and bulletin boards and newsgroups.

There could be classrooms to run the computer-based training for self-study, chat rooms to socialize (like, maybe even share a virtual coffee or beer just like a real-life campus), and bulletin boards to work on group projects.

Today, there’s “collaborative” software for all these things, but back when I took my course, things were primitive. In fact, this was before they had computers and the Internet in Zeeland. No, I don’t live in Zeeland, but I know they didn’t have computers and the Internet when I was taking my course.

But that’s another story.

Truth is, I didn’t learn much about building an online learning community in my course. If fact, I really didn’t learn much about building online communities, you know, with people of similar interests exchanging ideas, discoursing at heightened degrees of relevance, and interacting at personally meaningful levels.

Come to think of it, we don’t do this in the real world. But that’s yet another story.

Everything in the course was slanted toward two things: carrying over the economic model of consumer servitude that exists in the real world, where humans are weighted in terms of their ability to spend increasingly larger amounts of money – whether they have it or not – and tying economic stability into the concept of getting bigger and bigger, growing and growing, consuming and consuming.

I learned about the components of an online community, about the stockpiling of content, the value of growing membership, about the various development stages from first forays into gleaning members and content with the attractiveness of “free access” to the advanced fee-based communities where members band together more for the purpose of saving a buck-through-purchasing-power than engaging in meaningful social interaction similar interests or not.

And, of course, the whole idea was to trick people into joining an online community that would generate profit. Yep, the whole thing was predicated on somebody – preferably the owner(s) of the community – making money.

It occurred to me that, if the Internet were to go the way of this course, then it would eventually re-create the real world.

And maybe go one further.

The smaller communities would be eaten up by the larger communities (just like in the real world). The larger communities would merger (just like in the real world). The larger, merged communities would swallow up even more smaller communities until there were no more small communities were left.

There would be only a handful of large, merged, bloated, and very powerful communities. But they would still have to grow. And there would be only one way to grow.

They would have to feed on each other.

OK, so that’s not how the war was started in The War Bug, but it created a picture in my mind of an online world toward which we appear to be heading if we keep thinking of the Internet as just an extension of the real world.

To be continued.