62 - Internet Nation
Strap in, ! Here's an introduction to an idea I want to explore a bit more publicly, even if it sounds like something from the 1990s about the NEW WORLD OF THE INTERNET.
Welcome to the Information Super-Highway
The Internet is a wild and wonderful place. It's the birthplace of memes, of videos, of countless 'wasted' hours, of connectivity, of new online experiences, of Minecraft, of humanity at it's best, and humanity at it's worst.
I literally have a section on this newsletter where I recommend you things that I've found on it - mostly the good, optimistic pieces that I think will have value to you - as well as showing that the same mirror to humanity reflects the world of crime.
The internet is seen as an infrastructure; a backbone to business, government services, a source of rich data and information, and, especially during our current time of coronavirus, a way to entertain, learn and connect with other people. We buy things, sell things, trade things, market ourselves, our careers, our lives, consume data, content, information; it's an integral part of our lives that would be incredibly difficult to unpick.
But while most of us think of it as a tool, an infrastructure, I'd argue that it's even more than that.
The New World Is Really Cool and Hip
The Internet is a colony. A new world of valuable, rich potential waiting to be unlocked. Early pioneers breaking out new tracts of land, settling and building empires, crafting new norms, creating history, building cultures...the list goes on and on.
Think about the early days of the internet - well, at least what I can remember. It was kinda like the Wild West - small towns and communities, people staying around message boards, forums and chatrooms to congregate. Websites built in HTML 1.0 were like the new businesses, the new creation made in a time of high potential. Geocities allowed a whole generation of people get used to the new world, spinning up easy, ugly websites for the world.
I mean, dude, Space Jam is still up! (and it got ported to https? Good job guys!).
Over time, the colony creates analogues to the old world - Mail (messaging). Libraries (Wikipedia). TV (YouTube, Netflix). Currency (Bitcoin). Sports (e-Sports / Steam). Music (Spotify). Education (Khan Academy). Places to hang out socially (Facebook, Reddit, Instagram). The list goes on and on.
And this is facilitated by a few key differences (which I'll talk more about in a later post):
- There's no limit to space on the internet (other than building more servers somewhere)
- The cost of sharing something across the world is pretty much zero
- I don't have to share my identity online if I don't want to...(yet)
And I mean...though we haven't ported our 'selves' on to the Internet yet (unless you're into Fortnite), virtual reality is growing closer and closer. Soon, the only thing our world will be good for is to appeal to our spongy prisons - dealing with our physical needs while the mind traverses the internet. I'm sure there'll always be a place for in-person hangs but, well, what if the Internet supplants that need?
Come In! We're Under New Management
And just as it happens in real life, the major companies, conglomerates, big-wigs of town settle in. The dominance of tech companies in the Wild West is at once dazzling, but also frightening. Imagine being Henry Ford, setting up your first car manufacturing plant - unlocking a whole wide world of travel for people whose next best mode of transport was horses. The Rockefellers who struck oil and started selling it, consolidating their power and building up their fortunes.
Well, well, well, data's the new oil, ain't it?
The biggest companies on the internet, tech companies, are warlords unto themselves in this new world. Amazon (through AWS) owns a significant portion of the infrastructure of the world. Google helps navigate it. Facebook is your phonebook - your way to connect. Apple gives you the ability to connect to that space. I could go on and on, but what is fundamentally thrilling but also scary is the amount of control they have over this new nation. They are critical parts of how we interface with the internet today, and is intrinsically connected to how we experience it.
If they decide to change something, billions could be affected (think medically dangerous fake news, or radicalised populations, or even cutting off access to certain geographies).
And if you don't like it, what are you going to do, leave?
Can you imagine a world without Google? Or without iPhones? If AWS failed for some reason, half the 'country' of the Internet would instantly plummet. And I mean...I don't even know if I have HALF of the phone numbers of my friends on Facebook...
The Old World Wants What They Can't Have
It's been a trend over the last few decades - moving things on to the Internet. Services, products, deliveries - everything can be sold, consumed, watched, created and shared on the internet. They're seeing what can be done, and they want their share of it. The old world is slowly learning about the new world; you can see these trends accelerating in a time of coronavirus which has enhanced these shifts...education online, telehealth, delivery businesses, getting my egg tarts from Instagram - it's happened at an incredibly rapid pace.
But as the colony grows wealthier, and stronger, and more important in the lives of the commonfolk, the old world knows that it has to cling on to the last vestiges of power that it has - regulation. You see this in the EU, the US, Australia - all trying to take their share of the pie. What's the last thing that's happened in this space? News agencies wanting their cut from Google, or else they can't be linked? Memes being banned in the EU? (Okay I get this is more about copyrighted content, but it still fundamentally misunderstands how the new world works).
Slapping a tax on a product, or regulating how it can be used is more difficult on the Internet, from a regulation standpoint, as nothing online is owned by governments. People aren't being forced to purchase a product - the nature of the Internet is that they can go somewhere else, but the reality is that they won't. They've stifled the competition with incredible market dominance; it's hard to see how any competitors will achieve the same amount of growth.
Bottom line, the big dogs of the Internet control how you interact with it. And if they're not regulated properly, then there's a risk that the Internet that we know and love will be ripped away based on the whims of those companies.
Can you imagine a world where you're limited to the Apple Internet. Or the Google Internet? Belonging to a different tribe, forced to pay tolls to travel to other areas of the internet?
Maybe one day, you'll be an Apple-Australian. Or a Google-Chinese. Are these companies going to be the new governments online?
This is already a long piece, so I'll leave it there for now.
Let me know your thoughts!
Chat soon :)
✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Zero to One - the Peter Thiel book (one of the early pioneers of the Internet) that lays out his early thoughts about how to build a successful business. Essentially, the advice is - find a niche, exploit it, become a monopoly, and win the market. Pretty much established tradition now, but it's a good read about the new world nonetheless!
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The Everything Store - a book about Amazon and the rise of Jeff Bezos. A really interesting book that shows the terrifying focus and intelligence of the man in charge one of the biggest 'countries' in the new world.
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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A short lesson in empathy - TheirTube - Take a look outside your filter bubble - venture out into the wilderness once more. What does YouTube look like for a conservative? A liberal? A climate denier??
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Betting on Things that Never Change - by Morgan Housel, a writer I love reading. This is one of his classics about how there are some things that'll never change, just because we're human, and we want certain things all the time :D
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How the Passion Economy will disrupt media, education, and countless other industries - previously undervalued 'passions' of our population have started disrupting incumbents, and this'll just grow and grow over time. An interesting piece, even if I don't agree with some of the points in it (mainly, that even though people can launch things, it only rewards the 1000x winners, not the 'small businesses' that a lot of people would love to have on the side).