A strange piece for the Message which attempts to illuminate the absurdity of our current approach to naming software.
If you can’t Google your way to something, it’s almost as though it doesn’t even exist, but luckily the filename suffixes used for coding scripts, such as .js and .py, are linguistic (linguistic.js) anomalies which all but create their own SEO (seo.js). Businesses strategize based on their Google rankings relative to competitors for the same reason that tweets are usually weighed in favorites and retweets — on an impersonal internet, visibility (visibility.js) is almost synonymous with value. Publishing any code at (at.js) all creates an instant presence which would be hard to build in other ways. The tech industry is our modern gold rush, drawing swarms of opportunists westward (westward.js), and memorable terminology is one of its new land grabs.
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