How the internet changed everything
"There are decades where nothing happens;
and there are weeks where decades happen”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
What is happening in to the world? For most of my adult life our social trajectory felt stable, predictable and inevitable.
Politics was a battle for the centre ground. Globalisation of trade, culture and people was supplanting local and national identities. And power was being consolidated by the three Es: the establishment, the elites, and the experts.
During this period, where ‘nothing happened’, the internet emerged. And in many ways it appeared to reinforce and accelerate the status quo.
Yes, it blew up the music business, and we all love Wikipedia. But that’s just pop culture … isn’t it?
This post is about the idea that, actually, the internet changed everything.
The internet enabled a fundamental shift that is now, rapidly, changing all aspects of society.
The central feature of this new world is the decentralised network.
These feel like the weeks where decades happen.
I was already thinking about these themes, when Simon Wardley shared this map:
I loved this map, and have been reflecting on it ever since.
I took the idea and tried to generalise it. Here’s what I ended up with.
The map is about this idea:
The orthodoxy relied on trust in institutions and expertise. These institutions centralised and certified knowledge, legality and authority, based on an agreed set of ‘facts’.
The new, decentralised model instead places trust in a community of active participants. Success and reputations are based on outcomes and evidence.
The foundations of this new model are technical and cultural. The internet put all the world’s data in our pockets. It also democratised access to expertise, each other and powerful tools - enabling new forms of communication and experimentation, while fundamentally undermining the ‘gatekeepers’ of the establishment.
When David Bowie was interviewed on the BBC in 1999 he said:
I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
It’s an alien life form, is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here. The actual context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about. It’s happening in every form.
That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.
Bowie understood the paradigm shift. He focused on “content” and “mediums”, but also saw that this was about society more broadly.
Not just music, magazines and TV.
Politics, economics, education, currencies, identities, and nations. Nothing would be immune from the decentralising force, and the new “interplay between the user and the provider.”