Pictured above is not a work of art, but it should be thought of so as such. It's a rendering of surface ocean currents by NASA. That's right, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration!

Wow.

In an article brilliantly titled Better Than A Van Gogh: NASA Visualizes All The World’s Ocean Currents by Mark Wilson, you can see the world's ocean currents visualized. These are the surface currents.

There's even a video! It's spellbinding.

Luckily, I got a job at the Faculty Research Center of University Computing Services, and was at ground zero of a high-tech lab that was allowed to try anything new. Anything. And this WWW stuff was really new, and really exciting.

Gopher was cool, but Mosaic was cooler.

Dr. Rashidi mentored me through the next few years as we embarked upon a fantastic journey of web servers, httpd, Mosaic web browsers, Marc Andreeson, NCSA, Netscape web browsers, Sun Sparc 5 Workstations, Winsock protocols, Solaris, NeXT, and a whole host of other highly technical things that 99.99% of people dismissed.

This was when Yahoo was still a project at Stanford. Google (Googol) was still a word that meant (1) followed by (100) zeroes. Mark Zuckerberg was only 8 years old.

The "world wide what?" people would say as I told them what I was working on. Ha! Boy I wish I had those conversations video taped.

But three years later, in 1995, people like Jeff Bezos realized it was going to be big. Really big.

Perhaps so did Phil Alden Robinson, a writer/director who released a fairly obscure 1992 movie called Sneakers. It's one of my very favorite films, especially for this line of dialog:

The world isn't run by weapons any more, or energy or money. It's run by little ones and zeros, little bits of data - it's all just electrons. There's a war out there old friend, a world war. And its not about who's got the most bullets, it's about who controls the information, what we see and hear, how we work, how we think. It's all about the information.

While he could be talking about media, he's actually talking about computer networks. Email. Web. Facebook. Google. Twitter.

As you can imagine, Phil's prediction turned to be quite correct. Eerily correct. It's all about who controls the information.

In this clip from Sneakers, Robert Redford (Marty) finds an experimental electronic device that can hack into any system by quickly rendering any encryption useless. Ben Kingsley (Cosmo) wants the device for himself. They then discuss the power of who controls the information...