I must protest. The movie Ralph Breaks the Internet is totally wrong. That is not how the internet works, with little people zipping around inside the cable. Also, the product placement was excessive, with all kinds of internet companies represented with big signs in your face all the time. Wasn’t this one of the many problems with The Emoji Movie?
But still, it was a sweet movie with a nice message. I also liked how all these little kids in the audience got up and danced in front of the screen during the closing credits. They were terrible dancers, but they were enthusiastic.
Not with anything modern, no, but between 2001-2007, there was a company called WWW Anthropomorph, Inc which was working on an “Everything Is People” (EIP) protocol stack, with literal hands doing the handshaking. The primary investors were rumored to included a swarm intelligence. Alas, the advent of xkcd’s comic about Rule 34 caused development to come to a screeching halt. One of the lead developers Walt Whitman declared that his multitudes could imagine quite a lot, and the other, René Descartes, complained that his virtual theater would become a peepshow. CEO Alexandrina Victoria Hanover famously proclaimed “We are not amused”.
Demo and beta versions of the stack are still available in archives long gone from the actual site, but with known vulnerabilities. You really don’t want that running on any of your hardware if it gets rooted.