In the beginning, there was the Void. And on the surface of that Void, there was NCR.
In the mind of IBM, there was Microsoft. And then Eve got hold of an Apple, and things started to get juicy as the mind took physical form in a series of schismatic manifestations.
Time passed. The Internet was delivered on ancient stone tablets (a prototype of things to come). Microsoft built Rome and tried to crucify Netscape. And so the Zealots started to leave Rome and form their own camps; they even started to speak new languages based on ancient cuneiform called SCO.
After many years, a tribe called The Crusaders set forth in their Netscape Navigatorcraft, and the first Holy War of the Internet—the War of the Browsers—was fought. The blood was shed mainly in the great courts of the U.S. and Europe. Eventually, the law lords and pharaohs laid down the law, and this first war subsided to bring about a new era—not of peace, but of regulated calm.
However, regulation in the new world was not sufficient to control the populace. Over time, in many corners of the new world, battles broke out on new fields.
One of these battles was between Microsoft’s Rome and a tribe called Real, and the battle was only spoken of by a small sect of polyglot priests who termed it the Player War. These priests would convene in the advanced village forums of the Tower of Babel at Streaming Media gatherings and debate with great anger and vehemence the validity of Rome’s ideology against Real’s ideology.
Eventually, Rome paid many shekels to silence the Generals of Real. But while these two ancient adversaries were occupying each other with their bartering, the mercurial upstart Adobe launched a stealth attack in a Trojan Horse called Flash, and by the time Rome had defeated Real, regrouped, and rallied its forces—expecting to dominate the new world—Adobe was standing on the hill, preaching a new sermon with all the confidence of a messiah to a crowd far larger than either Rome or Real had ever seen before—a sermon that reached into the temples of Rome, and those of the Holy Apple, and even into the ancient tribes of SCO.
Lost in the wilderness for some years, Rome made an unholy alliance with the holders of Eve’s Holy Apple—ensuring that its duopoly could survive by arming the Holy Apple forces with much gold and placing at the leadership of the Holy Apple army a High Priest of great vision (Arch Angel Jobs)—and both in their way sought to ensure that the upstart messiah Adobe would face fierce challenges reaching out to audiences in landscapes entirely controlled by the duopoly.
Rome itself created a Trojan Horse powered by Silver Light while benefitting in the foothills from the proliferation of Flash, protected its Holy Grails of shininess, the iPhone and the iPad, from invasion by Flash by sealing the walls so incredibly tightly that all innovation in these Grails was only permitted along the guidelines laid out by the High Priest.
Nonetheless, the Adobe movement gathered momentum and was becoming a widespread ideology until one of its greatest allies, the movement of the Great and Never-Evil Technicolor Logo (known to its acolytes by the mysterious name “Google”), decided that borrowing ideology from others was not fitting for a powerhouse of such dominance. Procuring its own ideology from a small but clever tribe in the outback of the new world, the Great Technicolor Logo ensured that the world would always have multiple ideologies. Stripping its own people’s reliance on Flash from its world-renowned (and envy of Rome and Apple) Soothsayer Tube, it began to replace its own entire ideology with its own texts and scriptures.
Not to be defeated, the Holy Apple, which so far had been resistant to adopt any ideology other than its own, had outgrown the clutches of Rome and announced that it was going to seek a new and better ideology.
And so the Zealots cheered—for Rome was, in their eyes, defeated.
However, Rome held one last secret—it stole a march on the Holy Apple and introduced a new adaptive ideology at the ancient competition of the Olympics, one that appeared to be perfect to the populous in all situations.
Yet, even as Rome proclaimed its success, within the blink of an eye, both the Holy Apple and the mercurial Adobe were also proclaiming their versions of the new adaptive ideology.
Despite many years of bloodshed of the innocent and confusion among the people, schisms and zealots of each ideology still congregated around their respective temples, being drawn into the wars blindly, as if there was a need to believe in only one view of the universe.
Still today in the Forum, debate boils over to become battle on a regular basis with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The battles led up to this year’s congregation of all ideologies—the annual convention known across the new world as IBC—where Adobe announced that its temples would also now be speaking the Holy Apple’s adaptive ideology.
“Look!” cried the Macolytes (the followers of the Holy Apple). “Adobe is defeated—it even speaks our language now!”
“Look!” cried the Flash warriors. “Now our ideology is supported even in the temples of the Holy Apple, and so we defeat its dominance!”
And so it was deigned by the great and powerful that the war of the religions continued in a cycle of destruction, seemingly cursing the populace for time everlasting.
The priests and Dream Teams of the Tower of Babel at Streaming Media, being obsessive and opinionated in these matters, called their clans to arms and declared that the future for these ideologies was not necessarily to converge in one place, for doing so would be fraught with complexity, risk, and a dearth of innovation—the essence of the survival of the species.
The truth was that the best ideology for all people would be to embrace all technologies and accept that the underpinning monotheism and philosophy of convergence was, in fact, the worship of a false god, established by the leaders of the various schisms to create the power and fear known as “divide and conquer.” In fact, the ancient polytheistic tradition of tolerance and divergence was, and ever would be, a better and more peaceful way forward for all peoples of Earth, the new world, and the netherworld.
It would probably lead to a better picture on the screen of more devices too. And there would be much rejoicing.
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2011 Streaming Media European Edition under the title "The Religious Wars."