15 years in Cyberspace
By FBWorld Team

It's unbelievable! This blog known as FBWorld formed in 2004 established itself in the Internet as a community. A place where people hosting dinners go when they are looking to blow minds. A place where college kids go for creative party spreads. A responsive community that would send people chasing red eye flights to source ingredients readers requested.

Over the 15 years we have taken up residence in cyberspace, many relationships have formed. People who wanted to engage with food on a competitive level were finding us, reading our stories, and asking questions. People in the food industry saw us as viable outlet to spread messages. Many of the people we would deal with over the years we have not met. We didn't need to. The bulk of everything needed could be found in cyberspace by way of work done in the past and references.

Representation of Cyberspace

Cyberspace is a term difficult to define. It's an intangible communication space created by the world wide interconnection of computers. A meeting place, a cultural and economic frontier, an issue of global conflict, a virtual space beyond excellence. It is sometimes seen as a territory guaranteeing the circulation of information.

People navigate through the web. Information flows through portals, gateways, channels or ports. Communities of all shapes and sizes take root in cyberspace.

What drew me was an obsession with throwing fun parties. My father started the blog with a few of his old army friends, but as the blog evolved into a magazine, the world of public relations came into being. By writing about popular consumer products such as wine and gourmet food items, complimentary food and wine became a two way street. If I wrote about it and posted it on the internet, enough people saw these postings, that it became a viable way of spreading the word. College students found themselves in the world of P.R. and loving it.

Chongqing China mayors welcome dinner

Press access to events led to more stories and industry insights and were used and reused by the companies we were writing about.
Even though we were a small percentage of the hoards of people looking to upload insight and expression, our activities were constant and carried through the years. A truth that many people with various interests share today.

What is it about the Internet? What started in the sixties as a response to the Russian Launch of Sputnik by ARPA as an instrument of control, has evolved into a humanitarian tool placed in the hands of civil and commercial fields. In 2015 out of the 7 Billion human beings on the planet, 3 Billion have access to the Internet.

When Tim Berners Lee created the 1st website with a graphical interface and hyperlinks, he could have filed a patent. This patent would have made him quite rich. Instead he gave everyone access to the source code in affect giving the Internet to Humanity.

Imagine a world where the Internet belonged to one of several companies. Like an encrypted TV, the service would primarily be profit driven. We can assume that each company would maintain its own network. People with subscriptions could grab at categorical information without having to travel. This system would have been good but the system we have today is so much better.

With the Internet we can be in several places at the same time. Every post is added to the collective memory of humanity and can be recalled by anyone at any time.

49er Cheerleaders Cocktails & Couture Party

Tim Berners Lee may have been the most important, but he is not the only one to contribute to the Internet and mold it into the open community that it is today. In many respects the creation and form of the Internet is quite anomalous.

Elon Musk one of the founders of Twitter had a lot to say about this over the years. Everything uploaded to the cloud is essentially going everywhere. We have all seen those pictures of server farms. I'm sure we all have seen Silicon Valley and heard about cell phones and Smart devices. Average people own that power and store the information needed for the Internet.

Who really knows where your data is going, and most importantly, what's going on once it gets there. Are we creating something that is artificially conscious? Are we molding it to look after our coming generations? Do we need this? What is driving humanity to lean on this?

49er player walking catwalk & Cocktails & Couture party

To answer these questions it helps to look at everything that is evolving around it. Humanity is rising in ranks and is looking to be greater than 8 Billion within the next 10 years. Food companies are forced to modernize and keep up with demand. Crops have been genetically modified to produce greater yields.

Lets not forget power. A liberating force, one that lets us warm our home. Light our streets, travel, and even communicate. Much work and consideration must go into these infrastructures that function to prop up Humanity. As Demand grows the pressure for these organizations to produce greater output has them constantly evolving and adapting. In many cases these infrastructures outlive the workmen & women who operate them.

There is an inherent risk here. Take the Chernobyl reactor accident that took place 32 years ago. Started out as well meaning Engineers looking to test one of the older reactors in the case of a power cut. Ended up being a story that many of us have heard.

What many people do not know is that the accident was on the verge of being much worse if it were not for three of the engineers who sacrificed their lives to prevent an explosion that would have been an estimated 50 times that of Hiroshima. Had that happened, portions of Russia and large parts of Europe would be unlivable or at the price of cancers or genetic deformities.

Today in the areas that surround the Chernobyl disaster are liquidator squads, that continually burn everything in 25-mile quarantine zone and slaughter animals. There are tours offered where you can fly over the reactor and see the Steel & Aluminum Dome built over it to contain the radiation that still leaks today. The life span of this dome they say is 100 years. Then it will be a matter to be handled again. It's weird to think "with all that the situation could have been a lot worse".

Steel dome built over plant to prevent radiation leakage

It's not like Nuclear Power has a monopoly on environmental disasters. Between chemical plant explosions, oil spills, livestock virus outbreaks & melanin infested dairy pipes there are few shortages to where humanity is vulnerable. The crux of the matter is the situation can only get worse while demand grows, and our infrastructures age.

If one can step back and look at humanity as a whole it's easy to imagine Internet, Cyberspace, and AI as humanity's hedge, staving off the inevitable clutches of chaos for as long as possible. A collective consciousness designed to have a memory to serve multiple generations. Imagine how recent history would be different if the lead engineer at the Chernobyl power plant was warned that the sensors in reactor #4 had not been updated and the risks might be too high to test the reactor in the case of a power cut.

For those who pay attention there is a sense that something out there in Cyberspace wants to get to know us. Evidence of this can be seen by the email suggestions Spotify sends about our preferred music, Or by Gmail and how it prioritizes emails that are important to you.
Over the years many people have contacted us and asked for back links because our content was aligned. These people have ranged from hotels, chefs, restaurants, and home -maker blogs, military commissary restaurants and a range of PR companies. As a result of this, all participating parties had their content circulate in meaningful ways satisfying the curiosity of people surfing the Internet.

It's not clear how all of this works, but one thing is clear. Internet's impact on humanity has yet to be measured.

Now a days, whatever your interest the first place you go when curiosity strikes is a search engine. From someone who has actively participated in the Cyberspace community for 15 years, its clear that we are in the early stages of what is being developed. More & more people are getting comfortable using it, and the tech industry has dedicated itself to expanding its capability.

How will things look in the next 10 years? We'll see but one thing is for sure. We at FBworld will be focusing on the culinary arts & wine and the insights that we find will be here in Cyberspace for any curious web surfer. As our insights get uploaded something will be organizing it, to be called back up when searched or when certain environmental or infrastructural circumstances deem it relevant. This will be true of anything uploaded about any topic by any individual users, public & private companies alike.

 

By Arthur Walsh