The internet was born out of research for the U.S. military on how to create a network which could withstand a nuclear attack. The instructions for how the internet gets your data from your computer in Peoria to a server in San Francisco are still based on that early 1960s research. Recent research shows that the internet has retained this resiliency in the face of network damage. In December of 1993, John Gilmore famously quipped "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." I don't know if this is the first time that someone has treated a social rule of the internet as being as factual and inviolable as a simple network algorithm, but it's certainly one of the more notable ones. With a large enough mass of users, we can treat all internet users as one organism and make predictions about its behavior. This is what I thought of today when the Mozilla Corporation released the Facebook Container Extension for Firefox:
This extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies. [...] When you install this extension it will delete your Facebook cookies and log you out of Facebook. The next time you visit Facebook it will open in a new blue-colored browser tab (aka “container tab”). In that tab you can login to Facebook and use it like you normally would. If you click on a non-Facebook link or navigate to a non-Facebook website in the URL bar, these pages will load outside of the container.
This is fascinating. The internet is starting to treat Facebook as damage and is starting to route around it.