Since I was a kid, I have always been curious about how things really work. I remember having been caught aged around 8 by my parents while I was dismantling the home phone and so many other stuffs they had to forbid me to touch anything built on some kind of mechanism. Which lead me to become a real jerk psychologically unable to manipulate any electronical device since I finally flew away the family nest.

Now I am an old man and I am still curious about what makes things operate. Technology is an infinite source of wonder and my brain can't stop questioning about how all these silly gadgets do work.

I was recently wondering how could Internet be working ? Yeah the big Internet itself. We use it everyday and we don't know what it's made of. How come I can send an email, visit a website, blog something, or watch a video on Youtube ?

I know all the blablabla about computers connected together, and IP address and some funky named protocols they use to communicate, but all this is by no means the real truth about how Internet works. It's just a technical explanation that explains nothing.

It's not about dwarfs or gremlins either.

It's about garbage, storage system and noise management.

To understand fully how Internet is working you should compare with a wide rubbish dump. Just imagine Internet like a huge huge dump. People stuff it and fill it with content they want to relieve their heads of. They stuff Internet with messages, videos, mails, texts, images, all kind of content that pollute their minds and they want to get rid of.

It's just like a big disposal for the brain.

And, on the other end, there are a lot of people, the very same guys, that need to get something back. So they start using Internet as massive population of hobos digging in it to find something that could be useful. Like in any dump, they spend lots of time digging for few real useful objects. The content they get out of this dump is merely strange, outdated, inappropriate, corrupted or idiotic.

All of the hobos hanging around the net feel quite unsatisfied with this system but

- they have no other source to retrieve stuffs to feed their brains with.

- it's free

In this wide garbage, every new disposal is shouted and announced, so people can get informed of what's incoming. Though, as there are so many disposal in a minute, you just can't hear nothing clearly. All you get is a big noise of information melt together, that doesn't make much sense.

Yes, you can destroy one part of the dump doing no harm to the rest. Yes, It can take many roots to go from one part to another. Yes some parts are jammed while others are almost free. Yes, everybody is speaking the same language so that anyone can understand what kind of disposal they have to deal with.

It's such a total anarchy of content and stuffs clustered together that everybody believe the dump is infinite.

Yes, that's the real good analogy to understand how Internet does work. People are swapping data all around with so little idea of what they are doing, you could compare with hobos throwing things away and digging others out.

E-mails, websites, Instant messengers, videos, and so on are just the shapes that this garbage can take.

So why is it working ? Everything rely on one single idea : everyone has content but nobody has an idea what to do with it. So they swap and swap until someone eventually find out.

That is the ground reason why Internet is working, all things considered.

To finish, you can watch this video. It's another funny theory about how Internet really works, you may enjoy also :