I always wanted to write something on all the technologies that a website relies on in order to have been created and work. My attempts have so far failed because it spirals out of control so quickly. Kevin Kelly sums it up:
A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to re-create all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society.
The article isn’t about the web hardly at all, it’s about the interconnectivity of tools and how far we’ll be set back if that is disrupted. I enjoyed the term “upcreation tool.” So many of the tools we use as web workers are tools in which to make more complex tools.
