An Ode to the Internet

I.

On August 15, 1995, Indians woke up to the tariff plan of a new sort of communication service. They could buy dial-up internet.

At Rs 15,000 a year, it was not quite something the average Indian could afford then.

I was still a young kid when I had a glimpse of the Internet¹. The old dial-up connection tones, the slow speeds and hefty charges levied. But I was part of the generation that grew up with it’s evolving use cases. From simple search back then to entire generations who experience banking online and now even - digital factories.

The Internet’s effect has been phenomenal - on Economies and People. It has also been documented extensively.

So, why write about it now?

The qualitative side of it’s effect, is still unexplored. The beauty lies in the fact that every qualitative effect is intensely personal.

Thus, every qualitative effect is unique and worth exploring.

II.

Here is an excerpt I came across that can explain one of it’s effects : Digital Piracy - which has had a profound effect on me.

If someone were to claim that never before in the history of the world has anyone invented anything as useful as digital piracy, I wouldn’t feel compelled to disagree. Knowledge is power and power is, in a very real sense, life. The knowledge of any individual person has throughout human history been limited by three factors, and never before has any of them been less limiting than today.

1. Discovery. You can’t learn something that hasn’t been discovered yet. Einstein couldn’t have been Einstein if he’d been born in Biblical times. He needed the work of previous scientists to build upon. Similarly, you and I couldn’t know half the things we know if someone else hadn’t known them first and been able to teach us. The sum of human knowledge has been increasing at an accelerating rate for thousands of years and is today greater than it ever has been.
2. Technology. In order for you to learn something that’s already been discovered without having to discover it yourself, the knowledge has to find some conduit from the person who knows it to you. The technology for this has historically progressed in relatively sudden leaps. First, everything had to be taught in person and the transmission of knowledge was very limited. The invention of writing made a huge improvement to this. The invention of the printing press made another. Then radio, then TV, and most recently the internet. The ability we have today to turn on our computers and search for more information on any topic in the world we wish to learn about is quite possibly more revolutionary than any of that. Just 10 years ago, it would not have been possible for a single individual to independently build himself anywhere close to the kind of body of useful knowledge that it is today. Even if all the knowledge had been available somewhere, the time he would have had to spend looking for it would have limited his potential severely. Something that today takes 10 seconds to find out with the modern Google or Wikipedia could have taken minutes, hours or days in 2001. Aside from that, a lot of recently discovered knowledge that has proven to be very useful indeed just wasn’t available then.
3. Sharing. Since the dawn of time, people possessed of powerful secrets have made the rationally self-interested choice of keeping the secrets to themselves, or possibly selling them to a limited number of others in exchange for some sort of profit. Even in the internet age, Wikipedia won’t tell you the most valuable secrets that would really make a difference in your life. That kind of information is usually at a premium – in the internet age, it’s being sold as DVDs, eBooks and such for what are often considerable amounts of money. I’ve seen the prices of information products range anywhere from one dollar into the thousands. Someone wishing to learn a lot had to be seriously rich and willing to risk his money on a lot of things that might or might not turn out to be pig-in-a-poke scams – until widespread internet piracy came along and changed all that. Software piracy is as old as software itself, but not until recent years has it been possible for any random individual to go on the internet, do a quick search for a pirate copy of a relatively rare information product, actually find it, and download it onto his own computer within minutes.

III.

The biggest leeway the Internet has afforded me is in Exposure.

I grew up in India within the constraints of a middle-class family. It was still a time where access to knowledge would have been difficult. Until I discovered the Internet.

It enabled me to create an entire world - that I could immerse myself into.

As kids, we are usually handed a set of “responsibilities” along with an environment to carry them out in. Without much control over either - we experience the force of rules guiding us. Controlling everything - what we read, studied, thought and exposed to.

Without exposure to anything that challenges these rules and environment.

We grow up believing that this environment and its rules is world.

The Internet enabled exposure to things that challenged this environment. Without needing the approval of teachers or parents - I was in a sense free.

Free to read and think about things that challenged the rules and the environment I was brought up in.

That all along - what was hindering learning - was the very thing that advertised it - School.

And so many other such illusions were revealed.

This was liberating - I could for the first time - pursue things on my own terms, test my beliefs and learn new things on my own time and in a way that was unique to me.

That was not all - it even enabled me to explore my interests. Seek out opportunities I never thought I would have been capable of acting upon.

IV.

The Internet has afforded me one of the longest levers of leverage - and I may be using a mere 10% of it.

The limits of what is possible, of how close to his desired ideal a man can shape his life, have undergone incredible expansion in the last few years and we still don’t know just where they’ve gone. The limits of possibility have expanded so fast that the actual people chasing them have not yet caught up

Footnotes