The internet will change everything. (Any questions?)

I’d like to take this opportunity to abandon my usual spaz-tastic personality and become a little bit more sophisticatified (Although, make no mistake, that’s not some fake me that only comes out during iEye, that’s what I’m really like, in fact my questionably sane Coke consumption makes it impossible to be anything but spazzy, not that I’d want to be anything other than spazzy, it’s actually really fun, you should try it some time. I digress). Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation, but I suddenly got a thought in my head while doing my usual 5-7 different things at once. In an effort to make this more my personal blog (the tech stuff is going over to the iEye blog), I’ve decided to share it. Also, I’m really tired, which makes me extra special cynical, so this should be interesting.

The internet has changed the course of history forever, it’s changed the planet in 10 years more than it had changed in the 100 years before it, and in the next 100, it could change us more than we’ve changed since the beginning of civilization. Seriously, read on and I’ll explain more. I know many people think of the internet as a cesspool of people who can’t be bothered to spell out actual words and instead save themselves a couple hundredths of a second by butchering language so much so that it makes them seem like the mental equivalents of 7 year olds, but really the internet is an amazing tool for connecting billions of people in a way that has never been done before. And yeah, some people are gonna be idiots, trolls, bullies, and just bad people in general, but you know what, I know a lot of really great people who are online too (you’re welcome, by the way). The point is, even the biggest luddite has to take note of this as something REALLY REALLY big. I think it’s bigger than anybody ever imagined though. The internet has already caused many industries to be re-designed and re-thought, such as the music industry and the gaming industry, but in the end, almost every industry will be affected in some way or another.

The global economy will have to change entirely to be, well, I hate to say it, but more communist, in a way. You see, on the internet, many many things are free, there is no physical material cost, no shipping costs, and no having to go through retail stores. The only cost left is paying the developer, which, because free things get a lot more users than commercial things, can be paid for with ads. As we are seeing with piracy, people don’t want to pay for things anymore. In communism, people don’t have to pay for things. You see where I’m going here? Take, for example, JamLegend, a free, online version of Guitar Hero. I actually like it better than Guitar Hero because of it’s ever-expanding set-list and it’s web 2.0 style community. Yeah, that’s right, the free online version is better than the commercial console version. Let me say that again for impact: THE FREE THING IS BETTER THAN THE NOT FREE THING. Or for you math nerds out there: 0$ > 1$! Yeah, you know what that means? People are gonna stop buying stuff. The entire economy of the world is gonna have to be turned upside-down, and somehow the world is gonna have to adapt. It’s so astounding and unlikely, it’s mathematically impossible, unless $ = 0, which, in the future, it might be.

Now, what about the governments of the world, what will become of them? Well, on the internet, the concept of a hierarchy of power does not really exist. Sure, there are people who have more influence than others, but there is no king of the internet, technically, everybody has equal power, to a point anyway. That’s called anarchy, which is usually a bad term used as a synonym for chaos, but it is an actual form of government where all of the citizens are relied on to police themselves, and on the internet, for the first time ever, it’s actually working. Wikipedia is total anarchy, it works great! Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all pretty much governed by users (not entirely of course, there are people who work at those companies who are payed to police, but they really can’t do everything themselves, and so in a lot of cases the community really does most of the work, ‘burrying’ on digg for example). Could the future see that form of government spreading into the real world until there is no more government? Maybe, although the real world is a much different place from the internet in that there is much more as stake if something goes wrong, so maybe not. Still, a complete change of how the people communicate, learn, play, work, and buy things has got to change something in the government, well, unless people like, dare I say this, alright, here goes: McCain, take over, in which case, nothing will change. SORRY. I couldn’t resist, although the thought of a president who can’t operate a computer has got to scare every geek just a little bit.

So yes, the internet seems like a fad, a silly little thing the kids do, but if you take a step back and look at what it is, and what it’s doing, it’s so much more. I think these next few years are crucial, and the adaptation to a completely new way of doing things will be rocky at best, but I really think that this could be a huge turning point in human civilization. This is where we ditch thousands of years of systems, structures, and traditions in favor of new ones. This is where we all come together to accomplish greater things than we’ve ever done before. And now that you think about it that way, those people who write poorly seem insignificant, don’t they?

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