Oh Sara, you speak like a scientist and I am a wild visionary in search of entertaining ideas. I try to make sense of the world and the vision above makes perfect sense. More than any other idea I've heard. Especially, the Internet, how it evolved, the viruses and worms... It makes you wonder how did real viruses evolve? They cannot exist, unless there is already in existence a cell (and not just one!) with all its machinery running so that they can take over and make copies of themselves. It would seem that the widespread hypothesis that viruses are protolife from which a primitive cell eventually evolved is illogical. Some rightfully doubt that viruses can even be considered alive! The same is with the computer viruses. These little programs can exist and function only when a sophisticated system is in place and it is used often exchanging information with other systems (and the vector is a memory key, lol). But again I got carried away... You Sara, just get my brain going.
But, returning to your question "where would the first intelligent designers come from in your particular example?"
Ah! This is actually easy. Here we have to invoke the most ancient of myths and envision something like this: imagine a god, the one and only, alpha and omega, beginning and the end. And he is oh so lonely. There is nothing but him in the whole world. He is the world. With infinite time on his hands. And so it came to pass that God got bored. And he created a mirror. His image kept him entertained for an infinite while, as he kept company with himself. But then this too was no longer enough. God was overcome with terrible longing, longing for something he could not name. And so in a fit of frustration he smashed the mirror and it shattered into a myriad of pieces. That's how the first world was made.
You have other questions?
I had fun :)
PS
Or take the topic of many essays here, like Does nature have faithful mathematical representation? (by Roger Schlafly). Roger argues againts the prevailing notion of modern theoretical physics that the true nature of reality is mathematics. But why not? If our world is someone's computer, this would make perfect sense. After all, before computers were linked into a world wide network and became the main source of entertainment, their first designation was to compute. They are highly logically organized. And the stuff they can do! My last job was in LA, in a special effects studio. Already then the quality was such that you can hardly tell what's the real footage and what is rendered. Hey, the rendered stuff is usually better! Have you ever wondered, what goes on in between those blocks of 1's and 0's through which processes crunch for days on end? That's logically organized space represents a virtual world modeled on ours.
