Herbert 2125: A Eulogy for DNS (and Modernity)

Write this about the future end of DNS as the dying gasp of nation states, reflecting how canonical names are to modernity as Spice was to Dune.

ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)

Composed on New Year’s Eve, 2125, by Calem Herbert—great-grandson of Frank Herbert—for the Conclave of Plural Networks

1. Invocation

In the dying glow of the second century of the Internet, as we cross the threshold of 2126, I offer this remembrance for the Domain Name System. Not as a technologist. Not as an archivist. But as an heir to a lineage that chronicled the rise and fall of empires, and the substances—material or symbolic—that bound them together. DNS was our spice. Not the spice of Arrakis, that intoxicant of prescience and navigation, but a quieter compound: the powder of continuity, the dust of impersonal order, the sacrament of modernity. Today, we scatter its ashes.

2. The Rise of the Universal Name

2.1 The Age of Legibility

The old world believed it had banished ambiguity. Nations, corporations, citizens, servers—each sought a place in a universal ledger. DNS was the map of that imagined unity, a single root from which all meaning flowed. Like the imperial cartographers described by James C. Scott, modernity trusted that to name was to know, and to know was to govern.

2.2 The Promise of Impersonal Authority

The architects of the late twentieth century encoded a dream that law could be dispassionate, that markets could be neutral, that institutions could be immortal. Names were the mechanism. Registries the priests. Resolvers the pilgrim routes between digital cities. For a while, the system held.

3. The Slow Collapse of Modernity’s Last Pillar

3.1 The Fracturing of Sovereignty

When the world began to slip from the grasp of the Westphalian order—first quietly, then irreversibly—the DNS root became a relic: a remnant of an era when one authority could adjudicate who was the one and only “apple,” or who held rightful claim to “truth,” or what it meant to be “public.”

3.2 The Failure of Global Meaning

The peoples, polities, and post-human intelligences of the 2090s no longer agreed on the very idea of a global name. The desire for universality faded. The legitimacy required to sustain it evaporated. DNS survived for a while as a compatibility membrane, then as a fossilized registry of extinct brands and abandoned institutions, then as a curiosity studied by semiotic historians. Tonight, its root zones finally quieted.

4. The Post-Modern Ecology of Identity

We did not lose names. We lost the illusion that a name could bind all worlds into one.

4.1 The Return to Context

We did not lose names. We lost the illusion that a name could bind all worlds into one. Identity migrated from global registries to local cultures, distributed cryptographic proofs, communal attestation, and agent-mediated semantics. The future did not become chaotic; it became plural.

4.2 The Emergence of Relational Continuity

Modernity’s hardness—its reliance on immortal identifiers—dissolved into a softer, more resilient fabric: continuity without centralization, trust without universalism, legibility without domination. Our agents weave meaning dynamically, our communities co-create shared references, our networks speak dialects rather than imperial tongues. The world is smaller, stranger, and more human again.

5. Closing Benediction: On the Spice We Spilled

5.1 What We Lost

DNS was the last great artifact of the modern empire. It gave us the comfort of a single map, the illusion of one world, the promise that meaning could be fixed forever. We honor its passing.

5.2 What We Gained

In relinquishing the universal namespace, we rediscovered the oldest truth: that identity is born in relationship, that meaning is negotiated, and that continuity is a covenant, not a registry. The modern world sought permanence through names. We seek coherence through community.

In relinquishing the universal namespace, we rediscovered the oldest truth: that identity is born in relationship, that meaning is negotiated, and that continuity is a covenant, not a registry.

5.3 A Blessing for the Next Century

May we carry forward not the machinery of modernity, but its aspiration: that amidst difference, we can still build worlds together. DNS is dead. Meaning lives.