I suppose that my obsession with the mash-up technique is a logical extension of my interest in the similar but distinct cut-up technique, pioneered by the Dadaists and refined by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the fifties and sixties. Burroughs used to say that “when you cut into the present, the future leaks out”; likewise he described his trilogy of cut-up novels, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, as his attempt “to create a new mythology for the space age”.

This was pre-internet, in an age when information was primarily produced, archived and interacted with in print form; the earliest home computers with any degree of sophistication or user-friendliness a whole generation away. We now carry sophisticated, user-friendly and most importantly adaptive computers around in our backpacks, in our coat pockets, without a second thought. We use them to read our mail, to contact people around the globe, to look up trivia and to play video games and do our homework. I am writing this post now on a piece of equipment that a mere 20 years ago would be considered either a feat of science fiction or else a rich man’s toy, an extravagant novelty. O brave new world, indeed.

I emphasised adaptive before because that is something that is key to all of our interactions with culture and technology – we adapt, we tweak and tinker and fix what’s broken or unwieldy. We put aside ideas that are dead-ends and pursue what works now.

In the final chapter of the third volume of Alan Moore’s Miracleman, out of the ashes of a superhuman holocaust that razes Thatcher’s London to the ground, a utopia powered by alien technology and Nietzschean philosophy is born, exponentially driven by a cabal of beings – some alien, some born of Earth but augmented by alien power, who have transcended humanity’s foibles and petty insecurities. Nuclear disarmament, the abolition of capitalism, and the creation of new generation of metahumans all occurs within a few short years. A new Olympus, a new Jerusalem, is built on the land that was once fabled to have been settled by the exiles of Troy and from which so many legends have been born. Rather than hide their existence or remain anonymous among humanity, the new gods (for that is what these metahumans are seen as) make it their business and their duty to drag humanity, kicking and screaming, into a new golden age.

In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, whilst the pagan gods of old struggle to subsist in a post-Christian, post-secular New World by feeding on the superstitious beliefs of the descendants of the immigrants who worshipped them in the Old Countries, New Gods flourish: The Technical Boy, a personification of the internet; Media, the goddess of television; The Black Hats – Mister World, Mister Town, Mister Wood and Mister Stone – sinister men in black born of America’s obsession with UFOs and conspiracy; and the Intangibles, representing the “invisible hand of the market”, new gods of the modern stock market and capitalism.

Now, in an age where anyone with a computer and a phoneline or wi-fi connection can say or read whatever they want, we have come to a place where the internet – information itself – is now being treated as a commodity or a utility that can be bought and sold, and where unfettered access to it is becoming practically a necessity in order to engage with an increasingly globalised society.

Net Neutrality was passed into law in America recently, in an attempt to ensure that all information on the internet is treated equally and prevent attempts by service providers to control the flow of it, whether for monetary or idealogical reasons.

“Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

“A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page.” (source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html#.VP3OdvmsU1I)

Naturally, one of the first to cry foul regarding this development was Fox News, a media conglomerate whose stock and trade is misinformation and rhetoric – when Google’s “trust” algorithm goes live, it will surprise no-one when they are the first to fade into obscurity. By redefining the parameters of a system that we have all come to take for granted, Google are attempting to shift the culture of the internet away from “popularity” created through ubiquity and click-baiting, and towards a system where information is weighed by its adherence to cold, objective fact.

In some ways, we are the new gods. We create our own mythologies, our own legends. The 21st century can and must continue to be an age of miracles.