I mean, it feels like the entire world is on-line, but the truth is, that's only less than half of it. There's almost 4 billion people who don't participate in this important aspect of human life.
> "In 2016, people no longer go online, they are online. The spread of 3G and 4G networks across the world had brought the internet to more and more people,"
True, and this is cool. I still remember the times of "going on-line" - phone modems, Internet cafes, etc. Being on-line is a huge qualitative difference over going on-line.
There's a lot of work to be done. Work, I fear, not many want to do. I'd like to see a clean separation between data, code and compute. The data would belong to users, code would be a commodity we run on data instead of sending our data to code vendors. Compute is pretty abstracted away already on a technical level, but it's chosen by the code vendors instead of users. I think it would be ultimately worth it to decouple the two.
No denying the importance. But let's keep things in perspective too. Steve Jobs put it rather well: "Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology."
Full quote here: "The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t. That’s going to break people’s hearts.
I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
[…]
Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology."
It's also a very lonely place. Human beings are reduced to casual stimulation. No amount of information is ever enough. We don't know our neighbors.
I try as hard as I can to stay away from the internet, especially social media. Hacker News is the only exception, the only drug that I can't quit.
I sometimes wonder how the tobacco executives feel as they promote a harmful product, even while many of them do not smoke.
Detached consumerism is a disease. It is hard to cure because we are all complicit in this ailment. The internet, with its stimulating advertising and glossy social media perceptions of a flawless moment in time, is a vector for this disease. I'm not sure the internet is helping us. It may be instrumental in us hurting ourselves, and each other, instead.
And yet there are almost 4 billion people who don't know the mental clarity of spending a day with someone they care about devoid of the glow from a screen. Grass is always greener...
That's the difference.
For a number of technical reasons (security and scaling) I've come to believe that urbit or something much like it is inevitable.
IPv6 might solve the address space problem but the high level problems (e.g. constant privacy invasions) are such a clusterfuck that it is crippling IoT and other potential growth sources.
I'm happy to shill for them because there really aren't that many people doing truly new things with computation in Silicon Valley.
What I wrote about the three-way decoupling is a result of some time I spent thinking "the Star Trek way" - i.e. how would the cloud ecosystem look like if it was made primarily to be useful, as opposed to sucking money out of people.
This is the "bubble" that is spoken of post-election.
But the internet is still magical. Sometimes you jump around and next thing you know you're up at 2 in the morning wondering what's the big deal about pizza shops and Wikileaks and Hillary Clinton or why this girl is smooshing her face into bread.
God bless the internet.
"But the internet is still magical. Sometimes you jump around and next thing you know you're up at 2 in the morning wondering what's the big deal about pizza shops and Wikileaks and Hillary Clinton or why this girl is smooshing her face into bread."
That's magical?! Sounds more like the epitome of a pathetic, consumerist life.
I get what your saying, but the point I take away is: I can research whatever I want, no matter how silly, right now. I can learn quantum physics. I can learn to play an instrument. I can research statistics on the latest election. And, of course, I can watch cat videos.
