Topic Battle

The Internet's oldest continuously operating components date to approximately 1969, making the network younger than many of its users' parents. Its infrastructure requires constant maintenance, periodic replacement, and the continued functioning of global civilisation to persist. A sufficiently severe solar storm could reduce decades of development to electromagnetic noise.

Individual websites demonstrate even less permanence—the average webpage survives roughly 100 days before modification or deletion. Digital preservation efforts struggle against technological obsolescence, format degradation, and corporate indifference. The Internet exists in a state of perpetual becoming, never achieving the stability that Mars takes for granted.

Accessing the Internet requires only a device and connectivity—resources available to over 60% of the global population. Public libraries, mobile networks, and satellite coverage have extended this access to remote villages, polar research stations, and ocean-going vessels. The barrier to entry has dropped from substantial to negligible within a single generation.

The Internet actively invites engagement, presenting itself through interfaces designed for maximum accessibility. One can contribute to its archives, modify its structure, or simply consume its offerings with equal ease. This democratic accessibility represents perhaps the network's most revolutionary characteristic—a global resource available to billions without requiring security clearance or spacecraft.

The Internet's influence on contemporary civilisation borders on the totalising. With over 5.3 billion users accessing its resources daily, the network has achieved penetration rates that would make any conqueror weep with envy. It has reshaped commerce, demolished traditional media, revolutionised political organisation, and created entirely new categories of human employment and unemployment.

No aspect of modern existence remains untouched by this digital membrane. Relationships form and dissolve through its infrastructure. Revolutions organise across its channels. The global economy pulses through its fibre-optic arteries with transactions exceeding $30 trillion annually. The Internet has become less a tool than an environment, a new medium in which humanity increasingly conducts its existence.

The Internet currently stores approximately 120 zettabytes of data—a figure so large it has ceased to convey meaningful information. This repository contains humanity's accumulated knowledge, creative output, personal communications, and an estimated 500 million tweets daily, most of which contribute nothing to the permanent record of civilisation.

Access to this archive proves instantaneous for those with connectivity. Search algorithms can retrieve relevant information from this planetary brain in fractions of seconds. However, this storage exhibits troubling fragility—server farms require constant cooling, data centres consume 1-2% of global electricity, and bit rot silently corrupts digital archives that nobody remembers to maintain.

The Internet has generated cultural phenomena at a pace that overwhelms traditional analysis. Memes, influencers, viral moments, and entirely new art forms emerge from its substrate continuously. It has democratised cultural production while simultaneously enabling unprecedented concentration of cultural power among platform owners.

More fundamentally, the Internet has become the medium through which culture itself propagates. Music, literature, visual art, and human discourse increasingly exist first as digital phenomena, with physical manifestations becoming secondary. The network has not merely influenced culture—it has become the primary infrastructure through which culture operates, achieving a significance that transcends mere subject matter.