- If unseen agents of an intertidal continuum, a microcosmic world in miniature, can truly reflect on the increasingly complex realities of a networked cosmos, so be it. It is perhaps true that wading in ad hoc tide pools alongside of the Super Sargasso Sea, one may find some speculative theory objects, blogjects and assorted memetic flora and fauna.
Lurking adjacent to this vast aerial ocean of lost, forgotten and obscured ideas only the hardiest of inhabitants will survive. Regularly, portions of this nodal enclave are covered and uncovered by the advance and retreat of the Super Sargasso. Life forms in this ecological niche must adapt, evolve or otherwise embrace the worldview of the barnacle. Not necessarily, or literally, the sedentary crustacean clinging on to a fixed spot (the marine equivalent of desktop computing) but an equipped barnacle, a networked thing. Not an absolutely inflexible stubborn barnacle either, but a progressive 21st century barnacle. Barnacle 2.0, the barnacle that blogs. Like acres of other barnacle species, these variants dwell continually in their shell, in this case a figurative housing represented by a small fleet of networked devices. These wireless appendages: feathery, barbed and information-prone, draw data-plankton in from the hertzian currents which permeate even the murkiest patches of the Super Sargasso Sea.
Barnacles in said shells find solace amongst other transients in the data cloud of the tide pools, the primordial soups of an altermodern ecosystem. This is home to inhabitants tuned in to network culture; rich with a perpetual influx of information and robust infrastructurally with a ceaseless attention to nuanced nodes on which to cling. Mobile, yet clinging on.
Often times these wired barnacles intentionally voyage out into the Super Sargasso, drifting in heterotopian fashion, attaching themselves to the underside of vessels. These derelict vessels, from discarded media to forgotten theories and interdisciplinary wrecks may be salvaged if sufficiently encrusted with barnacles. Like so many deep sea research submersibles, the blogging barnacle relies on an omnipresence of heterogeneity, an entourage of pingbacks, trackbacks, links and related search engineering.
It is perhaps also true that barnacles do not blog, that periwinkles do not gush that tide pools along the Super Sargasso are as speculative as the migratory patterns of eels circling back to Earth.
While antennae will likely remain fashionable and functional, extra-terrestrials with enormous brains will certainly be an endangered species in near-future network culture. A strange survival from a discontinued future, an evolution short-circuited by the rise of the outboard brain.
