Hooray! Too Many Stupid Toys!

life after IP Address DoomsdayPut on your party hats, pop the cork on that bottle of Dom Perignon, tell your boss to go consummate his relationship with his fountain pen and break out that emergency reserve of cocaine-dusted hookers because we've hit an Internet milestone. Well, at least we're about to. In just a few months (by current estimates from very estimate-y people) we're going to run out of IP addresses. For all ya'll who live out in the sticks, that means we're short on the numbers, dots and magicals that make the glowy think-box work. That's right, while there is a functionally infinite variety of domain names for use on the Internet, there's a very limited number of meaningful device addresses that actually allow your computer to access all that porn and pirated music, and probably some business-related stuff, too.

So, a few things are going to happen in the days leading up to IP Address Doomsday. First, a bunch of complete morons are going to freak out on Internet forums and start claiming that it's the end of the Web as we know it. It'll be annoying and all of your most stupid friends will start to entertain the idea that there just might be something to it. About a month later, cable news networks will jump on the story with their usual empty-headed mix of simultaneously sensationalist and dismissive coverage. A chiseled-jawed talking head will say something like, "Are we running out of Internet?!" and then lead into some low-content story about the dwindling IP's that's just panicked enough to grab the crucial idiot demographic but not enough to concern people who are too old to care or too smart to watch cable news unironically.

After all that business has stopped making ratings and being cool to post on forums, the people who actually make our technology will just add a couple extra digits to IP's, giving us another 4 billion addresses for another 4 billion Inter-toys. Those of us born before the 1990's (aka the cool kids) experienced a similar event back in 80's when phone and fax numbers were at peak saturation. This is what happens whenever humans make a new tech ubiquitous. I'm sure there was a time when people freaked out about running out of domesticated oxes, or a long-gone era when fire and tool making hominids worried about running out of forests to cut down and... oh. Crap. Well, even though we're facing a treeless future in which oxygen is the preferred commodity of mutant raiders and shadowy CEO kings in their monolithic towers, at least we'll have plenty of IP addresses for our increasingly redundant Apple products.

The reason we're running out of IP's is our love of mobile Net devices. Aside from our desktops, laptops and traditional office items, there's almost no such thing as a modern cell phone that doesn't have online capabilities. Hell, it seems a bit silly to even call what we carry today "cell phones". We're really stretching the definition. Usually when something starts doing things it normally doesn't do, we change the name. That's why we don't drive Toyota carriages or kill one another with Glock iron ore. Perhaps we won't burn through the extra 4 billion IP's in just a few years if we stop marketing smartphones as, ya know, phones. That way it'll be harder to convince people that they need iPads and other pointless dovetail toys.

But that great, rational future is far away. For now, let's just celebrate the fact that we've consumed enough technology to force ourselves into an even deeper bureaucratic hole. Yay!