Happy Birthday, World Wide Web!

CYBERSPACE—Where has the time gone, World Wide Web? It seems like only yesterday you were a loose collection of bulletin boards and primitive websites, unable to stand on your own two feet let alone send a clear photo without crashing like a baby. Look at you now—a strapping 21-year-old whose influence has far outpaced your years, whose sheer size penetrates every facet of our lives, and whose ability to create feast or famine has made you into a sort of a god. No wonder you are worshipped and feared. Not surprisingly, from the beginning you had a fixation with sex; in fact, few boundaries were able to contain your vast appetite for more of everything, no matter what anyone said or did. It was kind of cute at first, watching you stretch your wings, but now they say you are dangerous to yourself and others, and there's talk of restricting what you are able to see and do. They tried this in the beginning, as you well know, but your parents would have none of it. "He needs to be free to grow," they argued persuasively. "If you stifle him, he will wither and die." They were blind with love, but now they might be afraid that, like a lion cub raised in captivity, you are simply too wild and unpredictable as an adult with few restraints. We have to admit that we are a little concerned, too. As much as we still value your awesome ability to connect us with one another, to allow us to share what we love (and hate), to build new things and envision new, easier ways of doing the same things we've done for generations, and yes, to also destroy the things and people we hate, you don't seem to care about some of the traditions that have made us who we are. You seem to prefer to make rules up as you go along, no matter who is hurt in the process. Or maybe you're just too inexperienced to know any better. After all, you wouldn't be the first 21-year-old to think s/he had it all figured out! Of course, the real truth about you is simpler than most people realize. You're as dumb as a stump, with no idea what you're doing or where you're going. In a sense, you're like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. You love life and all of the soft and beautiful things in it, but you don't know your own strength or how to keep from killing what you love. In the end, your guardian may believe he has to put you out of your misery, to keep you from hurting anyone else. That's not really an option, of course. We'd prefer to see a few small restrictions put on you, nothing you couldn't handle but enough to keep you from smothering the rest of us by accident. It may be too late, though. You may already be too large to control. You're considered an adult now in every country on earth, old enough to drink anywhere on the planet, start a business, have a family and certainly long since old enough to go to war or become a porn star. Happy birthday, WWW. Oh, and here's a picture of you on the day you were born. Your papa took it, or so we're told. He still can't believe how much you've grown.