For the past 10 years I have literally been eating, sleeping and dreaming the Internet. I bought into the hype of the late 90's, continued believing in the virtues early in this new millennium and up to today believed that the Internet is on the cusp of revolutionizing everything we do.
I was wrong.
Depending who's version you believe, the product we now know of as "electricity" was conceptualized in it's modern form early in the 1600's by English scientist William Gilbert. A virtual litany of European, Greek, Middle Eastern and other smart folks had been playing with it before and certainly it did not begun getting delivered in product format until perhaps the late 1700's to early 1800. Can you imagine the World reaction to the advent of this remarkable product? I suspect the printing presses of the time hummed with news of the great revolution, the amazing capacity and the end of life as it was then known. In hindsight they were all right, but how do with think about electricity now. It's part of our life no doubt and makes everything we know possible but how many changes have happened to that product over the past two decades? The power grids are woefully outdated, we have brown outs in California during summer and we didn't even think about renewable energy until we were forced to by high oil prices and global warming.
Get my drift here? The Internet has changed our way of life forever and has thus now become a commodity to be used by humans just like electricity, flight and the nuclear bomb (all of which we now complain about). Over time the infrastructure will deteriorate (except of course for the wealthy industrial complex and educational usage) and its "pie in the sky" reputation will fade. The World has lost hundreds of billions of dollars building cyberspace and en-richened very few in the process. As always the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer...
Just imagine the societal benefits if we had invested that money in education or clean water for the third world? According to the State department we could have provided lifetime health insurance for every man, woman and child in the United States just with the losses incurred during the dot com meltdown. Waste, greed and downright theft occurred then and it's occurring now with the mortgage fiasco: When will we learn?
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