Internet to be completed by 2010

Officials have announced that the internet will be completed in 2010, ten years ahead of schedule.

The massive effort has been underway since the 1960s, when the internet was first launched as ARPANET. It its first year, it contained 32 emails, a picture of an American flag, and a web page about ponies.

The international consortium of developers announced yesterday that the remaining work was mainly “filling in the gaps”. They have already finished the most difficult stages, combining billions of so-called “junk” web pages of interconnected ads, affiliate marketing schemes, and red hot pornography.

“The porn posed special challenges,” said project leader Dr. Justin Squash. Faced with demands for higher wages by their exotic performers, his team worked around the problem and cut years from the project by replacing the flesh and blood actors with virtual models. Developers generated the images and video by cutting up pre-existing face and body images. The bodies and groups of bodies were then recombined in random combinations.

“We think everyone will be very satisfied with the results. Although perhaps not as satisfied as the couples in the videos,” laughed Squash.

Not all parts of the internet could be created automatically, however, and from the outset, the project has depended on an army of internet volunteers, who manually filled in the forums, blogs and webpages assigned to them.

Volunteer blogger Ryan Windex is relieved that the project is finally wrapping up. “I’ve enjoyed it, for sure,” he said, “but I’ve been sitting in my basement with my nose to a monitor for two years. It’s been a full time job, creating strategy guides for online games, and posting strident comments and bitter rants about subjects that, frankly, don’t mean very much to me.”

Asked what he would do when the internet was finished, Windex laughed: “Probably take a shower.”

The final words and graphics on the internet are scheduled to be put in place in the summer of 2010. Once complete, the internet will be disconnected and put on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. At over a trillion pages, it is the largest work of human labour ever completed, and will be visible from space.

The consortium behind the Internet will meet in December of this year to discuss a follow-up project, known as StickyMountain. This time it will have nothing to do with computers.

“StickyMountain is a huge pile of used bubblegum and chewing gum, mixed with other found objects,” said Squash. “It represents the first step in a paradigm shift towards a post-information spittle-centered society.”