Underrating The Internet

Was the steam engine or the internet a bigger invention?

If you asked that question in the early 2000s, not many people would answer “the internet” with confidence.

Over the last two decades, society started waking up. It’s no longer crazy to suggest the internet affects geopolitics. Almost every waking hour, we have screens in our pockets that place the world’s information at our fingertips.

But the internet continues to be wildly underrated. If, millennia from now, our descendants look back at the history of human technology, the internet’s impact will dwarf that of the automobile. That may not be going far enough. In a recent podcast, Patrick McKenzie suggested that the internet is more transformative than the entire field of medicine from its founding until today. I agree.

The invention of the internet is on the same scale as the invention of language.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I’ve felt this way for years. As time passes, the world is inching towards my view. And we’re still in the internet’s early days. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Frontiers

Today, I’m introducing Frontiers, a new series at Coverage Critic. An overarching question will unite posts–roughly: How can we nudge the development and evolution of the internet in a good direction?

I’ll touch on AI, politics, and social media. I’ll speculate. I’ll be wrong.

I’ll dive into the meta-question that some readers are already mulling over. Ancient hunter-gatherers probably couldn’t hope to nudge language towards good and away from evil. Is trying to affect the evolution of the internet just as pointless?

But most of the time, I’ll keep my head out of the clouds. Here’s a sampling of things I plan to cover:

• Is Google getting worse?
• Why do Twitter X’s Community Notes work so well? Can we get similar features on more platforms?
• Did Steve Jobs merely speed up the introduction of stuff that was coming regardless? How path-dependent is internet technology?
• Could dating apps shift cultural values towards whatever norms are profitable for the apps?
• An obscure Reddit community let me know how to cure the worst health issue I’ve ever had. Are we missing similar opportunities?
• Why have so many once-great websites gone downhill when business people took the reins from idealistic founders?

Frontier’s home will be coveragecritic.com/frontiers. You can subscribe here for ongoing updates.