KidsIL

It’s pretty much the sad story I love to tell, and since you asked for it (or at least I’ll pretend you did), so you now get to hear it.

’twas the age when life was good for geeks. Universities built us a huge, world spanning network and we loved what we saw. We went and built ourselves a cute garden, where we made our claims and planted wonderful flowers and trees to enjoy, no need for fences or barbed wire because, hey, we WANTED to invite each other over to have a look at what we did with our little turf on the ‘net. Come in, and if you enjoy my creation, here’s a sapling for you to plant in your garden, no worries, it’s free. Sure, there was that occasional bully, but in general we were pretty nifty and knowledgeable gardeners and knew how to beat them with our shovels and rakes. And the occasional gopher didn’t bother us too much. Actually, it was a cute little critter! And of course, in some corners of our garden, we planted our special herbs and spices, complete with a camo net. Sure, everyone knew what’s growing there but hey, nobody really cared. And if you needed some to relax, just go and take some, there’s plenty.

We looked at what we built and said that it’s beautiful, too beautiful to be just for us, we wanted the world to participate and enjoy that beauty too! We decided it would be unfair to keep the others, who are no gardeners, out of it. After all, you don’t need to be a gardener to enjoy the sight, sound and smell of our creations, these people, too, should enjoy our roses and relax in the shadows of our trees. We went and built paths through our garden, we cut bushes and made it pleasurable and non-intimidating even to those that were kinda wary of this “jungle”. We created safe roads for them so they don’t have to climb over bushes but so they could see all there is for them to see. We probably shouldn’t have shown them the field with the camo net, but hey, they too wanted some weed, and it just wouldn’t have been fair to keep it away from them. Yeah, they just took and didn’t plant, but hey, there was plenty to go about. And those that were too stupid to stay on the path or too eager to be troublemakers were even easier to deal with than those gardeners that did the same, since these people were even more clueless.

The whole mess started to fall down on us when two things happened. Once, some of those idiots had to brag about our camo patches and how they got some really good dope for free in here. That’s when the real world started to muscle in and tell us that we can’t do that. Ok, we rebuilt it, made the herb fields smaller and less obvious, but sadly we also made the mistake to tell everyone how to still get there. Talk about learning from a mistake, but that’s the geek, if he builds something nice, he thinks that everyone should benefit from it. Sadly, that’s not the way most people think.

Especially not corporations, who first wondered where all their consumer sheeple went and, realizing that they went to our garden, decided that this cannot be. There is a place where sheeple flock to, run by technically and not legally inclined people? Their appetite for our nice little garden awoke. They came with big building machines, evicted some of us on the pretense that they now own our turf and build some amusement park on it, fenced off and only accepting those that paid their fee. We looked at it with contempt, since it violated everything we wanted from our garden. You couldn’t even go there and take a sapling from their trees, they’d rather uproot and destroy it rather than giving it to you, anathema to the geek ideals. Worse, they took your saplings, grew them and then called the park cops, claiming that you stole your tree from them, not the other way ’round.

More and more of them came, and less and less we could build our gardens the way we wanted to. Worse, often enough, we couldn’t even build our gardens at all anymore. We were swindled out of our turfs, and better not even dream about building a camo patch, the park rangers are sniffing them out faster than you could grow them.

I think it’s time to move on and build a new garden. And this time, we should maybe not let anyone in but people we know.